All "terrorism" is "blowback". Terrorists aren't just crazy folk who come out of the blue and go "I know, I'll blow some shit up just because" - they're politically motivated and use fear as a weapon.
They're politically motivated due to actual or perceived past injustices perpetrated by their targeted nation or organisation.
On the note of using fear as a weapon however, our own governments have become absolutely expert, and media reports can now almost have the same impact as an actual terrorist attack in terms of controlling patterns of thought through fear.
So, by the definition of a terrorist as being someone who controls a population through fear, or in fact the fear of fear... you can see where I'm going.
Not to mention the terrorists that planned 9/11 were, decades earlier, "freedom fighters" to the State Department as they were denying control of Afghanistan to the Soviet Union.
Funny how quickly the prevailing winds can change.
AQ has been and continues receiving DoD contracts in Afghanistan[1]:
“I am deeply troubled that the U.S. military can pursue, attack, and even kill terrorists and their supporters, but that some in the U.S. government believe we cannot prevent these same people from receiving a government contract,”
I don't even know if you can call this blowback any more, because it sounds like some people in power are playing a big game of red team vs blue team and take everyone else along for the ride… which goes along with "So, by the definition of a terrorist as being someone who controls a population through fear, or in fact the fear of fear... you can see where I'm going."
It is not as though she was just some random school girl:
"In early 2009, at the age of 11–12, Yousafzai wrote a blog under a pseudonym for the BBC detailing her life under Taliban rule, their attempts to take control of the valley, and her views on promoting education for girls. The following summer, a New York Times documentary was filmed about her life as the Pakistani military intervened in the region, culminating in the Second Battle of Swat. Yousafzai rose in prominence, giving interviews in print and on television, and she was nominated for the International Children's Peace Prize by South African activist Desmond Tutu."
As sad as this shooting is, it is not a refutation of the claim that terrorists have political motivations.
The goals of terrorism need not be worldwide. The point the gunman was trying to make when he shot Malala Yousafzai was not to the West. It was to the local people in Pakistan that education of girls would not be tolerated even if it were mandated. It was not to stop schools from opening, but it was to deter interest in the parents and girls from attending those schools. That is a political goal, and it absolutely motivated the shooter to commit an act of terror.
One may argue about the legitimacy of that goal (it's certainly taken as a religious teaching in that part of the world), but that does not make the goal apolitical.
Something tells me you were aiming for that. But in fact it isn't, it's just people with a few screws loose in their head that are afraid of emancipated and educated women closely aligned with a religion.
Think 'insecure males' before you think 'terrorism' in this particular case.
> It's not like there's a whole ideology and movement and organization that supports their actions.
The same can be said of the culture of illegal invasions, illegal detentions, secret trials, secret jails, spying, drone attacks and other fun things brought by the National Security State.
The Taliban is far younger than and wouldn't exist but for the American National Security State. Let's keep cause and effect in mind here.
You are now engaging in a particularly uncreative and disingenuous form of goalpost moving. Just because it's blowback doesn't mean it's for American policies. It's local blowback for local policies. You can continue to fake at naive, but seriously - you are smart enough to follow hacker news, you are smart enough to understand context. (Hint, it's basically the same as variable scoping).
What is the point you are so uninterestingly trying to make? Are you just super sad and annoyed that someone dare suggest that the US didn't do something good? Or are you just a sockpuppet loser who needs to continue the "terrorism is evil and we are stopping it!" propaganda?
Right. So a girl wants self determination and education and local policies allow her to do that and she gets shot in the head for that.
The point is that there are real people in the world that have very regressive views and are willing to murder school girls to promote their ideology.
These are dangerous people. As much as you would like to bury your head in the sand and pretend that it's all a government conspiracy, these people do exist and they are smart and ambitious.
> a sockpuppet loser who needs to continue the "terrorism is evil and we are stopping it!" propaganda
Oh I disagree with you so I must be a shill. What a liberal and open minded person you are.
Please fucking go back to reddit. Actually, on second thought, please invite all your friends here so this place burns down faster.
You're some person who has been here for all of 13 hours and you're complaining about quality degradation of the site? Sure you aren't a sockpupptet.
You just act like one and have a hard time with explanations that answer your questions rationally. Oh and you are goalpost moving because each rational explanation is met with a change of topic as if it invalidates the explanation - the definition of goalpost moving basically.
Come back when you're old enough to do simple logic and basic reading comprehension.
Not all acts of terror are blowback for American policies. Nobody ever claimed that they were. Just that all acts of terror were blowback for something.
Religious fanatics are committing atrocities all over the world. In Algeria they behead people, in Iraq they blow each other up, in Ireland they used to blow each other up (including schools) and in the US they shoot each other and innocent bystanders or professionals.
Northern Irish here. We have a cultural division that aligns roughly with a religious division. The political leanings of Unionism and Nationalism stem from that cultural division - the historical inequalities and injustices. Religion is not the source of the division.
Sometimes it has been part of the problem. It has encouraged the establishment of separate school systems for Catholics and Protestants and it has been used a tool by the extremists to give legitimacy to their violence.
Sometimes it has been part of the solution. It has given emotional healing to victims, and it has motivated community leaders on both sides to push for peace.
I'd suggest that the same is true of most conflicts that you think of as stemming from Islam.
In actual fact, it's pure tribalism. When you are born into one tribe, you adopt the cultural aspects of that tribe. Those include the religious denomination and political beliefs, including hating the other tribe.
In Northern Ireland, religion is correlated to political belief because the two major tribes are divided along those lines. Nobody who believes Northern Ireland should be part of the UK does it because of their interpretation of the Eucharist.
And you could say exactly the same about Islamic terrorists too.
Abortion doctors are often the target of violent actions. Bombings and fatal shootings have happened intermittently, but with enough regularity as to paint a pattern. Collateral damage is hardly a concern for those engaging in these events.
> Religious fanatics are committing atrocities all over the world ... in the US they shoot each other and innocent bystanders or professionals
This is really just a platitude.
If we call anti-abortion attacks "Christian terrorism" (and we certainly should), then there have been 8 deaths in 16 years from fundamentalist US Christian terrorism.
Compare this to the nearly daily, and sometimes more, bombings, shootings, and executions carried out by fundamentalist Islamists. Adding up to thousands of deaths and hundreds of attacks every year, Islam is several orders of magnitude more violent than any other religion (specifically 10^4 or 10^5, depending on what you are comparing it to).
You can't just talk about religion without talking about geopolitical and demographic pressures. In poor Christian countries in Africa there is a lot of violence, too. Same goes for Hindus in the more destitute parts of India. Societies that are educated, where the population is not exploding, are generally more peaceful regardless of religion.
You said it yourself with 'history of violence' - for the most part, all the Christian religion(s) seem to have left it in the past. A few fringes have hung around, but that's probably to be expected.
I think it's more to do with Christianity being the majority religion in the west, where we have a cultural history of tolerating (even celebrating) differing opinions. Under a different set of circumstances, I could easily see Islam being more open and liberal (see how it used to be) and Christianity being more... like modern day Islam in many places? But that's not where we ended up.
Christianity isn't the majority religion in the west, it's secularism. Countries like Norway, Sweden and England are only officially Christian, but in practice are pretty much non-religious.
If you're coming from an American perspective you've been taught that America is tolerant, inclusive, etc. but that's hard to argue in the face of facts. The level of racial separation is higher than in Apartheid South Africa, the income disparity is huger than in all but the most destitute banana republics, and non-Christian religions and non-believers are constantly persecuted by the Christian majority.
In the 1400s Islam was more liberal and open only because the countries in which it was practiced were relatively affluent. Christians at the time were waging bloody wars of conquest, especially the series of brutal Crusades to the Middle East.
If America had a demographic like Egypt, you would be seeing riots, blood in the streets, and major religious conflict. It's only because the people are too old to raise a fist in anger that there's peace. Baby Boomers are not going to riot no matter how riled up they are. Just look at how pathetic the Tea Party protests were compared to what happened in Tahir Square.
You can't look at religion through the lens of the last fifty years. Things shift dramatically and unexpectedly.
It's also easy to argue that a lot of Islamic extremism has been instigated by America and Britain because of the various coups they've thrown (Iran, Iraq) and oppressive regimes they've supported (Egypt, Saudia Arabia). Prior to that, things were a lot more orderly.
Look at how Lebanon went from a place of peace, tolerance and harmony, with a standard of living similar to Europe, to one of bloody civil war. This could happen anywhere when the conditions are right.
I meant 'majority' as in 'biggest religion', and I wasn't counting secularism as a religion.
In regards to the rest of your post, I get the feeling you would prefer if western Christians were actually more violent, because surely each one of them is actually insane and will go Old Testament at the drop of a hat and start rounding up secularists...
What I'm really getting from it is that affluence leads to liberalization (in the classical sense) of religion, whereas the opposite of that leads to more fundamentalist religions. Which makes some sense - objective reality sucks when you are starving to death.
One could easily argue that Catholic extremism led to WWII fascism. It's not so far away in the past as you think. There's plenty of rampaging christians in Nigeria up to their necks in sectarian bloodshed as well. Same with Lebanon.
No religion has left their violence in the past, they have a book, hadtih/scrolls and vickers/mullahs which tells them they have a divine right to certain things like violent retribution for blasphemy or "blood atonement" and land titles, so violence will continue forever. Even buddhists are rampaging in Myanmar with machetes butchering up a sectarian storm.
I'm not going to argue pre-WWII Catholicism, it's about as relevant as eugenics and Aryanism (the west has changed a lot), but the violent Christians / Buddhists you are pointing out seem to be in response to violence from some members of Islam, so it's basically just tribal violence.
And Buddhists don't have such a book, so I'm not sure what you're actually arguing here other than that religious fundamentalism is bad. Most religious people in the west already believe that (unfortunately not all of them).
Ireland is nothing to do with religion. It's a handy banner. It's all about British colonialism and oppression. Fuck, we sold the Irish as slaves to west indies planters. Of course it's geopolitics.
Religious fanaticism, however, does not equate to terrorism. It is a subset of the phenomenon, and operates on its own little set of utterly irrational rules.
Great. So we've established that not every terrorist attack is blowback for purely political/nationalist reasons. Often religion and ideology comes into play.
Probably has something to do with sexual politics. Why would you order a drone strike to kill a 16 year old (along with 9 other people) eating at a restaurant?
Just cause it doesn't target the entire world doesn't mean it's not terrorism. Terrorism can be local. That murder is very clearly meant to control and coerce people. The definition of terrorism.
So because of such heinous acts that are committed by individuals (that happen everywhere around the world, everyday), the population must be subjugated with fear of entire groups of people?
Pardon me, I was just trying to preempt where cherry picking examples usually leads to by responding with a question that could from be the point you were trying to make.
They're politically motivated due to actual or perceived past injustices perpetrated by their targeted nation or organisation.
On the note of using fear as a weapon however, our own governments have become absolutely expert, and media reports can now almost have the same impact as an actual terrorist attack in terms of controlling patterns of thought through fear.
So, by the definition of a terrorist as being someone who controls a population through fear, or in fact the fear of fear... you can see where I'm going.