'@TheChief'
"There's a difference between fighting foreign dominion of your nation and butchering everybody who disagrees with you."
You don't know what's going on in Syria right now do you. ISIS is only one faction among many, constrained to specific geographic areas, belonging specifically to Sunni Islam, and didn't really exist in the country as we know them until 2013. Add on top of that the fact that ISIS in large part is an organization made up foreign recruits, not so much the locals in places they conquer. ISIS broadcasts its extremism to attract crazies from around the whole world, who frankly actually come to resemble foreign dominators to the local villagers and what not. To say nothing about locals who aren't Sunni Muslims, because while I'm sure you're familiar with ISIS mistreatment and killings of Christians, they do the same for non-Sunni muslims like Alawites, Ismaelis, and vanilla Shia.
Surely someone Irish can appreciate the importance of sect in religion?
Coming back to Ireland, what is Ireland's history? Especially Northern Ireland? Its of the English/British crown trying to colonize the place and control it better. Which meant eventually encouraging trustworthy and tough Protestant settlers (mostly from Scotland) to go over and "tame" the land. That's where all the Northern Irish Protestants, who make up the Unionists, came from.
In Irish history they (and the English nobles who took land in Ireland) were minorities ruling over a majority. A situation very much akin to apartheid in South Africa, up to and including the native Irish being excluded from major rights deep into the 19th century.
This talk you're making of the Irish struggle, well lets look at the Syrian Civil War.
Syria was (in part still is) a country run by a dictatorship belonging to a minority group. This group is called the Alawites, who are a very strange offshoot of Shia Islam (I guess you could compare them to Mormons in terms of really out there Christian sects). Alawites are essentially Arab as well.
The majority population is Arab too, but Sunni Muslim.
So for years since 1970, there has been a dictatorial regime run by members of the Alawite people. And with that has come dominance by the Alawites in all social spheres, and discrimination and marginalization toward the Sunni Arabs. And even worse discrimination against Sunni Kurds.
The war began with basic rallies and protests against a dictator, like the other Arab countries in 2011 (Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Libya etc.). The Syrian government brutally attacked such protests, with full on military and lethal response accompanied by secret police terror. This backfired because the severity was so great that it lead to protestors arming themselves and fighting back rather than just limping home and staying quiet. Imagine Tiananmen Square if Stalin had been in charge or something. This just kept escalating and eventually produced a war between rebels and government.
ORIGINALLY this was not sectarian, meaning it wasn't so much about X Group vs Y Group. But that tension between a ruling minority vs a underclass majority was an undeniable elephant in the room. And the dictator eventually (with evil intelligence) started playing to hatreds to divide his population, and make sure a significant portion decided to stay loyal (so Alawites and other minority groups sans the Kurds).
By 2016 where we are its become super sectarian, and tons of ethnic cleansing and borderline genocidal actions have taken place. Because essentially a majority was being controlled by a minority.
Which is the Irish experience with English/Scottish Protestant settlers and colonizers.
In the SYRIAN Civil War, those same minorities became spooked both by propaganda and some actual genuine concerns and turned against the anti-government rebellion and stayed loyal to the Assad regime. Alawite Muslims, Ismaeli Muslims, many Christians, and sort of the Druz.
In the IRISH drive for independence, the minority Protestant population became spooked by propaganda and some genuine concerns and turned against the Irish drive for independence and stayed loyal to the British crown. Demanding the parts of the island where they lived in large amounts stay in the UK.
ISIS? ISIS isn't even from Syria. They formed from an assemblage of war tourist jihadis and disgruntled Sunnis and former Saddam people during the Iraq War, as a little group called "Al Qaeda in Iraq". Remember all those horrific beheading of hostage videos during the war? That was them. We were able to flatten them pretty well in 2006 (I think), and they sort of went quiet.
Then guess what! The country next door collapsed to anarchy and horrific chaotic bloodshed! So along with other Al-Qaeda loyalists they moved over and started operating within Syria. Eventually they got tired of Al-Qaeda and had big disagreements and turned on them, and broke off as their own group. Christening themselves (among other names) the "Islamic State of Iraq and Syria". They started a sophisticated propaganda campaign online and advertised like crazy, and tons stupid and/or crazy people flocked to join them from around the world. They gobbled up and killed lots of Syrian rebel groups in the countries east, and also attacked and took territory from weak far flung Syrian government areas. This also meant they controlled the border with Iraq, so they took a gamble and started crossing it and trying to take territory.
The Iraq military was a miserable weak corrupt entity and collapsed way more easily then anyone expected and ISIS as able to capture a ton of territory in Iraq really quickly including Mosul.
They are a transnational group that while they've claimed to have founded a country and do control territory, are still basically similar to Al-Qaeda in that they're not really tethered geographically to a people, or area. They are not a native outgrowth of Syria, as I said their rule in Syria and Iraq tends to resemble that exact foreign domination you mention.
Expecting Syrian refugees to have sympathies to ISIS is ignorant and uninformed for a variety of reasons. Namely that local Syrians who do support the group would not be fleeing Syria and deciding to try and live in the west, they would be fleeing to ISIS controlled cities and territories.
And if they belong to any group that isn't Sunni the suspicion is extra ignorant. It would be like thinking a Protestant from Northern Ireland might secretly be an IRA member.
And the IRA (and Unionist terrorist groups) did plenty of killing that wasn't strictly on the basis of soldiers and officials or any of that. Killings were also made purely on sectarian basis. And certainly the hate came down to that sort of non-political distinction. I have stories of plenty of older locals of Irish ancestry who can remember their parents refusing to let their kids marry anyone of English blood in the US!
"The racism against the Irish was the reason we had to resort to crime. I'm not saying that doesn't have a hand in what's happened to the Mexicans and such, but the fact is that generation of immigrants coming to this country didn't do so with the intention of helping a national crime syndicate."
No generation of immigrants has any such intentions.
"Point is our economy can't support as many mouths as we got let alone those coming here."
The largest generation of Americans alive is entering retirement age and then subsequently the sweet embrace of death. The Baby Boomers. The subsequent generations are smaller, a population shrink would normally be occuring, especially with low brith and even marriage rates of Millennials thus far. But this won't be an issue because of our well controlled and steady rate of immigration. Even including illegals, who by the way have significantly slowed down on the whole.
"That wasn't racial tension. That was a fight to unify the nation and free it from British authorities and their Unionist sympathizers."
It's not racial yes, but its ethnic tension. You clearly don't know who the Unionists are. They're the descendents of Protestant settlers from (mostly) Scotland. So the Troubles are colored by hate between Irish Catholics and Scots-Irish Protestants. You've surely heard that term right? Scots-Irish? Scotch-Irish? Ulster-Scots? Those are the Protestants of Northern Ireland. They are not indigenous Irish Catholics who just so happened to be loyal to London. Their reason of being Unionists and loyalists, is because they feared living in a new independent Ireland dominated not by London but by Dublin. By the Catholic majority. Both for losing their privileges, and fearing backlash.
And lacing all that is the inevitable hatred and bigoted feelings that have grown between the two groups over history as well as the recent 20th century as Northern Ireland.
Some Unionists will abuse symbols of Catholicism, use phrases like "Fenian" or "Paddy" that are straight up ethnic slurs, and gloat about bloody conflicts they won in history. Similar comes from the Republicans (the Irish natives).
This is much better and calmer nowadays, but even so that change is fairly recent.
Give some watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4RZ73gNom8
And of course this infamously disgusting recentish event: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Cross_dispute
Functionally speaking hatred between groups largely defined by a religious divide is basically racism for all intents and purposes. Being Irish-American you should be supremely familiar with the fact that Catholicism is tied to the identity and the culture and the family. Not just some random theological choice. It's near inseparable as part of Irish ethnic identity, as it is for Italian, Latino, Polish and so on.
You're not some Evangelical Protestant who thinks of religion strictly in terms of missionary activity, born again context, and rootlessness. You should know this.
"The way I hear it is that the Bobbies have for the first time had to start using guns due to the crime caused by unregulated immigration. "
In what way is immigration to Britain unregulated.
"And in France need I point out the recent attack by ISIS militants?"
None of whom were Syrian refugees or even from France.
"The EU has passed unfair laws without any consideration to those not in the leadership and forced Britain to accept immigrants they aren't ready for and can't take care of. "
Movement of EU citizens within the EU is very loose yes, but that requires the individual moving to be an EU citizen. This doesn't cover refugees or immigrants from outside the EU. Moreover the UK is not part of the Schengen Area, they chose to be excluded, which means the lack of border controls between EU countries doesn't apply to the UK to begin with.
The UK hasn't been forced to accept Syrian refugees and as always they are able to basically pick and choose pretty freely what they participate in unlike many of the weaker poorer EU countries like Greece. So zero refugees have been forced on the UK by the EU. They have decided to accept some of their own volition though, which is y'know, control of their own immigration if I've heard of such.
If anything the immigrants in question that Brits are less able to deny because of EU law... are from poorer EU countries. A large part of British anti-immigration sentiment isn't just against Muslims and Hindus, but against Poles, Romanians and Bulgarians.
"Idiots who make up-according to the most recent pole I read-48% of the British population."
Surely someone of Irish extract can find little to argue here.
0
'@TheChief'
"There's a difference between fighting foreign dominion of your nation and butchering everybody who disagrees with you."
You don't know what's going on in Syria right now do you. ISIS is only one faction among many, constrained to specific geographic areas, belonging specifically to Sunni Islam, and didn't really exist in the country as we know them until 2013. Add on top of that the fact that ISIS in large part is an organization made up foreign recruits, not so much the locals in places they conquer. ISIS broadcasts its extremism to attract crazies from around the whole world, who frankly actually come to resemble foreign dominators to the local villagers and what not. To say nothing about locals who aren't Sunni Muslims, because while I'm sure you're familiar with ISIS mistreatment and killings of Christians, they do the same for non-Sunni muslims like Alawites, Ismaelis, and vanilla Shia.
Surely someone Irish can appreciate the importance of sect in religion?
Coming back to Ireland, what is Ireland's history? Especially Northern Ireland? Its of the English/British crown trying to colonize the place and control it better. Which meant eventually encouraging trustworthy and tough Protestant settlers (mostly from Scotland) to go over and "tame" the land. That's where all the Northern Irish Protestants, who make up the Unionists, came from.
In Irish history they (and the English nobles who took land in Ireland) were minorities ruling over a majority. A situation very much akin to apartheid in South Africa, up to and including the native Irish being excluded from major rights deep into the 19th century.
This talk you're making of the Irish struggle, well lets look at the Syrian Civil War.
Syria was (in part still is) a country run by a dictatorship belonging to a minority group. This group is called the Alawites, who are a very strange offshoot of Shia Islam (I guess you could compare them to Mormons in terms of really out there Christian sects). Alawites are essentially Arab as well.
The majority population is Arab too, but Sunni Muslim.
So for years since 1970, there has been a dictatorial regime run by members of the Alawite people. And with that has come dominance by the Alawites in all social spheres, and discrimination and marginalization toward the Sunni Arabs. And even worse discrimination against Sunni Kurds.
The war began with basic rallies and protests against a dictator, like the other Arab countries in 2011 (Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Libya etc.). The Syrian government brutally attacked such protests, with full on military and lethal response accompanied by secret police terror. This backfired because the severity was so great that it lead to protestors arming themselves and fighting back rather than just limping home and staying quiet. Imagine Tiananmen Square if Stalin had been in charge or something. This just kept escalating and eventually produced a war between rebels and government.
ORIGINALLY this was not sectarian, meaning it wasn't so much about X Group vs Y Group. But that tension between a ruling minority vs a underclass majority was an undeniable elephant in the room. And the dictator eventually (with evil intelligence) started playing to hatreds to divide his population, and make sure a significant portion decided to stay loyal (so Alawites and other minority groups sans the Kurds).
By 2016 where we are its become super sectarian, and tons of ethnic cleansing and borderline genocidal actions have taken place. Because essentially a majority was being controlled by a minority.
Which is the Irish experience with English/Scottish Protestant settlers and colonizers.
In the SYRIAN Civil War, those same minorities became spooked both by propaganda and some actual genuine concerns and turned against the anti-government rebellion and stayed loyal to the Assad regime. Alawite Muslims, Ismaeli Muslims, many Christians, and sort of the Druz.
In the IRISH drive for independence, the minority Protestant population became spooked by propaganda and some genuine concerns and turned against the Irish drive for independence and stayed loyal to the British crown. Demanding the parts of the island where they lived in large amounts stay in the UK.
ISIS? ISIS isn't even from Syria. They formed from an assemblage of war tourist jihadis and disgruntled Sunnis and former Saddam people during the Iraq War, as a little group called "Al Qaeda in Iraq". Remember all those horrific beheading of hostage videos during the war? That was them. We were able to flatten them pretty well in 2006 (I think), and they sort of went quiet.
Then guess what! The country next door collapsed to anarchy and horrific chaotic bloodshed! So along with other Al-Qaeda loyalists they moved over and started operating within Syria. Eventually they got tired of Al-Qaeda and had big disagreements and turned on them, and broke off as their own group. Christening themselves (among other names) the "Islamic State of Iraq and Syria". They started a sophisticated propaganda campaign online and advertised like crazy, and tons stupid and/or crazy people flocked to join them from around the world. They gobbled up and killed lots of Syrian rebel groups in the countries east, and also attacked and took territory from weak far flung Syrian government areas. This also meant they controlled the border with Iraq, so they took a gamble and started crossing it and trying to take territory.
The Iraq military was a miserable weak corrupt entity and collapsed way more easily then anyone expected and ISIS as able to capture a ton of territory in Iraq really quickly including Mosul.
They are a transnational group that while they've claimed to have founded a country and do control territory, are still basically similar to Al-Qaeda in that they're not really tethered geographically to a people, or area. They are not a native outgrowth of Syria, as I said their rule in Syria and Iraq tends to resemble that exact foreign domination you mention.
Expecting Syrian refugees to have sympathies to ISIS is ignorant and uninformed for a variety of reasons. Namely that local Syrians who do support the group would not be fleeing Syria and deciding to try and live in the west, they would be fleeing to ISIS controlled cities and territories.
And if they belong to any group that isn't Sunni the suspicion is extra ignorant. It would be like thinking a Protestant from Northern Ireland might secretly be an IRA member.
And the IRA (and Unionist terrorist groups) did plenty of killing that wasn't strictly on the basis of soldiers and officials or any of that. Killings were also made purely on sectarian basis. And certainly the hate came down to that sort of non-political distinction. I have stories of plenty of older locals of Irish ancestry who can remember their parents refusing to let their kids marry anyone of English blood in the US!
"The racism against the Irish was the reason we had to resort to crime. I'm not saying that doesn't have a hand in what's happened to the Mexicans and such, but the fact is that generation of immigrants coming to this country didn't do so with the intention of helping a national crime syndicate."
No generation of immigrants has any such intentions.
"Point is our economy can't support as many mouths as we got let alone those coming here."
The largest generation of Americans alive is entering retirement age and then subsequently the sweet embrace of death. The Baby Boomers. The subsequent generations are smaller, a population shrink would normally be occuring, especially with low brith and even marriage rates of Millennials thus far. But this won't be an issue because of our well controlled and steady rate of immigration. Even including illegals, who by the way have significantly slowed down on the whole.
"That wasn't racial tension. That was a fight to unify the nation and free it from British authorities and their Unionist sympathizers."
It's not racial yes, but its ethnic tension. You clearly don't know who the Unionists are. They're the descendents of Protestant settlers from (mostly) Scotland. So the Troubles are colored by hate between Irish Catholics and Scots-Irish Protestants. You've surely heard that term right? Scots-Irish? Scotch-Irish? Ulster-Scots? Those are the Protestants of Northern Ireland. They are not indigenous Irish Catholics who just so happened to be loyal to London. Their reason of being Unionists and loyalists, is because they feared living in a new independent Ireland dominated not by London but by Dublin. By the Catholic majority. Both for losing their privileges, and fearing backlash.
And lacing all that is the inevitable hatred and bigoted feelings that have grown between the two groups over history as well as the recent 20th century as Northern Ireland.
Some Unionists will abuse symbols of Catholicism, use phrases like "Fenian" or "Paddy" that are straight up ethnic slurs, and gloat about bloody conflicts they won in history. Similar comes from the Republicans (the Irish natives).
This is much better and calmer nowadays, but even so that change is fairly recent.
Give some watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4RZ73gNom8
And of course this infamously disgusting recentish event: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Cross_dispute
Functionally speaking hatred between groups largely defined by a religious divide is basically racism for all intents and purposes. Being Irish-American you should be supremely familiar with the fact that Catholicism is tied to the identity and the culture and the family. Not just some random theological choice. It's near inseparable as part of Irish ethnic identity, as it is for Italian, Latino, Polish and so on.
You're not some Evangelical Protestant who thinks of religion strictly in terms of missionary activity, born again context, and rootlessness. You should know this.
"The way I hear it is that the Bobbies have for the first time had to start using guns due to the crime caused by unregulated immigration. "
In what way is immigration to Britain unregulated.
"And in France need I point out the recent attack by ISIS militants?"
None of whom were Syrian refugees or even from France.
"The EU has passed unfair laws without any consideration to those not in the leadership and forced Britain to accept immigrants they aren't ready for and can't take care of. "
Movement of EU citizens within the EU is very loose yes, but that requires the individual moving to be an EU citizen. This doesn't cover refugees or immigrants from outside the EU. Moreover the UK is not part of the Schengen Area, they chose to be excluded, which means the lack of border controls between EU countries doesn't apply to the UK to begin with.
The UK hasn't been forced to accept Syrian refugees and as always they are able to basically pick and choose pretty freely what they participate in unlike many of the weaker poorer EU countries like Greece. So zero refugees have been forced on the UK by the EU. They have decided to accept some of their own volition though, which is y'know, control of their own immigration if I've heard of such.
If anything the immigrants in question that Brits are less able to deny because of EU law... are from poorer EU countries. A large part of British anti-immigration sentiment isn't just against Muslims and Hindus, but against Poles, Romanians and Bulgarians.
"Idiots who make up-according to the most recent pole I read-48% of the British population."
Surely someone of Irish extract can find little to argue here.