And that's a discussion that has been had many times over, it's as boring to me as vi versus emacs.
Terrorist is a relative term, it mostly depends on which side of the fence your bed currently resides and what your personal belief system is.
I see precious little difference to an attack on Fallujah to 'liberate' it and an attack on Paris to murder a bunch of people. In both cases lots of innocents will die and the world will end up a substantially worse, not better place for everybody afterwards.
While you can point out differences in their justifications, you can't pretend their actions are unrelated.
Oh of course, they're the same thing.
Bombing civilians (without those being the explicit target) in a military context is exactly the same thing as just invading a concert room or shooting randomly at people
You're missing the context and the intent, just that. But I can see your ideology prevents you from seeing that
Pick some, they're all true.
Bombing civilians in a trumped up war about resources is to the victims exactly the same as shooting randomly at people. Ditto blowing up weddings with rockets, killing a few hundred thousand civilians to stop them from subscribing to another ideology and so on.
All of these activities are deplorable. I'm all for national defense, I'm not a pacifist (try harming me or someone I love and see how that ends) but at the same time I'm all for restraint and very careful consideration of the consequences of actions.
Note that there is a fairly direct line between the Iraq invasion (which France was adamantly against, remember the 'surrender monkeys' and the 'Freedom Fries'?), and the attacks in Paris. Action begets reaction, so before you react without considering the consequences you should hold still. And only when and if you've identified root causes can you go and attack the problem.
Attacking Iraq on false pretexts after 9/11 was a step on the way to Liberating Fallujah (or should that be 'wiping it off the face of the earth') which indirectly led to the US leaving Iraq which led to a power vacuum which led to on the raid of Mosul by IS which was one step on the way to IS becoming more coherent which was one step on the way to a bunch of murderers shooting up the Paris nightlife.
It's not that hard. Context and intent are a lot more complex than they seem to be at first glance, ideology has precious little to do with it.
Imagine if a drone from Saudi Arabia or better yet Assad's Syria swooped into your community looking for, the leader of a US infantry commander, and instead blew up a wedding party. And not just once, but dozens of times over the course of years.
How would you feel about that? Would you want retribution?
Would you want to spend time debating what a "terrorist" is?
If you start talking about intent like this what your really saying is I share the values of one side and hence find their actions more justifiable. And I obviously even after with you about the west fighting for the better value system, but I would also prefer it would win on its own merit and not because it was forced on countries like Iraq.
To your question though, the French resistance during the second world war could easily have been called terrorists, as could the American revolutionary army.
It's absolutely not inconsistent to hold the view that Islamically-inspired terror is a big problem for the world, whilst simultaneously holding the view that the vast majority of muslims are peaceful. I don't know why anyone would think otherwise.
A vocal and deplorable minority of Muslims are actively attempted to split the world into Us and Them, I don't see that playing into their hand and deciding that I'm going to declare all Muslims want me dead is really going to help matters.
I think one of the major issues is defining peaceful and non-violent. From my personal experience (I am from a Muslim country), I have seen many Muslims who would not commit violence themselves, but they do not have any trouble if some extremists commit violence. Some would even give moral justification of the violence. In our country's atheist community we commonly joke "Extremists want to kill us, Moderates want Extremists to kill us". FWIW, apostasy is punishable by death in some Muslim countries.
To sum up, almost all the Muslims are non-violent, but how many of them are truly peaceful? You will be very surprised to know the number.
- Vietnam
- Cambodia
- Ghana
- Iraq
- Afghanistan
The list is endless, you can keep that going for a long long time before you run out of names.
There are over 1.6 billion Muslims worldwide [1]. Size estimates for the terrorist groups are: ISIS (52k - 258k [2]), Al Qaeda (19k-27k [3]). There are others, but I believe these are the main ones that people are talking about when worrying about terrorist threats abroad. We're talking about 1 in 5,600 to 22,535.
My humble opinion is that the terrorist threat worldwide is indeed significant, but if you think that it is a problem with Islam, then you are playing right into the hands of the extremists, who want (and they have publicly published these intentions) to divide the world into two camps that hate each other. The more hatred you direct towards Muslims, the more you drive them apart from you. ISIS's stated objective is basically world war - they want you to hate Muslims, so that Muslims feel like they have nowhere to go in the Western world.
[0] http://thinkprogress.org/world/2015/01/08/3609796/islamist-t... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_world [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_State_of_Iraq_and_the_... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Qaeda
http://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7552225/terrorism-europe-chart
(and you can add a big chunk of green for France November 2015 now too)
I find this comment very strange. It's as though I can't acknowledge that Islamic terror is the biggest violent threat facing Europe whilst at the same time not hate muslims (?!?!?! how can anyone do that ?!?!?!).
