| ArnoldRimmer said: And even those terrorist attacks carried out by islamists are usually not really linked to islamic beliefs. It's obvious that the real motivation for their attacks has nothing to do with what many people believe to be "Jihad" (muslims fighting unbelievers/non-muslims for religious beliefs) by looking at the fact that about 90% of all victims of islamic terrorists are muslims themselves. |
If you mean that most people have a very facile and superficial understanding of jihad and extremism in general, then sure. But it's rather nuts to say that it has nothing to do with their beliefs just because they kill far more Muslims than non-Muslims. Of course it has everything to do with their beliefs, and as much as jihadists might hate the infidel they hate Muslims who they see as insufficiently Muslim just as much if not more.
Breivik killed far more Norwegians than he did immigrants, but it would be silly to say his anti-immigration beliefs had nothing to do with why he did what he did. He specifically targeted Norwegians whom he felt were race traitors. You might say, however, that extremism is to a large degree a function of personality type and therefore ideology is somewhat fungible: an extreme leftist or right-wing extremist might easily become an extreme Islamist, for example.
