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Re: Soldier butchered in street in Woolwich
Originally Posted by Kirkland Laing
I'm not making an excuse for anything or trying to justify anything.
Let's say me and you are going to a football match. We're seated outside a pub before the game enjoying a glass of chilled chablis and watching the world go by. On the other side of the street X, a big bugger in stylish blue polyester, is walking down the street. Y, a smaller man clad in red ployester, is walking the other way. As they come up to each other X punches Y right in the dish. Y falls to the ground, gets up, takes a knife out of his pocket and stabs Y with it, killing him instantly.
Now lter we're talking about the incident. I say to you that if X hadn't punched Y in the face in the first place then he'd never have been stabbed and killed. I might also comment on the nature of violent acts begetting further violence. I see this as reasonable speculation about the incident and violent acts in general. Neither of these two arguments negates the fact that the stabbing was a reprehensible act of murder, excuses it or justifies it in any way.
" And it's that kind of thing that pisses Muslims off and causes them to bomb your skyscrapers, sporting events etc."
Those people had an agenda. That agenda was not to draw attention to an injustice suffered by innocent civilians at the hands of indiscriminate carpet bombing by allied forces. Their agenda was the propagation of extremist ideology and the glorification of violence. So clever is this agenda that you and thousands of well meaning people like yourself have now been used to propagate it. To call them Muslim, and this is where both you and Lyle agree, is to further heap insult onto the civilian victims of extremism who would not raise their hand in violence.
Miles who like yourself, I would in many instances defer to as having superior knowledge on politics, economy and history comes to the same conclusion as you and it surprises me considering his distaste for religion. These same religious extremists are often responsible for agitation and the escalation of sectarian violence within Muslim countries. Their war is not just with Britain,America and the West but with moderates in their own countries who would condone the mutilation of women, the burning of books and the execution of ethnic groups they deem to not be pious or totalitarian enough in enforcing their own twisted brand of religion.
If we are really interested in justice then how hypocritical is it to enjoy the benefits of living in a flawed but basically decent democratic society and then turn our eyes away from those whose own liberties are trampled on by despotic leaders who seek to persecute and wipe out those who seek nothing more than the human rights we hold dear ? You can pretend that the Iraq war was all about Oil but that is a gross over simplification and misrepresentation of a conflict prompted by much more than that and at it's heart represented a universalism and willingness to stand alongside others who wished for nothing more than the opportunity to aspire to liberal ideals.
The Left has let down many oppressed people in these conflicts by deluding themselves into thinking that groups like the Taliban can be reasoned with or that the victims of such nutjobs should be allowed to remain subjugated in order to ease their own uncomfortable feelings about the harsh bloody realities of liberation. I say this as somebody who I consider to be way farther to the left than either yourself or Miles. Pacifism does not work and the kind of socialism that busies itself only with the interests of it's own members due to something as arbitrary as nationality is acting in a far more self interested way than the most hard hearted of Capitalists.
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