This is how you create terrorists.
What do you think the children and friends feelings towards the US will be from now on?
People get radicalized for much less than that.
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What about the feelings of the children and friends after 9.11, Charlie Hebdo, Bataclan, Nice, Stockholm, Trèbes, Paris, Liège and Strasbourg? I could go on. Of the 24 jihadist attacks in the EU in 2018, 10 occurred in France, four in the United Kingdom, four in the Netherlands, two in Germany and one each in Belgium, Italy, Spain and Sweden. In 2017, a total of 62 people were killed in ten completed jihadist attacks in the European Union, according to Europol figures. The number of attempted jihadist attacks reached 33 in 2017.
If a single drone strike is how you create terrorists, what is being created in Europe?
The drone killings are anonymous, out of the sky, with no idea who the guilty party is besides a nebulous "USA" or "the West"; a vacuum of information besides a robotic, faceless apology in a press release (that is itself just more insult, more humiliation), and the knowledge that a foreign country can reach out and murder people living next door to you without consequence. The humiliation and rage and sense of powerlessness and living every day knowing that they'll do it again and nobody will do anything about it simply festers. These are key ingredients in growing terrorists. This is how you make terrorists. Humilation and anger and a sense of powerlessness and that the perpetrator will face no justice.
When some idiot boy shoots up an office in Paris there's a guilty party, a reckoning with a body (or an arrest), a name, an investigation and professional state employees actively going after someone, actively pursuing justice (very different to the state doing no more than shrugging and saying "yeah, that's the USA for you, they murder you and your neighbours, nothing we can do about it"). There is a qualitative difference; the key ingredients above aren't present. Even if the terrorist gets away, it's recognised that it was an individual(s) and that they are being pursued; someone is seeking justice on your behalf.
If a single drone strike is how you create terrorists, what is being created in Europe?
On the face of it, not terrorists.
2) False equivalent, if you think the USA should be held to the same standards that we hold the terrorists to then effectively the USA have become terrorists as well.
3) The EU has taken its attacks so far quite well, no other countries were invaded, no mass deportations or murders of muslims or immigrants have happened. Unfortunately this bs has shifted the political climate.
Please try to argue your case better.
That's a tough sell when (large) parts of communities are complicit, hiding, funding, supporting the individuals.
It's my impression that the primary difference is that we expect better from advanced nations and their citizens, not that there's a large difference in behavior. Denmark officially murdering people because of their sexual identity would be a shock. Saudi Arabia doing the same isn't, because we don't see SA anywhere near the level of (cultural, social, civilizational) development of Denmark. A child throwing a temper tantrum is normal, an adult doing the same raises suspicion of delayed development.
What’s worse though is that it’s given us a general apathy toward the bureaucratic abuse of immigrants that happens everywhere. I live in Denmark, we have a place called Sjælsmark, which is an internment camp for immigrants who weren’t granted asylum but refused to leave. I understand why some people would go “well they could just leave”, but there are children in that camp who’ve been there for years. That would have caused a public outcry throughout danish society 25 years ago. I know because that’s exactly what happened during the Balkan wars where society as a whole cake together and did what the government failed to do, and actually integrated the “unwanted” as the decent thing to do.
After 18 years of anti-Islamic sentiment, however, we instead talked about putting the “unwanted” on a prison island to isolate them even further.
That’s what 9/11, Charlie Hebdo, Batavian and so on has done to Europe.
How many families were put out by 9/11? About 3000. And you call that an excuse to invade Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Pakistan etc etc etc. So 3000 American lives, taken by Saudi Arabian citizens, cost the lives of millions across the world so that the American people can feel good about their hegemony?
Al-Qaeda won that war before the US even left their own soil. They had one aim, bring about the end of the USA, and they did it by getting your own government to strip away civil liberties overnight, and you didn't even care.
You actually got my point, that these wars and terror attacks have a large effect on feelings and behaviours in Europe as well.
Wars aren’t as simple as good guys vs bad guys fighting between their own respective countries.
that's why you will see some perverts who will openly reminisce about the days after 9/11 and how we were all united, etc.
at some point, cooler heads should intervene, but fear is just too easy to engineer, apparently.
I'm unconvinced; I believe it's not a tough sell. This is based on my observations of to whom people ascribe these crimes. They blame individuals first. Even if they should ascribe more blame to the organisations behind those individuals, those individuals are recognised (rightly or wrongly) as the primary culprits.
When I see news reports of such things, it's individual people that are presented as the culprits. News articles and Wiki articles name the individuals involved. While they do have organisations and groups behind them, if you ask people "who did this" you don't get a nebulous set of organisations; you get a name.
you put parentheses around the "large" but I'm still gonna pick on this. For my part, I have yet to hear of a major jihadist attack in the west in which the perpetrators and their supporters were not completely surrounded by police and intelligence personel. In Germany we're watching a parliamentary commission pick apart what happened in the "lone wolf" case where someone drove a truck into a christmas market in Berlin. "You can't do anything about these things!" people exclaim. They're lone wolves after all. BS. That guy, and his supporters, were in constant contact with embedded sources around their milieu. I'm not a big friend of the police state as it is, and especially of intelligence services. And this story and others like it make it really hard to still believe in incompetence and bad coordination as the sources for all the fuck-ups that lead to him succeeding in the first place, and then the crucial witnesses being conveniently deported days after.
But my real point (sorry for digressing here for a bit) is that even in this in-depth investigation, the number of active supporters was tiny. And they were not even really organized. It was more like "I have a friend here ho will help me out, and one here, and one here." Your statement (even with parentheses) does not reflect how small these "parts" are.
Usually it's measured in the ratio of civilian casualties to combatants, and as far as I remember, US is keeping this ratio exceptionally low in comparison to other conflicts.
That's the key point here: your criticism applies to any war at all. War is hell, everybody knows that. To be objective in your judgement about US though, you have to quantatively compare different conflicts to each other.
Ratio of 15-20% civilian deaths is not "exceptionally low" by any means.
"Trump Revokes Obama-Era Rule on Disclosing Civilian Casualties From U.S. Airstrikes Outside War Zones"
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/06/us/politics/trump-civilia...
It starts with grocer's apostrophes, but before long everyone's splitting infinitives.
It's tempting to suggest, "or if we had done a better job with our meddling", but... no, it just doesn't work, empirically so, and we should stop doing it.
Unfortunately, pushing diplomatic solutions hard would be political suicide in the US; the "us vs. them" mentality is strong here, and I don't think most Americans would be ok with what they'd see as giving in or giving up. And even if the politics at home could work, it's unclear if all that many on the other side are interested in a diplomatic solution, given how radicalized some of them have become due to our recklessness and hubris.
That depends on who those individuals are though. The media reports and reactions do change very much if you exchange some words, like replacing "islamist radical" with "white supremacist" or "christian fundamentalist" and "mosque" with "website".
You will certainly get individual names for each attack, the difference is whether having those names concludes the investigation or not. There are exceptions to this, of course, it's just my general expression.
> Starting in the 1980s, it was often claimed that 90 percent of the victims of modern wars were civilians.
> The Vietnamese government has estimated the number of Vietnamese civilians killed in the Vietnam War at two million, and the number of NVA and Viet Cong killed at 1.1 million—estimates which approximate those of a number of other sources.[19] This would give a civilian-combatant fatality ratio of approximately 2:1, or 67%.
> During the First Chechen War, 4,000 separatist fighters and 40,000 civilians are estimated to have died, giving a civilian-combatant ratio of 10:1.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualty_ratio#Cheche...
After all the hell and atrocities done by US in Vietnam, I absolutely do not understand how there was no strong resent towards US anymore after the war to the point of actively seeking and eliminating US targets like terrorist/spies do.
It was a humbling realization for me, and I have great respect for Vietnamese people not only for this.
The US allied with the Northern Alliance after invading Afghanistan, and they had no say in whether we invaded or not.
The US asked the Taliban to extradite Osama Bin Laden, they refused, so the US invaded Afghanistan to bring him to justice and dismantle the Taliban.
The US killed Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban is just as powerful today as they were then. The conflict has also killed over 100,000 civilians, and almost the same number of US citizens have been killed in battle as on 9/11
Oh and let's not talk about how the officially stated purpose of the Taliban was to kick US armed forces out of Somalia and Saudi Arabia... We chose to get involved in Saudi Arabia's war with Pakistan in the first place! If it's a "war" then US military leadership's decisions are directly responsible for 9/11. The US military leadership has been actively endangering national security with their reckless support for Saudi Arabia's wars for decades, and continue to do so to this day.
US presidents and businessmen sold out their fellow citizens and soldiers to arm an absolute monarchy so Aramco could make money.