I think people are playing right into the terrorists hands, and feeling pride as they do it. The terrorists know what these attacks will cause, they saw what happened after 9/11, they know what will happen now. What we need is not a war of guns, but one of culture. We need to obliterate the sense of identity in the middle east, fill it with Christian missionaries, propaganda of the American dream, and build so many factories and so much infrastructure that ISIS couldn't hope to destroy it. We need to replace their way of life with our own, and until that happens, these terrorists will continue to be a problem. ___ As for the reaction based on terrorist bombings elsewhere. France isn't part of the middle east, it's part of the "western world". Paris is an icon, France is a long ally of the US. The reality of the world is that we only care about suffering and death when it is connected to us. France is, Lebanon or wherever else isn't so much. Why do you think we kill and torture pigs, cows, and so on, without a second consideration, while we treat dogs well? Why do we care so much for the suffering of children while the suffering of adults with much more complex lives and emotions get less attention? The suffering of kids matters more, as kids are the future. Adults have lived a part of their potential, and as a result, are more expendable. Why do soldiers of enemy nations not matter? Where is the empathy for the pain and suffering for the terrorists, the circumstances that lead to their desperation? They don't just not matter to us, they hurt us, so their pain and suffering may well be celebrated. It's cold, it's calculated, and it's what we are "programmed" to feel, regardless of if we want to believe otherwise. Lives do not inherently matter, they never have, and our teaching of that they do is leading to a lot of confused and misguided people living lives of guilt, wondering why they can live in such wealth while those in Africa starve to death (and similar examples).
This really isn't the right reaction – fear of this happening is exactly why people join terrorist groups.We need to obliterate the sense of identity in the middle east, fill it with Christian missionaries, propaganda of the American dream, and build so many factories and so much infrastructure that ISIS couldn't hope to destroy it. We need to replace their way of life with our own
Having their family bombed, having no purpose to turn to, being desperate, is what makes people join terrorist groups. That western way of live, that liberalism, that freedom, secularism, is what the terrorists groups fear. Why do you think they fear it? They want attacks, they want war, we shouldn't give it to them. They need a nice big helping of peace, wealth, and education.
There's nothing wrong with peace, wealth and education, but we don't need to force Christianity or all of western culture on anyone.
Do you think peace, wealth, and education are going to appear without them? You don't create the attitudes that exist within a nation without many decades of building up attitudes and readings. You can't just transform a nation's attitudes by sticking in the framwork that already exists, you have to disrupt it. I'd prefer we encourage a secular state, being an atheist myself, or perhaps for a massive push for moderate Islam, but I don't think the US/the west has a great number of moderate islamists who are willing to go into other nations and preach/convert people. Use what we have. The end goal is to take power from ISIS/Terrorists in any way possible, and the only way to do that is to make the people of those nations absolutely hate them, and their goals, in full. The only real way to do that, to my knowledge, is to westernize them, unless you have some other way in mind?