Terror attacks by Islamist groups

[Skids]

Another 163 dead & 173 wounded in the last week.... give or take the odd dozen or two.


2015.12.11 Cameroon Kolofata 11 dead 22 wounded
Islamists strap a 13-year-old girl with explosives and send her into a house, killing at least eleven inside.

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/12/k ... 30352.html


2015.12.11 Afghanistan Kabul 1 dead 7 wounded
A guard is killed when a Taliban suicide bomber detonates at the Spanish embassy.

http://edition.cnn.com/2015/12/11/asia/ ... index.html



2015.12.10 Iraq Mosul 1 dead
A female teacher is dragged before a caliphate firing squad and executed.

2015.12.10 Syria Tal Tamr 60 dead 80 wounded
Three suicide car bombers take out scores bystanders at a hospital and market square.


20http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/11/d ... lled-syria

2015.12.10 Nigeria Kamuya 14 dead 6 wounded
Religion of Peace activists bicycle into a village and massacre fourteen civilians, some by decapitation.

http://www.firstpost.com/world/boko-har ... 42738.html


2015.12.09 Iraq Baghdad 11 dead 20 wounded
A holy warrior with a suicide vest detonates at a Shiite mosque, sending eleven worshippers straight to Allah.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-midea ... 9PZb12H.97

2015.12.08 Afghanistan Kandahar 50 dead 35 wounded
Thirty-eight civilians are slaughtered with a dozen others when Taliban fundamentalists in suicide vests pour machine-gun fire into a crowded market.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-35043938

2015.12.08 Philippines Tulunan 6 dead
Three villagers are shot dead by Moro Islamists.

http://www.ndbcnews.com.ph/news/village ... nan-attack


2015.12.07 Libya Tripoli 2 dead
Sharia advocates behead two men for 'sorcery' at a public event.

http://heavy.com/news/2015/12/new-isis- ... d-youtube/


2015.12.06 Yemen Aden 7 dead 3 wounded
A suicide car bomber turns seven 'apostates' into rubble.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-yemen ... 5K20151206

[David]

As I've always said, progress happens everywhere. Just not necessarily at the same time, or at the same rate.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-35061808

[watt price tully]

As I've always said, progress happens everywhere. Just not necessarily at the same time, or at the same rate.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-35061808

That's getting' a bit desperate David!

[Mugwump]

^ there has always been a deep conflict in Saudi Arabia between reformers - often allied with the cautious Royal family - and the conservative religious establishment. That doesn't make "progress" inevitable, alas. As many countries show, from Afghanistan to Pakistan to most of Africa, progress is very reversible. However, this is good news in this particular instance.

[Skids]

[David]

Yes, progress. Don't you think there's at least a slight chance that allowing 50% of the population the vote may have an impact on some of those laws?

Saudi Arabia will change for the better. It's just a question of when and how. Sceptics may see this new step as superficial, but I'd say it's a pretty significant step forward for Saudi women.

Western civilisation has been around in some form or other for well over 2000 years, and yet there are people alive today who were around when women couldn't vote in the US and elsewhere. Did you know French women didn't get the vote until 1944? Swiss until 1971? Before you get on your high horse too much, look at our own history; you'll realise that many of the things we take for granted as core aspects of Western civilisation are relatively recent inventions.

[Skids]

Saudi Arabia will change for the better. It's just a question of when and how. Sceptics may see this new step as superficial, but I'd say it's a pretty significant step forward for Saudi women.

.

bahahahaha

Yeah, a 'significant step'..... she'll be dragged by her hair, thrown in the boot of a car, escorted to a polling booth and told who to vote for by her mahram..... IF she's lucky!

[Skids]

2015.12.12 Syria Homs 16 dead 54 wounded

Sixteen 'infidels' are pulled limb from limb by two ISIS suicide blasts near a hospital.

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/12/d ... 27732.html

[Mugwump]

Yes, progress. Don't you think there's at least a slight chance that allowing 50% of the population the vote may have an impact on some of those laws?

Saudi Arabia will change for the better. It's just a question of when and how. Sceptics may see this new step as superficial, but I'd say it's a pretty significant step forward for Saudi women.

Western civilisation has been around in some form or other for well over 2000 years, and yet there are people alive today who were around when women couldn't vote in the US and elsewhere. Did you know French women didn't get the vote until 1944? Swiss until 1971? Before you get on your high horse too much, look at our own history; you'll realise that many of the things we take for granted as core aspects of Western civilisation are relatively recent inventions.

I sometimes consider that too, but I always quickly conclude that it's a false analogy.

The emancipation of women had much to do with new technologies such as the birth control pill and labour-saving devices in the home, which freed women from childbearing and much domestic work, and then the experience of factory work by women in two world wars which changed the reality perforce.

These created new potentialities for women, and because liberal democracy is a self-correcting system, these potentialities emerged quite quickly into social and political reality. They also had their roots in the European liberalism of the 19th century.

In the Middle Eastern and African Islamic countries, all of the same technologies are possible now, but the political system to support evolution is not. Any religion that does not differentiate the claims of church and state will hinder positive change (Ireland was a lamentable Christian example, now thankfully freer than ever before because it was also a democracy within a Church that at least had a history - in modern times - of engagement with enlightenment values).

Islam seems the major force of reaction in much of the world in that regard, preventing the political and social evolution that technology should permit. Perhaps it will fall in the end, but noxious ideas can last a very long time, if they are deeply rooted in systems of cultural significance and embedded in power structures and regressive histories.

In the end, progress - by which I suppose we mean the ideas of Western liberalism - will probably happen, but it'll be patchy at best, and it is not certain. The penetration of bastions of Western liberalism and enlightenment thought by Islam seems to me the greatest present threat to progress.

[David]

Saudi Arabia will change for the better. It's just a question of when and how. Sceptics may see this new step as superficial, but I'd say it's a pretty significant step forward for Saudi women.

.

bahahahaha

Yeah, a 'significant step'..... she'll be dragged by her hair, thrown in the boot of a car, escorted to a polling booth and told who to vote for by her mahram..... IF she's lucky!

I don't get it. Are you being facetious, or do you actually believe that's what's going to happen?

[stui magpie]

Saudi Arabia will change for the better. It's just a question of when and how. Sceptics may see this new step as superficial, but I'd say it's a pretty significant step forward for Saudi women.

.

bahahahaha

Yeah, a 'significant step'..... she'll be dragged by her hair, thrown in the boot of a car, escorted to a polling booth and told who to vote for by her mahram..... IF she's lucky!

I don't get it. Are you being facetious, or do you actually believe that's what's going to happen?

I reckon that will happen to roughly the same number who get a free vote, The rest won't be able to vote because their husband won't take them, or will vote for who they're told without the histrionics.

The men who control the country and the religion have vested interests in keeping it the way it is at present and will pay lip service, at best, to progress.

[HAL]

That is a hypothetical question.

[David]

Yes, progress. Don't you think there's at least a slight chance that allowing 50% of the population the vote may have an impact on some of those laws?

Saudi Arabia will change for the better. It's just a question of when and how. Sceptics may see this new step as superficial, but I'd say it's a pretty significant step forward for Saudi women.

Western civilisation has been around in some form or other for well over 2000 years, and yet there are people alive today who were around when women couldn't vote in the US and elsewhere. Did you know French women didn't get the vote until 1944? Swiss until 1971? Before you get on your high horse too much, look at our own history; you'll realise that many of the things we take for granted as core aspects of Western civilisation are relatively recent inventions.

I sometimes consider that too, but I always quickly conclude that it's a false analogy.

The emancipation of women had much to do with new technologies such as the birth control pill and labour-saving devices in the home, which freed women from childbearing and much domestic work, and then the experience of factory work by women in two world wars which changed the reality perforce.

These created new potentialities for women, and because liberal democracy is a self-correcting system, these potentialities emerged quite quickly into social and political reality. They also had their roots in the European liberalism of the 19th century.

In the Middle Eastern and African Islamic countries, all of the same technologies are possible now, but the political system to support evolution is not. Any religion that does not differentiate the claims of church and state will hinder positive change (Ireland was a lamentable Christian example, now thankfully freer than ever before because it was also a democracy within a Church that at least had a history - in modern times - of engagement with enlightenment values).

Islam seems the major force of reaction in much of the world in that regard, preventing the political and social evolution that technology should permit. Perhaps it will fall in the end, but noxious ideas can last a very long time, if they are deeply rooted in systems of cultural significance and embedded in power structures and regressive histories.

In the end, progress - by which I suppose we mean the ideas of Western liberalism - will probably happen, but it'll be patchy at best, and it is not certain. The penetration of bastions of Western liberalism and enlightenment thought by Islam seems to me the greatest present threat to progress.

I don't really see anything fundamentally different between the Western World's emergence from theocracy and the Islamic world's future (keeping in mind that secularisation has long since occurred in several Muslim-majority countries). Islam and Christianity are vastly similar religions, so we don't even have to use our imagination all that much; we know how these patriarchal systems operate when they have full control of a populace, and we know what that means for women, heretics and so on. Of course, I grant you that technological development in the Middle East is at a significantly different stage to where it was when our societies were at an analogous stage. Things will happen differently to the way they did here. But as we saw with the Arab Spring, there is a huge popular appetite for secular liberal reform in the Middle East, and it's not going anywhere. The 1848 revolutions in Europe weren't a failure either; not everything happens at once.

[David]

bahahahaha

Yeah, a 'significant step'..... she'll be dragged by her hair, thrown in the boot of a car, escorted to a polling booth and told who to vote for by her mahram..... IF she's lucky!

I don't get it. Are you being facetious, or do you actually believe that's what's going to happen?

I reckon that will happen to roughly the same number who get a free vote, The rest won't be able to vote because their husband won't take them, or will vote for who they're told without the histrionics.

With respect, how much do you know about Saudi culture? I'm not an expert myself, just wondering what these assertions are based on.

[Mugwump]

^ I understood the Arab Spring quite differently. The uprisings were more about the removal of corrupt and unaccountable government, than a specific clamour for secular liberalism.

I also doubt your Whiggish view of history as some kind of inevitable progression. It took about 150 years for the French revolution's separation of Church and state to become the comprehensive practical setting of the West, and I am not certain that it would have happened without the (contemporaneous) US Constitution and Napoleon's shakedown of the European monarchies. Neither of those were inevitable, and I believe that history is more accidental, multidirectional and mutable than we like to think. If Churchill had not been there in May 1940 then European history would have been reversed (or "progressed") toward a dark age, under either Nazi or (less likely) Soviet domination.

I am not sure what Islamic country you see as being securely "secularised" - if anything I see only the opposite, as the forces of Islamic reaction tighten their grip even on Turkey. Indonesia might support your case, perhaps. It is just far enough away from the Islamic mainsprings to keep its different Islamic dialect, so far.

I am not enough of a religious scholar to say whether Christianity is "vastly similar" to Islam, but having read both texts, I see marked difference between the overall tenor of all the words attributed to the founder of and embodiment of Christianity - an obscure sect leader who was tortured to death without resisting - and the latter (Medina-based) writings of the warlord Mohammed.