Why are muslim extremists always targeting civilians?

[justicar5]

It is often said that these atrocities come about not through Islam itself but for some demented misunderstanding of its teaching. The truth of the matter is that it is all about religion and nothing else. .

if you had stopped their you would have been 100% correct. This appears to be Islams time out of the Abrahamic faiths for slaughter and havoc, but all 3 share the blood lust and divine mandate to genocide and conquest, the old testament makes the first duty of the faithful totally clear, the annihilation of all unbelievers, then the death of all believers who ever had contact outside the faith.

So yes this is about faith, the death cult of abraham.

[PointOfViewGun]

Who is this Islam guy? And where can I meet him?

[basics]

if you had stopped their you would have been 100% correct. This appears to be Islams time out of the Abrahamic faiths for slaughter and havoc, but all 3 share the blood lust and divine mandate to genocide and conquest, the old testament makes the first duty of the faithful totally clear, the annihilation of all unbelievers, then the death of all believers who ever had contact outside the faith.

So yes this is about faith, the death cult of abraham.

justicar5,

Abraham was accounted righteous before God on the pre-circumsional belief that Jesus Christ would come to pay for his sin in time. There was no death cult in that. He knew already that the price of sin was death because all men died whether by the sword or not and perhaps in his case at that particular time it was always a case of survival as proved to be the case. But this time he had God on his side. The great problem you have however is distinguishing between what Abraham believed and what became Judaism and Islam.

If however as I suspect you are including Rome as being an Abrahamic faith and coupling it with Judaism and Islam then of course your estimation appears quite correct. However, that is not what Scripture says of them being of the faith of Abraham, for if nothing be clearer, they are not. Abraham's faith lies in Jesus Christ taking away the sins of all those that He would die for, full stop. The three mentioned do not believe that. Rome thinks it holds the whip hand in that respect, whilst Islam hopes for mercy and Judaism awaits a Messiah to restore David's kingdom without anything about after death.

So we see all three hoping to be rulers of the world totally out of sync with what is written and what they are doing is being done in God's name and that can't be right under any circumstances.

[justicar5]

If one looks across this world possibly even as I write civilians are being killed or taken hostage by Islamic terrorists. To localise it to Israel is just silly because the threat is much greater than that. The threat is that a certain amount of Muslims have been so brainwashed to believe that anything not Muslim is worthy of killing. That they use the name of God to justify the atrocities they commit is beyond comprehension. Nonetheless they do these dastardly things believing that God will be pleased with them so it doesn't matter to them who they kill as long as someone is killed.

Same thing for Christian terrorists, they are as bad if not worse (LRA is about the worst full stop)

[xcorps]

Really? That's all you got? You can't prove Hamas targets civilians, not in a way you couldn't say the same about IDF (which kills hundreds times more civilians than the Palestinians, in absolute or proportionally).

From 1987-1993 they attacked "collaborators and moral deviants" (civilians) HAMAS in Politics by Jeroen Gunning
The Passover Massacre March 27, 2002
2008 Dimona Suicide bombing in a shopping mall http://www.theguardian.com/world/200....international
The al Qassam rockets in the Negev. The Qassam rockets on Ashkelon.
Who knows how many HAMAS rivals were killed in Gaza? More than 1000. Including teenagers. "Alleged Palestinian Collaborators with Israel and Their Families: A Study of Victims of Internal Political Violence". Yosif Mahmoud Haj-Yahis


Most of the Middle East except Gaza hates HAMAS. What's that tell you? It tells you "Good luck with your fantasy about HAMAS choirboys".

[Caligula's_Horse]

From 1987-1993 they attacked "collaborators and moral deviants" (civilians) HAMAS in Politics by Jeroen Gunning
The Passover Massacre March 27, 2002
2008 Dimona Suicide bombing in a shopping mall http://www.theguardian.com/world/200....international
The al Qassam rockets in the Negev. The Qassam rockets on Ashkelon.
Who knows how many HAMAS rivals were killed in Gaza? More than 1000. Including teenagers. "Alleged Palestinian Collaborators with Israel and Their Families: A Study of Victims of Internal Political Violence". Yosif Mahmoud Haj-Yahis


Most of the Middle East except Gaza hates HAMAS. What's that tell you? It tells you "Good luck with your fantasy about HAMAS choirboys".

Actually, the Gazans hate Hamas even more then most people; they're the ones suffering the brunt of their policies, after all. Its just that Hamas has guns and a willingness to turn them on dissidents, which has a way of discouraging any attempt at protest or rebellion.

[Dracula]

to try and inspire fear. But what do they hope to accomplish with it? Do they want people to fear Islam? That fear leads to hate, which wont help their cause at all.
The only thing it will accomplish is make people shun muslims.

For them it is on the contrary. Fear - submission to religious precepts. Hatred is indifferent whether it will be. Even I think they all hate each other there, so a muslim will not understand your concern of hatred at all. And islam is religion which no sane with his branes person would have accepted voluntarily, so fear was at its beginning, it is its normal practise to this day.

[basics]

Same thing for Christian terrorists, they are as bad if not worse (LRA is about the worst full stop)

justicar5,

Who are the LR

[gaunty14]

"Lords Resistance Army"

militant extremist Christians in Uganda.

[Yayattasa]

There's also the MEND. Also, let's not forget the Buddhist 969 movement in Myanmar.

[Henry of Grosmont]

if you had stopped their you would have been 100% correct. This appears to be Islams time out of the Abrahamic faiths for slaughter and havoc, but all 3 share the blood lust and divine mandate to genocide and conquest, the old testament makes the first duty of the faithful totally clear, the annihilation of all unbelievers, then the death of all believers who ever had contact outside the faith.

So yes this is about faith, the death cult of abraham.

+rep
Also, the fact that Koran is literally considered to be the word of God meaning that there's no room to try and sneak their way like Judaism and Chrisitanity trying to do in light of an enormous progress of the science in the last 200 years. But they are essentially the same, just masquerading better. Experience...

[Knight of Heaven]

Then what? It seems to me that it would force Western countries to take extreme measures such as evicting all Muslims and not allowing any muslims into the country. Just to be safe rather than sorry. They'd ban the entire religion.

Angola as recently banned Islam in their country for instance.

It is often said that these atrocities come about not through Islam itself but for some demented misunderstanding of its teaching. The truth of the matter is that it is all about religion and nothing else. .

People who think like you do, usualy doesnt have a clue how Modern islamism came to be.
At anycase for the islamists, radical islam, is indeed the true islam.

Hope it helps in understanding in how to seperate the two.
http://www.speroforum.com/a/LHICXZIU...m#.VLxaOy6CDIU

[Aeneas Veneratio]

Extremists in Western countries have more to do with social economics than religion. I'll explain later tomorrow, I'm tired.

[Roma_Victrix]

Might be a simple question, but I'd like to hear others their thoughts on it.

To me this is an act of cowardice used to try and inspire fear. But what do they hope to accomplish with it? Do they want people to fear Islam? That fear leads to hate, which wont help their cause at all.
The only thing it will accomplish is make people shun muslims.

I mean.. just think for a moment how this would progress if things escalate.. Let's say.. there is a string of succesfull attacks on civilian targets in the western world. They blow up landmarks and kill many people along with it.
Then what? It seems to me that it would force Western countries to take extreme measures such as evicting all Muslims and not allowing any muslims into the country. Just to be safe rather than sorry. They'd ban the entire religion.

As the situation currently is, many people are already distrustfull of Muslims and more and more people are getting more right wing ideas about the subject. Right wing political parties are growing. And with each succesfull terrorist attack, they push the western world further towards right wing policies.

I mean.. there can't be any ending to this that would be good for these extremists in the long run. They just destroy the future of their own offspring.

Seems that they just want to watch the world burn and nothing else.

The Al-Qaeda operatives who killed the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists explicitly expressed the act as a revenge for a perceived slight and insult against the prophet of Islam.

However, we've known for quite some time, via leaked cables of communiques between top Al-Qaeda leaders, that the Salafist terrorist groups ACTUALLY WANT the West to be dragged deeper and deeper into the never-ending conflict in the Middle East. As they say for themselves, they truly weren't naive enough to think the attack on 9/11 was going to cripple the USA's financial might or security apparatuses. They used this attack as a means to provoke the US into launching wars in the Middle East, to drain its resources (as we certainly did in Afghanistan and then Iraq, the bill being about $4-6 trillion ) and to slowly demoralize the American public. They learned a valuable lesson in how to demoralize, exhaust, and ultimately defeat a larger, far more well-armed opponent when another superpower came rumbling into Afghanistan: the Soviet Union with its invasion and war in Afghanistan from 1979-1989.

Al-Qaeda actually supports an apocalyptic ideology that encourages not only warfare in general, but the war to end all wars before the prophesized Judgment Day. This is the same ideology that ISIS openly admits to having, even pointing out the particular settlement (the town of Dabiq in Syria) as the place of the final showdown between the armies of Islam (in the view of ISIS, they are the only legitimate one) and the Western "Crusaders" who will ally together and show up there in full force. This is according to a prophecy attributed to the prophet Muhammad, who allegedly spoke at the time about the Byzantine Empire and Rome (Constantinople). Funny enough this is superimposed onto today's modern political order.

It becomes clear then that targeting civilians is not only done for a demoralizing effect, it is also done for reasons of deliberate provocation and stimulation of a fight. Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups would simply LOVE a right-wing movement in Europe to discriminate and hound Muslims in Europe. It would not only polarize the international community and have Arab leaders think twice about working with Western states, but also provide such terrorist groups with more recruits from a desperate Muslim population that is squeezed by both European far right wingers and the Islamists who attack your average secular Muslims as sellout blasphemers and apostates. Al-Qaeda and such groups thrive on the discontent of the Muslim community, yet we all saw how for a while they were completely shunned in Iraq by even their Sunni brethren who caught on to their divisive strategy that only stacks up more and more Sunni bodies and Sunni children. Dressed up in the speech of martyrdom, Al-Qaeda really couldn't give a damn about its own followers. They certainly don't care for their fellow Sunnis sitting on the fence of neutrality but who are ultimately collateral damage when it comes to the worldwide contention with Shia Muslims and Shia powers like Iran. Those are the same Sunnis that Al-Qaeda and their competitor ISIS have no problem feeding to the wolves should another Western invasion force arrive and become bogged down in yet another occupation fighting an urban insurgency and facing guerrilla warfare.

I don't think there will ever be an end to Islamic terrorism. However, the most effective way to combat it is obviously to work with Muslim communities and Muslim leaders. Sensible immigration policies are one thing, but contentiously polarizing entire Muslim communities with talk of banning Islam or kicking Muslims out of Europe only fans the flames that Al-Qaeda started. I don't think we should fall prey to Al-Qaeda's coveted fantasy of civil strife, or worse, civil war in Europe between Muslims and Christians (plus Jews, who are usually involved in this because of Israel). Why give such terrorist groups exactly what they want on their wishlist? I would like to think that this is all just an impossible pipe-dream of Al-Qaeda's, but given the dramatic rise of right-wing rhetoric against Muslims in Europe lately, I wouldn't put it past some EU states. I think ultimately, though, grown ups will take charge (i.e. cooler heads will prevail against lynch mob mentalities).

[basics]

I think it is quite obvious that there is no easy answer to the question of Islamic terrorism simply because its god appears to approve of it according to its followers. So, when one gets to that level only death seems to be the arbitrary answer as it's the reward for one and punishment for the other. If killing is a sin then it would appear that there is no need for God's mercy because sinners can walk into this paradise on the back of killing someone and it doesn't appear to matter whether they are men, women or children.

Jesus said that the two greatest commandments are, " Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and might and love your neighbour as yourself." and He is to Islam a prophet of God. Clearly there is something quite wrong here? God's prophets can never lie because they speak as though God was doing the speaking yet somewhere along the line He is being ignored. So God or prophet, Jesus has to be listened to whether Christian or Muslim and yet He is not, why? If He is to be our Judge, Muslim or Christian and only God does the judging where do these terrorists get their authority to behave as they do?

[LestaT]

Why are muslim extremists always targeting civilians?

Why are US military always targeting civilians?

[sumskilz]

Why are US military always targeting civilians?

They aren't, in that the civilians who are killed aren't the targets. What's your actual point in relation to the thread's topic?

[snuggans]

the thread title might as well be "why does asymmetric warfare and sectarian violence exist?"

[G-Megas-Doux]

Might be a simple question, but I'd like to hear others their thoughts on it.

To me this is an act of cowardice used to try and inspire fear. But what do they hope to accomplish with it? Do they want people to fear Islam? That fear leads to hate, which wont help their cause at all.
The only thing it will accomplish is make people shun muslims.

I mean.. just think for a moment how this would progress if things escalate.. Let's say.. there is a string of succesfull attacks on civilian targets in the western world. They blow up landmarks and kill many people along with it.
Then what? It seems to me that it would force Western countries to take extreme measures such as evicting all Muslims and not allowing any muslims into the country. Just to be safe rather than sorry. They'd ban the entire religion.

As the situation currently is, many people are already distrustfull of Muslims and more and more people are getting more right wing ideas about the subject. Right wing political parties are growing. And with each succesfull terrorist attack, they push the western world further towards right wing policies.

I mean.. there can't be any ending to this that would be good for these extremists in the long run. They just destroy the future of their own offspring.

Seems that they just want to watch the world burn and nothing else.

Asymmetric warfare of this form is designed so that civilian government make the military mistake of cutting down on civil liberties rather then actually learning how to use the tools they already have to effectively remove terrorists from society. If civil governments curb civil liberties this motivates the populace who feel they are being abused and as such actually recruits for the terrorists on one had and divides the society on the other hand as people object to living in a police state. It is simple divide and conquer which is why they do it as mathematically it has the highest ratio of return to investment. This is why every time the government curbs a civil liberty it is an own goal as it gives aid to the enemy and brings each instance of attack and reaction closer to an all out conflict of destruction that terrorists want. The whole goal is to have the target lose any moral superiority they feel they possess and destabilise that nation. It is a very old warfare concept and highly effective for anyone to foolish not to understand the strategic goal.

[Caligula's_Horse]

Asymmetric warfare of this form is designed so that civilian government make the military mistake of cutting down on civil liberties rather then actually learning how to use the tools they already have to effectively remove terrorists from society. If civil governments curb civil liberties this motivates the populace who feel they are being abused and as such actually recruits for the terrorists on one had and divides the society on the other hand as people object to living in a police state. It is simple divide and conquer which is why they do it as mathematically it has the highest ratio of return to investment. This is why every time the government curbs a civil liberty it is an own goal as it gives aid to the enemy and brings each instance of attack and reaction closer to an all out conflict of destruction that terrorists want. The whole goal is to have the target lose any moral superiority they feel they possess and destabilise that nation. It is a very old warfare concept and highly effective for anyone to foolish not to understand the strategic goal.

Its hardly that cut and dry.
You'll always have your extremists, either religious, nationalist or ideological fanatics, or the plain and simple violently mentally ill. Even if you give them all the civil liberties in the world, they'll still often turn to terrorism. And because they have all the civil liberties in the world, you're not allowed to spy on them, or arrest them preemptively, so good luck making the rest of your citizens feel safe. Many a sectarian violent groups actually start their way as militias set up for defensive purposes, because they fell the central government isn't doing enough to protect them.

While terrorism movements often can be fed through crackdowns that turn the population against the existing authorities, blaming their existence on the central government to begin with is a vast oversimplification. Ethnic, religious, economic and cultural differences create sectarian violence just as readily as the oppression that may or may not be there.
Take for example the American's 9/11 attacks. They weren't suppressing Muslims in the slightest when it happened.