12 killed in shooting at satirical newspaper office in Paris

Maybe this video will help get the point across.

 

ok, ill send an email to the BBC and CNN to tell them to only do news papers from Monday and drop all this modern moving image stuff.

rejection of a media/medium due to personal preference is fine, but to say that the media type is a problem is fundamentally wrong, I think you forgot yourself so its fine.


As a side that Caspian Report dude is pretty good, comes across as factually accurate and very almost overly even handed non biased.

 

No offense, mate, I just don't do news on video.

 

If you want to genuinely understand the issues we are debating here, then you'll make an effort to watch a few five-minute clips. If you can't be asked, perhaps it's time to bow out.

 

5 minutes spent reading is more efficient

 

I see anonymous have declared war on them now by tracking them down and removing all their social media campaign stuff. I hope it's legit! Silence the campaign would be a massive help! Can't link the article on my phone I'm afraid but just google it!

Sent from Bittech Android app

 

So why mention it? And some perspectives might have the troubles starting quite some time before the government reacted to what was going on...

Anyway....


I am Not Charlie This link is well worth a read, and No-one was murdered because of this image but it offends me, and it was intended to.

 

All I know is that those poor innocent hostages woke up yesterday expecting a normal day and are now not here because of those *****. Unforgivable.

 

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http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=869_1420833044

 

When we have to deal with a major problem of Christians committing terrorist acts and explaining this as being due to their Christian faith then we can talk about that.

But the issue is that the vast majority of deaths from terrorism worldwide are down to individuals and groups that state that their acts are justified and/or required by their understanding of their faith.

Sure they may all have social, mental, whatever issues. But the catalyst to translate this into attempted or actual mass-murder is always this particular ideology of violent, political Islam. And that ideology is the problem that faces us. There just isn't an equivalent problem coming from radical Christian or Buddhist originated ideologues.

Clearly I must not forget how stupid people you don't agree with you may appear to be.

 

See above.

The reason that there are so many Islamist terrorists is because the West has been effectively astroturfing the Middle East and Asia for their proliferation for the last three decades. To wit:

• Western funding with money and materials of Fundamentalist Islamic schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the 80's to breed the next generation of Jihadists to kick the Soviets out of Afghanistan, which contributed to the emergence of the Taliban and of Al-Qaeda;
• The invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, replaced by an ad hoc government of mainly Shiite officials who then went on to alienate the Sunni minority. This led to an effective civil war and left the country wide open for ISIS to come across from Syria and proliferate like rabbits.

That's why they are such a big problem.

And seeing as we are talking about catalysts, the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq have been mentioned time and again by Islamist terrorists and their sympathisers as the events that turned them to this violent ideology for the first time.

No, it's their emotive distortions of what I am supposed to have said that do it for me.

 

These points

Don't actually counter this point.

 

Risky argues that fundamentalist Islam is a special problem because it creates so many terrorists. I argue that any extremist ideology contributes to terrorism, but also that it is a modulator (i.e. it shapes how the problem manifests itself) rather than a root cause.

Risky says I'm wrong: the higher ratio of Islamist terrorists to terrorists of any other ideology proves that. I state that this higher ratio has nothing to do with this ideology creating more terrorists than other extremist ideologies, but with the fact that we --in one case quite deliberately, I may add-- created the conditions for these specific terrorists to grow and thrive in.

When someone suffers from a delusion that they are appointed by God to kill infidels, you do not try and fight the delusion (have you ever tried to tell a delusional that he's wrong?). You try and figure out what made him delusional in the first place and address that problem.*

I do wonder why Risky gets so heated up about this. It's not as if I'm saying that Islamist terrorists are not bad guys. It's not as if I'm saying they're just poor misunderstood boys. I am saying that it is the extremist nature of the ideology, rather than the religious orientation that is the problem, and I am saying that this is a shaping influence on terrorism rather than a root cause. Something is going on with a certain group of people that they feel attracted to an extremist ideology, suspend all personal rational and moral judgement and go out killing people and get killed over an abstract cause. I wonder why such a proposition causes such an emotional response.


* You do not, incidentally, help him build schools where he can teach his delusions to children, and you do not create power vacuums in countries where he wishes to take control.

 

Just a hint, When a US or UK military action kills civilians, it's because the mission went wrong. When Al-Queda, SI, Boko Haram et al kill cilivilians, it's because their operation was sucessfull. This is a handy way of working out who is the terrorist as you may be having problems with this.

And moreover, the 2003 war did not happen because President Bush was a Christian. There were votes in congress and also in the UK, Poland, Australia. The ultimate reason behind it was a miscalculation in the process of moving from a reactive foreign policy to a pre-emptive, after 9/11 showed that reactive wasn't the whole solution, but please this is surely a debate for another thread, which you can start if you wish, particularly given that France was opposed to the war in the first place.

 

Just a hint: I think that to the civilians at the receiving end that distinction is kind of academic (especially when they are used to getting brutalised by their own governments). Saying that you didn't mean to kill them is neither exoneration nor justification.

The terrorists don't think that they are terrorists either. ISIS thinks itself an army with a mandate from the state it is busy creating. It organises itself like an army, has uniforms and emblems, and in its rhetoric and propaganda refers to itself as an army. And it sees itself fighting a war. The Kouachi brothers, in their few statements over the telephone and to one of the hostages talked about themselves as being soldiers fighting a war, and that they "don't kill civilians" and aren't "murderers". They just have their own idea about who the civilians are, and who legitimate targets. The Lee Rigby murderer Michael Adebolajo said: "I don't want anyone to die. I just want the soldiers out of my country.". He, too, saw himself as fighting a war, and killing an enemy soldier. That's the problem with terrorists: they don't think they're the bad guys.

This messed up logic reminds me of how the West has been approaching the issue of "enemy combatants" and how they put a lot of people in cold storage in Gitmo, off US soil so that they fall outside its legal restrictions on how either civilian criminals or enemy soldiers should be treated.

Sure, the US did not set out to harm civilians directly, but it did feel entitled to determine how they should live and under what values. Slippery slope, that. And for Bush to then prattle on about how his Christian God told him to do that, at a political summit in front of an assembled audience of Muslim countries may cause people to interpret that in a very particular light.

 

But there are Christian extremists: Westboro Baptist Church, while not necessarily violent, does preach religion-inspired messages of hate; the attacks (including firebombings and murder) of abortion centres in America are carried out by people calling themselves Christians; even the KKK had Christian religious overtones (despite being just as anti-Catholic as they were anti-Semite or anti-black).

There have been many acts of Buddhist extremism and violence.

Perhaps we don't see as much Christian extremism because the West is predominantly Christian anyway. There's no displaced diaspora to create feelings of isolation, there's no bored second- or third-generation of Westernised children and nobody's invading a Western Christian country. The causes just aren't there in Christianity to create the kind of extremism that we see with Islamists.

Perhaps if ISIS were to invade a Western, Christian country perhaps we'd start seeing Christian extremist fighters?

 

Well I think the distinction is important. The current operations vs IS way well kill some civilians but have also saved many by preventing IS adcancing. They are not morally equivalent to killing people ina supermarket. Even if tge terrorist say so. And yes ever if he thinks that killing the Jews is OK in any case.


And given that this was France, much of the objection is to theirintervention in Mali. Shoot they stop that intervention because it may be considered objectionable to some potential terrorists.

 

It is our actions in Iraq in the first place that allowed ISIS to proliferate. It originated and gained foothold as part of the Sunni insurgency against the coalition forces and the new Iraqi government. It expanded into Syria to take advantage of the power vacuum created by the civil war there.

I think that it is facile and unhelpful to just dismiss terrorists as evil and to pin the cause on a specific extremist ideology. Not only is it a gross oversimplification of how humans work, but such a profound lack of understanding does not actually help us address the problem preventatively.

Moreover --and this is very important-- it leads to the false dichotomy that if the terrorists are terrorists because they believe in extremist ideology X, then we and others who don't believe in it must be the good guys, and beyond reproach. To wit: That the morality of killing civilians can be measured on a sliding scale.

 

German newspaper got firebombed in Hamburg for daring to reprint some cartoons.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/01/11/germany-newspaper-attack-idUSL6N0UQ0CB20150111