Paris Attacks
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alanjjohnstone wrote:Fisk at his best again bringing some perspective to the problem…and asking a poignant question ….if the French could retaliate by taking out an arms depot and training base, why didn't they do it a week ago rather than in revenge attack?…
Maybe because they didn't want the Syrian army to get to Raqqa first, i.e before their proxy pawns on the ground:http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/11/syria-aleppo-army-lift-blockade-kuweires-airport.html
alanjjohnstone wrote:I vaguely recall a long time ago DannyL when he was a regular orator at Hyde Park becoming involved with some radical Muslims speakers there and the idea of a formal debate was raised…and we shit our pants – so to speak – scared that the debate would become a physical confrontation and HO would be damaged and no more was said about the possibility.I'm no sure about that anecdote. We have confronted radical Islamists in debate, at various universities in the 1990s. I recall the late Eddie Grant saying after he had done one that the last time he had seen an audience segregated into men and women at a meeting was at a synagogue. At one anti-war demonstration in Hyde Park our stall happened to be next to a radical Islamist one. The young people (men) of Bangladeshi origin were fascinated to hear the atheist case presented. They had never met one before. The perils of living in a secular society, nothing of course compared to the perils of an atheist living in ISIS-land.
ALB wrote:alanjjohnstone wrote:I vaguely recall a long time ago DannyL when he was a regular orator at Hyde Park becoming involved with some radical Muslims speakers there and the idea of a formal debate was raised…and we shit our pants – so to speak – scared that the debate would become a physical confrontation and HO would be damaged and no more was said about the possibility.I'm no sure about that anecdote. We have confronted radical Islamists in debate, at various universities in the 1990s. I recall the late Eddie Grant saying after he had done one that the last time he had seen an audience segregated into men and women at a meeting was at a synagogue. At one anti-war demonstration in Hyde Park our stall happened to be next to a radical Islamist one. The young people (men) of Bangladeshi origin were fascinated to hear the atheist case presented. They had never met one before. The perils of living in a secular society, nothing of course compared to the perils of an atheist living in ISIS-land.
I also debated with radical muslims during the war in Bosnia.
alanjjohnstone wrote:. Robbo, why bother responding in anyway to religious fundamentalism, whether it is IS terror or assassination of abortion clinic doctors? I agree that we don't end social ills by arguments which i think is what you mean. Only by the creation of a just equitable economic system removes the core root causes of religion. Like the State religion withers on the vine when socialism is established , but we cannot have socialism without the acceptance and cooperation of the majority of people which means we have to devise an approach that is inclusive of those with religious beliefs.You misunderstand me, Alan. Im all for attacking the objectionable social policies of various religions. What I question is the point in attacking the metaphysical assumptions underlying religious beliefs. As I read you, you seemed to me saying that we have to point out to religious folk that they are mistaken. which I took to mean that they are mistaken in holding those metaphysical assumptions and that the task of a socialist party is thus inter alia to convert such people to an atheist position. This, in my view, is utterly futile pointless and irrelevant. If we are going depend on the working class rejecting religion thats never gonna happen. On the contrary, as the link I provided shows, religion is gaining ground both absolutely and relatively on a world scale notwithstanding the process of secularisationAs an addendum to this I would point out that the overwhelming majority of atheists are firmly pro-capitalist and, in my experience, atheists tend to be disproportionately more militantly pro capitalist than non atheists. If you don't believe me pop along to the Socialism versus Capitalism FB page (which has incredible amount of traffic and it growing by leaps and bounds). I have been active putting across socialist ideas on this site for a few weeks now and have had the usual run-ins with a large number of people on such issues as the refugee crisis and terrorism, Interestingly, those who take a hard line nationalistic even racist position on these matters, Ive noticed, tend also in the main to be declared atheists. I find this quite disturbing actually and it does kinda demonstrate how a blanket critique of religion can quite easeliy be co-opted by some unsavory anti-socialist cause. Repeatedly you find the same old argument cropping up. The Quran says this therefore this is how Muslims behave. Since what the Quran says is objectionable therefore we must oppose Muslims and prevent them coming into the country to undermine "our way of life". Always the assumption is that you can read off how a Muslim is likely to behave by perusing the Quran – as if Muslims don't cherry pick the bits they like and conveniently forget those they don't just like Christians do with the bible. As Ive pointed out repeatedly to these Islamophobes if what they said was true how would you account for conflict between Muslims themselves. How could they come to be at each others throat if they were all singing from the same hymn sheet Now I quite agree that correlation does signify causation and I would be the last to suggest that applicants to the SPGB who profess to hold atheistic should therefore be excluded from membership . But exactly the same argument should apply in the case of religious applicants. Each applicant should be considered solely on the basis of her understanding of what socialism is about and her affirmation that this is an objective that she wants to see realised regardless of whether she holds religious beliefs or not, But this is not the case at the present time is it
alanjjohnstone wrote:You will say you have the better way than than the enn xclusivity of the SPGB. But you yourself if i interpret your past posts have a fairly narrow definition of socialists with religious ideas, ie you also cannot accommodate any who adhere to various church canon or whatever, there has to a "revolution" within many religions…some say the process is now going on in christianity but can we say that with the election of Modi and murders of beef-eaters in India, just to use another example that is not muslim fundamentalism, is this "revolutionary" transformation of religion really happening?Pragmatically speaking I have argued a case for a compromise postilion which allows in only those individuals who do not actually belong to an organised religion. So people holding personal religious views would be admitted. However ideally speaking I would prefer even this restriction to be dropped. If someone is a member of the Muslim faith and happens also to be a socialist, I think sooner or later the problem of trying to square her socialist convictions with some of the objectionable social policies of that faith will cause her to drift away from it. Either that or should there be sufficient numbers of Muslim socialists to make a difference this might actually transform the character of that religion in quite a dramatic way. I personally don't think thats likely in the case of Islam but it might be in the case of some other religions. Religion has a remarkable capacity to adapt to changing social circumstances and it will be interesting to see what form religion will take in a socialist society. That is assuming we will ever get such a society which we wont if we insist that everyone needs to be an atheist before we can have socialism
Once more you will be hard pushed to find it headline news. A bomb planted by Boko Haram explodes in a market square killing over 30. Buried in the inside pages of the newspapers. The bombing came less than a month after at least 55 died when suicide bombers hit two mosques in north east Nigeria. Regardless of our grief for our French fellow workers, we have to express the same degree of mourning for our Nigerian fellow worker and sadly we play into this hierarchy of the deserving and the forgettable victims of the terrorist war. I await Cameron's expression of sympathy to all those Nigerian people living in the UK…and it will be a very long waithttp://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/11/nigeria-market-bombing-151117213718605.html
Why is this sort of image being permitted. Pick and choose what is racial hatred and incitement. Shameful. http://www.thecanary.co/2015/11/17/daily-mail-sunk-time-low-despicable-response-paris-attacks-image/
ALB,Here is a related thread which i think may be one you are thinking of and as usual my failing memory misrepresented. https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/spintcom/conversations/topics/5031The proposed debate was with Hizb ut-Tahrir that didn't happen (as an aside, there are very many important exchanges and debates on Spintcom and Spopen and WSM FORUM that are inaccessible to most folk these days. I wonder if they can be made more accessible
Condemned from their own lips in regard to escalating air-strikesOn 1 October the US government and its allies issued a joint statement declaring that the Russian president’s decision to intervene in Syria would “only fuel more extremism and radicalisation”.Moscow’s bombing campaign will “lead to further radicalisation and increased terrorism”, claimed David Cameron on 4 October.Speaking at a Nato summit on 8 October the US defence secretary, Ashton Carter, warned of the “consequences for Russia itself, which is rightly fearful of attacks”On a BBC panel discussion the Telegraph’s Janet Daley referred to the crash as “a direct consequence of [Russia’s] involvement in Syria”, adding: “[Putin] has perhaps incited this terrorist incident on Russian civilians.”http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/17/russian-bombs-terror-vladimir-putin-syria-david-cameron
Young Master Smeet wrote:Yes, the real gangsters and terrorists are the Western powers. The murderers in Paris of 130 are just kids copying adults in comparison.Even the French police can kill more in Paris, with only their hands and cudgels: no need for guns.We'll know when ISIL is the real deal, when tens of thousands are dead in Paris (as in Baghdad), and hundreds of thousands of French refugees are streaming out of France, in search of safety (as in Syria, Iraq, Afghan, Libya…).
We live in the free world of democratic peace-seeking nation states protecting us from undemocratic states and terrorists.That is if you still live in the matrix: A computer hacker who learns from mysterious rebels about the true nature of his reality and his role in the war against its controllers. The horror that is ISIS can only be understood from outside the matrix that is capitalist propaganda and political science
alanjjohnstone wrote:Why is this sort of image being permitted. Pick and choose what is racial hatred and incitement. Shameful. http://www.thecanary.co/2015/11/17/daily-mail-sunk-time-low-despicable-response-paris-attacks-image/It is dispicable and the editor could be prosecuted for inciting racial hatred
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