Sam Harris on Charlie Hebdo

[Rinchen Dorje]

Cone...Huge difference between "convert or burn in hell in your afterlife" and convert or die right now..

[Mkoll]

I suggest that those who are curious about ISIS, which seems to be the most radical Islamic jihadist group of the radical Islamic jihadist groups, read this much lauded recent article here from The Atlantic. It's long, but there is a lot of important information that you probably haven't heard yet and it should provide some insight into the mentality of ISIS and elements of that mentality can be extrapolated to the mentality of jihadist groups in general. As Buddhists, we know that it starts in the mind...

1. Mind precedes all mental states. Mind is their chief; they are all mind-wrought. If with an impure mind a person speaks or acts suffering follows him like the wheel that follows the foot of the ox.

2. Mind precedes all mental states. Mind is their chief; they are all mind-wrought. If with a pure mind a person speaks or acts happiness follows him like his never-departing shadow.

The Atlantic: What ISIS Really Wants

[Johnny Dangerous]

Sure, Wahhabism/Salafism is a part of it, pretending it's the entirety of the problem is pretty silly...nothing in the world as complex as something like this can spring simply from.one.ideology. IMO people's motivations are for more varied and murky than that.

[Johnny Dangerous]

I suggest that those who are curious about ISIS, which seems to be the most radical Islamic jihadist group of the radical Islamic jihadist groups, read this much lauded recent article here from The Atlantic. It's long, but there is a lot of important information that you probably haven't heard yet and it should provide some insight into the mentality of ISIS and elements of that mentality can be extrapolated to the mentality of jihadist groups in general. As Buddhists, we know that it starts in the mind...

1. Mind precedes all mental states. Mind is their chief; they are all mind-wrought. If with an impure mind a person speaks or acts suffering follows him like the wheel that follows the foot of the ox.

2. Mind precedes all mental states. Mind is their chief; they are all mind-wrought. If with a pure mind a person speaks or acts happiness follows him like his never-departing shadow.

The Atlantic: What ISIS Really Wants

This was a good article, but I actually did know the whole apocalypse cult thing already, and none of what's here was news to me. I keep seeing people post this article as if it's some sort of piece that would sway opinions in one way or another, and I don't get quite why.

[Johnny Dangerous]

Cone...Huge difference between "convert or burn in hell in your afterlife" and convert or die right now..

IMO most of the reason there aren't violent dominionist Christians right now is simply that they've already done the convert or die thing, and are now the dominant world religion.

[Mkoll]

This was a good article, but I actually did know the whole apocalypse cult thing already, and none of what's here was news to me. I keep seeing people post this article as if it's some sort of piece that would sway opinions in one way or another, and I don't get quite why.

A 10,000+ word article and that's all you got from it? That's too bad.

[Kim O'Hara]

The elephant in the room - this DW room - is that religion is (mostly) not the real reason for "religious" war - jihad or whatever it is called. Rather, the religion is a rallying point and a pretext. People with enough food and shelter just do not go out with swords or machine guns to launch unprovoked attacks on other people, religious imperative or no religious imperative.
Just take a world map and a couple of high-lighters. Colour the regions that have been experiencing droughts and food shortages in yellow. Then colour the regions that have had war, civil wars, revolts, and jihads in blue. You will end up with a map with lots of green areas, much less yellow and very little (or no) blue.
Try it!


Kim

[Rinchen Dorje]

I just listened to this and found it particularly insightful and wanted to add it to the current topic of conversation...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1e024ybtXc

[Johnny Dangerous]

This was a good article, but I actually did know the whole apocalypse cult thing already, and none of what's here was news to me. I keep seeing people post this article as if it's some sort of piece that would sway opinions in one way or another, and I don't get quite why.

A 10,000+ word article and that's all you got from it? That's too bad.

The article doesn't offer a lot of solutions or insight if one already knows about ISIS ideology. It great if it's new information. Since you have an issue with what I got from.the article, and ostensibly think it presents some new angle, maybe you can explain what is so enlightening about it.

Basically, I'm not blown away by this ermerging 'guess what, religion IS involved' counterpoint that's emerging in the media. It's sort of a no brainer tjat ISIS is BOTH motivated by religion, uses it as a pretext, and every shade of grey in betwen. However, that does not mean there aren't other, fairly obvious factors at play as well.

[conebeckham]

Cone...Huge difference between "convert or burn in hell in your afterlife" and convert or die right now..

Yes, especially if those holding the latter view are the ones to institute the "dying."

[Mkoll]

This was a good article, but I actually did know the whole apocalypse cult thing already, and none of what's here was news to me. I keep seeing people post this article as if it's some sort of piece that would sway opinions in one way or another, and I don't get quite why.

A 10,000+ word article and that's all you got from it? That's too bad.

The article doesn't offer a lot of solutions or insight if one already knows about ISIS ideology. It great if it's new information. Since you have an issue with what I got from.the article, and ostensibly think it presents some new angle, maybe you can explain what is so enlightening about it.

No thank you. All I was trying to say with my comment to you is that the "whole apocalypse death cult thing" is only part of the article. It's one of five subjects (and the shortest one at that) that the author is presenting. There is much more content there than what you implied with your initial comment. Hence, my comment.

Those who are interested can read the article for themselves.

[Malcolm]

Noam Chomsky starting from around 4:39

Unfortunately, ISIS, the Islamic Caliphate, is now…almost…a representative of Sunni…a large part of Sunni Islam…that’s an utter tragedy.

Earlier, starting around 3:47, he blames two main causes for the rise of ISIS, 1) Allied disruption of Iraq that lead to sectarian violence 2) Saudi Wahhabi funding.

phpBB [video]

[Dan74]

The elephant in the room - this DW room - is that religion is (mostly) not the real reason for "religious" war - jihad or whatever it is called. Rather, the religion is a rallying point and a pretext. People with enough food and shelter just do not go out with swords or machine guns to launch unprovoked attacks on other people, religious imperative or no religious imperative.
Just take a world map and a couple of high-lighters. Colour the regions that have been experiencing droughts and food shortages in yellow. Then colour the regions that have had war, civil wars, revolts, and jihads in blue. You will end up with a map with lots of green areas, much less yellow and very little (or no) blue.
Try it!


Kim

I don't think this is borne out by evidence in this case, Kim. The key IS operatives (as in this article from today http://www.theage.com.au/world/jihadi-j ... 3q66a.html), are all too often from wealthy educated backgrounds, as are often terrorists from other organisations, Islamic and otherwise. We have to recognise that ideas/sentiments move people, but be careful to identify which are these ideas that have moved people to radicalise.

My sense is that there is a natural tendency in many of us to oppose the existing order, whatever it may be. Anti-authoritarianism, rebelliousness, Father complex, revolutionary anarchism, Jihadism, whatever label you attach, it springs from the same source. These days, when rampant consumerism and the complacent electorate has made it all but impossible to be an effective radical, perhaps ISIS has become a symbol for the little man opposing the corrupt juggernaut of the West? Sad, but it seems to appeal to far more people than previously anticipated.

In any case, it is of course very sloppy to equate it with Islam, seeing that Islam has many different strands and millions of Muslims are horrified at ISIS's barbarity and terrorist tactics. Recall though that the earliest 20th Century terrorists were actually the Jews fighting for independence in Palestine:

Neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat. We are very far from having any moral qualms as far as our national war goes. We have before us the command of the Torah, whose morality surpasses that of any other body of laws in the world: "Ye shall blot them out to the last man." But first and foremost, terrorism is for us a part of the political battle being conducted under the present circumstances, and it has a great part to play: speaking in a clear voice to the whole world, as well as to our wretched brethren outside this land, it proclaims our war against the occupier. We are particularly far from this sort of hesitation in regard to an enemy whose moral perversion is admitted by all.

And of course the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka (Hindu while some of the top people were actually Buddhist, like Balasingham, though he was not involved in the military operations, apparently.) So we have to admit that it is not religion so much as the circumstances that lead to the emergence of this mindset. Islam, given the circumstance of the recent times, the cultural shifts, etc has become a convenient flag for the anti-establishment radicals to rally under and we may well see more people converting and joining the cause.

[Malcolm]

Islam, given the circumstance of the recent times, the cultural shifts, etc has become a convenient flag for the anti-establishment radicals to rally under and we may well see more people converting and joining the cause.

Dan, seriously, this is just nonsense. Wake up and smell the roses. ISIS may be many things, but a convenient flag under which anti-establishment radicals might convene is hardly one of them. It may have a flattened, synchronic view of Islamic history, it may have left behind nuances of centuries of Islamic jurisprudence, but one thing people can hardly claim is that they are not Muslim in the fullest sense of the word. They just happen to subscribe to Wahhabism, and their execution of their Wahhabi values are completely consistent with the origins of Wahhabism in the late 18th century, you know, like when Ibn Saud and his men slaughtered 5,000 Shiites in a single day in Karbala in Iraq in 1801.

In 1801, the tomb of Hussein bin Ali (Prophet Mohammad's grandson) in Karbala was destroyed by the army of Abdullah bin Saud, causing anger among the Shiite Muslims.[1] Additionally, many people in Islam's holiest cities of Makkah and Madinah were killed and Prophet Mohammad's Mosque was damaged by his army in the same year. As a result, the Ottoman authorities found themselves in a situation that they had to punish the Saudis for their crimes because the Ottomans were the then-official ruler of the Arabian Peninsula. The guardian of Islam's religious places was the Turkish-Ottoman Caliph in Constantinople, Mahmud II.[1] He ordered that an Egyptian force be sent to the Arabian Peninsula to defeat Abdullah bin Saud and his allies. In 1818, an Egyptian army led by Ibrahim Pasha (Mohammad Ali's son) completely destroyed Abdullah's forces and took their capital, Diriyah in Najd. Abdullah bin Saud was captured along with two of his Wahhabi supporters. They were then sent to prison in Constantinople. Abdullah and his two followers were publicly beheaded for their crimes against holy cities and mosques.[1]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdullah_bin_Saud

The sole difference between then and now is that there was an Ottoman Empire to put down the Wahhabis, and force their very Calvinist interpretation of Islam into the deserts of what is now Saudi Arabia.

The fact is that it is Wahhabi/Salafi money fueling ISIS, mainly from the Saudis. The other point is that the Sunnis in Iraq are, in reality, barely more than 25 percent of the total population (Kurds have always been counted as Sunni for some bizarre reason), and yet they have had an uninterrupted reign of terror in Iraq since the 1979 and actually from well before that, dating back to the Hashemite Kingdom.

In reality the Sunnis in Iraq has historically behaved little better than White South Africans under Apartheid or Southern KKK fanatics towards the majorities under their rule.

For example, many people have claimed that burning apostates is unlawful under Islam —— well it isn't.

Haykel...explained he was specifically referring to two groups of people who declare ISIS unIslamic: Muslims he says are “just ignorant” of Islam’s legal and political history, and Christians who engage in what he called “the Christian tradition of interfaith dialogue” and declare Islam a “religion of peace.”

Haykel singled out CNN talk show host Fareed Zakaria as an example of the former, who recently said that ISIS’s public execution of a Jordanian pilot by burning him to death — which at least one prominent Muslim cleric in the Middle East also decried as “away from humanity, much less religions” — is “entirely haram,” or forbidden in Islam.
“That’s actually factually wrong — the burning apostates is in the [Islamic] legal code,” Haykel said.

...

Still, Haykel said his frustration with people of faith who try to disavow religious extremists is not limited to Islam.
“[They] present Islam as ‘Oh, Islam is a religion of peace,’” Haykel said. “Well, what does that mean? I mean, Christianity is sometimes a religion of peace, and sometimes a religion of war, depending on what time we’re talking about. There’s no such thing as a religion of peace.”

http://thinkprogress.org/world/2015/02/ ... rd-haykel/

And these days we can included Buddhism in the "sometimes a religion of peace, and sometimes a religion of war" given what has happened in Śrī Lanka and Burma.

[Malcolm]

http://www.democracynow.org/2015/2/26/w ... amic_state

[Kim O'Hara]

The elephant in the room - this DW room - is that religion is (mostly) not the real reason for "religious" war - jihad or whatever it is called. Rather, the religion is a rallying point and a pretext. People with enough food and shelter just do not go out with swords or machine guns to launch unprovoked attacks on other people, religious imperative or no religious imperative.
Just take a world map and a couple of high-lighters. Colour the regions that have been experiencing droughts and food shortages in yellow. Then colour the regions that have had war, civil wars, revolts, and jihads in blue. You will end up with a map with lots of green areas, much less yellow and very little (or no) blue.
Try it!


Kim

I don't think this is borne out by evidence in this case, Kim. ... We have to recognise that ideas/sentiments move people, but be careful to identify which are these ideas that have moved people to radicalise.

Have you carried out my experiment?
The Pentagon certainly has - http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/14/us/pe ... hreat.html - and is firmly of the opinion that food shortages radicalise people.
And look around you: what would motivate your colleagues, or the people around you on the tram, to take up arms against their fellow citizens - their friends and neighbours - or their government? Immediate threats to their survival would do it. Threats to their children? Yes. Insults to their religion? Nope.

The key IS operatives (as in this article from today http://www.theage.com.au/world/jihadi-j ... 3q66a.html), are all too often from wealthy educated backgrounds, as are often terrorists from other organisations, Islamic and otherwise.

In any organisation, people with money and connections tend to end up in leadership roles.
In any organisation crazy enough to idealise martydom, the craziest people will gain prominence.

My sense is that there is a natural tendency in many of us to oppose the existing order, whatever it may be. Anti-authoritarianism, rebelliousness, Father complex, revolutionary anarchism, Jihadism, whatever label you attach, it springs from the same source. These days, when rampant consumerism and the complacent electorate has made it all but impossible to be an effective radical, perhaps ISIS has become a symbol for the little man opposing the corrupt juggernaut of the West? Sad, but it seems to appeal to far more people than previously anticipated.

I think you're conflating affluent Westerners' motivations with desperate Middle-easterners' motivations.

In any case, it is of course very sloppy to equate it with Islam, seeing that Islam has many different strands and millions of Muslims are horrified at ISIS's barbarity and terrorist tactics.

Agreed.

Recall though that the earliest 20th Century terrorists were actually the Jews fighting for independence in Palestine:

Neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat. We are very far from having any moral qualms as far as our national war goes. We have before us the command of the Torah, whose morality surpasses that of any other body of laws in the world: "Ye shall blot them out to the last man." But first and foremost, terrorism is for us a part of the political battle being conducted under the present circumstances, and it has a great part to play: speaking in a clear voice to the whole world, as well as to our wretched brethren outside this land, it proclaims our war against the occupier. We are particularly far from this sort of hesitation in regard to an enemy whose moral perversion is admitted by all.

Whether they were the "first" depends very much on your definition of "terrorist" and how you separate that from "guerilla". Remember the Boer war? The classic bomb-throwing anarchists? The Easter Rising in Ireland?

And of course the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka (Hindu while some of the top people were actually Buddhist, like Balasingham, though he was not involved in the military operations, apparently.)

Again, an oppressed minority - at least in its own view.

So we have to admit that it is not religion so much as the circumstances that lead to the emergence of this mindset. Islam, given the circumstance of the recent times, the cultural shifts, etc has become a convenient flag for the anti-establishment radicals to rally under ...

That's exactly what I said.

... and we may well see more people converting and joining the cause.

I hope not. But if we are to avoid it, we have to understand the real cause and try to address it, rather than focusing on the superficial cause and trying to suppress the religion.


Kim

[tlee]

The news corporations choose what to broadcast and what to keep silent about.
I always ask myself, "what do they want me to believe?"