RE: Why was nobody murdered because of this cartoon?

Sun, 18 Jan 2015 17:20:07 -0800 

 

 

From: [email protected] 
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of meekerdb
Sent: Sunday, January 18, 2015 2:09 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Why was nobody murdered because of this cartoon?

 

On 1/18/2015 10:03 AM, spudboy100 via Everything List wrote:

Because its not part of the party line is why. It's the ideology of progies to 
enable the jihad attacks against the west, perhaps so as to winnow down the 
forces of resistance, via Islamist attacks, and thus, get the party worldwide 
into power, placed their by beleaguered votes? Paranoid indeed, but it kind of 
makes sense. 

I observe a empirical fact, Muslims behave like homicidal imbeciles when their 
religion is insulted, but Christians and Jews and Hindus and Buddhist do 
not.Why the difference? It is a perfectly legitimate question. 

 

  John K Clark

 

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: John Clark  <mailto:[email protected]> <[email protected]>
To: everything-list  <mailto:[email protected]> 
<[email protected]>
Sent: Sat, Jan 17, 2015 4:31 pm
Subject: Re: Why was nobody murdered because of this cartoon?

On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 10:33 PM, PGC <[email protected]> wrote:

>> A fair question.  


>I'm not so sure about that. The question presupposes ironically that violence 
>is a justified response to insult.

 

I observe a empirical fact, Muslims behave like homicidal imbeciles when their 
religion is insulted, but Christians and Jews and Hindus and Buddhist do 
not.Why the difference? It is a perfectly legitimate question.


Of course it is not all Muslims who become homicidal, only a small number; yet 
certainly a much larger proportion than among those other religions.  But the 
Tamil Tigers are Hindu and have engaged in suicide bombing and other terrorist 
acts.  Christians and Jews certainly also in different times.  Buddhist and 
Jains and Quakers not so much.  Atheists...depends on how you count Stalin, 
Mao, and Pol Pot.  I don't think they had their 'religion' insulted; they just 
wanted power, but that might be true of imams too.  I think the important 
difference is Muslims have been marginalized by the advance of technological 
civilization and the Enlightenment.  So disaffected young men, like the Kouchai 
brothers, see fighting for Islam as a worthy and noble venture to give meaning 
to their lives, without having give it themselves.  By comparison, fighting for 
communism would have been attractive in the 50's but is passe now.  Fighting 
for Capitalism makes no sense because Capitalism is dominant.  



I am glad you see the distinction, and recognize that there are all kinds of 
people living in the middle east and Iran. The Arab/Persian/Turkish spheres all 
have long and glorious histories. They are complex places. Up to a point I 
agree with the analysis you provide. One cannot totally discount the experience 
of European Colonialism and later on the petro-dollar empire the victorious 
post WWII US. We have backed brutal tyrants (the Shah, whom we installed in a 
1953 CIA run coup in Iran, instigated by that countries democratically elected 
governments refusal to continue allowing BP to take 90% of oil revenues out as 
profit). The opulent narcissistic kleptocracies of the Gulf & Egypt also backed 
and supported… certainly not in the name of freedom.

Iraq has been destroyed by more than twenty years of war (actually more than 
thirty, counting the Iraq/Iran war). Even in the periods between the two later 
Iraq wars it was strangled by economic war. Predictably it has fallen apart now 
and the most extreme elements of that society have emerged in the vacuum of the 
absence of state power. 

Should anyone really  be surprised that a people traumatized by a multi 
generations long war, with all infrastructure basically destroyed (rebuilt 
“somewhat” to soon become destroyed again), with everything that comes with 
living under those kinds of harsh, brutalizing, dehumanizing conditions… should 
the West be surprised with the psychopathic freak/horror show that subsequently 
emerges?

The Neocon prescription has been followed for almost 15 years. Iraq and 
Afghanistan were bombed into freedom; the United States went in and broke the 
pottery – just as Collin Powell had warned.  You break it; you own it. 

ISIS and the other criminal gangs that have emerged may all adopt the messianic 
cloth of Islamic extremism, but the cause of their emergence is more the result 
of a many decade long US military action. What we see is what emerges from 
shock and awe and nation “building”… it is war’s bumper crop… this is classic 
blowback.

Quite conveniently for the neocon airbags that still blather on (as they have 
been now for 15 years) exhorting  others to go out to wage war, to kill and be 
killed… quite conveniently for them, ISIS makes the perfect bogey man (they are 
scary monsters, no doubt, I have seen some truly gruesome footage). 

History is complex and multi-faceted. I understand the motivations for 
presenting history as a simple morality tale with a Manichean caste of good 
guys versus bad guys… makes for a great Hollywood narrative, and for many this 
is and has been the narrative. Propagandists always depict this stark struggle 
between good (and we always know who they are) and evil. 

But reality is not that simple. Reality is shaped by the histories that have 
already happened, by the linguistic, ethnic, sectarian and other cultural 
realities… world events emerge from the interactions of many often orthogonal 
forces and systems all operating concurrently.

For all the horror of ISIS, there are some under-reported stories emerging of 
true courage. One, for example, of a Sunni man living in ISIS controlled city 
of Mosul Iraq, risking his life to smuggle a terrified young Yazidi woman to a 
secret hinterland desert rendezvous with an “enemy” Kurdish man (who himself 
drove deep into dangerous territory to meet him) and who then took the young 
mother and her infant baby to safety. Both these men very much were 
substantially risking their lives to save that woman and her baby’s life… a 
woman who was not of their faith or ethnicity. Those two men acted out of a 
deep reservoir of human decency – that exists deep down inside most all of us. 
For all the horror of ISIS, humanity is not dead in northern Iraq, though it is 
clearly under assault and must hide and work in secrecy.

-Chris


Brent

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