The Saudi-led coalition said a projectile struck a terminal at Riyadh’s airport Sunday, a day after a missile attack killed 13 people and injured 309.
An unidentified projectile struck Saudi Arabia’s main international airport Sunday, injuring people a day after a deadly missile attack at the same site raised questions about whether the United States would join another conflict in the region.
Saudi Arabia’s General Authority of Civil Aviation confirmed the death of a Pakistani resident and injuries to 11 others in the new attack on King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh. It said authorities were assessing damage and checking the safety of airport facilities.
The Saudi-led coalition said the projectile struck Terminal 4, causing a fire that authorities were working to control. It also reported intercepting and destroying a cruise missile near the airport.
So essentially you’re defining “fanatic” to mean (or at least include in its definition) “non-secularist.” That’s a possible definition of the word, but it’s not a particularly useful one, and while I could go at length into why that’s the case I’ll just say that one group of people that wanted to base the law of the land on 1500 years old superstition was early abolitionists. British sailors capturing slavers might as well have been screaming “deus vult.”* Which, you know, if that’s a group you’re comfortable calling religious fanatics I’m not going to stop you, but I think most people wouldn’t be.
*Just to drive this point home:
-Wikipedia.
So you call it normal to execute people simply because they don’t believe in Islam?
That’s not what I said; my point is by widening the meaning of the word too much it loses its explanatory power. When you say that the people running Saudi Arabia (chiefly MBS) are religious fanatics, what you’re doing is taking some of their actions and using them to derive a hypothesis about the character of those people. However, for this to make sense this hypothesis needs to survive contact with the evidence or it must be discarded, and the hypothesis that—say—MBS is a religious fanatic doesn’t do that. Neither his domestic nor foreign agendas match up with someone who considers religious concerns a priority in their governance, so the situation we’re looking at (the fact that Saudi Arabia executes people for criticizing Islam) needs to be explained some other way.
I am absolutely not widening the definition, I stand by my claim that regimes like the Saudi are literally fanatics by any sensible definition just as much as the Iranian regime is. And their death penalty for apostasy is part of that.
The fact that you can do other normal things without the death penalty does not change that the things that are fanatic remain fanatic.
I have no idea what your agenda is, but it certainly isn’t compatible with democracy or humanism if you defend a regime like the Saudi.
Uh for the record fuck the Saudi regime. That aside you’re either not actually reading anything I say or you think “secular nationalist dictator” is a string of words that can be a defense of someone, and either way this isn’t a conversation worth having, so instead I’ll just say: “Fanatic” is a word that describes people, not things.
WTF? Of course a toaster can’t be fanatic!?!?!?! What’s you point. Also a nationalist dictator can be equally fanatic, I never claimed otherwise!?!?!
What are you on about? None of that changes the fact that the Saudi regime is both religious and fanatic, any debate on whether they would be as fanatic without relifion is irrelevant, because that’s not the reality we are dealing with.