If a mod wants to move this to Serious, please feel free. I'm putting it here simply because this is where other 9/11 threads have been, and I'd like it to reach a relatively larger audience.

So, there seems to be a wide range of people, on here and in real life, who seem inexorably quick to blame the West for the actions of these Islamists. It seems as if we've lost some sort of sense of proportion. Have we committed crimes? Sure, things like torture, the horrors of Abu Ghraib, Clinton's bombing of Sudanese pharmaceutical centres and various actions in Viet Nam can all be counted as criminal. It's a shame that these people haven't, in a lot of cases, been held to account.

In the same box, however, lie the Islamists. I'm sure U.S. foreign policy is destructive and provocative, nobody dare doubt it. However, we're talking about the people who've said they'll never forgive the West for not allowing Indonesia to commit genocide in East Timor, and for helping East Timor - predominantly catholic - become independent.

These are pretty much the same people who, barely even a month ago, tried to commit genocide against the Yazidis and who are currently fighting the Kurdish Peshmerga. Genocide: the destruction of a people. These are also essentially the same people who told Thomas Jefferson that they could kidnap and attack American sailors because the Koran allows it.

I'm not going to argue that their beliefs are the main cause of their behaviour; it isn't. A big part of it is to do with the condition of the Middle East, the community offered by such an extremist group, some psychological factors and the sense of justification from having a holy book behind them. Whether or not America is to blame for the rise of these people is largely irrelevant from a perspective of "What do we do?" They're here, they've been here for a while and these people will not stop until they accomplish their aims.

Be that genocide, the establishment of a caliphate or the destruction of the West. The implication that, had we just been nicer to them, it'd all be okay, is as anodyne as it is banal. Whatever their justifications or their morality, the consequences are the same, and they would limit the freedoms history and progress has brought us. And I will not bend my knee to Fascism hiding behind a holy war.

Fuck the implication that the West should stay out of it, and fuck anybody who blames the West for the actions of these psychopathic crusaders.

Fucking right, man.

Pretty much agree with everything you said, if the West stays out of the Middle East it'll only provide IS and other militant groups with the chance to grow. However whether or not 9/11 was actually carried out by some ragheads from the desert is for a different thread.

Quote from: Gatsby on September 11, 2014, 01:40:14 PM

However whether or not 9/11 was actually carried out by some ragheads from the desert is for a different thread.

Doesn't matter where they were from; we know their ideology.

I meant it in regards to that 9/11 may have been an inside job carried out the US themselves. I'm not completely made up on who it was and I never will be, but I have my reasons.

You know, there's something that comes to mind here when I read this. And it's kind ofhard to put a starting point down on it. But let's see if I can. It has to do with cause and effect in a way. What I mean is, if you swapped something out of time, and event, or a specific person, something else would eventually step in to fill it's shoes.

If something exists, anything at all, then that means it will exist again. It will happen again, at some point in time. For example, let's take Hitler, since he's such a good person to hate on. Let's just say we knocked him over and out of the equation suddenly. Maybe Germany wouldn't have been all dammicky for a second world war. Maybe they would have. But in all likelyhood, another person, somewhere, at some point in time would have likely stepped in and the events that occured because of Hitler would play out, albiet in a somewhat different form.

This is why I don't ever "hate" political figures, or even events, because if that person suddenly went missing, or that event never happened, regardless, eventually something would fill it's shoes and I would hate them all the same.

So in this point, you are right. Maybe the West not being dammicky would have changed things. It might not have. But, in some form or another, this conflict would have arisen just the same, albeit with a few details in different order.

But, it also raises another point. People can blame the states for what happened. But that doesn't change the here and now. And it never will. So rather then waste time and potential efforts on energy on laying blame, it's best to just move onwards and forwards with the present.