Paris Shootings and Explosions Kill Over 100, Police Say

I'm sure that if you did a survey of disenfranchised white youth in the US, you'd find a lot of people volunteering to enlist, and you could probably get some sympathy for the need to "go kill ISIS" or some other media-oriented headline. France has many issues, I doubt any of them are truly deeply connected to Islam. But it is of course easier to point at religion as the source of civil unrest, rather than at a failing economy, systematic discrimination and a growing divide between rich and poor.

ISIS is a jihadist terrorist organization, and that's recognized by most governments, many Islamic ones even. It's dishonest to compare openly fighting ISIS with blowing up and shooting civilians as a primary mean.

What happened today was not "civil unrest".

> It's dishonest to compare openly fighting ISIS with blowing up and shooting civilians as a primary mean.

That's all well and good to say when you know enlisting in the US military in conventional warfare against ISIS has a good chance of succeeding.

But what if the US was the small poor state and ISIS was the world's largest economy whose military targets were too well-defended to attack?

I'm sure you'd find lots of recruits in Texas for "guerilla special units behind enemy lines". Especially if cruise missiles and drone strikes were hitting US soil every other day.

I find this relativism disconcerting. Please explain how targeting innocent civilians for their ethnicity or beliefs is equal to military vs. military operations. Most of the world is shades of grey but one has to recognize when an ideology is clearly a danger to human society and needs to be fought against. Whether and how violent the means need to be is up for discussion, I just can't understand why people would downplay what ISIS, Boko Haram, Taliban and similar groups are doing. Just because the term "Freedom Fighters" has long been intemixed with Terrorism doesn't mean that it applies here. IMO most of these groups don't want to 'liberate' people, instead they want to either bind them to their religious ideology, kill or enslave them.

> Please explain how targeting innocent civilians for their ethnicity or beliefs is equal to military vs. military operations.

It's not. I'm sure the terrorists would actually prefer to be shooting soldiers and high-ranking politicians instead of innocent civilians. But since those targets are too well protected, in their minds the only thing they can do to retaliate against their enemies is to commit terrorist attacks against civilians in their enemies' homeland.

If the roles were reversed and ISIS were the world superpower launching cruise missiles against Houston (some) Americans would surely sign up to do similar things to get back at them. The only reason we don't is because we're rich and powerful and don't have to stoop to that level, not because we're incapable of it or somehow more morally enlightened.

Edit: see the firebombings and nuclear attacks on Japan in WWII for what the US is capable of when they don't have an overwhelming military superiority.

All warfaring nations have committed atrocities, I'm not denying that and I'd be the first to condemn these actions if they'd be discussed now. What I'm unconvinced of is whether Americans would put their own personal survival lower than the prospect of martyrdom, as long as they don't get indoctrinated by religious beliefs of this sort. It's a similar argument of whether the Nazis or the Khmer Rouge were just a product of their circumstances - no, I don't think so. Their ideology was actively warped to a point where it was detrimental to human survival, detrimental to what our biology tells us to do, and something everyone with a clear mind is IMO obligated to stand up against.

There's a difference between terrorism with clear political goals and terrorism that's targeted at our very way of life. One can be attributed to circumstances and can be dealt with in a more or less peaceful matters (e.g. 'give them what they want'), the other cannot.