shk292:
Sorry, I promised not to argue with you but...
I also agreed not to engage with you any more and I want to keep my word. But I also want to be able to participate in what I see as an important discussion of principles.
ISIL, ISIS, Islamic State, Daesh, whatever you want to call them, are a bunch of evil murderous b*ards, make no mistake about that. I have no sympathy for them whatsoever. I don't care about them at all. But I do care about what are sometimes termed 'western values'. I care about where I live. I care about the kind of society I am part of. I care that I am seeing the end of personal privacy, that the unregulated nature of the Internet is about to cease, that the openness of liberal western democracies is being dismantled, that our civil rights are being eroded and we will soon all be living in a surveillance state. These things are all a direct result of the 9/11 attacks and everything that has come after. Al Quaeda won that one. They succeeded in bringing about exactly the kind of reaction they wanted. ISIL is doing precisely the same. They want our fear, our outrage, the crackdowns, the cessation of free speech and civil liberties. They want to make us behave like them. When they do that, they have won.
I don't want to live in the kind of society they are trying to bring about. Voltaire famously said (at least it is attributed to him) that 'I disagree with that you say but I will defend to my death your right to say it'. If any ISIL supporter steps out of line, even a little bit, he should be squashed like a bug. But he should not be denied the right to free speech or the other rights we all enjoy just because of what he believes. If we start punishing people for their ideas rather than their actions, we will have entered the world of Orwell's Thought Police.
I think the problem of Islamic radicalisation is multi-generational. Vulnerable individuals need to be identified as early as possible and every conceivable effort must be made to change their thinking and give them a better path through life. But I don't see any value in denying them basic human rights because of something they might do. That is a bad guy tactic. It shouldn't be ours.