The death toll is at at least 68 in Nairobi, with 175 injured. So that was Saturday’s work; Sunday’s work was at least 75 people killed in Peshawar, in two suicide bombings at a church. And good morning to you too, religion of peace.
Two bombers blew themselves up as worshippers were coming out of the city’s historic All Saints church after attending Sunday Mass, police say.
Relatives of the victims gathered at the scene to protest against the government’s failure to protect them.
Militants linked to Pakistani Taliban have said they carried out the bombing.
The religion-testosterone cocktail strikes again.
More human sacrifices for the greater glory of Allah.
One news article I read claimed the bombers were “no true Muslims”. Yeah, right.
Lofty:
Yeah, I can understand why some would say that, particularly if it is a personal vested interest to dissociate oneself from Islamists. The sensible thing would be to state that one, as a Muslim, does not remotely condone such violence. It’s much more clear and avoids confusion with other “no true (Muslim)” fallacy-containing statements used for other purposes. I’d assume the article you mention was doing the latter.
Yes, yes, Muslims are evil, job well done.
Now, onto something a little more constructive:
1. Can we investigate why “indiscriminate murder” was used rather than, say, peaceful resistance or political action?
2. What was the purpose of the indiscriminate murder?
3. How was it allowed to happen?
You might find that it’s not unique to “Muslims” or “Arabs” or “brown people” but rather to a place in a point of time under certain conditions.
#4 Poolboy.
The clueless twits abound. Drag racism in and muddy the issue so the sheer horror of what is happening to a poor beleaguered minority is obscured and some western liberals can get to feel all so superior about themselves vis a vis the ”racist and islamophobic” ones like Ophelia Benson. So much more genteel to turn one’s eyes away.
You have a poor opinion of ‘muslims’ if you so easily dovetail all one billion of them with islamic nutcases and vicious murderers who have a a really ugly theocratic agenta and whose first victims have always nearly been other muslims and lots and lots of other brown and black people. Fuck you. And fuck you again!
Agree with #5 above. I save my ire for the Taliban and extremist trash that take joy in murdering people. Anyone agreeing with that sort of criminality is aiding and abetting it. This is not by any stretch of the imagination all Muslims.
1. Can we investigate why “indiscriminate murder” was used rather than, say, peaceful resistance or political action?
Because peaceful resistance and political action are incompatable with Islamism.
2. What was the purpose of the indiscriminate murder?
I’d be interested to hear examples of ‘indiscriminate murder’ you think served a purpose.
3. How was it allowed to happen?
I’m sure faithists would cite ‘free will’
You might find that it’s not unique to “Muslims” or “Arabs” or “brown people” but rather to a place in a point of time under certain conditions.
Yes, the Quakers did something similar in my local Quicksave just last week.
miraxpath #5:
All right, who left the projection room door unlocked this time…
Shatterface #7:
Or maybe you’re seriously privileged and don’t know what political desperation looks like, making it easier for you to just say “a pox on their house” rather than ask why are they doing what they’re doing. Maybe they’ve tried peaceful resistance and found it ineffective.
One would think that a self-proclaimed anarchist would consider what they might do if peaceful resistance proved ineffective. It’s a mark of very high privilege to declare that peaceful resistance is always effective — there are times when it was definitely not. That’s the “civility” argument in disguise, folks. Or do I need to point out for the millionth fucking time that Martin Luther King Jr. != the entire Civil Rights Movement, that there were more radical movements that got erased by history because they weren’t as “civil” as MLK?
Jezuz fuck, the state of radicalism sure is sorry when self-proclaimed radicals won’t do any fucking research on radical struggle =/
Setár, peaceful resistance to what? Girls going to school? Women leaving the house? Secularism? Do you have any fucking clue what al-Shabaab even is?
“Radicalism” my ass. Islamists are “radical” the way Nazis are radical. They are not in any sense on the left or socialist revolutionaries or anything of the sort. They’re radical fucking theocrats, and wherever they win they make a hell on earth.
Or maybe you’re seriously privileged and don’t know what political desperation looks like, making it easier for you to just say “a pox on their house” rather than ask why are they doing what they’re doing. Maybe they’ve tried peaceful resistance and found it ineffective.
I lost interest at the word ‘privilege’ since you know jack shit about my personal circumstances.
If peaceful resistance and political action aren’t bringing about a world in which women are murdered for showing their faces and homosexuals aren’t lynched for simply being gay then peaceful resistance and political action are doing their job, so fuck these Nazis and their sympathisers, ‘privileged’ or not.
To be sure, it’s no doubt true (and we pretty much know it’s true) that some people who join the Taliban and other Islamist organizations do it for reasons of frustration or poverty or ignorance combined with years in a madrassa. But that doesn’t make the Taliban itself any kind of valid resistance movement.
One would think that a self-proclaimed anarchist would consider what they might do if peaceful resistance proved ineffective
‘Propaganda by deed’ was renounced decades ago. Violence breeds violence and any society born of violence will be violent – hence the genocide perpetrated by revolutionaries like Hitler, Stalin and Mao.
In any case, I’m not aware of any anarchists fighting to impose a world-wide theocracy – particularly a theocracy based on ‘submission’. You have heard of the phrase ‘No Gods, No Masters’ haven’t you?
But that doesn’t make the Taliban itself any kind of valid resistance movement.
No more than neo-Nazis who also draw from the marginalised.
Being ‘underprivileged’ isn’t much of a guarantee of virtue however much their self-appointed champions might like to romanticise it.
The idea of specifically targetting noncombatants is hardly restricted to one group of religious or political extremists. Bluntly if your “Great Cause” requires you to either kill indiscriminately (Peshawar) or seek out and target noncombatants (Nairobi) then your cause needs to be stripped for any parts that might (with some work) be useful and then unceremoniously dumped in a deep dark pit and filled over.
(declaration of interest, I was on Bridge Street, Warrington at 12:23 on 20/03/93).