Quote from: Assassin 11D7 on November 13, 2015, 06:30:53 PM

I'd make a distinction between the Muslims that are adapting to western society and those that would be in the masses. Denouncing all of Islam would only serve to outcast those Muslims that aren't a problem, and make them more likely to become one or be spiteful. The amount that has/is adapted is a minority, but sweeping generalizations in times like this tend to create problems.

Ahem

Again, they're solely an American phenomenon  and a vast minority in the global Islamic population.

Quote from: Prime Megaten on November 13, 2015, 11:38:37 PM

Quote from: Assassin 11D7 on November 13, 2015, 11:36:29 PM

Quote from: Assassin 11D7 on November 13, 2015, 06:30:53 PM

I'd make a distinction between the Muslims that are adapting to western society and those that would be in the masses. Denouncing all of Islam would only serve to outcast those Muslims that aren't a problem, and make them more likely to become one or be spiteful. The amount that has/is adapted is a minority, but sweeping generalizations in times like this tend to create problems.

Ahem

Call them moderate Muslims, then. But you don't title a community by the quiet minority; there are Muslims, and a few moderate Muslims. Not radical Muslims and Muslims.

Yes, but using Muslim is still what they identify by, so you are still inadvertently lumping them in with the others.

And like Das said, they are fairly unique to America, but that doesn't change the fact that they will be fully aware and at the front of whatever anti-Muslim drivel is spewed out. You don't want the few that are good to be turned away from you.

At this point in time, the American Islamic community is pretty desensitized to name-calling. Any action taken from here on should apply to those who wish harm upon the world, not Muhammad Jackie Crusoe in the Bronx.

The world is not going to ask permission to take a stand; if the moderate population doesn't want to be lumped in with the rest, they should make a stand of their own.

Don't know if it's been posted before or if this is the best place to post it, but have it anyway.


I wanted to stay out of debate, I don't like hating people. I don't think I can keep that up.
Gonna need to get some momentum. France, it would probably help to go French Revolution on these asses.

Russia is a civilized country compared to Islam.

So a Syrian passport was apparently found on one of the suicide bombers.

https://twitter.com/AP/status/665500256621223936

So a Syrian passport was apparently found on one of the suicide bombers.

https://twitter.com/AP/status/665500256621223936

Passport survives but the bomber blew up. The fuck they make those things out of? Space shuttle grade kevlar? That seems highly conveniant, honestly.

Quote from: Sandtrap on November 14, 2015, 07:32:59 AM

Quote from: gatsby on November 14, 2015, 06:25:56 AM

So a Syrian passport was apparently found on one of the suicide bombers.

https://twitter.com/AP/status/665500256621223936

Passport survives but the bomber blew up. The fuck they make those things out of? Space shuttle grade kevlar? That seems highly conveniant, honestly.

It's not unusual.

To be loooooved, by anyone.

Something someone posted on Facebook that should be kept in mind:

"[I'm afraid this is probably incoherent. My thoughts in the moment. Take them for what you will. I mean well.]

Reading reports of the horror unfolding in Paris, under siege at this moment, I am left with no answers and many concerns and questions.

What does seem clear to me is the strategy behind these murderers and the people who control them. For such people, violent extremist Muslim fundamentalists who reject the idea of pluralism and tolerance as sinful and a betrayal of their faith, a pluralistic society in which Muslims are free to join a broader culture, adapting their beliefs and practices and shaping their identities to embrace both their religion and membership in a secular national community, is their worst nightmare. It is everything they are fighting against in their attempt to return to some imagined utopia, likely rooted sometime between Muhammad's conquest of Mecca and the end of the Umayyad period (around 750 AD), when Islam had expanded from Spain to Afghanistan and was united under a single ruler.

The society that succeeded this one, the Abbasid Caliphate, was, at its height, as modern and tolerant (by medieval standards) as any in the world at that time, but that is not the vision of these so-called jihadis. who see the world as divided into the purely faithful and the infidel, for whom slavery, death or, if he sees reason, conversion and total submission, are the only justifiable fate.

So Paris is the perfect target. France has a large population of assimilated Muslims, but it is not a situation without its tensions. Many Muslims feel alienated and only marginally part of French society. A tradition of ultranationalism in French politics stokes those feelings.

So these terrorists aim to put France, and especially its Muslims, in an impossible bind. Attack savagely, without any seeming purpose and no regard for any human feeling other than hatred, and arouse in the non-Islamic population a deep and powerful fear of the country's Muslims. Powerful voices will argue that any course other than a total rejection of the virus of Islam from the body social and politic is self-annihilating, and as the senseless massacres and terror mount, they will find more receptive ears.

In the mind of the jihadist bent on a Caliphate, rejecting of a pluralistic society, this will be good news. He will be able to say to his moderate, modern fellow Muslims, who have committed themselves to being full citizens of France, "You see: they hate you. They will never accept you. Join us. Reject their laws and their society and their supposed openness--it is against God's will. You have no choice. They will never accept you."

The prophecy they intend to fulfill themselves is the clash of civilizations we've been told by some is inevitable.

It isn't. I refuse to believe it.

Now is the time we have to double-down on our values.

That doesn't mean not fighting these cold-blooded killers. That's the opposite of our values. People who are willing to, eager to, do the things these people have done are the living antithesis of our values. The world they want looks nothing like the one we want.

Or the one that nearly a billion Muslims live in and envision each day, right alongside the rest of us.

Can you trace some of this back to Islam's roots? You can, but Islam is more than its most violent texts, just as Judaism is more than the slaughter of the Canaanites. Look, I'm an atheist. I don't believe any of these religions, and I'm sick to death of the mayhem their worst practitioners have created, but I have no illusions. They are not going away. No one will argue them off the face of the Earth. Islam is not just the Koran and the Hadith. It is the billion+ Muslims living today, and they are overwhelmingly against this insanity.

There is a virus, a deadly one, in Islam. It must be fought from without and within, and it will take a long time to subdue, but we can't subdue it by declaring Islam inherently evil and incompatible with pluralistic, democratic societies and we can't subdue it by labeling any Muslim living among us an enemy, his friends and family a fifth column.

Because That. Is. What. They. Want.

That's the aim, the purpose, of these bombings and shootings and hostage takings and stabbings and beheadings. The extremists hope to make people like us and our Parisian brothers and sisters so fearful and hateful of the Muslims among us that they have, essentially, no choice but to give up on any hope of being themselves while being one of us.

I don't know the particulars. I don't know how you win this fight, but I know how you lose it. The killers have given us a blueprint.

So no tolerance for intolerance, and that means not being squeamish about confronting evil practices when they are done in the name of a religion. Understanding will take you a long way, and I'm committed to it, but understanding will never cause me to excuse the inexcusable, either in my own country or anywhere else. Curiosity about and respect for other people's cultures is part of my value system, but I have values that come from my own culture too, and I can't be afraid to draw a line.

So let's remember what we stand for and what we stand against. We stand for a free society, one in which anyone may believe what he wants to, may preach what he wants to, but cannot foist those beliefs onto his neighbor. We believe in a world where a person's sex or creed or color does not limit his or her potential . We believe that the only people fit to govern us are ourselves--that no one can claim the mantle of heaven to impose his will and whims and phony law on his countrymen and women, and we believe that the price of joining the club isn't any of those categories--sex or color or creed--it's sharing these beliefs.

The door has to stay open. You have to be able to walk through it whether you wear a cross or crescent or a mogen david or an ank or an ohm or a lotus or a Darwin fish with feet. If, in fear, we close that door, we lock out a potential source of our growing strength and vitality.

And we leave them a choice between slavery and death, or something even worse."

Quote from: Nuka 'Kal Vargun on November 14, 2015, 11:00:03 AM

So this is interesting:
https://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post/173468563/0/0

It really isn't. "I studied hadjis in college and translate Arabic".

"They follow their own crazy, twisted, demented form of Islam" LMAO

Nobody gives a fuck.

I'm guessing he's of Middle Eastern decent himself.

According to CNN, at least one of the aggressors was a French citizen.

Two passports were found on attackers: one from Syria and the other from Egypt. One passport has been possibly been processed through Greece, although there is still a possibility that it is a fake.

Latest figure is 128 dead, 300 wounded.