This Taliban attack in Pakistan is absolutely unbelievable. Methodically shooting children in the head, lighting children on fire, showing a complete indifference to human life. Just reading the news stories makes me physically ill.

Perhaps even sadder is the fact that there just isn't anything that can be done about it. Literally every option sucks. These people are beyond any kind of logic. We can go abroad and try to kill them, but that just breeds more of them when innocent people are inevitably slaughtered either by accident or by shield. We can do nothing and hope they leave us alone, but then they may grow immensely powerful and ultimately require huge resources and loss of life to control. Plus, people who shoot 140 kids in the head would undoubtedly love nothing more than to obtain and use nuclear and chemical weapons.

Obviously a huge part of this is the influence of radical Muslim faith. Call me racist, call me intolerant, whatever. These horrific acts are almost all religiously motivated. Yeah, every religion has crazy people. But one in particular seems to have cornered the market on religiously motivated terrorism. And I see no way to stop it.

*drops mic*

-Bill Maher

This attack in Pakistan made me shake my head as well, especially because they targeted children specifically, which I think most would agree is the sign of true fundamentalists. However it's also true that they feel justified in what they're doing: they are rational actors and while their methods are clearly indefensible, their motivations probably are. Whenever there's a terrorist event like this I'm always reminded of the thousands of innocent non-combatants, including children, killed by the US drone campaign. Nowhere is that more true than in Pakistan of course. America's foreign policy over the last decade has not been much less despicable than the actions of al-Qaeda or the Taliban. The only difference is that while they might go out of their way to murder children, the US government does it and writes the loss of innocent life off as collateral damage.

So it only took 2 posts to get to USA #1 = Talibanzzzzzzzzzzz pretty sweet efficiency up in this piece. Mods lock it up.

FALCON 2016!

I might start going with Barack Hussein Obama al-Hawai'i.

It's almost like people with very strong, clear opinions on complex political problems are idiots by default.

i think you're confusing "fundamentalist" with "extremist".

Grossly generalizes an entire race based on the actions of a few sociopaths

- Forfeiture.

Didn't white people do **** like this in Bosnia? RADICAL CHRISTIAN FAITH

dealing with a racist

Call you racist, call you whatever you say? Its more like do you understand how the world works, are you mentally aware of whats going in the world? Your views are part of a minority. There are 1.7 billion Muslims in the world, GCC countries maintain an important strategic relationship with the USA. So many Muslims, including princes from Saudi Arabia, are rising up to fight ISIL, and here you are with this thread.



Huh if Obama was Jewish would you say Joooooo Obama? al-Hawai'i though huh dawg?



FALCON 2016!!!!!

Perhaps, but I think you'll agree that one has to be a fundamentalist in order to be an extremist. For me you have to adhere to a fundamentalist ideology to feel justified in resorting to extremist tactics.

"A Pakistan Taliban spokesman told the BBC they had deliberately killed older pupils and not targeted "small children"."

oh well no problem then.....

A tactical nuclear strike against a few of their stongholds might be effective.

Too bad that someone did something terrible somewhere else and talking about religious zealots who come in every color is racist, so we can't talk about this today.

This one is really sticking with me. Nightmares, awful images, etc. I genuinely don't understand how a human being could get to that place.

Denying that the Muslim faith seems to currently be breeding way more hyper-violent, faith-driven atrocities than any other religion is not controversial. It's OK to say it. We get it, most are peaceful. But on the whole this is a religion that is far more tolerant of the absolute worst in human behavior than anyone else.

Ehh, I don't know who is 'tolerant' of this. Even the Afghan Taliban, who are allied with the Pakistani Taliban and who were like probably committing atrocities as they released this statement, were aghast and condemned the attack:

http://www.businessinsider.com/afgha...ssacre-2014-12

I can find precisely zero people who tolerate what happened, so I don't get how we can say Muslims tolerated this really horrible thing, other than by saying it was a Muslim who did it.

I was referring to this:

What country was this poll conducted in?

The US. But in THAT case, where we say OH BUT WHAT REALLY MATTERS IS WHAT COUNTRY YOU'RE IN, also relevant here:

http://web.archive.org/web/200710050..._Jan07_rpt.pdf



I think the problem with these "no but really Muslims are super violent" is that they probably are but you'll find they are often equal to or eclipsed by most other categories of humans in their love of telling pollsters how much they are OK with killing civilians.

So anyway I think this is something afield from the OP, I think the important point I wanted to make here is these dudes were so vicious and terrible even the vicious and terrible people the perpetrators ally themselves with condemned them. This probably isn't the right place to say how Muslims are just oh-so-tolerant of violence and are A-OK with this kind of violence when there has been nothing but universal condemnation of this attack. It just proves the reflexive bigotry on display, that Muslims can literally do nothing to stop dumb white Americans from saying how much they love violence. They can condemn attacks, they can tell pollsters they don't feel attacks on civilians are justified on civilians at a lower rate than everyone else, and yet here we are. Like the notion this is especially heinous (it is) and that Muslims cornered the market on barbaric school shootings of innocent children, the ****? Am I even? No I am not even. I won't bother to remind you that whites, mostly Americans but not universally so, probably nominally Christian, are like the school rampage shooting kings of the world, Pakistani Taliban militants aren't even in contention for the medal yet. Like if Muslims are collectively guilty for tolerating school massacres because of this, white Americans are so seeped in collective guilt I'm pretty sure Hannah Arendt is writing a novel about it right now.

This thread I suppose is just for piling on the attackers here, who are uniquely evil, grotesque and terrible people no doubt.

As an American Christian, I'm not sure about how I feel about suicide bombings.

Some Muslim or Christian Kurdish women in Iraq was reported to blow herself up, killing ten ISIL soldiers in doing so, rather then surrender to ISIL.

I think plenty of folks might justify the Kurdish womans action, including myself.

+1

I think it's the same thing as siding with one group/party in any war. If it is the aggressor taking the action, then it is wrong, and otherwise it may be justifiable.