Al Qaeda Urges Lone Wolf Terrorists to Target White Americans, Cites a Specific Reason
In a recent memo to their followers, Al Qaeda said to only attack whites and not minorities in the US.
Then the left can get 100% behind them.
It is rumored that the shooter in Orlando told a few blacks that he had nothing against them. his mistake, though, was targeting gays.
Ironically, Al Qeada's alleged obsession with race mirrors the American Rightwing, which also refuses to judge people as individuals, but instead chooses intellectually lazy generalizations like "Mexicans" or "Muslims" or "Gays".
Tragically, both Al Qeada and the American Right benefit from the politics of demonization where while cultures, races or religions are blamed for the actions of a minority of radicals. By turning this into a "war for civilization", the American Right has a context for oil intervention and defense budgets, and Al Qaeda gets an "evil enemy" that can be used to scare moderate Muslims into moving the Middle East toward the Right, so they can keep their world from modernizing and evolving out of their barbaric, anachronistic religion/traditions.
Both Trump and Al Qaeda use fear to grow their own political power.
There is something you need to realize, world wide Islamic terrorism is a problem.
Islamic terrorists are like pit bulls. Not every dog attack is a pit bull, but if you hear of one, 9 times out of 10 it is a pit bull attack.
Deal with it.
I almost agree with this, but I think both Christianity and Islam are based on barbaric, pre-modern texts. The sanctified violence and sexism in the Old Testament is laughable when considered as a sacred moral document.
Just as Reagan made appeals to religion/conservatism/tradition to fool people into actualizing a political movement that was essentially economic (lower taxes and regulations), the heads of Al Qeada are using religion to convince stupid people to become literal weapons in a war to remove Western outsiders from their politics and natural resources.
Here is why it's hard to have this conversation with someone who has never studied the region's history but gets news from partisan, political sources. Because you don't know anything about how the USA and Russia turned the region into a Cold War chessboard, with each superpower funding terrorist proxies in order to cause trouble for the other. This is why Reagan funded and trained early Al Qaeda (called the Mujahideen) in Afghanistan. He was trying to trap and thereby bankrupt the Russians there, so he got in bed with terrorists because they served a wider agenda.
This was the same reason we replaced the popular Mosedeq (in Iran) with the brutal Shaw - because we wanted a leader who would play ball with British and U.S. Energy needs.
Problem is, when you make terrorist stronger - by directly funding them or removing popular leaders, which, in Iran, gave power to homegrown, nativist radicals - it becomes harder to ignore your role in the outcome.
This is not to remove blame from evil doers, but it is to say that it's hard to take seriously people who've never studied our long, complicated history in the region.
I'm all for killing the bad guys, but Bush taught us that the act of simply dropping bombs until freedom sprouts is going to create exactly the kind of instability and resentment that enables ISIS to rise.