Is the 2% of the Muslim world population that are terrorists too much?

Please don't flame me... me and my mother were discussing the death of Zarqawi and how they had bombed all of those buildings. My mom was pleased that it had happened, that Shrunkbrain had gotten the number 2 wanted man. Personally I gotta say I feel mixed about it, glad he's gone but sad that civilians might have gotten hurt.

Anyways we ended up discussing Muslims and terrorists in the world and I had mentioned that I had read on the Internet that out of the 2.5 billion (million? I can't remember the exact number so if you can help me out I'd appreciate it.) that only 2% of them are terrorist and that was a small number compared to the rest of the population.

My mother says that is a lot, 200,000 and that is quite enough. Being that I practiced Islam for a while I am dismayed by our media's portrayal of the Muslim world. The impressions that we get are that all of them are terrorists and my mom pretty much shares this worldview.

So I am wondering if anyone can help me with information that can counter her argument. I feel that while yes that there are terrorists, the whole world isn't full of them and that Islam's image has been tarnished by the American media.

Blue

Edited to say that this is a question that is on my mind and not to lambaste Muslims.

Mods: If you feel this belongs in another forum or is innappropriate do what you must do with this post.

My guess is the number is a LOT less than 2%. Remember in order to be a terrorist you actually have to commit a terrorist act, and at least in the US there has only been one terrorist attack in the last decade that can be tied to Islamic people.

Equals 32 million.


:wow:


Horseshit!

...put the global Muslim population somewhere between 1.2 and 1.8 billion. I don't know where the 2% terrorist figure comes from, but I'm pretty skeptical about it. While a significant percentage of Muslims may sympathise with the aims of Islamic extremists, that's a long way from being terrorists themselves. There are probably no more than a few thousand active Muslim terrorists worldwide (depending on what definition you use for 'terrorist') outside of the Iraqi insurgents and Afghan Taliban forces.

and there is so much about terrorists and Muslims that it's too much for me to go through. I will try www.dogpile.com as I find that search engine to be more precise. I know that I have read that statistic before and I thought that it was a pretty low number.

Like I said my mom's got a twisted view of Islam and the Mid East because she doesn't parse through the information. She does rely on our media instead of getting on the Net and searching. I have met many good Muslims that share anti-American sentiment (and who wouldn't with Bush at the helm?)but they wouldn't dream of hurting others because of it. While I was in my Islam phase she had called the FBI on me to monitor my correspondence with my Muslim friends since she felt that I was getting brainwashed by them as I was starting to spout anti-American sentiments. Actually this is something I have had since Bush stole the elections in 2000 so it's really anti-Bush adminstration sentiment.


She called the FBI on me!!! can you believe that!!! I was pissed off at her when she told me that.

Blue

Wasn't it the Nazis who wanted family members to turn each other in for 'disloyalty?' I'm sure your mother thought she was looking out for you but, seriously, she needs a good talking to if she thinks that bringing down the wrath of the state on your head is an act of love.

rule.

There was also an orgainzation in Nazi Germany called the Nazi Youth.

My mom did this about a year after 9/11 when I got into the whole shebang of Islam.

Blue

encouraged children to turn in their parents for drug use. Sieg Hell yeah!

i spurt out many anti-american views. mine has been since bush also, but i've kinda looked back in history at some of the things this country has done in latin american countries and it is not a pretty picture.

So that is why my phone was clicking a lot during that period. I am wondering now if I am on a no-fly list or something and I hope I am not since I am trying to get to an art school in California.

But yes she did say she called the FBI to monitor my correspondences and not necessarily on me but still I was pissed about it.

Blue

Are you sure she really did this and didn't just say she did it? She could have gotten you in a lot of trouble. Have you read about the Arab students in the U.S. who were put in jail for months as "witnesses" for people "suspected" of terrorism? There was one featured in the NYT about a year ago. He was considered a "witness" because he criticized the U.S. on his web site. While he was in jail, he lost his scholarship to do a doctorate at a Middle-Eastern university, and the stress destroyed his marriage. He's now a truck driver.

Anyway, don't worry too much. I'm sure the FBI gets lots of false alarms. I've heard of people going to restaurants and then reporting their waiter to the FBI the next day because he "looked Arab."

because she told me after I had stopped practicing Islam.

radical terrorists. but i can never get the picture out of my mind of all the muslims in areas of the united states cheering and clapping. and there certainly were many in the mid-east who were happy.

i have met some muslims on the DU (one in particular) who is a sufi muslim and she is a really nice, peaceful person. we've had some interesting e-mails that opened my eyes to many of her beliefs and they are all loving and peaceful.

if that is how you spell her SN. I have talked to her as well and I find Sufism very interesting and mystical.

I don't know about the Muslims clapping and cheering for I am very paranoid about the media, as far as I know that could be film footage from a holiday or something.

Blue

daily for awhile learning each others beliefs. when my cat was ill she prayed for him. we still touch base now and then. she is constantly growing in her spirituality.

I love learning different paths and incoporating them into my own. Currently I am into Vodouism as I have been for years but haven't been able to do anything with it until now.

Learning different faiths does open one's eyes and heart.

Blue

spiritual teacher many years ago who practised a combination of both. his mother was cuban but his grandmother's best friend was a voodo priestess at the age of 13. she was like another grandma to my teacher. there was no killing of animals. he was quite modern. if we made a sacrifice we went out and bought a chicken or whatever was appropriate. he did keep a live snake which you know is the highest god in the voodo religion. i believe he's called dumballa. it's been a long time, but i have a deep respect for the religion.

i wish they would make a movie about the good side of voodo and santeria. they always make it look evil.

currently I am on a Yahoo group that is into Vodou and I am trying to understand it. I don't know of any good books besides Mama Lola and I got to try and get that next month. Being that I live in Grand Rapids, there isn't many pagans in this area and the ones that do practice paganism are into Druidism, Wicca or some other Euro-centric path. I am not really interested in those (like all things European) as they don't really give me a sense of spirituality.

I am discussing the Hollywood thing on my Yahoo group and yeah I agree with you about their portrayal of Vodou being evil, I think that they should show the good side.

Blue

teacher was in new york and he passed away about 10 years ago. new york city was an easy place to get information. because of so many cubans and puerto ricans they had stores called "botanicas" where you could buy plants, herbs, books, etc.

will change your life!!

in a well organized, very well attended Santeria ceremony/trance dance. It was absolutely inspiring and beautiful.

some of the most intelligent, interesting people there. it was a celebration for one of the god's. everyone would bring white flowers. after eating -- there were a few people doing all the cooking (quite a variety of foods). well anyway my teacher would get out the big incense burner -- like the one they use in the catholic church. he would go through the room and purify everyone. then he would go into a trance. he would sit in a big chair and one by one we would go up for his blessing, healing, whatever. it was quite amazing. i remember one guy who was a long-time student actually kissed his feet. it was quite something to be a part of.

i had been with him 2 other times when he went into trance and i know that i was in one too. he would play certain drumming music and the energy in the house would completely change. even the dog who was usually quiet would howl.

"Aw, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. Forty percent of all people know that."

___

Hey, the liberal light is always on at the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy. Please stop by and say "hi!"

I think that even Wolfowitz in his wildest PNAC masturbatory fantasies doesn't believe there are 24,000,000 Islamic terrorists on Earth, although because of his actions the number does increase daily.

There are about 1.5 x 10^9 Muslims in total (give or take a few hundred million).

2% of that is 3 x 10^7, or 30 million Muslim terrorists. This number seems implausibly high.

I would guess that there are between 1.5 x 10^2 and 7.5 x 10^5 Muslims who have engaged in acts of violence for ideological reasons (between 0.05 percent and 0.00001%); probably nearer the higher end of that range. How many of those you class as terrorists is pretty subjective, but even if we take all of them that's still fewer than 2% by a factor of 40.

I think that liberals tend to be too unwilling to condemn Islam, but while there are plenty of good reasons to do so, "Muslims are terrorists" or even "a non-trivial number of Muslims are terrorists" are emphatically not among them.

stated claims by many Muslims recently that all Muslims are being tarnished and that religion has nothing to do with terrorism. When I hear these comments I feel I am listening to Bush and his neocons talk about America and democracy. Both parties are engaging in spin and obfuscation.

The fact matter is that there is no definitive interpretation of the Koran and because there is no definitive interpretation extremist sects such as Wabaibis impose their own interpretation on the Koran and QUOTE the Koran to justify their extremism. Therefore Islam is in effect implicated in terrorism in that if one does enough cherry picking from the Koran one can find justification for violent acts.

A Sufi imam in Toronto on the CBC said this exact thing, he also said that the mosque that the alleged terrorists attended is affiliated to an organization in Ottawa that is funded by Saudi Wahabis. He also said that Saudis are sending Korans to Canada with Jihadist teachings and money to finance Wahabi organizations.

So frankly I think the charge that media are unfairly tarnishing all Muslims is a straw man. Please cite one article stating that all Muslims are terrorists.

Yet the media are not tarnishing all Christians. I wonder why that is..

The idea that all Muslims are being tarnished is a strawman.

I doubt that anyone can find any public quote from Nixon or his people where they publicly maligned all black people

Yakusa? How many Italians are Mafia?

The numbers in all cases are infinitesimally small. Each organization gives its larger ethnic group a huge and largely undeserved black eye.

One Muslim in 50 would be one terrorist for every active troop we have.
If you define terrorist as someone who actually commits or attempts
a terorist act, they could do a lot more damage than the estimated 650
terrorists acts in 2004. With an army that big, would they even need use
asymmetical warfare tactics?

It may be plausible that 2% of Muslims hate Americans, infidels, westerners
in general, but can you find any group of people of significant size
where 2% or more don't hate some other group of people?

Estimates vary with 3,000 to 10,000 al Qaeda fighters and as many as 100,000
al Qaeda trained or influenced militants.

"It may be plausible that 2% of Muslims hate Americans, infidels, westerners
in general, but can you find any group of people of significant size
where 2% or more don't hate some other group of people?"

It may be that is what the statistics were pointing out. I personally feel that what my mom said was way off, I do believe that Al-Queda is only a very small faction of the entire group.

She just believes that a large majority of the Middle Eastern people are in her words "Absolute nutcases" Her words, not mine.

So I tend to try and find out what the real numbers are though I am not much of a math geek.

Blue

It's extremely ignorant and offensive to say that a "majority" -- or even a significant minority -- of Middle Easterners are "nutcases". (I'm sure that even the average fundamentalist Muslim is no more insane than the average evangelical over here -- and not all Muslims are fundamentalists). I think your mother needs to visit a few countries like Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco to meet some of these people and decide for herself whether they seem like nutcases. A friend of mine made a trip through several countries in the region (including Iran, I think) a few years ago, and he said the people he talked to there were some of the nicest people he'd ever met. The bottom line is that most people are the same wherever you go.

Some Middle Eastern and Arab countries (especially the oil-producing ones) have corrupt governments that find it convenient to encourage fundamentalism and keep their people uneducated and misinformed. They spread the idea that Jews cause all their problems, so that the public won't realize the real root of the problem, which is the corruption of their governments. Now, tell me, what is the best way to improve this situation? Is it to bomb these innocent yet uninformed people, or offend them by writing them off as "nutcases"? Or is it to fund their education systems so that they'll learn about democracy and critical thought? If fewer Arab youth felt hopeless in life -- if unemployment were lower and there were more ways for a poor person to get a proper education improve his/her status in life -- I'm sure there would be fewer terrorists. Sure, the terrorists at the very top are absolute nutcases who can't be handled with diplomacy; but they'd find it awfully hard to get supporters if most Arabs saw political, civil ways of solving their problems.

to say that a significant minority of middle easteners are nutcases if you use nutcase to mean "hold ultraconservative and deeply unpleasant views on women's rights, gay rights, crime and punishment, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, etc, often for bad reasons" - a loose definition, but one sufficiently often used in political discourse to dismiss e.g. Fred Phelps to be justifiable, I think.

It *is* undoubtedly offensive to say so, but I don't think that's a good reason not to say it (although it is arguably a good reason to choose less emotive words than "nutcase" to make the same point).

many of those who label muslims as "nutcases" often fit the same description of holding "ultraconservative and deeply unpleasant views on women's rights, gay rights, crime and punishment, freedom of speech, freedom of religion".

Fundamentalists of different stripes often hate each other but actually have quite a lot in common.

but just because people who are wrong about a lot of other things believe something doesn't mean it's not true. But yes, I am aware that criticising Islam puts me in some pretty unsavoury company, and so I generally try and choose my words carefully when doing so, and would advise avoiding using emotive terms like "nutcase" except in referece to other people's having done so.

The fact that right-wing Christians and right-wing Muslims dislike one another so much isn't coincidence, of course - attitudes to religion that have a strong element of "my gang" in them, and so can't stand rival gangs, even similar ones, correlate strongly with conservative views in general.

One should be slightly careful when comparing RW Christians and RW Muslims as groups, though - the Muslim lunatic fringe is even more lunatic and less fringe. Similar, yes, but one is non-trivially worse than the other (by which I mean "the average over one body is worse than the average over the other body", not "each member of one body is worse than each member of the other body", which would be a far stronger and patently absurd claim).

kind of relativism, i.e. that RW christians are less dangerous than RW muslims.

Examples given are that some muslims riot over cartoons whilst christians do not, some muslims support al-Qaeda etc.

I think both are loony but in different ways, you can't compare like for like. For instance B*sh's fundamentalist base is quite comfortable with torture, extraordinary renditions, targeted killings (eg. blowing up a buidling to get one person), "shock and awe" (war based on lies resulting in tens of thousands of innocent civilian casualities), warrantless wiretapping, outing of govt agents for political gain etc etc.

On edit: I guess you could say that your average islamic suicide bomber is a lot more dangerous than your average christian nutcase, but you could also say that they are outnumbered a hundred to one by the 130,000 troops sent to war on a pack of lies (85% of whom according to surveys believe that the invasion and occupation of Iraq is revenge for 9/11), a number whose magnitutude is also quite horrifying.

At the end of the day no religion or nation has a special claim to violence or ignorance, it's fairly evenly distributed.

I agree with you that no religion or nation has a special claim to violence or ignorance, but not that it's evenly distributed - Buddhism, while *by no means* faultless, appears to lead to oppression less often than Christianity, which in turn is *on average* less oppressive than Islam. Wiccans have never persecuted anyone, so far as I'm aware of, while the number of people killed by the Aum Shrinrikyo (sp?) cult is an appreciable fraction of the number of members it's ever had.

I think that the social teachings and the interpretations of those teachings of Christianity and Islam (and of other religions) are sufficiently similar for it to be legitimate to compare them.

To pick one example there are some fundamentalist American Christians who are happy with torture in a few circumstances, but (while I admit that I have no data to this effect, and as such if you want to dismiss this whole paragraph as bullshit you'd be entirely within your rights) I suspect as a proportion of Christians they are lower than the proportion of Muslims who support corporal punishment (which, as prescribed in Sharia law, is, I believe, both harsher than anything Bush is supporting and prescribed for much, much more minor offences as standard).

Likewise, for extraordinary rendition, targetted killing etc - they'd all be considered relatively mild in many Muslim countries. That's *not* an argument against Islam in itself, though - to make it into one, one would have to claim that that fact is due to Islam, and I don't think that's the case.

I find it interesting that when you're looking for examples of Christian atrocities you (and virtually all the other DUers I've had similar arguments with) reach for American ones, rather than e.g. those of the Lord's Resistance Army or similar (which *aren't* paralleled by anything in even remotely mainstream Islam, although the Muslim Janjaweed in Sudan are doing similar things; note also that neither the LRA nor the Janjaweed can be blamed on their respective religions; religion is an incidental factore in bothy cases, I think). This makes me suspect that a lot of liberals' unwillingness to compare Islam unfavourably with Christianity comes from a (possibly subconscious) desire to stick up for the underdogs - the belief that evil is more likely to be perpetrated by rich white people than poor brown ones. I think this, while better than the alternative prejudice by a mile, is still an obstacle to clear thinking, and should be avoided.

As I've said, I don't think terrorism is a good reason to dislike Islam, because it's something only supported by a small minority of Muslims (although many of those who do support it do so *because of* Islam). The war in Iraq isn't a good reason to dislike Christianity, because Christianity wasn't one of the motivating factors.

The *good* reason to dislike Islam is that the Koran contains a lot of instructions on how to run and administer a society, and many of those instructions are very bad ones. Christianity's equivalent is considerably milder, because the NT is phrased in generalities rather than specifics and contains specific dispensations from the madder parts of the OT, and because its interpretation has changed either more or in a better fashion since the Dark ages.

and Quran as you pointed out. I read both, the first because I was raised in that religion, the second because of curiosity, though only a translation, and I know its not officially authoritative. But, as far as I can tell, the New Testament doesn't supersede anything from the Old Testament, and the OT is not any milder than the Quran, in fact, the reverse is true. The only major difference I can see between Christianity and Islam is actually how MUCH of the Bible is ignored by Christians or their societies entirely, whereas in Islam, in some countries, they interpret it to the extreme. To give an example, the Quran states for women to dress modestly, so anal leaders in Saudi Arabia interpret that to mean a Burqa from head to toe. Of course, the Bible says the same damned thing, but the interpretations are different in different cultures. Also, even in Islam, this isn't universally true, as others have stated, go to Egypt or other places in Northern Africa, or go to Southeast Asia, and you can see Muslim women with cutoff shirts and wearing shorts, with a Hijab covering their hair. And that's but one example.

Also, some Christian societies also take such interpretations to the extreme, and some are harmless, others not so much. Others are oddballs and proclaim to kill for Jesus, Operation Rescue is an example of that, also the Krar couple in Texas, that gathered some materials to build a cyanide bomb to kill a stadium full of people. The only difference I can see between Muslim terrorists and Christian terrorists is that the Muslim ones seem to be simply more competent, other than that, no difference that I can see.

Biblical interpretation is not something all Christians agree on, by any extent, and I'm neither a Christian myself or an expert on the Bible, but I can tell you that the overwhelming majority of Christians (Catholics, Orthodox, and most Protestant denominations) believe that many of the odder rules in the OT are a matter of ritual purity that ceased to be necessary after the death (or possibly after the coming, but I think only after the death) of Christ.

To quote from the inimitable Andrew Rilstone's article on the ordination of g ayBishops, http://www.aslan.demon.co.uk/gaybishops.htm :



1.The Bible is split into two halves.

2.The first half is labeled in large friendly letters The Old Testament

3'Old' as in superceded, past, we've moved beyond that now. (Jews find this quite irritating, oddly enough.)

4.The 'old' Testament contains rules. Don't eat this kind of food, refrain from that kind of sexual practice, sacrifice goats, don't touch icky things.

5.The second half of the Bible is labeled the New Testament.

6.A very large proportion of the 'new' Testament is given over to answering the question 'Do Christians have to obey all those rules in the Old Testament? If not, what was the point of them?' See Romans, Hebrews, Galatians, etc.

7.Be honest, you gave up half way through Acts and skipped to the juicy bits of Revelation that are mentioned in that Clint Eastwood movie, didn't you?

8.Christians say that God is Holy and Man isn't. They say that as long as we aren't holy, we can't talk to God. (This is called 'Original Sin.')

9.In the 'Old Testament' God picks a particular tribe and says, 'If you do try really hard to be clean, abstain from certain foods and certain sexual practices, do special holy washing and wear special holy clothes and don't touch icky stuff; and then kill animals in the temple to 'pay' for sins, then I'll treat you as if you were Holy and let you, or at any rate your priests, talk to me, even though that stuff can't make any difference really. '

10.The theological sections of the New Testament say: 'Because Jesus (God) really did die for our sins, it is not necessary to kill sheep and goats in the temple. Because Jesus (God) really washes us clean of sin, it is no longer necessary to do all the washing and abstaining from 'unclean' foods. We actually are holy again. We can talk to God whenever we want to. Hurrah!'

11.Or words to that effect.

12.But that doesn't mean you can do what you like: God hasn't changed his mind about the moral stuff in the Old Testament, like not killing and not stealing.

But please look this stuff up in the Bible, though: St Paul says it much better than me.



(Likewise, please look this stuff up in the original article, Rilstone puts it far better than I can...)

I would agree that the OT is at least on a par with the Koran in terms of detatchment from reality, although I think that a society organised along the lines laid out in it, while unpleasant, would be slightly less so (stoning of adulteresses is preferable to stoning of adulteresses *and* mutilation of pickpockets, for example). But nearly all Christians believe that most of the odder rules in it no longer apply. The disagreements about which rules are just part of the purity code and which are moral commandments is the source of a great deal of interChristian conflict, though.

In regards to picking on American examples of extremism I do this merely because it affects my life the most.

The LRA in Uganda or the genocide in Rwanda didn't really affect me.

As for muslim atrocities in the West I believe that 9/11 was allowed to happen through complicity and manipulation from American sources and foreign sources allied to them, all of who gained greatly from 9/11 and suffered few repercussions. I choose to point most blame at the American culprits because without their help it could never have happened and also because those very same people are tasked with protecting the American people.

The crime of 9/11 provided the political capital for everything else that followed, including the invasion of Iraq, which itself contributed to the vicious circle of actually increasing terrorism. Again I blame the American culprits because they initiated the conflict and also because their actions affect my life more than the islamic fundmentalists. Without the complicity of the renegade American faction, islamic fundamentalists would not be a major threat to America and Europe, there would be less of them and they would be off fighting in Chechnya and Kashmir, not in Iraq fighting agaist US and British troops.

On edit: I now realise I didn't really address your point about the textual diffrences between the Koran and the NT (and differences between christian and islamic societies), however I think my main point that Western christian fundamentalism affects my life more was the point I was trying to get across.

I am extremely critical of Islam; but that's not the same as being critical of Muslims. One can respect Muslims without respecting Islam. Muslims are not a uniform group: many Muslims (Turkish Muslims, for example) believe in feminism and democracy. Most Muslims who don't speak Arabic don't even know what the Kuran says; they think it talks about respecting one's neighbor, respecting people of other faiths (as long as they believe in one God), and treating others the way one would like to be treated. I've met people like this who became atheists after reading a translation of the Kuran.

One doesn't accomplish anything by calling Muslims names. And I disagree that Muslim extremists are "more lunatic and less fringe." Christian extremists here bomb abortion clinics, kill doctors providing abortions, and pass around the names and addresses of such doctors. They have so little respect for women that they would ban abortions, knowing that this will result in women dying in botched abortions, and ban the HPV vaccine, knowing that women will die of cervical cancer as a result. They think that a woman who has sex outside of marriage deserves to die. I would call this pretty extreme -- and it's not so "fringe", either.

Absolutely no useful purpose is served by insulting Muslims as a group, let alone by being hostile to Muslims one meets in the course of one's daily life; the fact that most people who are critical of Islam are also, not to put to fine a point on it, anti-Muslim bigots is why one has to choose one's words so carefully when doing so.

Your second point is anecdotal, not statistical, though. Yes, there *are* Christian extremists as extreme as the most extreme Muslims (or rather, there are both Christians and Muslims so extreme that comparison becomes meaningless). However, if you were to plot graphs of degree of right wing extremism vs population centile then I *think* that the graph for Muslims as a whole would be non-trivially shifted to the right compared with the one for Christians as a whole, and I'm sure that the one for middle-Eastern Muslims would be (something I always have difficulty reminding myself of is that the largest Muslim population is in Indonesia; the common mistake that most Muslims are arabs and vice versa is one I am ashamed to say I have to work quite hard to avoid). The fraction of Christians who think that a woman who has sex outside of marriage deserves to die is much lower than the fraction of Muslims who think that (although, as you've said, that fraction itself isn't all that large).

with something I read from an ex-CIA or govt official who estimated there were 5,000 al-Qaeda fighters.

Zarqawi being dead is a great thing. Some evil people in the world have to die.

:eyes:

Welcome to DU yadda yadda yadda...

Because that is what the original posters mixed feelings were over. He said he was glad Zarqawi was gone, but he was not so glad about losing civilians in the process. Is it wrong in your book to be upset when civilians are killed? Having mixed feelings over the actions that took out Zarqawi seems like a perfectly reasonable position to me.

I have no mixed feelings that Zarqawi was killed. I think it's great in fact!

I would be terribly sad if they were.

Blue

to set the stage for dangerous confrontations in the Middle East; confrontations driven not by a real desire to fight terrorism much less spread democracy; but confrontation with a real motive of domination and self-serving economic interest.

in the history of that religion, have participated in acts of war, terrorism, crime and violence? Probably more than 2%

I did some research using numbers from SOA Watch, and came to the conclusion that roughly 2% of their graduates went on to do the heinous acts which are generally used to attack the whole institution. I was roundly accused of defending Nazis and Klansmen.

The problem, I think, comes from trying to grapple with the nature of evil and how to reduce it. It's much easier intellectually to understand evil as coming from some institution, rather than a potential within everyone. It's easier to say that Germans were just all evil, or that Islam is evil, or that SOA is evil, than to say that people all have the potential for evil.

If so, then the comparison is false, the School of the Americas SOLE purpose is to train military officers on HOW to foster coups within their own nations. Given this, it is more like Al-Queda, and has a similar relationship to Christianity as Al-Queda does with Islam, mostly incidental.

human and nonhuman, those hoodles are small change.

Do you really mean that there are 12-15 million Americans terrorising the world? That seems like an awful lot. Even if you include every soldier, every politician, and even (not that I'm suggesting for a moment that it wouldn't be ludicrous to do so) every executive of a company involved in foreign trade, I doubt you'd get above a million, and probably significantly lower.


What sense of the word "terrorising" are you using?

The Rich. It is for their benefit that oil is an object of war, that Congo is being ground down for it's resources, that the Gulf of Mexico is becoming a dead zone. Though they may never pull a trigger, issue a fatwa or bulldoze a pristine stream, it's all for them. Though they go through life blithly unaware of the blood and ruined planet heaped at their door, donating to good causes and supporting liberal politicans, you won't see them recoiling in horror from their income.

What is terror? Is not bombing an inhabited city terrorism? What of embargos which reduce people to extermities? Or dispossessing people of their homes(Native Americans, Palestinians, etc).Is the manner in which the weak respond to these things and so much else terror or counter-terror?

is that they stop meaning *anything*.

Terrorism is a word. It has a specific meaning. Terrorism is, roughly, "trying to achieve a political goal through (covert) violence whose objective is to inspire fear rather than to achieve specific tactical goals".

Bombing an inhabited city is only terrorism if you're doing it to frighten people rather than to destroy specific targets, and arguably only if there's some measure of stealth involved.

An embargo is not terrorism.

Dispossessing people of their homes is not terrorism, unless it's done specifically to threaten or inspire fear rather than to clear that specific patch of land (and arguably not even then).


I think the general thrust of your post - that the American rich are to blaim for most of the suffering in the world - is at best so gross an oversimplification of the real state of affairs as to be essentially wrong, and probably not merely innacurate or misleading but actively mistaken - the suffering of Africans is caused far more by African kleptocrats than by American businessmen, for example, and investment by the rich usually *alleviates* suffering. However, this is debateable. What *isn't* debateable is your use of language, specifically your debasement of the word "terrorism", which, like all words, means something specific and not anything else.

actively supported acts of extreme violence against the civilian populations of Muslim and other countries.

Unfortunately this does include America and its close allies. And it does continue even now. Much of this would fall well within a definition of terrorism. Every credible independent human rights group on earth would attest to this reality. Some of it may not meet the technical definition of terrorism. Much of it would. But the reality is the same. A civilian population is brutalized and terrorized and in some cases dispossessed.

As far as definitions of terrorism goes when a group (even an Islamist group) attacks a military target that supports an illegal occupation or the support structure of an illegal occupation - it may or may not be a wise or moral thing to do. It might in some cases be a stupid thing to do. There are cases were it might be immoral.

But it does not meet the definition of terrorism. It is indisputably illegal under under international law to use force to maintain or support an illegal occupation.

Conversely, 48 percent of respondents nationally said they do not believe that civil liberties for Muslim Americans should be restricted.

link: http://128.253.161.178/cals/public/comm/news/archive/americans-muslims.cfm

snip:"About 27 percent of respondents said that all Muslim Americans should be required to register their location with the federal government, and 26 percent said they think that mosques should be closely monitored by U.S. law enforcement agencies. Twenty-nine percent agreed that undercover law enforcement agents should infiltrate Muslim civic and volunteer organizations, in order to keep tabs on their activities and fund raising. About 22 percent said the federal government should profile citizens as potential threats based on the fact that they are Muslim or have Middle Eastern heritage. In all, about 44 percent said they believe that some curtailment of civil liberties is necessary for Muslim Americans."

read full article - link:

http://128.253.161.178/cals/public/comm/news/archive/americans-muslims.cfm

It makes a big difference whether you interpret most of those with the words "some" or "all". Some of them are clearly meant to mean "all" - the ones about curtailment of civil liberties and racial profiling, for example - and are clearly wrong - but the ones about closely monitoring mosques and infiltrating civic and volunteer organisations are clearly silly if interpreted as "all" - there are far too many mosques in the USA for the FBI to monitor them all - but I think right if interpreted as "some": there *are* mosques and muslim volunteer organisations that I'd like to see the security forces monitoring closely (the mosque one in Finsbury Park here in the UK is an example).

The lessons are, I think:

1) many people who reply to polls are extremely unpleasant.
2) always be very, very careful when phrasing a question - words like "some", "all", "on average", "most", "in some cases" and the like should *not* be ignored, omitted or used interchangeably.

required to register. That's still pretty bad. But yes it is true that how a poll ask a question does definitely effect the result.

If someone asked if there was genuine and credible evidence that a Mosque, Church, Synagogue or Temple were plotting acts of violence, should they be monitored?

I would agree with that. Very few people wouldn't.

It would be the same if it was a social club, bar or a private business.