Above all, the Islamist extremists want to divide us and turn us against each other

There will be anti-Muslim threads popping up, but are they from new people who have just decided to hate Muslims in the light of yesterday's attack, or are they from people who have posting histories of posting weekly anti-Muslim threads anyway....?

And apologised for by many more. The terrorists laugh at people like that. Charles Martel and also the soldiers at the Battle of Vienna must be rolling in their graves.

Well said.

The correct response to hate is love. Our values will not be changed because of the acts of the few.

Bit sad this morning to see anti-Muslim threads popping up already.

Whilst it's predictable that people will want to lash out (and we are all angry), we should pause a moment to consider what it is that the extremists behind these actions really want.

Above all, they want to create a climate of fear and hatred here in Europe, they want Muslims living here to be attacked and they want that to push young European Muslims into their hands.

They want us to act blindly, to react on the basis of hate and anger and to lash out. They want to bring about a collapse of our society into violence and rage.

The question for France is the same as the question for us - will we buy into what they want, or will we continue to stand for a society of law, enlightenment and civilised values?

Bit sad this morning to see anti-Muslim threads popping up already.

Whilst it's predictable that people will want to lash out (and we are all angry), we should pause a moment to consider what it is that the extremists behind these actions really want.

Above all, they want to create a climate of fear and hatred here in Europe, they want Muslims living here to be attacked and they want that to push young European Muslims into their hands.

They want us to act blindly, to react on the basis of hate and anger and to lash out. They want to bring about a collapse of our society into violence and rage.

The question for France is the same as the question for us - will we buy into what they want, or will we continue to stand for a society of law, enlightenment and civilised values?

What you call utterly stupid has over 2000 years built the civilisation in which you live; a civilisation which for every Muslim wishing to destroy it, a thousand Muslims are treking hundreds of miles and risking death to join.

I am not sold on the idea that these attacks are planned with a detailed knowledge of our society and its likely responses in mind. These attacks cause little or no material damage to the West while increasing support for Western attacks against Islamic countries and organisations. If we wanted we could destroy Islamic State by ground invasion in a matter of days, and return it indefinitely to direct rule by a colonial government, imposing secular education and outlawing private religious organisation. The Islamic world certainly does not have an interest in actually unleashing the vast military power of the West from its current ideological constraints.

It is more plausible to me that Islamic State does not understand our society or what motivates us. I think they are following their own goals in the context of their own model of the world largely in a vacuum. To their mind there is no "we" in a mixed population of secular democrats and muslims; there is a muslim population that should rule and an alien population that has no rights unless it makes the required submission to the muslim minority. Throwing bombs indiscriminately amongst this population, to their minds, is not a crime, and there is no complex rationalisation required for it.

Similarly they do not fear the possibility of an unrestrained Western military response because they do not realise it is a possibility. They do not have in-depth knowledge of the complicated technical means by which Western states derive their power, and therefore how inefficiently that power is currently being used. They see that Western states make limp responses in general and assume this is also the practical limit of their power rather than a result of ideological constraints. What we see is an emaciated peasant trying to push Mike Tyson and Tyson responding by tapping him on the shoulder. What they are seeing is a maximum effort by both sides which works out about equal, suggesting that the conflict is balanced and they therefore have a pretty good chance of winning it. Complex bluff and double-bluff conspiracies to induce Westerners to create more blowback are not necessary.

Bit sad this morning to see anti-Muslim threads popping up already.

Whilst it's predictable that people will want to lash out (and we are all angry), we should pause a moment to consider what it is that the extremists behind these actions really want.

Above all, they want to create a climate of fear and hatred here in Europe, they want Muslims living here to be attacked and they want that to push young European Muslims into their hands.

They want us to act blindly, to react on the basis of hate and anger and to lash out. They want to bring about a collapse of our society into violence and rage.

The question for France is the same as the question for us - will we buy into what they want, or will we continue to stand for a society of law, enlightenment and civilised values?

There is no confusion if you apply Aquinas' tenets of a just war:-
Most of the problems the West has encounted with militant Islam in the last 40 years result from a failure to adhere to these principles.

If you go back to Afghanistan in the early 1980s by what authority did the
Mujahideen act? Where was the government in exile to whom they were accountable?

My enemy's enemy is not necessarily my friend

That is not quite the point I was trying to make. A poster said that our civilisation was a creation of war. You said that we don't say things like that anymore because people who did were burnt to death in their front rooms by thousands of British and American bombers and implicitly people who don't want that to happen to them know to keep their mouths shut in future.

In other words, our socially dominant ideology of quasi-pacifism is a creation of war.

That war determines who wins social struggles is almost tautological, like evolution by natural selection. Once you see it you can't unsee it. The fact is that tolerant states won WWII broadly because the United States' tolerance of lots of different European diasporas and latterly the African Americans gave it the large free population it needed to overwhelm all the European powers and conquer them by e.g. building thousands of bombers to burn little German children to death in their beds. That is, there are technical reasons why tolerance was an adaptive idea at that time; it is not divine providence making this idea always triumph in all circumstances. It is perhaps not pretty but that is the world as it is and we must react to that.

Now we can see if that technical logic that worked for the US still works here, and I am not sure it does. That tolerance on the part of the United States only worked because it was reciprocated in large part by the immigrants themselves who dissolved willingly into a common national culture. Muslims are broadly not willing to do this, including the peaceful and moderate. The US' own tolerance also was not so tolerant around the edges, where it appeared that tolerance was being used for ends incompatible with those of the United States.

You misunderstand my position. It is not merely that we do not say that our civilisation is a product of war; ideologically it isn't. Ideologically it is a product of Christianity and not a self-consciously hypocritical Christianity.

That ideology which has to some degree transcended Christianity is still the dominant ideology in the world.

You and I are old enough to remember a time when questions of ethnic conflict had virtually nothing to do with religion and were almost entirely about skin colour.

I do think the west needs to roll through the middle east with troops but I do not think colonialism is the answer.

America has to bring three things to the party:

I am not sold on the idea that these attacks are planned with a detailed knowledge of our society and its likely responses in mind. These attacks cause little or no material damage to the West while increasing support for Western attacks against Islamic countries and organisations. If we wanted we could destroy Islamic State by ground invasion in a matter of days, and return it indefinitely to direct rule by a colonial government, imposing secular education and outlawing private religious organisation. The Islamic world certainly does not have an interest in actually unleashing the vast military power of the West from its current ideological constraints.

It is more plausible to me that Islamic State does not understand our society or what motivates us. I think they are following their own goals in the context of their own model of the world largely in a vacuum. To their mind there is no "we" in a mixed population of secular democrats and muslims; there is a muslim population that should rule and an alien population that has no rights unless it makes the required submission to the muslim minority. Throwing bombs indiscriminately amongst this population, to their minds, is not a crime, and there is no complex rationalisation required for it.

Similarly they do not fear the possibility of an unrestrained Western military response because they do not realise it is a possibility. They do not have in-depth knowledge of the complicated technical means by which Western states derive their power, and therefore how inefficiently that power is currently being used. They see that Western states make limp responses in general and assume this is also the practical limit of their power rather than a result of ideological constraints. What we see is an emaciated peasant trying to push Mike Tyson and Tyson responding by tapping him on the shoulder. What they are seeing is a maximum effort by both sides which works out about equal, suggesting that the conflict is balanced and they therefore have a pretty good chance of winning it. Complex bluff and double-bluff conspiracies to induce Westerners to create more blowback are not necessary.

There's an extremely interesting article by Scott Atran, who has presented to the US Congress on this topic, in the Guardian.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/15/terrorists-isis

Atran shows that far from being wild and uninformed, the jihadi attacks are thought out and the aim is clearly to attempt to create an atmosphere of mutual loathing and terror between non-Muslim and Muslim populations in the West and that this was pre-planned and based on the ideology of one of the main founders of ISIL/ISIS.

Hit soft targets. “Diversify and widen the vexation strikes against the crusader-Zionist enemy in every place in the Islamic world, and even outside of it if possible, so as to disperse the efforts of the alliance of the enemy and thus drain it to the greatest extent possible.”

“Work to expose the weakness of America’s centralised power by pushing it to abandon the media psychological war and the war by proxy until it fights directly.”

...

"The world today is divided. Bush spoke the truth when he said, ‘Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists’, with the actual ‘terrorist’ being the western crusaders.” Now, it said, “the time had come for another event to … bring division to the world and destroy the grey zone”

I did not say that they were wild and uninformed. I said that they were operating from their own script, not ours. What they are doing will be reasoned and rational in the context of their intellectual ecosystem, but not necessarily in the context of ours.

You have said that they don't intend their attacks to cause direct damage, rather they intend to provoke Western actions that will be self-destructive. That isn't what it sounds like from the quotes in the link you provided:

This sounds very much like they see their military actions as directly effective, as though they were the Luftwaffe bombing radar stations or the Imperial German Navy torpedoing British merchant ships.

I have also said that they probably underestimate the strength of the Western powers.


Imagine if the US did fight a total war against a united Islamic world. The question isn't who would win, rather whether it would last weeks or days. Yet this is what they're writing to one another - they do not understand the force they are dealing with or its real limitations (ideological, not practical), just as Bush and Rumsfeld seemingly did not understand that Iraq was not a nation-state or the significance of the Sunni-Shia division.

I am not suggesting these people are morons just that they are no less blinkered by the assumptions of the intellectual ecosystem from which they emerged than our own leaders and thinkers.

I didn't say that.



I agree there are large, indeed, fantastic amounts of self delusion in their plans.

However, the basic point I was making is valid, that a key aim of theirs is to promote an anti-Muslim backlash in the West, pushing young Muslims into their arms. Inevitably there will be a backlash in countries where the New Far Right has following winds, like France, which doubtless contributes to their focus on Paris.