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Motivating more terrorists
by JR Mooneyham
| Apr. 15, 2008 |
There are three times as many Americans cheering for a terrorist like bin Laden, for every single Iranian doing so. But maybe if we bomb Iran, we can boost bin Laden's popularity over there to match what it is in America.
Muslim true/false:
What you think you know about them is likely wrong -- and that's dangerous| |
Excerpt: What about Muslim sympathy for terrorism? Many charge that Islam encourages violence more than other faiths, but studies show that Muslims around the world are at least as likely as Americans to condemn attacks on civilians. Polls show that 6% of the American public thinks attacks in which civilians are targets are "completely justified." In Saudi Arabia, this figure is 4%. In Lebanon and Iran, it's 2%. |
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I don't buy that line from the article, "Polls show that 6% of the American public thinks attacks in which civilians are targets are 'completely justified'." I'd be curious to see the source for that number, and especially to see how the question was phrased.
If the US military is doing the targeting, the real answer is almost undoubtedly a lot higher, at least as high as Bush's approval ratings (presently in the upper 20s). I've never seen any sign that your average American gives a fart in the wind about Iraqi or Afghan or Vietnamese or Panamanian, etc., civilians killed in US military attacks.
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Somewhere on my hard disk is more references to such studies -- maybe the same one, maybe others, I don't know. Unfortunately it's incredibly tough to locate such things with my standard Windows XP file search. Because it sucks! It won't even reliably search inside saved bookmark files! And when the results usually consist of 3000 hits you must then manually check through (or which 99% are irrelevant! GRRR!), and requires an hour of downtime just to BEGIN, you tend not to do such searches very often...
Sometimes when something's in a recent news item like this, you can look for other news items reporting on the same topic and get different details from each one. Maybe even the exact detail you're after. Or at least get pointed to where you CAN find the info (survey methods are usually provided somewhere for scientifically conducted polls).
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I don't need to see the data, JR. I'm just pondering how easily Americans have been manipulated, and had their humanity smothered by media and government that have no humanity at all. I don’t think there's any quantifiable fraction of Americans "cheering for a terrorist like bin Laden", but we're apparently forbidden to even ponder the why of why he and his followers hate America.
Bush sends a missile that blows up a wedding party or obliterates a neighborhood, and it's briefly mentioned in the American media but almost instantly forgotten. If there's any comment at all from any American official, it's essentially "accidents will happen", perhaps accompanied by the lie that there will be an investigation.
In the American media and in many Americans' minds, these American missiles, killing ordinary people who've done nothing against us, are somehow held as morally superior to the victims fighting back. No matter how many hundreds of thousands or millions of civilians are killed in the endless American occupation, every US-instigated atrocity is held as the acts of good guys, while the people of an occupied nation, people who use whatever weapons they can find or improvise to fight back against the army that's held their nation for years, are dismissed as savages we can't begin to understand.
Nobody sane is cheering for the terrorists, but I understand the urge to fight back, and so do you. It takes only half an ounce of honest empathy (far more than you'll find in American mainstream media) to understand that you and I would respond the same way the Iraqis are responding, if our nation was toppled and occupied for years on end...
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