WILL DRAW FOR COFFEE

iandsharman:

brevoortformspring:

When was the last time I heard of Jews, Christians, Buddhists or Hindus doing these kinds of things?

Pick up any newspaper anywhere.

If anyone has their “head in the sand” it’s those who believe that terrorism and the committing of atrocities is in any way limited to the followers of Islam…

Christian Terrorism and Atrocities

Anti-balaka

Anti-balaka is the term used to refer to the Christian militias formed in the Central African Republic after the rise to power of Michel Djotodia.On 2 December 2013, anti-balaka militiamen are suspected to have killed 12 people, including children, and wounded 30 others in an attack on the mostly Muslim Fula ethnic group in Boali, according to the government. In 2014, Amnesty International reported several massacres committed by anti-balaka against Muslim civilians, forcing thousands of Muslims to flee the country.

Gunpowder Plot

The Gunpowder Plot of 1605, in earlier centuries often called the Gunpowder Treason Plot or the Jesuit Treason, was a failed assassination attempt against King James I of England and VI of Scotland by a group of provincial English Catholics led by Robert Catesby.

Northern Ireland - IRA. UDF, etc.

Some scholars, such as Steve Bruce, a sociology professor at the University of Aberdeen, argue that the conflict in Northern Ireland is primarily a religious conflict, its economic and social considerations notwithstanding. Professor Mark Juergensmeyer has also argued that some acts of terrorism were “religious terrorism… – in these cases, Christianity”.

National Liberation Front of Tripura

The National Liberation Front of Tripura (NLFT), a rebel group which seeks the secession of Tripura, North-East India, from the country, has been described as engaging in terrorist violence motivated by their Christian beliefs.

National Socialist Council of Nagaland

The group has committed religious violence, as a part of NSCN’s described mission of forcibly converting the animist Naga to Christianity. Other goals include the formation of a greater Nagaland. There are occasional reports of the NSCN using force to convert locals of neighboring states to Christianity.

The National Socialist Council of Nagaland, Issac-Muivah faction (slogan: “Nagaland for Christ”), is accused of carrying out the 1992–1993 ethnic cleansing of Kuki tribes in Manipur, said to have leave over 900 people dead. During that NSCN-IM operation, 350 Kuki villages were driven out and about 100,000 Kukis were turned into refugees.

Anders Behring Breivik

In July 2011, Anders Behring Breivik was arrested and charged with terrorism after a car bombing in Oslo and a mass shooting on Utøya island that killed 77 people. Hours prior to the events, Breivik released a 1,500 page manifesto detailing that immigrants were undermining Norway’s traditional Christian values.

Bucharest Pogrom

Orthodox Christian movements in Romania, such as the Iron Guard and Lăncieri, which have been characterized by Yad Vashem and Stanley G. Payne as anti-semitic and fascist, respectively, were responsible for involvement in the Bucharest pogrom, and political murders during the 1930s.

Lord’s Resistance Army

The Lord’s Resistance Army, a cult and guerrilla army, was engaged in an armed rebellion against the Ugandan government in 2005. It has been accused of using child soldiers and of committing numerous crimes against humanity; including massacres, abductions, mutilation, torture, rape, and using forced child labourers as soldiers, porters, and sex slaves. A quasi-religious movement that mixes some aspects of Christian beliefs with its own brand of spiritualism, it is led by Joseph Kony, who proclaims himself the spokesperson of God and a spirit medium, primarily of the “Holy Spirit” which the Acholi believe can represent itself in many manifestations. LRA fighters wear rosary beads and recite passages from the Bible before battle.

Ku Klux Klan

After the American Civil War of 1861–1865, members of the Protestant-led Ku Klux Klan (KKK) organization began engaging in arson, beatings, cross burnings, destruction of property, lynching, murder, rape, tar-and-feathering, and whipping. They targeted African Americans, Jews, Catholics, and other social or ethnic minorities. Klan members had an explicitly Christian terrorist ideology, basing their beliefs in part on a “religious foundation” in Christianity.

Army of God, etc.

After 1981, members of groups such as the Army of God began attacking abortion clinics and doctors across the United States. A number of terrorist attacks were attributed by Bruce Hoffman to individuals and groups with ties to the Christian Identity and Christian Patriot movements, including the Lambs of Christ. A group called Concerned Christians was deported from Israel on suspicion of planning to attack holy sites in Jerusalem at the end of 1999; they believed that their deaths would “lead them to heaven”.

Hutaree (and other Christian militia groups)

Hutaree was a Christian militia group based in Adrian, Michigan. In 2010, after an FBI agent infiltrated the group a federal grand jury in Detroit indicted nine of its members on charges of seditious conspiracy to the use of improvised explosive devices, teaching the use of explosive materials, and possessing a firearm during a crime of violence. On 28 March 2012, the conspiracy charges were dismissed. Terrorism scholar Aref M. Al-Khattar has listed The Covenant, The Sword, and the Arm of the Lord, Defensive Action, The Freemen Community, and some “Christian militia” as groups that “can be placed under the category of far-right-wing terrorism” that “has a religious (Christian) component”

Crusades

It is estimated that anywhere from one to three million people were killed during the Crusades, described by some as “confident, aggressive, papal-led expansion attempts by Western Christendom.”

See also this list of the Ten Worst Terror Attacks by Extreme Christians and Far Right White Men, which includes the Oklahoma City bombing by Timothy McVeigh, the second most deadly terrorist attack in US history…perpetrated by a white, Roman Catholic man and not a Muslim.

Jewish Terrorism

Gush Emunim Underground

Formed by members of the Israeli political movement Gush Emunim. This group is most well known for two actions. Firstly, for bomb attacks on the mayors of West Bank cities on June 2, 1980, and secondly, an abandoned plot to blow up the Temple Mount mosques. The Israeli Judge Zvi Cohen, heading the sentencing panel at the group’s trial, stated that they had three motives, ‘not necessarily shared by all the defendants. The first motive, at the heart of the Temple Mount conspiracy, is religious.’

Bat Ayin Underground

In 2002, four people from Bat Ayin and Hebron were arrested outside of Abu Tor School, a Palestinian girls’ school in East Jerusalem, with a trailer filled with explosives. Three of the men were convicted for the attempted bombing.

Brit HaKanaim

Brit HaKanaim (Covenant of the Zealots) was a radical religious Jewish underground organisation which operated in Israel between 1950 and 1953,[1] against the widespread trend of secularisation in the country. The ultimate goal of the movement was to impose Jewish law in the State of Israel and establish a Halakhic state. It initiated its violent campaign in January 1951. On 18 January, 13 private cars in north Jerusalem, belonging to owners who drove during Shabbat, were torched, and oil-soaked bags were placed in the garage of the Egged Bus Company to protest public transportation on Shabbat. In February 1951, twelve cars and taxicabs and a butcher shop that sold non-kosher meat were torched, and a restaurant that was open on Shabbat was bombed.

Kingdom of Israel

The Kingdom of Israel group (Hebrew: מלכות ישראל, Malchut Yisrael), or Tzrifin Underground, were active in Israel in the 1950s. The group carried out attacks on the diplomatic facilities of the USSR and Czechoslovakia and occasionally shot at Jordanian troops stationed along the border in Jerusalem. Members of the group were caught trying to bomb the Israeli Ministry of Education in May 1953, have been described as acting because of the secularisation of Jewish North African immigrants which they saw as ‘a direct assault on the religious Jews’ way of life and as an existential threat to the ultra-Orthodox community in Israel.’

Eden Natan-Zada

Eden Natan-Zada killed four Israeli Arab civilians on August 4, 2005. His actions were criticized by then prime minister Ariel Sharon, as “a reprehensible act by a bloodthirsty Jewish terrorist”, and author Ami Pedhzer describes his motivations as religious.

Baruch Goldstein

Baruch Goldstein an American-born Israeli physician, perpetrated the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre in the city of Hebron, in which he shot and killed 29 Muslim worshipers inside the Ibrahimi Mosque (within the Cave of the Patriarchs), and wounded another 125 victims.

Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin

Yigal Amir’s assassination of Yitzhak Rabin on November 4, 1995 has been described as terrorism with a religious motivation. Amir was quoted as saying he had “acted alone and on orders from God.”

Buddhist Terrorism

Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway

Aum Shinrikyo, the shinshūkyō that unleashed Sarin gas into the Tokyo subway and killed thirteen people, injuring fifty, drew upon Buddhist ideas and scriptures. Religious studies scholar Ian Reader notes how Aum “emphasized its use and command of esoteric and tantric Buddhist practices,” published magazines called Mahayana and Vajrayana Sacca, and advocated Tibetan Buddhist ideas of the Bardo and phowa.

See also this list of Buddhist organisations with links to terrorist acts.

Hindu Terrorism

Ajmer Dargah attack

The Ajmer Dargah blast occurred on 11 October 2007, outside the Dargah (shrine) of Sufi saint Moinuddin Chishti in Ajmer, Rajasthan, India allegedly by the Hindutva organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its groups.

2008 Malegaon blasts

On 29 September 2008, three bombs exploded in the States of Gujarat and Maharashtra of India killing 8 persons and injuring 80. During investigation in Maharashtra, there were allegations of involvement of a Hindu group in the blasts.

Atheist Atrocities

The Holocaust

The Holocaust, was the mass murder or genocide of approximately six million Jews during World War II, a programme of systematic state-sponsored murder by Nazi Germany, led by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, throughout the German Reich and German-occupied territories. Broader definitions include approximately two to three million Soviet POWs, two million ethnic Poles, up to 1,500,000 Romani, 200,000 handicapped, political and religious dissenters, 15,000 homosexuals and 5,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses, bringing the death toll to around 11 million. The broadest definition would include six million Soviet civilians, raising the death toll to 17 million. While Hitler’s religious beliefs are hard to exactly pin down, he can be broadly defined as an atheist, while the majority of those in the Nazi party would have identified as Christian. They were all certainly white and none of them were Muslims.

The Great Purge

The Great Purge was a campaign of political repression in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin from 1934 to 1940.[1] It involved a large-scale purge of the Communist Party and government officials, repression of peasants and the Red Army leadership, and widespread police surveillance, suspicion of “saboteurs”, imprisonment, and arbitrary executions. Historian Michael Ellman claims the best estimate of deaths brought about by Soviet repression during these two years ranges from 950,000 to 1.2 million, which includes deaths in detention and those who died shortly after being released from the Gulag, as a result of their treatment therein.

Cambodian Genocide

In Cambodia, a genocide was carried out by the Communist Khmer Rouge (KR) regime led by Pol Pot between 1975 and 1979 in which one and a half to three million people were killed.

The Cultural Revolution

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, commonly known as the Cultural Revolution, was a social-political movement that took place in the People’s Republic of China from 1966 until 1976. Some 1.5 million people were killed during the Cultural Revolution, and millions of others suffered imprisonment, seizure of property, torture or general humiliation.

In conclusion - The committing of atrocities and acts of terrorism is something that transcends creeds and cultures, religious beliefs or lack of religious beliefs. It is not a problem unique to any one culture or religion but is, rather, a sad fact of humanity. Christian, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim and Atheist are all guilty of committing the most heinous crimes against their fellow man. To claim that one religious group is uniquely guilty of these crimes is ignorant at best.

Thank you Ian. This is a brilliant resource for anyone having this argument.

Sadly, 9 times out of 10 it won’t make the slightest difference, as people pushing the “islam is evil” agenda are almost always using it as a cover for racism rather than just being genuinely misinformed.

because, as the above demonstrates pretty well, people are awful.