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Watch Out for All Those Hindu and Christian Terrorists!

We also choose to ignore the fact that not all terrorists even claim to be Muslim – there are many Hindu, Jewish, Atheist, and yes, even Christian terrorists. ~Mephistophocles Via A.C. Kleinheider. I suppose there might be some of each out there (mostly atheists of one variant of communist guerrilla band or other, be it […]

We also choose to ignore the fact that not all terrorists even claim to be Muslim – there are many Hindu, Jewish, Atheist, and yes, even Christian terrorists. ~Mephistophocles

Via A.C. Kleinheider.

I suppose there might be some of each out there (mostly atheists of one variant of communist guerrilla band or other, be it in Colombia, Peru or Nepal), but where this “there are terrorists of every kind” argument always breaks down is when it comes to the differences between the different sorts of terrorists. There may be terrorists who are Hindus, Jews and Christians, but it is far more rare to find terrorists who are committed to engaging in terrorist activities as part and parcel of their religious duty or define their activities in terms of their religion. To say “there are many” of these other kinds of terrorists, especially when referring to Hindus, Jews and Christians, doesn’t really hold up under scrutiny.

Proponents of Hindutva are charged by their enemies with fomenting sectarian violence that takes the form of anti-Muslim riots (such as occurred in Gujarat after a deadly attack on a train of Hindu pilgrims), but they do not go around shooting up government buildings, detonating bombs, taking hostages or doing any of those things that terrorists do. Say what you will about them, but they are not terrorists, and yet they are the best example of specifically Hindu religious extremism around. There are myriad ethnic and tribal resistance movements inside India, many of whose members are presumably conventionally Hindu, but their Hindutva, so to speak, has nothing to do with why they are fighting central and state governments.

Yes, Tamil Tigers are terrorists, they are Hindus and they were the ones to bring us the suicide bomber, but unlike Islamic terrorists they conceive of their struggle in principally, perhaps entirely, ethnic and nationalist terms. Islamists may latch onto ethnic and nationalist grievances and even adopt some of the rhetoric of the nationalist (as Hamas and Hizbullah do), but their principal identity and ultimate justification is found in their understanding of their religion, which, it might be noted, lends itself to their kind of interpretation.

With the exception of the so-called Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda and the occasional oddball here or there who represents no one but himself, I am hard pressed to think of any self-styled Christian terrorists in the world. Inevitably someone will probably invoke Bush as the counter-example, which is silly–silly because his justification of indiscriminate violence against innocents is not premised on anything to do with Christianity, but on a secular messianism that most Christians do (and all Christians should) regard as a contradiction of the Faith. Perhaps someone will point out the roving bands of Christian terrorists I have missed.

There have been cases of individual Jewish terrorists among the settler communities, and pre and post-independence Zionist terrorism is well-known, but even here these are usually the actions of secular Zionists and not those who at the very least clothe themselves in stark religious rhetoric.

In my view, this indiscriminate lumping of Muslim terrorists with various other kinds of terrorists, some of whom happen to adhere (at least nominally) to a religion, muddles things rather badly. It is a great assumption of “Mephistophocles”‘s part that anyone among us is lumping all Muslims together–many Muslims themselves lump themselves with Islamic terrorists in their, at best, often ambiguous response to many such terrorists’ actions. The rest of the time they “lump” themselves together with Islamic terrorists by adhering to a creed that does implicitly and explicitly justify religious violence not only as a necessary evil, but as an obligatory requirement of the dutiful believer.

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