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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

To ask what the problem is (The terrorists)

116 replies

lemisscared · 09/01/2015 17:32

Because i just don't know. Have they got a genuine gripe? Why the hatred? What do they want to achieve? Honestly, shouldn't people be sitting round a table and making concessions on BOTH sides?

I am terrified which is probably daft but in Syria and other countries that im embarrased to say i don't know, people are being massacred daily and the West bats not an eye. They live with terror every day - how can we make it stop?? Not just here, but everywhere?

If there is a God, whoever's God you are, now would be a good time to intervene because i can't help but feel that the whole world is turning on itself.

Can somone please explain this to me, possibly from the point of view of the Islamists behind these attacks, because they must feel justified in their actions, i don't believe that the route of the problem is evil.

I'm just scared

OP posts:
NettleTea · 09/01/2015 18:52

Seems to me, in the most simplistic of terms, that one set of people with a certain belief have been killing different sets of people with different beliefs, purely for their differences, since man first took up arms against his neighbours. And when there was a shortage of food and goods, or they needed some women to expand their tribe, things got alot nastier, alot faster.
From that happy start it has just got more complicated and more bloody from then on in. As a race we have a truly horrific history of treating each other appallingly, each time with 'right' on the side of the victor. None of our countries/religions (bar a few peaceful indiginous tribes), are blameless and now we are living out the sorry mess.

RandomNPC · 09/01/2015 18:55

I'm an atheist, and I agree with Ehric.
I'd ban faith schools though, religion should be a private, personal thing. You should get state funding to propagate your beliefs to the next generation.

HesterShaw · 09/01/2015 18:56

Interesting point Nettle. Maybe now there is just too much history in the world :(

MuddhaOfSuburbia · 09/01/2015 18:56

Muddha, so a drone killing children is bad but terrorists storming a school and shooting children is that not so bad because other Muslims did it?

no. It is all bad.

I'm an agnostic pacifist, raised an atheist. Everybody-on both sides- who kills anyone is being a complete shit imo

MuddhaOfSuburbia · 09/01/2015 18:57

and what Nettle sez

RandomNPC · 09/01/2015 18:57

We don't know if Jesus was 'nice' or not. All we have are some gospels written a long time after the fact, and the unreliable testimony of Paul.

GrandTheftQuarto · 09/01/2015 18:57

you can't ban people having beliefs Hmm ever heard of the Spanish Inquisition? Burning heretics and Protestant martyrs in Tudor England? Banning people from having faith hasn't worked out so well in the past.

I actually largely agree with this, but wanted to point out that the Communists were actually quite successful in their efforts to suppress religion. Partly, probably, because Maoist and similar ideology shares many characteristics with religion and so slots neatly into the place religion once occupied. And partly by being totalitarian bastards. But religion hasn't rushed back in in quite the way it would if it were truly impossible to suppress it.

It can only ever be moderately successful, though (cf TCM and other superstition, remarkably resilient) and only with extreme control and pressure. Not desirable. And there's always an underground. The cure is worse than the disease here IMO.

HesterShaw · 09/01/2015 18:58

Yes and they were successful because they suppressed people through fear of awful violence and suffering. That's not really on either.

GrandTheftQuarto · 09/01/2015 18:59

Well, quite Smile

GrandTheftQuarto · 09/01/2015 18:59

That came across a bit sarky; sorry. I meant, I agree entirely, Hester.

RandomNPC · 09/01/2015 19:00

Stalin was a pragmatist, he wasn't afraid of using the Church as a galvanising factor during WW2.

EhricLovesTheBhrothers · 09/01/2015 19:00

Yes they were successful, the point I'm making is not that the Catholics failed to eradicate the Protestants but that a lot of people died in the process. Much like in Maoist China.

HesterShaw · 09/01/2015 19:01

:o

I like "Well quite". It reminds me of Blackadder when Baldrick has said something blindingly obvious.

EhricLovesTheBhrothers · 09/01/2015 19:04

X posts :)

GrandTheftQuarto · 09/01/2015 19:04

ISWYM Ehric - sometimes people say "you can't ban people having beliefs" and what they mean is that people are resilient, there will always be an underground, it's impossible to stop people believing and passing on their faith, etc. So I just wanted to say that it is actually possible to turn a largely genuinely religious population into a largely genuinely atheist one in just a couple of generations - it's just that to do so you have to do horrible things.

GrandTheftQuarto · 09/01/2015 19:05

X-posts, x-posts everywhere Wink

HesterShaw · 09/01/2015 19:06

Interesting to look at that from a British perspective, GrandTheft. Do you think it would be fair to say that church attendance has gone right down in this country since consumerism began to get so all encompassing? That appears to be Britain's belief system nowadays.

GrandTheftQuarto · 09/01/2015 19:11

(Feel I am derailing the thread, slightly - apologies)

I think you're right that other things have taken the place or places of religion in the UK Hester - personally I'd point to self-improvement/fitness/health/diet obsession, complementary/alternative medicine, self-actualisation/crystals/other woo, and other ways we protect ourself from the randomness of life, and the inevitability of death, before consumerism. But it's part of it, I think.

Saltedcaramel2014 · 09/01/2015 19:19

I'm in no way justifying their actions which any decent person would find horrific. But when I saw the pictures of the children killed in gaza (particularly those boys playing on the beach) it made me pretty powerfully angry. The treatment of prisoners in Abu Graib, Guantanamo... that made me angry too. I'm not even Muslim. I'm not surprised people have become radicalised. No one should be.

nancy75 · 09/01/2015 19:29

Saltedcaramel - the death of god knows how many children in the School at Beslan made me pretty angry (killed by Islamic Chechen terrorists)
The murder of 132 kids in the Peshawar school in Pakistan (also at the hand of Islamic terrorists) pissed me off too - Is that enough reason for me to go out and shoot a few Muslims? No? Of course not. Stop making excuses for terrorists.

Worksallhours · 09/01/2015 19:38

The problem is, at heart, that the Muslim world ossified in the 18th and 19th century. The West, on the other hand, did not; it advanced at the rate of knots.

The end result of this ossification was pretty much the fall of the Ottoman Empire, which had been the locus of the Muslim world for hundreds of years. When the empire finally fell after the first world war, it not only left an enormous power vacuum in the Middle East (which is still playing out today), but shocked Muslims into realising how far behind the Muslim world had fallen compared to Western advances across all fields. Losing a war tends to provoke a lot of soul searching on the part of the defeated.

And it provoked the start of the quest for a solution to reinvigorate the Muslim world, to return it to its former medieval glories, so that it could, at least, compete with the West.

For men such as Ataturk, the solution was secularism. For others, mostly Arab thinkers, the solution was pan-Arab socialism. For the Gulf states, the solution was tribal monarchies supported by strong foreign powers (so a kind of neo-imperialism). However, for some thinkers, the solution was a kind of religious-Bolshevism, or Islamic-Leninism.

One by one, the three former solutions were tried with varying success, but the problem is that a) single unifying theories of political and cultural solution tend to attract single unifying sources of power: i.e. a dictator or authoritarian force such as the Army, b) a single theory doesn't tend to solve such a complex problem as societal and cultural ossification.

So the last solution, that of Islamic-Leninism, started to become more attractive -- and this is what we now call Islamism. It is a revolutionary creed that promises utopia through a very familiar mechanism: a vanguard will awaken the masses through revolutionary acts and the masses will see the righteousness of returning to a way of living and being that was in existence during a 'time of perfection', and utopia will then follow.

Once you understand this, you basically understand the entire landscape on which Islamic terrorism is taking place. The "terrorists" see themselves as the vanguard; the terrorism is a revolutionary act; the masses are the Muslim ummah; the perfect way of living is the strict observance of Sharia law; the time of perfection is the time of the prophet; and utopia is the Caliphate.

Everything else comes kinda secondary to this primary motivator. Western interference in the ME just reinforces the belief that the Muslim world is weak and is in need of the revolutionary Islamist solution. Isolation, poverty, deprivation and corruption in Muslim communities and societies just reinforces the idea that the revolutionary Islamist solution is required ... and so on and so on.

But also, importantly, the fight is also against the other three stated solutions. Syria is the real battleground here where we can see that Assad vs Isis is actually a fight against the results of pan-Arab socialism and Islamism -- you can also say the same for Iraq and Isis.

The West, and Westerners, are a cause in so far as they constantly remind Islamists of what they believe is the inferior state of the Muslim world and Muslim communities. The West is the benchmark by which they measure themselves and find themselves wanting -- and this is why Muslims with the most exposure to the West (ie. those in western countries) tend to find Islamism extremely attractive compared to Muslims living in Muslim countries.

Could you get them round a table? No. This is a battle between ideas, not people.

joanne1947 · 09/01/2015 19:40

I feel sorry for some "terrorists" like the children who are taught that if the wear a suicide belt and kill people they will go to heaven and have unlimited wonderful toys. I feel sad for the people they kill. (I feel sad for those children but would willingly put the belt on one of the teachers and set it off)

Madagascanparadise · 09/01/2015 19:41

I so want to understand all this and why we have ended up at this point, although I suspect we are no-where near an end point unfortunately.

HatefullyHeather · 09/01/2015 19:47

Too bad the billions of people over millenia who have worshipped God, Allah, Mohammed etc didn't have access to MN where they could have confidently been told 'there is no God'.

Would have saved them a lot of time.

GrandTheftQuarto · 09/01/2015 19:47

Works, thank you for posting that.