Monday 23 November 2015

Quote of the day: Why are there so few Muslim terrorists?

_quotation_marks1 (1)I think this actually is a great question. Given what a totally vile doctrine Islam is, and given how many people say that they follow it, why indeed do so few Muslims, percentage wise, actually do the kinds of murderous things demanded of them in Islam’s holy scriptures?
The more vile you consider the things that Islam demands of its devotees, and they seem to me to be very vile indeed, the better the question is.

~ Brian Micklethwait, Samizdata post asking ‘Why are there so few Muslim terrorists?

22 comments:

Anonymous said...

Because it only takes a few to lead the masses and the masses will do the subtle, less repugnant, work the few require. Humanity has always been a follower of the few which is why we admire the good few and write books about them because there are, relatively, so few of them.

3:16

Julian said...

I had a conversation with someone yesterday who made an interesting observation: Those who commit these terrorist atrocities are not radical Muslims. They are simply doing what the Koran requires of them. This does not make them radical. Rather, the radical Muslims are the many 'peaceful' Muslims who choose to reject some of the teachings of their religion.

Peter Cresswell said...

Which is why I recommend reading again the process whereby the IRA and protestant paramilitaries finally shut themselves down--it was when they finally lost the tacit support of all those who quietly "kept a door open for the lads" when they needed it, without whom etc.

Terry said...

No recognized Caliph in Islam generally means no violent attacks on the West by Muslims. The 1.6 billion strong Ummah is a body without a head at present. ISIS is claiming itself to be that head but the body remains mostly dormant, thankfully. If the West were ever to officially go to war with Islam then the question would become moot. In the meantime the puppeteers of the Ummah continue to take the Fabian approach to world domination (Islam is just a means to that end), and the West, particularly Europe, is thus far acquiescing to the post WWII strategy. Not many people know that Hitler is on record in his final years lamenting that he had wished Germans to be Muslim and not Christian (see http://wikiislam.net/wiki/Quotations_on_Islam_from_Notable_Non-Muslims#Adolf_Hitler).

Anonymous said...

The IRA had a problem in that they were never big numbers and they were clearly out of sorts with Christianity. I remember having to leave a market in London because of an IRA bomb threat but never took them very seriously as the risk was minor unlike the crap being inflicted nowadays by Muslims. Islam has at least 800 million that like Sharia law etc... Radical comes in various degrees but there is little in Islam that is noble because the noble, pinched from Christianity to give it appeal locally at the time, gets put to one side after the later visions. When push comes to shove we will see how many "nice" Muslims there really are.

Simon said...

Why were there so few Christian crusaders? percentage wise.

In 2015 is it even appropriate to refer to the "Christian" crusaders? Most christians at the time (percentage wise) were peace loving moderates who never travelled more than 5 miles from their farms and struggled to grow enough food for their masters and family.

"Those who commit these terrorist atrocities are not radical Muslims" Quite true. It is apparently quiet hard for sane moslems to argue with the nut jobs as the crack pots follow the literal meaning of the koran.

As for the Western concepts like separation of the state and religion forget it. Western law is man made law and cant compete against God's law.

Richard Wiig said...

Islamic law doesn't require all Muslims to become violent jihadists.

Richard Wiig said...

The IRA also wasn't backed up by Allah and Muhammad and sanctioned by Islamic law.

Peter Cresswell said...

Really? The IRA wasn't backed up by Allah and Muhammad? You astonish me.

Richard Wiig: Minister of the Bleeding Obvious,

Richard Wiig said...

It is obviously not that bleeding obvious to you, Peter, because you implied there is some kind of parallel between divinely sanctioned viollence and political violence. The divinely being eternally sanctioned.

Peter Cresswell said...

Oh sorry Richard. I hadn't realised reading 'Jihad Watch' non-stop had made you so concrete-bound you could no longer see a principle at work in one place and apply it in another. (And just by the way, if you think Irish violence was only political, you need to take those blinkers off too.)

Anyway, if I need to spell it out, you might notice who it was in the end that put an end to the Irish violence. It was the peaceful majority in Ireland however (that’s peaceful majority without the scare quotes) who finally ended the murders, the bombings and the assassinations perpetrated by the IRA—and who demonstrated how powerful a response it can be to rise up and say of such violence “not in my name!” (Witness especially the effect that the sisters of Robert McCartney had in speaking out against Irish violence -- in withdrawing their tacit support and saying "NO MORE!" theirs became the voices that brought an end to what up to then had seemed unending.

Dinther said...

I think it is rational to take a man on his word and the words of the club he devotes his allegiance to.

Anonymous said...

I would like to think you are correct but suspect that the Koran, which is the word of Allan and therefore cannot be doubted, will dictate outcomes. To give away the idea of building an empire on the earth at gun point will require that Islam be given away to a point where it just becomes a club. I don't think that's going to happen any time soon and the "moderates'', who are not really believers, won't matter.

3:16

Peter Cresswell said...

Yes, Allan is great, isn't he. (Sorry, couldn't resist.)

Peter Cresswell said...

@3:16: But seriously, clearly part of that change was also the (related) drying up of funds.
Stopping Iran and Saudi Arabia (the main Shia and Sunni terror funders, respectively) obviously requires a far more activist approach than was necessary with the likes of NORAID.

Peter Cresswell said...

@Terry: No head means no Ummah -- or, strictly, several Ummah with (violent) competition between them to assert their superiority, violent action being one the means whereby this competition plays out.

NB: I would be very careful about relying upon the book 'Hitler's Table Talk,' which your Wikipedia source relies on. His actual table talk was said to be deadly dull, so if anything sounds actually interesting it's probably a clue it's been either mistranslated or made up. That's possibly why your quotes sound so much like they've been cobbled together from Friedrich Nietzsche. Because they probably have been.

Anonymous said...

Yes, I typed Allan as a bit of fun and immediately regretted the childishness of it.

Cutting off the money would have worked a generation ago but I suspect the chickens are comfortably roosted in the western coops now and the weeds are sown and so on. Democracy and breeding will do what is required from here on unless the west decides it has a culture worth fighting for. Imagine the end of French Champagne. Socialism going bankrupt would also help but the darned many headed Marxist monster seems far more durable than I ever expected it to be.

I think the liberal west is in serious trouble and wonder what Christmas will look like in 10 years now that Devoy has opened her gob to start the ball rolling. You like architecture so start designing mosques - it will be a growth industry for some time.

3:16

Terry said...

@ Peter: no head means no *united* Ummah, it does not mean no Ummah. A caliph is by definition who unites the Ummah, that is, gives the Ummah its head. My metaphor stands.

Quotes from HTT are hardly "made up". Mistranslated perhaps.

Richard Wiig said...

I've read Robert Spencer and others in order educate myself about the nature of the enemy we face. I've learned more from them about Islam and the enemy than I have from you. Rather than being concrete bound, I was pointing out that your principle - which I did get- cannot be applied to the Ummah. You are comparing two very different beasts. Muslims in name only, who get sick of the violence and finally want to reject it, merely put themselves into the camp of apostasy and mark themselves for death. Muslims haven't purged jihad from their religion in 1400 years, so why would it suddenly happen now? It isn't going to happen, and Islam is taking over Europe. Aided and abetted by libertarians who are, perhaps not concrete bound but, most certainly dogmatic.

Richard Wiig said...

They are radical in the sense they are true to Islamic teachings. But yes, what they are devoted to is not radical Islam. It is just Islam.

MarkT said...

@ Richard - If your position is that Islam is Islam, and no amount of censure from moderates is going to change that, why does the same thing not apply to Christianity, which if you take certain passages from the Old Testament literally are no less barbaric or brutal than the Koran?

Richard Wiig said...

The Bible does have violent passages, but they are not open-ended calls to perpetually fight non-Christians until the world is all for God and dominated by Christian law. They are applicable to their time. If there was an open-ended call within Christianity, we would have the same problems with it today that we do with Islam.