Nader: Obama a War Criminal

[The Dharma Bum]

[Indy]

[The Dharma Bum]

If it is true, where's the evidence?

[Indy]

Not playing. Let's move on.

[Sandman]

You guys are making my head hurt, lol.

I think the big distinction not being made here is whether funding comes from government or just groups inside a nation. The Saudi Arabian government is aggressively anti-terrorist. But regardless, there is tons of money flowing from that country to terrorist groups around the world. Always has been. All the links that Indy posted make this distinction. It's not the government, or at least there hasn't been much conclusive evidence for that. It's "donors" inside Saudi Arabia. So the analogy to Pakistan, a country whose government is CLEARLY involved in funding and giving shelter to jihadist groups, is bunk.

And yeah, the whole salafi/jihadi/wahabi thing is a wash as far as I'm concerned. None of you are completely right here. Dharma is right when he says none of the terms are perfectly synonymous, but he was also wrong when he claims that nobody refers to themselves as Wahhabi. A ton of groups embrace that title. It's a derogatory term to muslims who are against terrorism in the same way that the name "Osama Bin Laden" will get some strong reactions out of the same people. But to those who support jihadi ideas, they embrace the title and it doesn't offend them at all.

Look, these are broad terms, and I think you guys might be overthinking them. Salaf just means ancestors. To be a salafi means to want to return to the roots of the religion. Wahhabism is named after an actual person named Wahhab, who was essentially a muslim fundamentalist. So yes, "wahhabi" is similar to calling someone a "fundamentalist", except it's connected to a historical person so it's more of a specific sect of the religion than anything. Both wahhabism and salafism lend themselves to religious jihad. Both make it a central tenet that religion can be defended and spread through "the sword". Hypothetically, a person could be a salafist, a wahhabist, and a jihadist all at the same time. The same as a christian in America could be a baptist, a fundamentalist, and a domestic terrorist, all at the same time. It's complex, especially without any context, but it's really not worth getting in a clusterf*ck semantic debate. And we certainly shouldn't decide who to nuke based on it, lol.

[The Comrade]

[The Comrade]

[Indy]

[The Dharma Bum]

[The Dharma Bum]