Of course, you'll be able to provide examples of where this has happened?

That's odd, since no person remotely has done. So i question why you would make such a claim.


You shouldn't be, because it's being done in your name.


Horrific deaths do not have to be by beheading, though. If a bomb exploded in the place you were holding a wedding reception, killing many of your guests, some gruesomely, and maiming many others, would you feel better about it as long as none of them had been beheaded?

If you are curious as to why I think the answer is important, that would be because of exactly what this and other countries are prepared to do, and indeed able to do, riding on the back of a "terrorism" justification.

I'm for it. Pretty confusing stuff, I know I've confused myself a few times in the was it or wasn't it terrorism part of the debate

It is, I'm pretty tall!

There are many brutal killings happening in the middle east thanks to the west, not just by troops, you may have seen reports of a rebel leader in Syria eating an opposition soldier's heart. Well it's us funding these rebels! Now, this in no way excuses the acts in Woolwich but it's worth noting atrocities happen on both sides.

Ah, so funding rebels against a murderous regime is an evil thing is it? I suppose it was evil to have liaised and assisted resistance movements during WW2 too was it?

I can't believe that people with so little political knowledge even dare to enter debates like this one, let alone swagger into the thread as if they're some kind of authority of all things politics.

Communism is a political system/society in which workers own the means of production, and goods are distributed based on need. Communism doesn't take a specific position on foreign policy, terrorism and Islam.

Your black and white thinking doesn't help anybody. This isn't a dichotomous issue. You can - take a breath and brace yourself - believe that our foreign policy and their actions are wrong. Acknowledging that this is a complicated issue with many contributing factors, including foreign policy, doesn't make you a turrist or a turrist sympathiser. Our foreign policy does not legitimise terrorist attacks against us, whether civilians or soldiers, and nobody is suggesting it did.

It's pretty cheap to put forward this notion that any member here is defending Wednesdays act, the individuals involved, or terrorism in a wider sense.

Well then I suggest that you should make a big effort to spend a lot of time researching exactly what sort of things have indisputably been done in your name. Here's a good as any place to start - it may nominally be the Guardian that you so despise, but it is actually an analysis of the leaked official coalition logs of things that happened which have been analysed. including records of thousands of civilian deaths.
rlhttps://www.guardian.co.uk/world/datablog/interactive/2010/jul/25/afghanistan-war-logs-eventsrl

Hi there.

Just curious, but perhaps you can let us have the names of those on here who are "sticking up for the sub human scum and their ilk that commited this atrocity" – I believe I've quoted you correctly?

Brief links will suffice.

If you're funding rebels, some of them questionable at that, for self interest and profit, then that's questionable. A good act done for sinister reasons is nothing to applaud. Context matters. There's nothing inherently evil in funding rebels, neither is it inherently good. Each case would need taking on individual merit.

We've supported plenty of murderous regimes, too, and quelled rebel uprisings (with more legitimacy than that of Syria or Libya) aplenty.

So you appear to have decided this funding is questionable? Is that because you think the victims or the Syrian regime are less worthy than suppoters of said regime? Or because you instinctively prefer to assume your country acts out of bad intention?

He gave examples both ways .... which bit of "context matters" don't you understand?

I've decided it's questionable because I can point to example after example after example of our government proving they have no regard for the welfare of citizens in other nations, often to the extent of funding and supporting the brutal governments against innocent people.

Do I need to list every ugly regime that we've put our support behind. Do I need to list every brutal regime that's been ignored, citizens left to suffer, by our government? Yes, with that in mind, when I see the government supporting citizens against a government in some far off land I have to question their intentions, as would any thinking person.

Ceausescu, Suharto, Karimov, Rajapaksa, Omar al-Bashir, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, Pinochet, Mubarak and Gaddafi too at one point. There's a couple to start with. Or what about supporting the attacks/ethnic cleansing of the Kurds, support for the Saudi establishment, Bahrain establishment, the illegal removal of Mosaddegh in favour of Pahlavi the Pawn, etc. When the ANC were rising up against the Apartheid regime in South Africa, we condemned them as nought but terrorists. Tip of the iceberg stuff. It wasn't that long ago that Bashir al-Assad himself was buying chemical agents from us.

I don't expect your or anybody else to agree with all of those, but you'd at the very least have to concede a few of them.

The British government has proven time and time again that it cares bugger all for supporting oppressed peoples and taking down dictatorships. The government care and take action when it suits, just as they support these brutal regimes when it suits. Foreign policy is decided on economic grounds, not morality.

To be fair – or at least, in the interests of accuracy – the UK government is far from the only one.

And I do think that we equally have to be careful about running the risk of excusing – or being seen to excuse – certain crimes.

I maintain little fondness for much UK foreign policy (I campaigned against the Iraq war – whatever that means – and have maintained ever since that Blair and Dubya should be tried in the Hague) and less still for Islamic fundamentalism (or any other religious fundamentalisms, just to be quite clear)

I've noted for some years that it would just have been cheaper – certainly in human costs – if we'd just handed Al-Qaeda a recruitment budget.

But we should also be wary of too easily excusing atrocities, whether they're genuine 'terrorist' crimes or not.

We effectively have, in this country, a form of economic conscription: there is a real class issue here and we should absolutely be clear not to demonise our soldiers (use of word "our" entirely deliberate).

But we should also not allow an analysis of our own, ongoing imperialistic adventurism to disguise the fact that, in some places (we have not been involved in Somalia, for instance) Islamic fundamentalism exists as an inhumane, sexist, homophobic, barbaric ethos.

To clarify: that is not to say that all Muslims are fundamentalists ... etc etc. The point being that it's so damned difficult to have this conversation sensibly, as this thread illustrates.

Absolutely. It's in the nature of almost all governments I can think of to lie, and to take advantage of others where they can, even if it means waging wars or supporting tyrants. Powerful countries are more prone to it merely because they have the capacity to do it and do it well. I'm only harping on about our own track record because it's a British based forum and, naturally, I take an interest in the political goings on in my own backyard.

I'm with you. Bad foreign policy might exacerbate certain issues, it might push some people towards radicalism, but it's in no way a cause of radicalism or necessary for radicalism.

The point really was that you can't deduce much about the nature of Islam from data alone. Most groups have a capacity for abhorrent violence from fringe elements if the environment is right.