Thanks, I didn’t take it that way at all! I need to use more emojis.

I wasn’t trying to insult you or anything – sorry if it came across like that. I didn’t know about Plutarch using it, and I’ve even read some bits of him! That’s interesting. 🙂 I just remember how it was used in some British fiction from the early – mid 20th century.

Heather, it’s origins aren’t racist. Wiki says the phrase goes back 2000 years to Plutarch, while the use of “spade” for a black person dates from 1928. I just looked this up, because though I didn’t know those specifics, I know that even in my day growing up in the States, people understood spade meant shovel and that you had to be quite specific to use it as a racial slur, which of course many people did. I would certainly choose different words when at school.

Being an Islamist, i.e. an extremist, fundamentalist Muslim, doesn’t necessarily make you a terrorist. Statistics tell us that. However, DAESH, al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, al-Shabaab etc are Islamists, and they rely on the Islamist interpretation of Islam to justify their actions.

It’s obvious to anyone that the members of these groups are Muslim. Saying they are not Muslim when it’s obvious they are just makes most people, who don’t think about it in a very nuanced way, think all Muslims have at least the potential to be like this because they share a religion.

If we can separate Islamists from other Muslims in the minds of the general public it should promote understanding of the issue.

It’s quite clear to me, for example, that the Anglicans, Methodists and Presbyterians in my town find the attitude of the US Southern Baptists towards gay people as abhorrent as I do. It needs to be common knowledge that most Muslims find the actions of their Islamist coreligionists abhorrent too. At the moment it’s not.

It is a good article, which I would say because it makes exactly the points I’ve made several times myself. The de-Baathification of Iraq and the extreme pro-Shi’a sectarianism of the al-Maliki government created an environment that meant terrorist groups were all but inevitable.

As an aside, I always think it’s funny when people like the clearly “one of the good guys” Ken uses a phrase like “call a spade a spade.”

It’s origins are racist – a “spade” was originally derogatory term for a black person, and “calling a spade a spade” was to not be afraid of pointing out someone was bad.

You are being very pedantic this week, Paxton!

Because pilots are doing it primarily in the name of their govts (whatever other personal motives they may have), I call them members of the military, or perhaps state terrorists, depending on the nature of the conversation. For the others, usually referring to sectarian violence is enough to create the needed context to avoid confusion.

In the situations that you and I are often arguing in, where there is much more knowledge and acceptance of the history, religion, politics, etc. that is involved, we can get as nuanced as you want about labels. That doesn’t work in a mainstream conversation where one side is saying it’s all about religion and politics has no important role at all. If you want a hope of getting through to this group that we have responsibility for the present situation too, and even that we have the greater amount responsibility, starting off by saying that the killers talking about Islam all the time have nothing to do with Islam just gets you no where. Much better to say, yep, they’re twisted Islamists, but that’s not even half the story and go from there.

Here’s a good article on how the Bush administrations actions in Iraq created ISIS/DAESH: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/11/23/how-the-united-states-helped-create-the-islamic-state/?wpmm=1&wpisrc=nl_most Who are the people on the right who accept “that Western actions in the Middle East” have contributed to the chaos, Heather? Certainly none of the Republican candidates, except maybe Rand Paul, who is an isolationist. I have noticed that Jerry Coyne admits that there are other factors besides religion that contribute to terrorism by Muslims, including ” the mishandling of many Middle Eastern situations by the West”, though he did not elaborate on just what these are. But I have not seen him admit that this “mishandling” consisted of terroristic attacks that have killed far more Muslims than Muslim attacks have killed westerners. I’m still waiting for those who see religion as the primary cause of Muslim attacks on the west to examine the religious roots of western military attacks on Muslim countries. Certainly greed and oil have been the biggest factors, but religious arrogance has been a big factor all along.

So what do you call a born-again Christian US Air Force pilot, or an Israeli religious Jewish pilot, who kill civilians in their bombing runs? A Christian or Jewish terrorist? Or do we have to invent new names for them to indicate that all Christians and Jews aren’t terrorists? Maybe Christianists and Jewishists?

And what about Sunni terrorists killing Shia (or the reverse) isn’t calling them Islamist terrorists just confusing the issue?

And what if they yell Allahu Akbar, but their real grievance is that U.S. Or Israelis killed family members (as is very often the case)? Shouldn’t we really call them anti-imperialist terrorists. To call them Islamist terrorists, is simply another way of evading our own responsibility for what is happening.

The Islamist ones are those yelling Allahu Akbar or otherwise claiming to act in the name of their religion. If we encounter terrorists who claim to be doing it in the name of Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism or atheism, then I’ve no problem calling them them that instead.

We have to counter the hatred already being stirred up against all Muslims by people who think their religion makes them all suspect. Arguing with these people about whether people who say they’re doing it in the name of their Islam are actually even Islamic seems to me impossible. Better to move the discussion to what other factors are causing them to act the way they do.