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General News Multiple terrorist attacks at Belgian airport and metro station

Discussion in 'Current Events, World News, & LGBT News' started by AlamoCity, Mar 22, 2016.

  1. TXTurbo90

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    This is what I was trying to get at with my first response I gave. This response shouldn't get buried, as it is a voice of reason in a continually growing radical view against the vast majority of Islamic people. Very well written and thought out Libertino. :thumbsup:

    Some of the nicest/most caring people I have ever met just happen to be Muslim. They do not believe in aggressive/brutal attacks on innocent people like the extremist sect of the religion do. They believe in helping others through this struggle everyone goes through called "life". It seems like most people who lump the entire group together simply have not met or cared to meet any everyday Muslim people.

    Let's look at what happens when any religious text is viewed in a violent way by looking at Christian extremist terrorist acts. (I am not hating on the Christians, they just have a large following here in the United States) A small group of all religious people become radicalized and the media decides whether or not to use it as a way to hate on that group. The Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing comes to mind immediately. Notice how nobody claimed it was a problem with Christianity, but rather a nutjob using it as an excuse to do horrible things? A few of the more recent attacks in history by Christian extremist: Here

    Now do most of you think it fair to label all Christians as extremist, terrorist filth that need to be isolated and discriminated against because of the actions of the small group of sick, disillusioned people that use it as an excuse to harm innocent people?

    I would like to make the same comparison of what is happening with Muslims to those in the LGBT community. Are there rapist and child molesters that are not straight? Unfortunately, yes. But they are a very small percentage of this group. If everyone thought that we were rapists and child molesters because a small group of sick people that happen to identify as non hetero-normative, how would that make us feel? I know I would be angry and hurt. Well we are seeing that reaction from those not part of the mass majority of the 1.8 billion people who are Muslim. If this was the viewpoint of a large amount of this group, we would have a hell of alot more attacks than we see today.

    Any time that extremist ideologies/action of a small percentage of a group are used to define that group as a whole, it leads to perpetuating a viscous cycle. ISIS/ISIL/ whatever they use to call themselves are able to play off the hate/discrimination that Muslims are getting by turning that hatred into a recruiting medium for extremist actions.

    Love and care for all people and groups in this diverse planet should trump the small percentage of people who commit horrible acts to divide and segregate us into not realizing that our society needs to work together. We are all struggling to make it through this crazy thing called "life" in this temporary plane of existence together. (&&&)
     
  2. HunterRaven

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    I lived within a seven/eight minute walk of that metro station for two years. It's terrifying to think that many of my friends and their families were in danger, but also heartening to see people in Brussels and elsewhere fighting against the hatred and intolerance and refusing to give into the fear generated by the attacks
     
  3. Euler

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    There is a very recent trend to "reinterpret" certain passages in Qu'ran. Now, I would be the first people to rejoice if these reinterpretations would actually catch on. However, the historically my case stands. Islam spread mainly though violent conquest and the Islamic rulers and scholars embraced the violent nature of the Islamic tradition. If you disagree with this then you disagree with history. Or can your scholar dad explain how "self-defensively" Islamic armies came to occupy lands from Spain to India in a matter of a few hundred years?

    Please, quote me correctly. I said "all suicide bombers in Europe have been muslims". This not the same as saying all bombers have been muslims. As far as I know Breivik is still alive and kicking.

    Belgium has never invaded Syria or Iraq. Are you saying that ISIS is so stupid that they don't know which country has attacked middle eastern countries? Why the terrorists never actually explicitly state that their goal is to stop US occupation of country X? Why they claim they will only stop when the whole world is united under the Islamic banner?

    300k is the estimated armed combatants of ISIS. This number totally ignores potential ISIS supporters. I don't know where you pulled that 0.001% number but it's wrong. (Not that the magnitude really matters as even the correct number is in absolute terms low, about 0.2%.) This is the chance of a randomly picked Muslim across the world from baby to pensioner being an armed ISIS combatant. From European perspective the relevant number is the share of islamic terrorist infiltrating to Europe with the asylum seekers and those already in Europe who are willing to commit terrorist acts. Even if we make the generous assumption that "only" 0.2% of asylum seekers from Syria and Iraq are ISIS infiltrators true figure likely to be bigger) out of 450 000 asylum seekers who have come from those countries this would mean 900 terrorists. This number is big enough to keep Europe in a permanent state of emergency for decades.

    Since you like statistics, let me show you some relevant numbers from the European muslims which make even grimmer read. This study (read about the background here) study probes the religious fundamentalism among Muslims and Christians in Europe. It clearly shows that religious fundamentalism is widely spread among the Muslim communities and that the Muslims in Europe show strong hostility against gays and Jews. This does not directly address the question of support of terrorism but I got an other study that does. In 2006 PEW Research Group asked from Muslims around the world if it's ever OK to blow up civilians in order to defend Islam. The results can be read here.

    I save you the trouble of going through the whole study and quote the relevant parts:
    35% of French Muslims accept targeting violence against civilians in order to defend Islam either sometimes or rarely. Only 64% categorically reject this. The same numbers for Britain are 24% and 70%, for Spain 27% and 69% and for Germany 13% and 83%.

    It does not look particularly bright for Europe if 13%-27% of European Muslims are willing to support and accept terrorist attacks against civilians in order to defend Islam. There are 19 million Muslims in the EU alone. Even 10% of them is nearly 2 million people willing to sometimes accept violent terrorism targeting civilians. But I guess they got Islam all wrong. Could your dad perhaps go and tell these people that Islam does not support terrorism?

    Islam is what Islam does. Who cares that some hypothetical scholarly construct of Islam is the most peaceful religion in the world when clearly only a minority of muslims subscribes to that view?

    ---------- Post added 24th Mar 2016 at 12:25 AM ----------

    I do understand that people want to protect innocent Muslims from potentially hostile lash-back. However, they are doing them a huge disfavor by pretending that (conservative) Islam is not the problem because it is.

    People say that oh, it's the non-integration of immigrants that causes the problems in Europe, not Islam. This is partially true but they fail to see that the incompatibility of Islamic and Western values are the root cause of non-integration or non-assimilation. Western (or any other value system) is not universal or objectively true. If you grew up in the West what are your chances of abandoning your values if you moved to a Muslim country? Would you suddenly start hating gays? Would you start hating the West? I don't think so. Core values don't change easily. Even if you change your clothing it does not mean you have changed your heart and this is why multiculturalism does not work.
     
  4. Phantasm123

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    I`m not in this forum to debate about these things. It is clear that terrorism has no space in Islam and scholars worldwide have condemned it. Here is link to "Letter to Al Baghdadi" who is the leader of ISIS. Over 120 respected scholars signed this right away and many, many others joined later or showed their sign of approval. And about the number 300k, thats way too big number for ISIS fighters. "Supporters" there are millions of people who want muslims dead too so dno what to say. If muslims really believed in this ideology, we would all be long dead. Peace, I leave my case. You could check the letter out. http://www.lettertobaghdadi.com/14/english-v14.pdf
     
  5. Euler

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    I guess we just have to agree to disagree about the terrorism not having space in Islam. I agree there is no point debating over this topic as I have never heard anyone convincing anyone else to change their mind on an internet debate.

    300k was from you. Size estimates of armed ISIS fighters range from few thousands to abut 200k so I assumed you refer to this.

    I'm not saying every Muslim believes in strict ancient interpretation of Islam and luckily they don't. Most Muslims have not even read Qu'ran or the associated reliable Hadiths. I have traveled in Islamic countries and countries with significant Muslim minorities. My personal experiences support the studies I posted above: anti-Western sentiment is widely spread and passive support of terrorist acts against the West is common place. By passive I mean people who are not willing to carry out or assist in carrying out terrorist attacks but would refuse to co-operate catching or turn in terrorists in their communities. The active support base for terrorism is relatively small but in absolute numbers still large enough to cause permanent martial law or state of emergency in the west if the current uncontrolled flow of people from outside of Europe is not curbed.
     
  6. beastwith2backs

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    First and foremost, my condolances to anyone who knew anyone who died in yesterday in brussels, it's really sad that we still live in a world where things like this happen so regularly that they're excpeted, but hey, that's the reality. I guess we have to deal with it and make it better for future generations.

    ---------- Post added 23rd Mar 2016 at 07:57 PM ----------

    It's hard to come up with a good argument against what euler says. He's pretty right about islam having a political side, that could be ( and is) potentially violent. This is because prophet muhammad was both a religious leader and a political figure. Mabye when discussing politics, and ISIS and all that, the political side of islam is important, it's...well...pretty bad...and should be stopped, but for the lives of muslims everywhere, what matters the most is the religious side( ramadan, zakat, five prayers, hajj, and so on.)
    There have been islamic sects that have little to nothing to do with politics, like the sufis.
     
  7. lemons123

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    Maybe I partially agree with you or at least I agree with you that NOT all Muslims are bad, or at the very least if we condemn them we should also condemn Christians and "Judaists" as they have pretty similar set of beliefs. Yes, they do. In Christianity it's also written to stone people for sodomy or take off the eye of someone who had done this to you, etc.

    Radical Islam represents about 1% or less of all Muslims and yes, it's a big problem.
    Yet the biggest problem here aren't even the "terrorists" but the real terrorists:

    America, Russia and Western EU who serve the rich Sheikhs and do everything for oil money. That's why they not only don't act against the terrorists but even support them and give them greenlight for terrorist acts. Farage and Wilders for example are clowns while Le Pen is Putin's puppet. And Putin on his term serves his master: the Supreme Leader of Iran...who of course supports Hamas.

    And yet some dumb Nazis still find a way to blame everything on Israel. How is Israel guilty here as it seems it's one of the very few credible parties to trust in the whole mass. On par with maybe China or Japan.
     
  8. tscott

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    What is happening today in Western Europe it isn't even close to what amounted to a civil war in Ireland. It is closer to the IRA's horrific acts of terrorism in London. I was going to school in London at the time. It made me ashamed to be an American, as these acts were largely financed by Irish-Americans for some misbegotten reason. On two occasions I was almost on a train that was bombed.

    I have tremendous sympathy for those families who tragically lost loved ones. The Belgium government is being accused of ignoring warnings of such attacks. Well, hindsight is always 20/20. It disgusts me that the same hatreds found today are not dissimilar to those of the Middle Ages.