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It seems to me that there are three distinct options...
the first (and in my opinion most likely option) is that the media is simply lying about the perp being "anti-muslim" or "aligned with the alt-right". They are desperate to deflect blame and acting acordingingly. You don't really believe that they are above fabricacating evidence do you?
The second is that this is all "Taqiyya", and the perp was a genuine Jihadi.
The third is that there there is a distinct subset of the extremly online ("Woke") Right who no matter how much they might claim to hate immigrants and people of color, they will always hate "Normies" and "Christians" and the "Grill-Pilled" more because the former is the far-group and the latter is the out-group.
Also what is this " car rammed into people" bullshit, the car didn’t do anything, the driver did.
IANA muslim scholar, but isn't taqiyya a mostly shia doctrine which tends to apply to either A) hiding religious mysteries from the uninitiated or B) escaping imminent persecution for the sake of continuing the faith, and not something which could easily be weaponized by Jihadis?
It seems true that Islam allows adherents to hit defect a lot more than Christianity does. But I don't think 'pretend to be an apostate to kill non-believers' is something Islam allows, or is believed to allow by actual Muslims.
If we're looking at strictly Quaranic examples/interpretations yes, but as i said, it has also been used by radical Sunnis historically to justify tactics like attacking under a false flag.
Agreed, and perhapse this is why Christianity has consistently outperformed its rivals despite being "weak", "cucked", "a slave morality", etc...
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You have hit on a pet peeve of mine, the incessant barking of "Taqiyya! Taqiyya! Taqiyya!" by right-wingers on Twitter who learned the term from Wikipedia and think they've stumbled onto the secret Muslim master plan.
Taqiyya refers, generally, to concealing your beliefs in the face of oppression or imminent danger. E.g., Muslims who were forced to "convert" to Christianity on pain of death were still considered good Muslims if they pretended to convert to save themselves. There are also some esoteric Islamic beliefs that some sects consider religious "mysteries" that should be hidden from unbelievers, even if it means lying about them. And various other corner cases covered in the sort of legalistic parsing of the Quran and hadiths that Muslims love to do. Islam, like most religions with a long legalistic history, has been divided into a multitude of sects and schools of thought, so like Christians and Jews (and non-Abrahamic faiths as well), you can find different branches who declare other branches flatly wrong or even heretical, and come up with all sorts of bizarre edge cases under which this or that practice is "allowed."
So far as I know, there are no mainstream Islamic sects (or even fringe groups, from what I have been able to find) that preach "Taqiyya" meaning "Pretend to be a non-Muslim to infiltrate a host society as a sleeper agent." I have never heard of even jihadists advocating that Muslims pretend to be atheists or Christians to sneak into the West so they can attack infidels. I suppose some of them might approve of this, but that sort of long game (spend 10 years pretending to be an anti-Muslim atheist and harassing people on social media?) would be hard to pull off for a professional spy under deep cover.
The more likely explanation is that this guy has always been crazy and had violent and vengeful impulses, and something pushed him over the edge. His motives seem to be a mix of anti-Saudi, anti-Islam, anti-German, and anti-West, in a way that anti-Muslims would love to condense down to "Deep cover jihadist practicing taqiyya" but doesn't really seem to match the facts.
It strikes me that a lot of terrorists/mass shooters lately have been a sort of ideological Rorschach blob. Like Luigi Mangione, whom both rightists and leftists are still assiduously trying to assign to the other tribe.
I'm somewhat more sympathetic to the more general anti-immigrationist argument that you can take the fanatic out of Saudi but you can't take the Saudi out of fanaticism (he seems to have retained a very jihadist psychology even if he stopped being a Muslim), but "Taqiyya" seems to have become a lazy, infinitely generalizeable dismissal of anything an Arab says because, you know, they're all lying double-agents practicing Taqiyya to fool the kafir.
Something being annoying or inconvenient doesn't make it untrue. The use of false flags and lying about one's intentions/beliefs are something that radical Sunni groups have historically engaged in and endorsed.
My reply to there being no mainstream Islamic sects that you know of who endorse that, is "No shit Sherlock". We are not talking about mainstream Muslims, we are talking about Deash, and the sort of guy who would Abracadabra Snackbar his way into a Christmas market.
That said i still think that the most likely explanation is that the media is simply lying. And that even if they are not lying, his alleged views are not some weird "mix", they are to all appearances fairly typical amongst the more woke elements of the online right. Herr Doktor is simply acting on a spicier verson of the sentiment occasionally expressed by multiple users here, IE that "the normies" are contemptable/subhuman and deserve to be punished.
All radical groups engage in deception, concealment, and false flags. The question is whether this is something specific to Islam. Which I maintain it is not, contrary to the people yammering about "Taqqiya" as if they have discovered Islam's deep dark secret. Yes, Muslims, like Christians and Jews, believe it's okay to lie to unbelievers who are persecuting them or to protect others. That's it, it's not a general practice of lying to unbelievers pretending you aren't planning to kill them.
And my reply to this is what I said above: I don't know if any Daesh clerics have issued some tortured interpretation of "Taqqiyah" to convince their agents to go deep cover as an infidel, but if so, I've never heard of it. And if the people I am complaining about were only claiming that jihadists are violent fanatics who twist their religion to justify terrorism, I would say "No shit Sherlock" right back at you. My point is that it's very common to see people claiming, essentially, that all Muslims (or ex-Muslims) are (or should be assumed to be) lying about their intentions. I saw this quite explicitly in a bunch of Twitter threads about Taleb al-Abdulmohsen. ("No such thing as an ex-Muslim," etc.) You proposed it as an explanation.
Maybe, though if there's evidence that he's actually a jihadist and the media is covering it up, that would be pretty dumb since we're already seeing years of his Twitter rantings being dug up.
I still think "woke right" is a pretty incoherent concept, but to the degree it exists, it think it fits exactly what I mean by "weird mix"; it's a stew of assorted resentments and grudges that don't neatly fit into a single coherent ideological category.
Christians are not allowed to lie to escape persecution under traditional interpretations of moral theology.
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I didn't claim that false flags and deception were specific to Islam, only that they were tactics that radical Islam has been known to engage in and endorse.
One of the core tenets of Wahhabism (the subset of Islam from which pretty much all modern radical Sunni movements trace thier roots) is that anything is acceptable if it is done in the pursuit of god's enemies. Or to put it in more familiar/secular terms, there are no bad tactics only bad targets. Deash clerics don't need to make the argument explicitly because the argument is already implicit in the Deash worldview.
Is your argument really that the media and assorted twitter personalities couldn't possibly be decieved and would never just lie to our faces? Because if so i have a bridge in London to sell you.
And again, i disagree because it seems pretty coherent to me.
As i have argued in prior discussions there seems to be a distinct subset of the extremely-online "right" that is far more "woke" and identitarian than they are right-wing. One of the unifying themes of this subset is a seething resentment of Christians/Normies/Anyone who isn't as black-pilled miserable or cynical as they are.
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Such a long con for such meagre reward (a mere five dead at the last count) seems a bit unlikely to me.
It's not actually that easy to slaughter dozens of people
believe me.Jokes aside it does seem unlikely to me it was some kind of long con too, but the number killed isn't necessarily an indication of their intentions as multiple spree killers have demonstrated, and while a ten year plan indicates a lot more strategy than say William Atchison, we make a plan and God laughs.
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I agree, I still think that the most likely explanation is that the media/internet is lying and that this guy was just a conventional Jihadi.
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