White Supremecists Slay 49 in NZ Mosques

[Dill]

(03-20-2019, 11:38 AM)Matt_Crimson Wrote: Okay, so a couple things I need to address here.

1) "Islamic terrorism is dropping world wide".

Would you say that you find that surprising? Because I honestly don't. 

ISIS (and its affiliates) have been the premier terror group over the last 4-5 years and has been committing a vast amount of terror throughout the world that caused a spike in global terror as a whole. Who has the US and other countries been mainly targeting and obliterating the last 3 years? ISIS.

So, I don't find it all that surprising that Islamic terrorism around the world has been dropping considering the world has been destroying the biggest perpetrators of it. The fact that global Islamic terror is declining doesn't mean that Islamic extremism is becoming less of an issue because Islamic extremism is dying. The decline in Islamic extremism is actually happening because we have been actively destroying it at a dramatically faster pace than any other extremist ideology out there, including white supremacy. Which leads me to the next point.

Quick note on this one.  I don't think the US or "the World" has been actively destroying an "ideology" called "Islamic terrorism" because it has denied one group, ISIS, its territorial base Syria.  

"Deaths from Islamic terror around the world" has always been to me a suspect measure, since so much of what is counted occurs in war zones.  If, during the battle for Raqa, an ISIS fighter drove a truck full of explosives into a Kurdish position and detonated, that would apparently qualify as a terrorist act, whereas an artillery shell would not, though intent and effect would be the same.

I also have questions about double standards again.  I don't think that mass incarceration and quasi-genocidal mass killing campaigns AGAINST Muslims (in, say, China or Myanmar) should be counted as "terrorist attacks" but such apparently are if perpetrated by ISIS or Al Qaeda.
For example, the June 14 Camp Speicher Attack, in which some 1700 Shia cadets were killed, counts as "Islamic Terrorism," https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20150709-iraqi-court-sentences-24-to-death-over-speicher-massacre/, and the Akashat ambush in 2013 https://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2013/03/20133415512939806.html, as well as the 2017 "Battle of Marawi" in the Philipines, in which thousands of armed soldiers and insurgents are fighting a pitched battle. https://web.archive.org/web/20170607193326/http://news.abs-cbn.com/news/06/02/17/marawi-city-siege-death-toll-reaches-175.

So a massive drop in the Caliphate's power to kill certainly produces a massive drop in what is counted as "Islamic terror."  But I doubt this number has much affect on Europe or the US or Afghanistan or Iraq.

I add that it is wrong to see armed groups as the simple source of terrorism, such that it will disappear if they disappear, rather the source is to be found in the conditions of political insecurity and privation under which many people live in the ME and Africa. If the U.S. military recreates these conditions in stamping out ISIS, they are only sowing the seeds of its return.