> Charlie Hebdo's targets ...<p>Who was it that killed who again?<p>>Charlie Hebdo's targets weren't simply religious extremists preaching from Saudi mosques; they were a portrayal of the French Muslim population as violent extremists, the dangerous other.<p>It sounds like the author is saying that the satire cartoon invented "racism" against Muslims. But the cartoon "targets" proved the magazine absolutely, positively, bona-fided-ly correct.
They proved Charlie Hebdo right.<p>>You sow the wind, you reap the whirlwind. What did you expect was going to happen?<p>So the author actually blames religious attacks on the act of people talking about it happening. In some circular way, the cartoon magazine created religious violence?<p>I cannot fathom how the author would explain religiously motivated violence in places where a satire cartoon isn't there to talk about it.
I really wonder if this guy has ever been living outside the US ( either in a muslim country, or in a few european countries) to make so many wrong assertions about the root cause of the whole affair. Actually i'm even surprised he's working in any field related to logic, because his whole evaluation of french attacks having anything to do with what french do or did falls on the ground as soon as you notice that they've been occuring in every single part of the world ( every country in every continent with any religion) for the last 20 years.<p>It is simply an ideology looking to conquer the world, which adjusts its speech to accomodate with its target. Nothing more unusual than that.
The author is implying that Daesh or something like it would/could exist without religion and specifically without Islam. I doubt that. Also, just because there is Muslim on Muslim violence doesn't mean that Islam isn't the cause of it. Wars between different factions of the same religion are the rule, not the exception. So ignoring religion as a cause of these problems while touting climate change is both silly and goes against the stated goals of the essay to not tout slogans as solutions. Otherwise, it's a pretty good take on the situation.
Just an aside, but Mr. Zunger is a large reason why I continue to spend any time following anything on Google+. He writes on all kinds of topics regularly (most are non-political), and is worth following.
The notion that mass immigration from Syria to Europe is a necessary consequence of the war is trivially falsified by looking at the timeline. The Syrian civil war started in early 2011. Daesh entered the war in early 2012 as al-Nusra Front, and operated as ISIL since 2013. The Caliphate was proclaimed in summer 2014.<p>But mass migration into Europe did not start until summer 2015. Obviously it did not take the Syrians four years to realize that there was a war in their country.
Author belittles commentators who make simplifications, but then claims root of conflict is water:<p>"When we talk about the ultimate causes of the situation, this is the fact we tend to ignore: at the root of it, there isn't enough water, and there isn't enough food, and droughts have been hitting the area harder and harder for a decade."
A serious question which I'd love to hear opinions on:<p>Why are immigrants to the US from Mexico viewed so differently from immigrants in Europe? Or are they treated the same?