mr fun writes, re: me on eboo patel:

now while this piece is dishonest, it is also combatting an American narrative that concludes with American interference in the Middle East, since (we all know) that is where Muslim terrorists come from. now the piece is dishonest, but the case you make for the truth here is and has been used as the kernel of American entire foreign policy for the past 8+ years.

well that's true, isn't it. and serracho says "chicken and egg': a good question, as the washpost makes clear today: they hated and ridiculed him and keyed his car down there because he was a conspicuous muslim. but on the other hand, even in the midst of disasters military and otherwise (for example, the destruction of tibet), i don't think you've seen, for example, buddhist suicide bombers or random mass murderers. for that matter, precious few shiite muslims or even christians, though you get the occasional eric rudolph. but adherents of sunni islam seem to do this every single day in many different locations. you want to call that a coincidence?

of course, most sunni muslims don't fly planes into buildings etc., and i'm sure many are peace-loving sweeties with love in their hearts. but on the other hand, when the next person shrapnelizes a woman's market or girls' school someplace, are you going to be in any doubt about their religious affiliation, or about the kind of thing they would say in justification of their own acts?

i might say the problem with this particular style or approach to violence is that it is anti-tactical, bizarrely irrelevant. your tibetan monk might be in despair. might be oppressed. but he's not going to start blowing people up at absolute random; that bears no relation to his despair. all over the world, people are in grinding poverty, despair, pain. they are devalued and exploited by the west or by christians or by commies or kleptocrats, etc. it would not be strange or even perhaps wrong to respond violently. but simply to start shooting or exploding or immolating people selected at random would not appear to have any possible moral justifcation or any fucking use. there is some peculiar ideology at work that detaches the act from its causes or effects in a fundamentally ahuman or alien/alienated way. so, um, where does that ideology come from? because it appears to me to be pretty unusual in human history.

so people do a lot of wrong things. "the west" does a lot of wrong things. it will lob a missile from a predator drone into your wedding, which looks like terrorism. and the evil of such things needs to be described and exposed bit by bit. but the logic is, for all that, utterly different: comprehensible even if wrong etc. both acts might be evil, even equally evil, but they are evil in fundamentally different ways. one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter is just wrong. no one is a freedom fighter in virtue of killing whoever happens to be present, victimizing people without any connection to a cause or comprehensible strategy for pushing it forward. i say that terrorism is real and well beyond stupid, and i say that 90% of it proceeds from sunni islam. that might be wrong and dangerous to say. is it false?

suicide bomb in pakistan kills 12: The morning attack took place in the town of Adazai, about 10 miles (16 kilometers) south of the main northwest city of Peshawar. The market was crowded with shoppers and goats being sold to celebrate the upcoming Muslim festival of Eid.

Comments

[mr.fun]

we couldn't get through the first 5 minutes of Windtalkers in my household. holy shit that is a terrible movie. awful awful awful.

what restrains them from blowing up everything and anything they see? what stops our boys from doing the same? clearly both sides get a kick from blowing shit up. is the distinction all that significant?

[Robert Kelly]

"Robert Kelly reads like he's running for Tribal Warrior Chief, even while he disdains the use of violence he's suggesting that Muslims are subhuman and somehow not fit to be among the rest of us. What is the end result of this spin offered by Mr Kelly, if not violence against Islam?"

No, I would never say anything like that. I would say that I think the Kahanists are eerily close to Al Qaeda, except Jewish, and that Judaism is the base of the Kahanist movement, but I don't think it's adequate to simply say the problem is Judaism. I mean, I like the secular and humanistic forms.

Changing subject, should think about the fact that these bombers are just dudes. I was reading the Times reporter who got snatched by the Taliban, Rohde (sp?), and he said the people who held him would stay up late watching war footage and playing combat video games you could find at any game store in North America. They liked the terrible Nicholas Cage movie Windtalkers and the decent HBO series Band of Brothers. That it celebrated American soldiers was irrelevant. They just like seeing things explode, which is pretty normal.

[mr.fun]

so. lotta ins, lotta outs. lotta strands in ole Duder's head. now, permit me my crazy.

maybe you need to provide a better example. I think I've got one, but I'm not sure how good it is. ok, it would be like being punched in the face on the subway platform, and then taking a baseball bat to the heads of every single person in the car you get on. or having your brother run over by a bus and then blowing yourself up the next day in the bus you take to work, taking along all your fellow passengers. it's a performance, an aesthetic. deadly expression. it's absolutely pointless. I'm babbling.

it seems that you're trying to drain from terrorism anything that remotely makes it human. the word target is used in the piece you link to. of course it was targeted, it was planned, and there was intent behind the explosion. but was it random, or selected? why? did the fact that it is a market make it a target, or was that market targeted? might there have been motives behind it? was it a response to something else? see, that's what you're trying to combat crispin, and that's where you're losing us, because the act itself might be (self) annihilating, but everybody comes from somewhere.

(and here is where I make your argument for you) so those dudes wanted to fly that plane into the Pentagon. do you think that is tactical? ha! what difference would that make? so the Islam you're on about here renders actions symbolic, arbitrary, and meaningless. it is god's/allah's will. it is alien will. it is "what the fuck are you talking about?" but yet people still die.

and again, what difference would it make if someone managed to take out our entire government? how tactical is that? do you think 250 million people are just going to stop doing what they're doing, stop believing what they believe, and stop being American? (but my passport still works around the globe!) and this gets at the heart of its pointlessness: what point is our response? it renders the political (and social) sciences useless. it's an aberration. THEY'RE NOT LISTENING ANYMORE.

BOOM

[charles f. oxtrot]

Robert Kelly reads like he's running for Tribal Warrior Chief, even while he disdains the use of violence he's suggesting that Muslims are subhuman and somehow not fit to be among the rest of us. What is the end result of this spin offered by Mr Kelly, if not violence against Islam?

It seems that Mr Kelly holds a hammer and therefore he sees nails everywhere. To continue the metaphor, the nails all look like they come from Islamic nail factories.

[crispy]

well that's true, and if i point out that most killers in this style are sunni muslims, maybe i should point out that most are men. we did give y'all art and science, though.

[LIsa Simeone]

Another pissed-off man decides to slaughter people. Same old story. Same old testosterone poisoning fucking up our world.

[Stephen]

Mark Ames at the Exile does a good job on this story fyi

http://exiledonline.com/fort-hood-cover-up-a-dozen-tales-of-disinformation/

Sorry if my comments on the Shias (Shiites) below seem off-kilter. I'm tired.

[Stephen]

Oh yeah... and this douche that shot up fort hood. I'm not impressed. He just strikes me as a loser. Pudgey, narrow eyed, with an idiot grin. It seems a bit premature to put this guy in the same league as the dudes that keister plastic explosives.

http://english.pravda.ru/hotspots/terror/08-10-2009/109755-explosive_rectum-0

[Stephen]

That whole 'except the Shias' comment more or less stops me in my tracks. These guys invented the suicide bomb in its modern terroristic form. Period. Remember that USMC barracks that got flattened in Beirut? Shias. Where do Shias make pilgrimage to every year? Karbala, where their Imam got cut to ribbons. They cut themselves with knives over 10 days to commemorate it. No less of an authority than the Ayatolla Khomenei said "Every day is the anniversary of the battle, and every place is Karbala." This means 'Become a martyr today, why are you even alive to hear this? Go out and get yourself killed for God'. Shias are your worst nightmare. They ran the Israelis like bitches.

[Robert Kelly]

Oh. Uh.

I'm talking about radical Islam pretty broadly, I suppose. I just went back and read Eboo and he's just nonsensical. It's a basic fallacy: "No true Muslim would shoot up an Army base." But a Muslim did shoot up an Army base, if the man was a declared Muslim (I haven't really looked into it). A Muslim is whoever Eboo defines, or excludes, as Muslim. But that would only apply if he knew God's thoughts or what God wants, which is impossible.

[Robert Kelly]

I think the Holocaust represented to the Nazis the destruction of abstract forces like banking interests, a world conspiracy of capitalist exploitation and "money capitalism", associated with the Jews. Blood, soil and the natural "community" are responses. It's not simple racism. Finance=abstract, production=concrete.

And I'm arguing in the strongest terms for resistance against that. So I don't care for Islam, but I don't think saying it's just Islam is an adequate explanation. At the same time I don't think the open-minded politically correct tolerant stuff is useful either, or even true. If I said Islam is a religion of peace, when it's obviously bloodthirsty, then I'd be speaking lies. Tolerance of suicide bombing, or trying to "understand" suicide bombing or reason with it, given the context which gives rise to suicide bombing as I described, is basically saying that suicide bombing is an adequate response to exploitation. It'd be like saying that Nazi rearmament policies were justified by the restrictions placed on Germany following the First World War.

[crispy]

the nazis didn't holocaust for wotan. but let's say they did, and at nuremburg they explained their actions by their interpretation of what wotan demands. and let's say that pol pot attributed the killing fields to his devotion to wotan. and rwanda all started because the pres was on the radio, screaming about wotan. wouldn't you start to get worried about the cult of wotan? or would you search for any or every other possible explanation, in order not to offend those who love wotan, or to prove how pluralistic and open-minded you are?

[Robert Kelly]

I'm just riffing on this, but it's interesting that the bombings of markets in Pakistan are not believed by most of those who sympathize with armed Jihadist groups, or the members of the Jihadist groups, as actions of those groups. The bombings are believed to be orchestrated by the United States and Mossad. In this sense they're conspiracy theorists. The enemy is simultaneously all powerful yet destined to be destroyed: "The Jews/USA control everything through a global conspiracy, they're the cause of all our ills, and they will surely be destroyed." Which is why these groups are destined to lose, because they can't rationally evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of their enemies. The Nazis were similar in the way they viewed the Soviet Union and "Judeobolshevism" as an all-powerful threat that was destined to be defeated. I also see this among New World Order conspiracists in the United States. I listened to Alex Jones once say that "nothing can stop [the New World Order]" and then less than a minute later, in one of these unhinged rants, say "and we are standing up against you, and we will defeat you in the end!" They are convinced that through force of arms, their enemy--who is simultaneously humiliating the believer with its awesome power and wealth--will be destroyed.

[Robert Kelly]

When crispy writes:

"there is some peculiar ideology at work that detaches the act from its causes or effects in a fundamentally ahuman or alien/alienated way. so, um, where does that ideology come from?"

These communist thinkers I like refer to it as a displaced form of anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism. Instead of defining and constructing an adequate critique of what are very abstract forces which have come about in a period of profound historical change, Islamo-fascists and Western sympathizers fetishize and reduce the problem into a dualistic and concrete representation.

[crispy]

yes i'm saying that terrorism is not a tactic. it is outside of means/ends rationality. well, many human actions are, in my view. but i have trouble doing anything with this one. your effective resistance/revolutionary movement cannot be outside means/ends rationality. i mean you can tell stories. it, er, terrorizes the population. it creates chaos. but actually i think this would happen even if demonstrably it had no useful effects, which actually i don't think it does. it's an act of expression, an outpouring, like a sob or a screech: it's not *for* anything. it's a sign of devotion, submission, faith, not an attempt to accomplish something, even paradise.

i think if you didn't *assume* there must be some purpose or reason, you'd see that there isn't, really.

no it's not like wotan and the nazis. not...at all.

[Robert Kelly]

I figure this sentence might be confusing:

[In these circles, anti-Semitism is viewed not as "left wing" like racism or homophobia and other bad things, but as a thing of the past now cynically exploited by Israel.]

Among leftist anti-imperialists anti-Semitism is viewed like racism and homophobia, not "left" but something done by bad people etc. etc. etc. or as a thing of the past now cynically exploited by Israel. I had one self-declared socialist tell me he didn't give a shit about the Jews anymore, since they exercise power and domination: Anti-Semitism as a form of counter-hegemonic discourse.

[Robert Kelly]

It could be that Islam has as much to do with mass killings as neo-Paganism or Wotan has to do with Nazism and death camps. It's not the root cause but a palingenetic base for the struggle against-- reaction against--abstract forces people feel that they cannot adequately explain or control.

The Middle East and many Arab and Muslim countries developed in a very haphazard way, and have in fact regressed. Interference between the two Cold War power blocs, the attempt to develop Arab countries along unwieldy statist and communist lines, combined with drastic shifts in the global economy to neoliberalism, has left many displaced people seeking answers. In Russia and Eastern Europe there is also a serious problem with neo-Nazi parties and street militias, and they often sympathize with the Islamist cause against capitalism and Israel (or capitalism defined as "Jewish capital" or "finance capital"). I think Al Qaeda represent a form of that ("Israel is one part of the twin-headed imperialist snake, with the United States being the other" or the "Zionist-Crusader Alliance" like the old Nazi line that conflated either Britain and the Jews, or the Soviet Union and the Jews). I think it's important to make it clear that if you read their literature, this is who Al Qaeda define as their enemy.

I'm going to borrow from communist thinkers Slavoj Zizek, Moishe Postone and Werner Bonefeld. The far right Islamist or Jihadist movement is essentially an anti-Semitic movement. Anti-Semitism is counter-hegemonic, it claims to explain the problems of the world. And this is very hard for left wing anti-capitalists and anti-imperialists to deal with. In these circles, anti-Semitism is viewed not as "left wing" like racism or homophobia and other bad things, but as a thing of the past now cynically exploited by Israel. There's no attempt to explain why it's unique. It's said that anti-Semitism is understandable, a reaction to the Israeli occupation, or a card used by neoconservatives and Zionists (there's the conflation again) to shield Israel from criticism.

To try and justify these actions, like the bombing of pet markets, or the indiscriminate rape and slaughter of Iraqis by Jihadist gunmen, is extremely dangerous. I can't even respond to this, when el serracho says, "what is an acceptable limit for oppressed people?" You could say the same thing about Israel, a million Jews fled there from Arab countries following the Second World War (who nobody gives a shit about), with millions fleeing the Holocaust. That doesn't justify Israel's actions. I just don't think it's very useful or interesting.

[marriotr]

I think the islam-terror correlation has more to do with how economic and political forces have shaped their history than specific internal belief structures. I'd write more, but I have RSI- maybe later.

[mr.fun]

well it's not that simple regarding the Buddhist monks. . .has anyone offered them or their families money or assistance to send one of their sons into a market laden with explosives and a button?

the problem is intractible, yet like crispin says, why is Sunni Islam so seemingly susceptible to creating suicide bombers?

[el serracho]

shit, i got all smart alecy and forgot the link.

:-)

http://aycu18.webshots.com/image/46857/2005590098390063106_rs.jpg

[el serracho]

ps - here's a picture of some buddhist monks (one with a machete) setting shit on fire. do you suppose that is the limit of what they will/might do?

what is an acceptable limit for oppressed people?

[el serracho]

yes. i think it is false. i'd suggest you were closer to the truth when you (very nearly) accepted that predator drone bomb dropping is terrorism as well. what is the point of those bombs in the afgan/pakistan border after all? does the u.s. government think it is going to kill every last taliban dude that is supposedly hiding out and living caves? or is the point to strike fear (terror?) and dysfunction into the mix? or is there a point? am i giving "our" guys too much credit.

i would imagine that the typical sunni holds a relationship to those talibani "freedom fighters" that is similar to the relationship i have with the guy yanking the joystick on that drone.

perhaps we'd all be better off if ol' president obama came out and said what you seem to be saying. then what?

[mr.fun]

so you are saying that terrorism is not, or cannot be viewed as tactical? I thought we took out Saddam's regime with the idea that they would no longer be able to arm a suicide bomber with nuclear material? that seems pretty tactical to me. scaring the women and children seems like a tactic to me. we can't go directly after your military, so we'll go after the defenseless, and really drive you mad. how is taking out Iraq, killing 200k people, displacing 2 million people, an act of self defense, if not for terrorism as a tactic?

terrorism is a complete act of futility, because what's to come from it? the boot presses harder. and so maybe it is just an expression. maybe I'm missing what you're getting at crispin. what sort of ideology brings people to kill themselves while taking out as many defenseless folks as possible? suicide bombings of military outposts, by civilians or otherwise, is not new. maybe the distinction there is illusory. are suicide bombings of the defenseless civilians new? really?

I'm going to chew on this some more, but I would recommend this post from Monsieur IOZ:

http://whoisioz.blogspot.com/2009/01/squish.html