Rip wrote:I think we don't need to show them we aren't the enemy. The fact that we aren't lining up Muslims and hanging and burning them should pretty much show that.
Let's see, in Guantanamo Bay we're torturing and killing muslims, even if they are innocent. Our Drones have killed maybe 100 targeted terrorists and over 1,000 civilians in countries with which we are not at war, including our own citizens. Not to mention Abu Ghraib.
If you can take off the blinders for a moment and try to perceive our actions from their point of view, the idea that we're being so nice to Muslims is rather ludicrous when we've been bombing Muslims on a daily basis for over a decade, and have likely been submitting them to torture for the better part of the past 14 years.
And that's just the stuff we've admitted publicly.
Have we shown forbearance? Sure - in our minds. But that doesn't mean that daily bombings aren't doing a lot of damage to our enemy/friend status, nor does it mean that they aren't much more likely to listen to lies about our barbarism and terror after witnessing our bombings (perhaps losing friends and family members in the process), and seeing the photographs of us torturing them, etc.
From the point of view of Joe Blow over there, it's possible to believe that we're not that much better than ISIS, and if you take into account the religious aspects, we can come off as much worse than ISIS to someone with a martyr complex who has been oppressed and driven towards radicalism by governments and corrupt officials who we have supported.
