A no warning bombing in a pub is designed to kill civilians in exactly the same way a no warning bomb outside a concert venue is designed to do so.
They are precisely morally equivalent.
Way to clamp yourself.
Iâm not the one who was hoping that certain people were killed in the recent attacks, you weird cunt.
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I wasnât hoping anybody was killed. I was hoping nobody was killed. But then anything even a little bit complicated flies over your head.
Even if one accepts the IRA carried out precisely the kind of attacks that Islamists are carrying out, i.e. attacks only targeting civilians, there is still the issue of whether the conflict was justified or not, which is what determines whether it was moral or to what degree it was moral. I think most sane people would agree defeating the Nazis was justified, and accept to some degree at least that the bombing of Dresden was somewhat moral to destroy the will of the enemy. The same for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
There is an argument that the IRA campaign was justified, especially early in the conflict, and there is even an argument that they were too restrained and perhaps the conflict would have been brought to resolution earlier if they had been more callous. There is no moral argument to be made that targeting civilians is justified because you follow a 7th century ideology that instructs you they are infidels and deserve to die, and that you will be rewarded in some imaginary afterlife for doing so.
The actions may be similar but there is no moral equivalence, as one is based on an arguably justified cause and the other based on insanity.
Youâre welcome.
I wasnât arguing whether the overall conflict was morally equivalent.
I gave a list of attacks which absolutely were morally equivalent to what ISIS are doing.
The overall conflict is irrelevant in determining the moral equivalence of these individual attacks.
Earlier on, by the way, you completely dismissed any political element in the existence of ISIS or Islamist terrorism.
That betrays a dreadfully simplistic understanding of whatâs happening.
It also doesnât tally with the fact that many of these attackers have a very poor adherence to extreme Islam - some drink, some smoke, some follow football teams - all things which are fundamentally against the extremist ideology. The likes of Salah Abdeslam would likely have been victims of ISIS had they been living in Syria and engaging in these things.
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Warrington?
Warrington isnât equivalent because there were warnings and the target was property and economic damage.
Same with Omagh.
Result was two kids dead âŚyouâre judged on resultsâŚscumbagsâŚ
I didnât say anything about the result. I merely said that the result wasnât the aim.
I think all rational people would agree the list of atrocities you listed, and the millions of other âterroristâ attacks in human history, are prima facie evil and thus presumptively unjustified. The question of moral equivalence however, has to consider whether the actions are justified or not, or to what degree they are justified. There is no moral equivalence for example between killing someone because of their religion and using unnecessary force to kill someone in self defense, even though both might be unjustified.
Your example of Islamists acting in an un-Islamic manner is also fatally flawed. If you are guaranteed heaven and 72 virgins for your killing of infidels, it doesnât matter how many beers you drink beforehand. You are not dealing with rational people, so logic doesnât apply.
Donât we all believe our cause is just and our beliefs the right ones. Isnât that why weâve been killing each other for as long as weâve been around
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In the case of Galway club hurling, yes.
None of the attacks I quoted were done in self-defence. They were all done out of hatred, some due to religion. It really doesnât matter what type of hatred it is. They were all either no warning bombs against civilians or shooting massacres of civilians. Therefore theyâre directly equivalent to what ISIS are doing.
Your analysis also completely leaves out the westâs behaviour in the Middle East and majority Muslim countries, which gives what ISIS do an obvious political element.
One cannot compare the recent Manchester bomb to, say the Canary Wharf bomb or the 1996 IRA Manchester bomb, but one can certainly compare the murder of Lee Rigby to, say, the murder of two Australian tourists who were mistaken for off-duty British Army soldiers in Holland in 1990.
The overall conflict is not irrelevant in the context of individual attacks and the moral equivalency you are espousing. You have gone down the road of equivocating the actions of the IRA to ISIS. No getting away from that and the logical conclusions that follow from it. I wonder if some of the other republicans on here would agree with you on that.
Youâre also using your pathetic go to method of, I understand the nuance of the situation. Your calls for nuance are when you are backed into a corner on the reems of shite you post.
Logic and reason are not friends of yours. You are a waste of skin, as Malcolm would say.
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Again, youâre starting from a point where youâre assuming that there is no political context to what ISIS are doing. Thatâs obviously wrong. In fact what they are doing, is more political than religious, and especially in Europe.
And itâs difficult to deny that the political element of Islamist terrorism has a point.
Blowback is to be expected in any such situation.
They just choose to give it in the most heinous manner possible.
Youâre really floundering in your attempts to morally differentiate the acts I listed which committed by Irish people, compared to what ISIS do.
Itâs not an equivocation of the IRA as a whole or the armed struggle in Ireland with ISIS. One can easily find reasons to legitimise Warrenpoint or Teebane.
The acts I listed were individual acts, driven by hatred, designed to kill civilians in cold blood, with no warning whatsoever, ie. the exact same, the exact same moral equivalence.
This is now just incoherent babble.
Whatever the IRA were motivated by, it wasnât hatred. Their most extreme atrocities were in response to loyalist atrocities, so self defense or the threat of all out civil war. Many of the atrocities on your list were committed by loyalists, which is a completely different moral argument.
Iâm not ignoring the impact of western interference in the ME. However, itâs not as strong an argument as the left suggests. The great majority of killings are Muslims killing other Muslims or Christians in Muslim majority countries. They donât really need any incentive from the west.
ISIS could just as easily argue that their attacks are âpaybackâ for whatever it is they want to argue itâs payback for.
The acts I listed were absolutely motivated by hatred. Go through them, one by one.
The Loyalist-perpetrated ones you agree with me on.
Which of the Republican-perpetrated ones werenât?
Kingsmills? Where 11 Protestant civilians were marched out of a bus to be shot and the one Catholic on the bus let go?
Darkley? Where a Protestant church service was sprayed with gunfire and three civilians killed and others wounded?
Altnaveigh? Where six Presbyterian men were shot in front of their wives and children and their homes burned?
Birmingham and Guildford? No warning bombings of pubs?
No moral difference whatsoever to ISIS and I say that as a Republican and a Sinn Fein voter.
The thing is, Iâm actually able to face up to the fact there were some completely indefensible atrocities committed in the name of Republicanism - and they happened across the generations.
What about the Lee Rigby murder? Morally equivalent to say, the Deal barracks bomb in 1989 that killed 11?
And if not, why not?