The Paris Attack Debate Thread

[Admiral Yi]

Reasonable Muslims at some point have to realize that there is too much about their religion that is fucked up, say to world that some things Mohammed said were retarded, that some of the Koran is bullshit, and either chuck it altogether or pick out some parts that are worth saving and invent a new religion.

[The Brain]

They won't. What's our response?

[Jaron]

A few hundred years ago Christianity was pretty brutal too. What with their inquisitions and tortures and burning people alive and all that. Christians moved past that. What was the vehicle of that change? What can help Muslims progress from where they are to where they need to be to be an acceptable part of modern society?

[OttoVonBismarck]

The enlightenment was largely what moved the West from being this prone to religious violence. The Muslim world has gone through reformations and it's resulted in movements like Wahhabism.

[Richard Hakluyt]

A few hundred years ago Christianity was pretty brutal too. What with their inquisitions and tortures and burning people alive and all that. Christians moved past that. What was the vehicle of that change? What can help Muslims progress from where they are to where they need to be to be an acceptable part of modern society?

The Spanish Inquisition...........wait.........no..................the Church of England.

[mongers]

We have almost no new information about Islam after these attacks. Why should we change the way we act regarding Islam?

I guess my question is what's our move? Before 9/11 the U.S.'s involvement in the Middle East, at least in terms of troops on the ground, wasn't very high. We had a presence in Saudi Arabia, obviously Turkey is a NATO country, and we supported Israel. This was enough to get 9/11. After 9/11 we've killed literally hundreds of thousands of Muslim jihadists, that has clearly not worked.

Do we simply accept that we'll always suffer terrorist attacks, because terrorists can easily take advantage of our free and open societies?

Do we retrench even more than pre-9/11? Meaning no support for Israel, not a single boot on the ground anywhere in the Middle East? I'm not sure that would matter--how many soldiers does France have in the Middle East? They're being targeted by their own Muslim immigrants. Do we stop letting Muslims move into our countries? Or do we  just accept there's nothing we can do?

I genuinely have no answers, but I think if you look around various Western countries, I think we've seen a pretty wide spectrum of behaviors. You've had America's militant response on one end of the spectrum, to countries like Sweden or Norway which have taken a much different approach. Pretty much the entire spectrum of countries have also been the targets of terrorist attacks by Muslims.

I've quoted this from the other thread.

Otto you've got that wrong, I'd guess the large majority of those killed were Iraq conscripts, officer class soldiers and Sunni/Shia Iraqi nationalists, the first two groups who had actively and passively keeping a 'lid' on or at least preventing the rise of radicalism in the Iraqi population. It wasn't nice, but the men with moustaches kept the bearded men at bay.

[Richard Hakluyt]

To be serious.

The problem is that it is not just a tiny minority of muslims, but nor is it a majority, the specific problem we face is a substantial minority.........................which is difficult.

[OttoVonBismarck]

I've yet to see a workable answer. When a country like Sweden has seen attempted terrorist attacks (the Iraqi who tried to kill people--but failed, who bombed Stockholm being an example) the "dovish" response clearly doesn't make this stuff not happen. I mean of the various countries in Europe, France has certainly been involved in some campaigns against Islamic terrorists, but it isn't a big supporter of Israel, it doesn't have any boots on the ground in the Middle East, its first airstrikes against ISIS were just in September of this year--and they'd already suffered the Charlie Hebdo attacks and other acts of Islamic terror before that. Plus, I don't even buy into these attacks being necessarily related to our (the West's) behavior in the Middle East anymore. That may have inspired 9/11, but I think we're entering a stage now where it's the domestic Muslims who simply dislike the Western societies they've found themselves in who are going to be the ones carrying out attacks on us. Not the ones mad we're killing Jihadi John, but the ones who don't like a society where women have equal rights to men, or where I'm allowed to draw a picture of Muhammad without being put to death.

In some ways that scares me more than the al-Qaeda attacks on the United States--that was an attack largely as a response to the American geopolitical behavior in the Middle East. I'm not saying I'm okay with 9/11, obviously, but I'm saying we can always make decisions about our Foreign Policy pretty easily. We can decide if it's worth it to be involved in the Middle East or not, for example.

But when you have growing domestic Muslim populations, and a percentage are enthralled by jihadist social media, videos etc, and then a portion of those are willing to kill--that's a problem. Those people are there now, they aren't leaving, they aren't going anywhere. They don't disappear just because we stop bombing ISIS.

As an American I don't feel a lot of personal fear, to be honest America is so big, with its population still well into the positive growth territory, and we also have a long history of " leave people's religion alone" in terms of government that I actually think our Muslim population just isn't a big problem. We're so far from the Middle East we'll never see the influx of Muslims Europe is, and we are also much bigger than any European country and can more easily absorb the small numbers we get. Some of these tiny European countries, with aging and declining secular/native European populations who are seeing huge amounts of Muslim immigration and then seeing those immigrants maintain astronomical reproduction rates--that would really scare me as a European. These aren't Mexicans (who America honestly has been living with ever since the Louisiana Purchase days) looking for work. In a free society that reflects the will of its people, what happens to secular, liberal Europe when a country's population is 30% Muslim, 40? 50?

I don't have answers or ideas, I don't know that there are any easy answers.

The one thing I will say is this--jihadist recruitment should not be protected speech, Lincoln didn't let Confederate recruiters operate with impunity in the Northern States. We need to force social media and streaming providers to 100% ban any jihadist recruitment activities from their platforms. We need our national police forces to shut down independent sites that run this stuff, and we need strong criminal laws prohibiting advocating going on jihad or etc. Recruiting for the enemy has never been protected activity in the United States. I don't know about in Europe--but it shouldn't be if it is.

The first and obvious response to this is "but you can't regulate the entire internet." Of course you can't, but you can regulate the huge forums and social media services that jihadists are recruiting on. ISIS has literally spoken with prospective  jihadists over Facebook. That can't be happening. What happens when you clamp down is this shit goes underground. I have no illusions you can get it off the internet, but I also think of the hundreds of thousands of disaffected teenage Muslims living in the West the number who have a Facebook account is way higher than the number who know how to download and run the Tor browser. We can't stop child pornography from being distributed on the internet, but we have certainly made it more difficult to distribute it openly. That's what needs to happen with jihadist recruitment efforts, there are going to be a large percentage of people that will not be engaging with this extremism to the same degree if it involves having to slink around unknown corners of the internet, install specialty software and etc. Again--some will always be willing to take those steps, but not all, and any reduction in open recruitment to jihadism is a good thing.

[OttoVonBismarck]

I've quoted this from the other thread.

Otto you've got that wrong, I'd guess the large majority of those killed were Iraq conscripts, officer class soldiers and Sunni/Shia Iraqi nationalists, the first two groups who had actively and passively keeping a 'lid' on or at least preventing the rise of radicalism in the Iraqi population. It wasn't nice, but the men with moustaches kept the bearded men at bay.

Eh, Baghdadi was an Iraqi officer prior to the invasion. So these aren't binary states, there are officer class soldiers who are also terrorists today. And is your point that no, we haven't yet begun to kill tons of jihadists, so we need to try killing some more? I agree with you that a lot of those killed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan weren't Islamic jihadists but were just disaffected insurgents brokering for power. But have you ever really read the various casualty reports in America's conflicts in the Middle East? We have killed thousands and thousands of terrorist targets with drone strikes, tens of thousands of Taliban (who are certainly jihadists, if not as international in ambition as al-Qaeda or ISIS), I mean I wouldn't be surprised if we've already killed 5,000+ members of ISIS just in bombing campaigns. There were several major terrorist groups (actually affiliated with al-Qaeda) who we killed in scores and scores at a time in Iraq, it wasn't all disaffected Baathists, and some of those people were terrorists by the time we got around to killing them.

[Razgovory]

Well don't look at me.  I ain't defending anyone this week.  Fucking tired of it.  If someone wants to pick up the slack, go ahead.  I don't give a shit.

[mongers]

Well don't look at me.  I ain't defending anyone this week.  Fucking tired of it.  If someone wants to pick up the slack, go ahead.  I don't give a shit.

Just pretend IS are like a bunch of Mafiaosa, controlling a territory and a number of money making rackets, accepting no open opposition and ruling by terror.   

[Barrister]

Guys while I agree that Islamic-inspired terrorists are the #1 suspect, we don't actually know who has done this terrible attack, or why.  Let's wait for facts before we start debating what to do next.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Guys while I agree that Islamic-inspired terrorists are the #1 suspect, we don't actually know who has done this terrible attack, or why.  Let's wait for facts before we start debating what to do next.

You're not in court where there is a burden of proof--there have been confirmed, by mainstream, reliable media, reports of Alahu Akbar being screamed during the attacks. This weird post of yours will go down in history as the dumbest thing you've ever said.

[mongers]

Guys while I agree that Islamic-inspired terrorists are the #1 suspect, we don't actually know who has done this terrible attack, or why.  Let's wait for facts before we start debating what to do next.

French Secret service confirmed they arrested a suspect returning from Syria in August, he had a plan to attack music venue, not unlike today's massacre.

[DGuller]

Guys while I agree that Islamic-inspired terrorists are the #1 suspect, we don't actually know who has done this terrible attack, or why.  Let's wait for facts before we start debating what to do next.

You're not in court where there is a burden of proof--there have been confirmed, by mainstream, reliable media, reports of Alahu Akbar being screamed during the attacks. This weird post of yours will go down in history as the dumbest thing you've ever said.