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.