re: #454 Obdicut

I’m sorry, but I can’t agree that alienation and radicalization inevitably leads to terrorism. To me, that takes away too much of the personal responsibility from it. There are plenty of persecuted religious groups who never turn to terrorism, despite persecution.

I do think that it might, for example, lead to Muslim Americans being less willing to inform on any suspect or dangerous individuals in their midst, out of less trust for Americans in general. That could, eventually, lead to deaths— but that’s a very attenuated chain of responsibility.

There’s responsibility, and then there is causation.

If a father abuses a child on a regular basis, that child is likely to grow up to become an abuser. When the child goes on to abuse, the father doesn’t bear responsibility for that. He is only responsible for the abuse he heaped upon the child. That doesn’t mean that the father’s actions didn’t create the situation that led to the child’s later acts of abuse.

If we alienate Muslims now, the acts with which we alienate them will create radicalized Muslims. Once those radicalized Muslims act out violently, they will bear full responsibility for their acts. But, so too will those who alienate Muslims now bear some responsibility for creating that situation.

The United States armed Saddam Hussein’s regime in the 1980’s. Do we now bear no responsibility at all for contributing to a situation in which he murdered his own people using the weapons we provided him?

Real actions have real effects. You can eschew the use of the word “responsibility” to describe the attribution of the effects of the effects, but it is foolish to pretend that our actions now will not set in motion events which may or may not be in our own best interests later, Much as I blame Rumsfeld and Reagan for propping up a brutal dictator in the 1980’s that we ended of fighting in the past decade, I will lay some blame at the feet of those who demonize moderate Muslims now for some portion of the existence of radical Muslims in the future.

Real actions have real effects. Whatever word you wish to apply to that is up to you. I use the word responsibility.