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Good post, yes at the moment it seems to be mostly muslims who are performing despicable acts such as suicide bombing and terrorism. But you rightly say that the West have been doing similar "terrorism" for years, and not only against Middle Eastern countries (anyone remember the IRA bombings?)
And many hundreds of years ago, it was the Christians who were indiscriminately killing during the Crusades.
An important point to make is that this concept of "martyrism" and suicide bombing is an extremely new phenomenon - it only started in the second half of the 20th century, in part due to Western influences on Middle Eastern government. ......
Almost none of what you wrote is relevant to the situation today. Islam owns suicide bomber whackjobs, period. There's no rationalizing about how somehow that's the fault of "the west." It's not. It's what they do. They blow themselves up, often with NO clear purpose or goal.
It's really quite laughable that you'd try to shrug it off. Or blame it on things that have zero relation to it.
You misunderstand, I'm not shrugging it off by any means. I think it's a despicable and cowardly ideology, and I'm not trying to put the blame on anyone. I'm merely stating that certain actions by the west (specifically the USA) may well have contributed to the radical Islamic uprising that we see today.
My point was also that it is a common misconception that radical islamic attacks, especially suicide bombings are some sort of medieval ideology.
Suicide bombings are a very new phenomenon, I think the first instance where we see these types of attacks en masse, are in the 1980s during the alliance of Hafez al-Assad and Ruhollah Khomeini (who was the leader of Iran after the Shah was overthrown in the revolution). They used this new form of suicide attacks to force American troops from Lebanon.
And it is important to note how advanced the Islamic world was in the "Golden Age" (between the 8th and 13th centuries), because it shows that it isn't necessarily the muslim religion or the teachings of the Quran that are the driving force behind the radicalism we see today. At this period in history the Islamic world was seeking knowledge, and developing and translating mathematics, philosophy and science in general. This is in stark contrast to the attitudes we see today from the radical islamists.
It's no-ones fault (apart from the actual terrorists) that this is happening, per se, I just think it's short sighted to put it all down to "the Quran is bad and teaches muslims to kill infidels" (which is what many people believe).
Again, I'm not blaming anyone or shrugging anything off - I'm just commenting that it is an extremely complicated situation that has many factors which may or may not have caused it, and to just blame "Islam" seems naive. I think all religion is bullshit, for the record.