Metal Reviews

That 27% youth number seems rather staggering. You'd obviously know better than me Stefan, but how many non-Muslim French youths are actually gonna say they support IS/ISIL/ISIS?

Since we don't have 27% muslims in French's youth, and since not all Young muslims support the heinous behaviour of ISIS, I'd say too many, way too many. And the growing antisemitic/antizionist sentiment is growing too, something which has no basis in reality except considering Israel's politics towards Palestine. All this worries me, as it should worry all people of good sense.

The whole region needs to be nuked.

well, i'm sure we all agree that what happened in Paris was a disgrace. on top of that, sad to see the extreme right take advantage of this tragedy.

what i do think makes for an interesting debate is the topic that arose when i talked to some friends about it. they said that offensive or dangerous (for example, neo-nazi) messages should be forbidden. mind you, no one said it justified the attack on Charlie Hebdo, but they did say that, yeah CH was a bit xenophobic.

i think that is neither here nor there. i think there should be zero barriers to free speech, regardless of how stupid, offensive or even dangerous the message being censored is. i understand countries like Portugal, Germany and Canada have laws against some of these messages, and i can't stand them.

society has infinitely more to lose by stopping people from expressing certain opinions, than from whatever is said in those opinions.

what do you guys think?

Agreed, absolutely. And fwiw Charlie Hebdo is a left-wing magazine, and one firmly anti-racist. People have been very quick to judge from cartoons taken out of context, about which they know nothing, as this French person observed:

http://67-tardis-street.tumblr.com/post ... -followers



Of course, even if Charlie Hebdo was a white supremacist manual, then that's still not justification of the 'well, they were asking for it' kind for the massacre. A lot of left-wing types are saying this and basically victim-blaming.

my intuition is that the shooters being muslim and whether or not charlie hebdo is islamophobic are pretty much irrelevant. the "pen is mightier than gun" pictures are sweet but i 'disagree' with them because i don't think there's anything concrete for the pen to take aim at.

Totally understand this sentiment. There should be no tolerance for people who think it's justifiable to kill others over something so trivial as a damn cartoon, no matter how tasteless it is. There are good people who practice Islam, but to deny the inherently violent aspects written into the religion is either willful ignorance or lefty 'anti-prejudice' posturing. A symbolic march of unity is all well and good but there needs to be some real legislative teeth that comes out of this whole thing. Something has to be done to effectively check these terrorist d-bags.

I agree to a certain point with Azrael's take on free speech. It is one of the hallmarks of western democracy and something that should be guarded by everyone. However, there are laws in the U.S. that rightly prohibit speech that is used to knowingly incite violence against others. I'm sure Germany, France, Britain and others have laws similar to these but I don't know if the particulars are quite the same.


Until a member of their family gets killed in a similar incident.

Don't agree with Islam being intrinsically violent at all, I've never seen any signs of Islam being intrinsically violent whenever I've been to mosques or talked to muslims.

this lady is imo wise (the stuff about how islam is a scapegoat that lets us ignore our role in causing this violence):
http://www.salon.com/2014/11/23/karen_a ... h_despair/

Nor have I, but that doesn't mean calls to violence don't exist in the Qur'an.

Quran (4:74) - "So let those fight in the cause of Allah who sell the life of this world for the Hereafter. And he who fights in the cause of Allah and is killed or achieves victory - We will bestow upon him a great reward."

Quran (4:89) - "They wish you would disbelieve as they disbelieved so you would be alike. So do not take from among them allies until they emigrate for the cause of Allah . But if they turn away, then seize them and kill them wherever you find them and take not from among them any ally or helper."

I've worked with some really great people who are Muslim and would gladly take up for them if they were being ridiculed for their faith. I think, like many Christians, moderate Muslims have a personal interpretation of Islam that fits within their own moral code. Good people find the positive angles, where angry or desperate people find the other. I'm not saying to throw the baby out with the bathwater in regards to Muslims at all, but radical Islam is a real problem that needs to be adequately evaluated and dealt with in the short term.


Good article. I'm glad the interviewer brought up Saudi Arabia as a chief exporter of radical Islam, which has been largely glossed over by the U.S. due to our oil ties with the House of Saud. The section on religious messages married to internal political motives was also an interesting talking point. I do agree that it is important to understand and address our role in the creation of the modern Middle East as Armstrong states, but it doesn't absolve these guys from the crimes they committed or keep the west from taking action to prevent further attacks.

On a side note, I think her assessment of the West's role in the Crusades was a little skewed given the attacks on Constantinople by the Seljuk Turks (which spurred the initial wave of crusaders into the Middle East) and the previous Muslim military campaigns into Western Europe along with the capturing of Byzantine held territory in the Near East.

Yeah, think it can become too much about explaining why the west is at fault than focusing on the actual victims - certainly don't think the Muslim cop or Jewish civilians killed bore any more sort of guilt than the cartoonists (who again were non-imperialist left-wingers).

http://news.nationalpost.com/2015/01/10 ... onal-says/

D:

Guys, there comes a time when you have to set civility aside and just punch a motherfucker in the mouth. Too many innocent people have been killed to continue without taking SOME kind of action against these people. Just admitting we made mistakes in the past and promising to do better is not going to stop future attacks like these from happening. It's time for the West as a collective to grow some balls and take a stand.

Please explain to me why any European government would allow these non-Muslim 'no-go zones' to exist and operate under their own system of laws? I don't trust a damn thing the American media is saying about them and hopefully you guys can educate me a little more.

Agreed. It was hard not to come away from reading a book of hers such as 'Holy War: The Crusades and their Impact on the Modern World' without thinking that Muslim Terrorism is actually the West's fault, from the Crusades on down to the division of Palestine. She embarrassingly ignores how Islam initially spread so violently, and how bad treatment of Christians became in the later Ottoman/New Turkish nation. She grew up in the nunnery tradition and 'woke up' when she discovered liberal Christianity: in her case, blame conservative Christianity for everything which befell poor Islam.

All this said, I agree with Noodles that Islam is not intrinsically violent, the problem is much of the Islamic tradition today adheres to pre-Reformation thinking: stuck in the 10th century or so, and yes, both Christianity and Islam managed to be violently dogmatic back in the 10th century. I don't know how to advance Islamic tradition centuries forward in order to more closely align with Christianity today, but if anyone does, they should probably start speaking up

i feel it's a bit condescending to see religions all on some race track towards some idea of modernity which sounds a lot like simple secularism, and islam chronically behind.

i mean, there's this:



http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ ... story.html

but there's also the billion+ population of muslims, in muslim majority countries as well as other countries (probably including yours), who are not total asshats. dunno about mass demonstrations (see above about political/religious repression by those in power), but they do seem to poke fun at extremists as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5nigZzgf4Y

(there's more on youtube, from other muslim-majority countries)

as for "non-muslim no-go zones", if you're referring to what that idiot said on TV about Birmingham,rest assured, it's not like that at all. i mean i've never been there, but i know many who have. the city has a general reputation for being a shithole, but not a muslim extremist shithole lol. i'm sure Zad can tell you more.

It's 20% Muslim or so and yeah, a general shithole, but think he's already apologised for that, a big story over here for some reason. I'm not as down on Fox as some people but but some stuff said is just downright wrong. Now if he'd had said Bradford... (which is also a shithole and not 100% Muslim either for the avoidance of doubt).

I don't think that's what North was getting at. Christianity as a whole has largely gotten over it's "Baptism or Death" phase whereas certain sections of Islam are still enamored with the destruction of the Great Satan. If Islam is to exist in the modern world, it's adherents must understand that people have a right to freely express their opinions about subjects that they may find offensive. You can believe in whatever God you want, but you just can't fucking murder somebody because they drew an unflattering picture of Allah or the Prophet. It's really not condescending to ask people to grow out of that sort of behavior.

i can be misenterpreting, of course. NFH did also say that he doesn't see it as an intrinsically violent.

i think a lot of it relates to where most followers of the faith are... areas of considerable conflict and uneasy coexistence with rivals and all that. i don't think it contributes to a healthy religious life it all. but here i'm really talking about things i know very little about.

I wasn't trying to advocate the road to modernizing towards secularism there Azrael, so if you were misinterpreting it was probably myself not being clear enough.

Scholars speak of a dividing wall in Western thinking between the Medieval world and the Modern world, which actually is physically there. Historians have a tough time entering the Medieval Christian mind, for example; in order to examine old Inquisition records. I can recommend a short book dealing with the wall between the Medieval and the Modern about a 16th century man burned by the Inquisition: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cheese_and_the_Worms Imagine all the elements of reason and logic and science we normally take for granted that must be abandoned to pass through that wall. I think its fair to claim the Medieval mind clung to certainty both because it was ignorant of so many things in the natural world and because living conditions for the vast majority of people in those times were awful. So yes, I think a mix of gross economic inequities within Muslim countries is a contributing factor, but if we look at similarly poor countries with non-Muslim makeups, they do tend to commit less acts of terrorism, right? So I'd pick the still pre-Reformation/Enlightenment view towards religion as the primary cause for creating willing terrorists.

True enough, Islam doesn't need to be perfectly aligned with 21st century Christianity (whatever that is?) but undergoing its own version of keystone intellectual events that would lead the majority of its followers away from the dangers of absolute certainties would go a long way to cut down on terrorism, I'd gather.

But don't Muslims consider the Qur'an to be THE absolute word of God, end of story? The legend, as I'm sure you know, is that the book was directly dictated to Muhammad from the angel Gabriel containing no outside influences, personal interpretations or translation flubs. It's a little bit trickier for Muslims to simply relegate certain violent behavior to a 10th century mindset when the Qur'an explicitly endorses it. You wouldn't doubt the word of God, would you? From what I gather, a lot of moderate Muslims are saying that the extremist sects are misinterpreting the guidelines for waging jihad and are openly ignoring the sections which condemns violence against non-combatants.

Check out the link at the bottom for a more detailed description.

http://www.islamicvoice.com/october.99/dialogue.htm

Think that's the issue; like all religions Islam isn't one big hivemind where everyone agrees with everyone else on every aspect of it, but has its own mormons, 7th day adventists, evangelicals, Westboro Baptists Church etc. Sadly this means dangerous nutballs like IS and Al-Q...