Why Do They Hate Us?
Here's a great article by Scott Horton, detailing the work of U of Chicago's Robert Pape. Two excerpts from the article:
Professor Pape says that while al-Qaeda terrorists are twice as likely to be from a country where radical Salafist/Wahhabist Islam is widely practiced, they are 10 times more likely to have come from a country that has U.S. troops stationed in it...
No suicide bombers have ever come from Iran, where there are no foreign troops. Iraq had never seen a suicide bombing on its soil before U.S. troops arrived in 2003. While Ayatollah Khomeini spent the 1980s criticizing American culture, many people agreed, but none resorted to suicide bombing. When bin Laden cited U.S. forces in the land of Mecca and Medina, men hopped on planes with knives.
Professor Pape says that while al-Qaeda terrorists are twice as likely to be from a country where radical Salafist/Wahhabist Islam is widely practiced, they are 10 times more likely to have come from a country that has U.S. troops stationed in it...
No suicide bombers have ever come from Iran, where there are no foreign troops. Iraq had never seen a suicide bombing on its soil before U.S. troops arrived in 2003. While Ayatollah Khomeini spent the 1980s criticizing American culture, many people agreed, but none resorted to suicide bombing. When bin Laden cited U.S. forces in the land of Mecca and Medina, men hopped on planes with knives.
Do you agree with the statement made repeatedly by George Bush that, "Islam is a religion of peace?"
ReplyDeletehttp://www.natashatynes.org/newswire/2005/04/iranian_hardlin.html
ReplyDeleteFrom the above link:
ReplyDelete"Around 400 volunteers signed up in Tehran to sacrifice their lives in "occupied Islamic countries" on Wednesday night..."
So, we have more evidence that "it's the occupation, stupid."
I may not be too bright, but I think the making the argument that suicide bombings are the result of foreign occupations is intellectually honest.
ReplyDeleteGroups of humans have been dominating each other since even before the genus homo started to walk without knuckles.
Suicide bombings on the scale we're witnessing in our age are something new.
I see it as a result of the development of capitalism and the circulation of commodities. Commodity-based societies concentrated wealth in a small group and the fruits of capitalism, like antibiotics, created a bubble in the population, because the birth rates in Muslim countries did not decline with the decline in death rates. Sure this is simplistic! But it is not disingenuous like the statistics quoted in the above referenced article.
Of course, the so-called Pakistani bombers in England just happened to be native sons, and there was a Jamaican. I've never thought of Jamaica as an occupied country. But, then again, I've no knowledge of Christian or Rastafarian suicide attacks coming from Jamaicans. There's just something about the angry young man as a religious convert... and there's something about that particular religion that our political correctitude ignores.
Anonymous:
ReplyDeleteIf Moslems are, caeteris paribus, more inclined to become suicide bombers than others, that is surely all the more reason to get out of the Middle East?!
julius:
ReplyDeleteYou see, what you suggest would be the sensible, non-erratic thing to do.
But since there *are* moslems inclined to become suicide bombers, the west *must* evidently intervene and kill them all.
(At this point, shut that part of your brain that loops back to the beginning of the argument and keep yourself from uttering, "But...")
I mean, do you really want to live with those crazy people right next door?