Al Qaeda hating freedom is denotationally true (by the definition of freedom you are currently using), but connotationally false.
Al Qaeda didn’t attack us because they were innately evil. They attacked us because they thought we were innately evil. If thinking someone is innately evil makes you innately evil, then I guess they are innately evil, but they’re also correct.
This is kind of a weird case. The connotation of “Al-Qaeda attacked us because they hate our freedoms” here is something like “boo Al-Qaeda”, which is neither true nor false; if we take the connotational loading out, it comes out to something like “Al-Qaeda perpetrated the 9/11 (and etc.) attacks because it objected to American values regarding religious tolerance, latitude of accepted sexual behavior, etc.” Which is more or less exactly what the quoted manifesto says, though I don’t think it necessarily implies that they think Americans are innately evil; evil, certainly, but not intrinsically so or they wouldn’t be trying to call us to Islam. (There were other motivations, of course, and you could argue that they were more important under the hood if not necessarily in rhetoric; but I’ll leave that to the geopolitics nerds.)
That still doesn’t mean there are little XML tags reading etched on their souls, though. They came to those opinions for a reason, just as we Americans came to honor concepts like “freedom” for a reason, and most of the things we can say about the one apply to the other. Consequences are, notably, not one of these things, but inherent evil doesn’t make any sense in terms of consequential analysis anyway.
Al Qaeda hating freedom is denotationally true (by the definition of freedom you are currently using), but connotationally false.
Al Qaeda didn’t attack us because they were innately evil. They attacked us because they thought we were innately evil. If thinking someone is innately evil makes you innately evil, then I guess they are innately evil, but they’re also correct.
This is kind of a weird case. The connotation of “Al-Qaeda attacked us because they hate our freedoms” here is something like “boo Al-Qaeda”, which is neither true nor false; if we take the connotational loading out, it comes out to something like “Al-Qaeda perpetrated the 9/11 (and etc.) attacks because it objected to American values regarding religious tolerance, latitude of accepted sexual behavior, etc.” Which is more or less exactly what the quoted manifesto says, though I don’t think it necessarily implies that they think Americans are innately evil; evil, certainly, but not intrinsically so or they wouldn’t be trying to call us to Islam. (There were other motivations, of course, and you could argue that they were more important under the hood if not necessarily in rhetoric; but I’ll leave that to the geopolitics nerds.)
That still doesn’t mean there are little XML tags reading etched on their souls, though. They came to those opinions for a reason, just as we Americans came to honor concepts like “freedom” for a reason, and most of the things we can say about the one apply to the other. Consequences are, notably, not one of these things, but inherent evil doesn’t make any sense in terms of consequential analysis anyway.