Of course, islamic clerics
> and assorted shysters want to cast it in different terms, as a
> "blowback" against Western imperialism, and the echo chamber on the
> western left parrots these claims. I think however that these claims
> are a bunch of crap, a PR campaign to cover up the extremely
> retrograde nature of this "movement" (if this term is even justified
> here.)
A Virginia/Gaza colleague who's currently in Pakistan for the anti-drone solidarity march there has a relevant blog post up today. It's worth reading in full, but here's a brief excerpt:
And after hearing testimony from many drone victims, reading a recent
> investigative report from Stanford Law School and talking to a female
> Pakistani lawyer about her thesis on what motivates terrorist recruits, I
> am convinced that the two (drones and the Taliban) cannot be considered
> separately. The former “feeds” the latter.
>
> “I interviewed 16 youth from Waziristan, all under the age of 21, who are
> now sentenced to Pakistani prisons for becoming attackers for the Taliban,”
> explained Anum Abbasi, an associate with the Research Society of
> International Law (RSIL) in Islamabad. “What became clear from this
> empirical research (not yet published) is that a primary motivator are the
> U.S. drone strikes. They breed anger, hatred and desperation.” And most
> certainly, anti-American sentiment.
http://paminprogress.tumblr.com/post/33367438693/taliban
The utterly bogus nature of these claims can be demonstrated
> by quoting a Syrian activist who observed that the pools of Syrian
> blood spilled in the civil war did not provoke any reaction from these
> guys, but the bunch of cartoons and a poorly made "film" noone heard
> of before had them run amok in the streets.
>
Who are "these guys"? The largest anti-movie demonstrations I saw reported anywhere numbered about 2,500. I have attended predominantly Muslim pro-Palestine rallies in both New York and Washington, DC that ranged from several to many times that large. And of course Muslim countries, including Pakistan, leave us in the dust.
> I see these guys as contemptible
> males who treat women and "infidels" as instruments of asserting their
> wounded warrior honor through humilliaton and clinging to clerics and
> assorted shysters who provide them with religious justification.
> There is nothing political about them. End of story.
Again, if you told us who "these guys" are, I could at least formulate an opinion.
-- "Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare, þe ure mægen lytlað."