John Wilkes Booth

actually i agree that people who physically attack people over swastikas should be held accountable for that ****. don't recall arguing with you over that.

John Wilkes Booth

ah. i like free speech better than human life personally. life isn't worth living if you stand for nothing. that's why i ultimately respect the extremists more than i do you appeasers.

John Wilkes Booth

i enjoyed this movie btw, and i wouldn't have seen it if it weren't for this argument

free speech ftw

Unknown Soldier

You do know that you can multi-quote everything into one post?

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Guybrush

Something that I find quite scary is that these terrorist attacks as well as other actions by extremists can serve to further alienate muslims in the western world. Take the words "allahu akhbar" (or how it is spelled), it simply means something relatively harmless like "God is great", but I dare say most westerners today associate it with something a little more sinister, like a terrorist battle cry. The actions of these terrorists is creating more and more such associations and if it goes far enough, you can end up in a situation where islamism and the harmless things that relate to the religion remind us of fear, violence and terror. When that happens, it ultimately doesn't matter if you're a rational being - as long as you're a human being with normal feelings, these associations can still be created and will create emotional responses.

All in all, it leads to the alienation of muslims in the western world. Non-muslims will get more suspicious, more negative towards islam - the conflict of religions and culture will escalate. This conflict, and a general environment of more alienation of muslims, may in turn promote more radicalization to extremist movements on either side.

This may be just the kind of world that such terrorists want to create. A world where it's muslims against western world culture. It is also the kind of world that western right wing political extremists want.

Such a world is incredibly dangerous and all of us should try to prevent that from becoming reality.

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grindy

I've read, that there were a lot of muslims protesting against the terrorist attacks.
Now I don't watch TV, so I might be mistaken there, but it seems that this doesn't really get reported, unlike the violent protests against the caricatures, which creates quite an unbalanced and biased view of muslim people. If that is the case, the media should really change the way they deal with this. People sadly generally focus on their petty differences instead of their deeper similarities and this doesn't help at all.

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John Wilkes Booth

i agree with the overall message of your post, just want to point out that islamism refers specifically to the political ideology of ruling through islam. i don't consider this to be harmless, personally.

i agree overall that the main problem with this kind of incident is that it drives a wedge further and further between our cultures/civilizations. there are plenty of muslims who would condemn the terrorism and would still be offended at the cartoons. i would agree with them. the cartoons might be insensitive and they have a right to attack it with words.

the media is in the business of making money, not mending cultural strife

Cuthbert

No real point to this post, but I've been watching/listening to a lot of stuff in relation to this/Paris etc and have a load of stuff I want to post in this thread, have a listen to this.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c03aASlesPM

It's funny as fuck . Even Nihal was going at her.

For anyone who can access the BBC iPlayer, Panorama did a good program - BBC iPlayer - Panorama - The Battle for British Islam

Can probably torrent it if that doesn't work.

grindy

Duh. Still ****ty though.
Also hoped someone would say muslim protesters against terrorism were at least somewhat covered. Would be nice to hear that.

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Guybrush

For someone who nitpicks, you don't seem to read my post thoroughly. Did my use of the word "islamism" indicate that I do not know its meaning? Did I write that islamism is harmless?

These are rhetorical questions.

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