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While you don't see South-American violence over cartoons, there is plenty of South-American violence over drugs, over poverty, over communist ideals, over territorial squabbles, over ethnic conflicts, over politics and many other issues. And fundamentally, the violence in the Middle-East is not...

Violent fundamentalism attracts many different kinds of people. Fighting for a cause is attractive for many people. And that's not limited to "that part of the world" -- just look at the Spanish Civil War, or the struggle for the creation of Israel, or the people who joined various communist...

Anyone above age 8 understands the difference between root causes and the last event in a causal chain, dude. I wasn't taking issue with your (incredibly condescending) explanation of what root causes are, but with the actual root causes you were describing. That is, your crackpot theories that...

Why is ignoring them not an option? Or rather, why can't we note that while terrorist attacks are a threat, instating abusive practices in an attempt to stop that threat is worse than having those terrorist threats realized? The world can't be solved, and violence is a fact of life. But we've...

I think you're overreacting by equating the stopping of a single demonstration to the changing of a society by authorities. In fact, I'd say that's exactly the kind of fear-driven reaction to relatively banal events that I was talking about earlier. Pegida isn't being silenced. They just had a...

Except that's not what radical Muslims in the area did before that. It is what Boko Haram does, but Boko Haram is from Nigeria, not from Niger. Charlie Hebdo is not Jewish. But, BBC explains: Similar demonstrations in the past have been conducted peacefully, and even the authorities could not...

I was not trying to say that fear itself is irrational. It is perfectly rational to be afraid in a war zone, or to be afraid when a gun is pointed at you, or to be afraid when falling out of an airplane without a parachute. But the fear of Islamic terrorism is irrational -- the fear of violence...

The terrorists aren't the ones changing society. That'd be the reactionary responses to terrorism. The ones fueled by fear. Which is exactly what we're decrying.

Why is TheWesDude trying to turn the Charlie Hebdo thread into a bizarro-world history lesson for someone clearly not interested in his crackpot theories?

I can fear for my life every time I step on my bike to go somewhere. That'd be a far more rational fear than the generalized fear of Islamic terrorist attacks, which has turned into a generalized fear of Muslims in many parts of Europe. Crni is correct: this fetishizing of Islamic violence is...

It's a response to the generalized fear of Muslims in general in Europe, the idea that Muslims pose an inherent threat to European society as a whole. They don't, really -- or at least not in a comparative sense.

While alec continues to spout blatantly Islamophobic nonsense, here's a sobering fact: just 2% of the terrorist attacks in Europe over the past five years were committed by Muslims. Keep banging that drum, though!

Or maybe punching at Islam in a country where it's already marginalized, where Muslims are routinely discriminated against, where anti-Islam sentiment is extremely common, effectively makes you a part of the discriminatory system, rather than one fighting against it. Perhaps there's a difference...

Whoooo /celebrates Yeah, it seems accusations of crude racism are overblown. On the other hand, the common "it's French tradition," "they offend everyone," and "they're far-left" defenses miss a few (a lot of) points too. I don't agree with everything in this article arguing that CH isn't...

Who's arguing that? TheWesDude posts two dumb videos, as per usual. The first isn't even worth addressing. The second is a speaker exploiting audience dissonance by asking, basically, "do you think the Quran should be followed" without specifying how the Quran should be interpreted. The latter...

You seem to be somewhat confused, alec. I do think those terrorists are Muslims. Their interpretation and actions are fringe beliefs within Islam, however. In the same way that Joseph Kony's army is fringe within Christianity, or the Buddhist Thai murdering Muslims are fringe within Buddhism. As...

Wrong. There's been opposition to that view since early Islam. Don't come in here with your Protocols of the Elders of Meccah views of Islam and expect people to take you seriously. What you do is not attacking specific doctrines or views within Islam. You don't present a nuanced view of...

I would call refusing to see the humanity of Muslims because of bidirectional ethnic tensions in the Balkans a pretty callous and vulgar view of humanity, yes. If you wanted to make the point that sometimes, violent conflicts split across religious lines too, then sure. That's what you seemed...

Well now we obviously see that the "real" problem with "Western" society is Muslims, and not folks like alec.

Attacks on mosques and Muslim businesses across France: not a peep from alec. One attack on a newspaper in Germany: alec jumps in to attack Muslims.