Murder attempt against Danish Cartoonist

My point has been that whether the perpetrator is insane or not has little bearing on the political implications of his actions. He probably is, at the least, unstable. But most unstable people - even, unstable Muslims in Denmark - do not just happen to attempt to murder targets of international jihadist rhetoric.

That would be "terrorists need not be sane."

No, the "world fame" was manufactured by a coordinated international PR effort by extremist Danish imams. They put together a "dossier" accusing the Danish press of all manner of outrages, most of which were invented (the actual published cartoons not being nearly incendiary enough for such propaganda). The actual publication of the cartoons themselves caused little stir outside of Denmark. It was the coordinated international campaign to demonize the cartoonist (and Danish society more generally) and mobilize Muslim outrage that ignited the controversy.

I'd thought that aspect of this story was pretty widely understood by now. Probably you should spend 10 minutes reading the Wikipedia pages on the subject if you intend to continue writing long posts debating this stuff.

That sounds a lot more like a madman inspired by extremist religion, than someone "inspired by madness."

He didn't create that "evil Western plot to sterilize Yemeni women and so undermine Islam" meme out of thin air, you realize.

That's a secondary consideration - one need not be a member of any identifiable "network" in order to be a terrorist. The "lone wolf" operator has long been a well-understood category of terrorist, and terrorist ideologues have long understood how to exploit such individuals and direct their violence, without actual formal contact with them. They simply provide the rhetoric and ideology, and wait for some suitable lone wolf to latch onto it and act it out.

The latter is a strawman. Nobody is asserting that is the case, and your implication that all terrorism must fall into the latter category - and so, be disqualified by the presence of craziness - is wrong-headed. At the outset it could have been written off as simple ignorant naivete, but by now - after having repeatedly explained it to you - your adherence to that bit of rhetoric is looking to be deliberately dishonest: a pretense for indulging your "Westerners are paranoid fools" line even in the absence of actual paranoia.

That, or it's a troll. Maybe there isn't even any difference.

And what you're missing is that terrorist ideologues know about that phenomenon, and so intentionally spread violent rhetoric in the explicit hope that some crazy will sieze onto it and act it out. And all without any operational links back to the ideologues, to boot. That is where the political connotations come in, even in the case that this guy is completely insane.

Indeed, but the latter is not the only form of terrorism. The threat is as much about "home-grown" nuts deciding to take up the cause on their own (however incompetently) as it is about formalized paramilitary organizations. Indeed, the former are in many ways a bigger worry since the latter are subject to infiltration and retaliation by our own (para)military forces.

I see no assertions that the Westergaard attacker had "deep connections" to anything - please cite an example, since the purported universality of such is the foundation of your criticism here.

Or, for that matter, cite some piece of wrong information on the subject about the Times Square bomber. Or whatever. I've asked you repeatedly to point to a false assertion about the nature of these perpetrators several times now in this thread.

The situation everyone else is dealing with does not assume that every terrorist is intimately tied into some kind of formal, unified paramilitary chain of command. It's understood to be split into an ideological component that broadcasts violent incitement (including specific targets, political justifications, and promises of solidarity), and small, dispersed cells or individuals that they hope to inspire into taking up arms for their cause. There is no assumption of a direct, operational link back to Osama Bin Laden or whoever for the vast majority of these cases. At most, there's the possibility that the home grown types might have visited some indoctrination camps for encouragement and maybe a bit of training.

The actual formal paramilitary networks are fighting in the actual warzone. They don't seem to have the spare resources to direct attacks thousands of miles away. So the internationalist ideologues spend their efforts trying to incite people who live in the West to kill their neighbors and countrymen. The press has, in my experience, been quite clear about the nature of how this stuff works for some time now; certainly by the time of the London tube bombings they were very explicit about this stuff.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

In the first place: not at all. There are plenty of violent crimes committed by Muslims that don't make the news. It's only actual acts of terrorism that get reported as such. If FOX News has been trumpeting pedestrian Muslim criminals (wife-beaters or muggers or whatever) as terrorists, I haven't heard about it. Again, please produce a counterexample if you can (and, no, the Jibla Hospital attack doesn't count).

In the second place: a coordinated campaign doesn't require direct operational links from the perpetrators back to the ideologues. In fact, it's frequently an advantage if such links do not exist. It takes the pressure off of the ideologues, and encourages credulous sorts like you to go around insisting we ignore them entirely.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Religions die out, are replaced - even atheistic ones, probably, although no example comes to mind (the oldest religions around seem to have taken up and sloughed off deities as occasion demanded, over the centuries).

And their manner of growth, while they grow, is worth examining - live by the sword, die by the sword, has an analogy in dogma. If Finland ever adopts Islam, it will not be the Islam we know today - unless by coercion.

Which brings us to the thread topic - how to establish a climate of coercion, accustom people to deference toward an arbitrary authority, among the newly colonized or the threateningly numerous or the inconveniently obstructive? The violently insane have proven useful, in the past: see the Klan, or Kristallnacht,

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.