Gordon Brown, the new prime minister of the United Kingdom, has instructed his administration to drop the phrase: War on Terror. I consider that a brilliant move and would do the same thing here in America. He’s also instructed his administration not to use the term: Muslim terrorist. That seem like stupid political correctness to me. I can understand deemphasizing the religious component as an electoral strategy, and even as a way to avoid further alienation. But a ban? That seems too much.
Regardless, there was never any way we could win a War on Terror. I’m glad the UK has stopped pretending otherwise.
Depends on what he recommends they say instead. If you can’t point out that a terrorist is a Muslim, that’s bad. But if he’d rather be more precise and say something like “Islamist terrorist”, that would be good.
You need evidence to claim “al-Qaeda” is behind these terrorist attacks, but that it has not stopped the corporate media or the fear-monger hacks with an agenda–i.e., slaughtering Muslims and divvying up the Middle East–from leading to conclusions and thus subjecting the public to non-stop propaganda. So let’s first try to find out: who are these terrorists anyway?
Much prefer to see terrorists identified by country of origin, which has the benefit of possibly increasing political embarrassment on the governments that sponsor and harbor terrorists, especially if they have any pretensions to democracy.
Still, since the term “Islamofascist” entered the OED this week, perhaps “Islamist terrorist” is a good and accurate phrase to substitute.
You don’t hear about Buddhists bombing mosques, do you? You don’t hear about atheists bombing abortion clinics, do you? So why should it be so far fetched that one make the statement “Muslim terrorists”? Are there any other kind? Sure, there was McVey and a few other nut-jobs out there, but 99.999% of your terrorists have 3 things in common – religion, race, and geographic location.
The Tamil Tigers invented modern suicide bombing and they are 90% Hindu.
I did not know that. Nevertheless, it is not being racist when one says the term “muslim terrorist” – it is however redundant. It is comparable to saying “stupid idiot”, “golden palamino”, or “that ugly chick who blew Bill Clinton”
there’s a reason you did not know that… and it’s because of the use of language like “muslim terrorist”.
read robert pape. it is not about religion.
well put.
so every muslim is a terrorist?
no. not all Muslims are terrorists – but most terrorists are Muslims. Just like not all women aren’t lesbians, but all lesbians are women.
Let me try to explain that statement this way. But don’t feel upset, you’re not alone.
The suicide bomber campaign can be seen as part of an Israeli PR war.
is your position that suicide bombers simply don’t exist?
The main effect these alleged suicide bombers have is that they allow the mass media to impress on people’s mind that ‘those muslim people’ are crazy. Implicitly they are saying that they can be dealt with according to that image. This kind of softening up of the collective mind to mass murder is familiar to us from Rwanda, from various holocausts, from lynchings. What is happening is that we are pursuing PNACs agenda of grabbing the power vacuum left behind by the collapsed USSR. We’ll have to do some mass killing in the middle east to make that happen. That’s serious, so be very critical when you are again and again reminded that those people are nuts anyway and should be dealt with..
For example: the BBC found that a number of the 9/11 suicide attackers were alive after 9/11. Atta spoke with his father on 9/12. A massive bridge in Bagdad that allegedly was taken down by a suicide bomber a few month ago, in fact must have been taken down by professional demolition.
I’ll ignore your comment about me personally.
You seem to subscribe to the theory that Anglo-American operatives are behind most terrorist attacks.
I don’t dispute that Anglo-Americans have been behind some terrorist attacks. For example, this.
I have suspicions about the Samarra Mosque, to be honest.
And, yes, the 9/11 hijackers have not all been properly identified. I did a lot of research into the hijackers. Here’s an excel sheet I did on the hijackers.
But, having said all that, there are real Muslims that carry out real terrorist attacks for real reasons. Perhaps some of these comically ineffective attacks are deliberately inept. But over in Iraq they are cruelly effective.
I am always skeptical of reports of responsibility for terrorist attacks, and I know that our own people are capable of carrying them out for their own nefarious purposes.
But your worldview takes this a step further to where there is no real external threat at all.
Israel’s experience with Hamas and our own with the mujahideen, should show that we lost control of the militants we created, not that they are still under our control.
Ditto what Selise said. Read Pape.
In the wake of the September 11th attacks, Robert Pape, Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, spent two years establishing a database containing details of every known suicide bombing or attack – 315 in all – since 1980. (His findings were summarized in a paper for the American Political Science Review in August 2003, and published in his book, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, in May 2005. The importance of Pape’s database was that it was a comprehensive record of suicide attacks worldwide. Usually, the only suicide attacks that we in the western countries care about are the ones that target us, and that allows us to make the association between Islam and suicide bombings, because it is generally Muslim countries that we are in conflict with right now. But by documenting the phenomenon from a global perspective, and taking into account the suicide attacks in far-flung countries that don’t usually make it onto our radar, Pape concluded:
Pape found that there was an indirect connection between religion and suicide bombings, inasmuch as suicide attacks often occurred in conflicts in which an occupying power of one religion was in control of a land where the occupied population was of a different religion. But once again, Islamic fundamentalism did not account for that connection, because the connection existed regardless of whether or not one of the warring parties was Muslim. For example, in the period Pape studied, suicide attacks occurred in conflicts pitting Hindu versus Buddhist, Muslim v. Christian, Sikh v. Hindu, Muslim/Christian v. Jewish, as well as in conflicts where there was no religious divide and both protagonists were avowedly secular (as in the campaign by the Marxist Kurdish Workers Party against the secular state of Turkey).
Pape’s conclusion was that the most common motivation behind organizations that used suicide attacks was not religious fundamentalism, but nationalism:
So while it’s true that we don’t hear about suicide bombers of different religions (or of no religion at all), it’s not because they don’t exist. Perhaps they are underreported over here because our news media thinks we are not interested in terrorism that targets people “not like us”, or maybe there’s a more ideological motive, i.e. the desire not to question the “terrorist = Muslim” stereotype.
He should just ban all war, period.
amen
A terrorist is a terrorist is a terrorist. It shouldn’t matter if he’s a Christianist Terrorist or an Islamist Terrorist. They should be treated equally. Timothy McVeigh is just as bad a Osama bin Laden. Period. So why were we so scared and spooked after a Muslim-cult attacked and merely “disappointed” in our deranged white christian-cult boy when he attacked? Just a misunderstood kid? Or is the difference that the current administration exploited our collective fears of brown people who pray on mats in order to get them self some “political capital” to enrich all of their friends with?
I wish we could retire the prefix “War on” (anything – fill in the blank) but then how would we keep the people in line? You gots ta scare them and make them think they’re “at war” with whatever the bogeyman of the day is to keep them in line, ya know. Or else they might get all uppidy and wants them some free healthcare & stuff.