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[Brussels Bombings] 31~ Dead, 250~ Injured

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Posts

  • jungleroomxjungleroomx It's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovels Registered User regular
    Oh, and just to make this sort of a public statement, if your discussion point is "WE SHOULD DO X" and you have absolutely no idea how, then it's not a policy debate.

    It's a sloganeering competition.

  • KaputaKaputa Registered User regular
    edited March 2016
    In regard to trying to eliminate or reduce this threat, the major efforts need to be made in regard to foreign policy. Some domestic approaches can make attacks less likely, but the phenomenon of radicalized European Muslims launching suicide assaults in EU countries can't be entirely separated from the modern trend of salafi-jihadists growing in size and scope, becoming linked, establishing media/internet presence, and even creating governance structures.

    The other wars and conflicts that have torn apart much the Middle East and North Africa - especially in Syria, but also Iraq, Yemen, and Libya - are what give these war-cult like groups room to expand and take root. And in that respect, I do not think that the US and its allies are winning overall. IS has gradually been losing ground to various enemies in its Syrian/Iraqi core, but in various other countries (Yemen, Libya, Afghanistan, some others), jihadist movements have gained ground in the last couple of years), and the list of failed or failing states has been growing larger rather than smaller.

    Finally, the financial and military support of US allies - primarily Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar- for jihadists and, particularly in Saudi Arabia's case, longstanding support for the proliferation of salafi/Wahhabi ideology in the form of an extreme clerical establishment, Saudi media, and funding for radical madrassas, is another elephant the room.

    Unless these issues are actually resolved or at least greatly mitigated, it seems difficult to imagine a real solution to the international jihadist threat. The world will continue to be destabilized as long as MENA is in flames.

    edit - I don't mean to suggest that US and EU foreign policy alone can necessarily resolve the problem, either

    Kaputa on
  • caligynefobcaligynefob DKRegistered User regular
    Enc wrote: »
    Also, a populace that stomps on another and then gets attacked isn't "Blame the victim" when we point out they were stomping on another. I'd say 99% of time the use of terroristic force is unjustified, but when a kid brings a knife to school and stabs the bully who has been stealing his lunch money and beating him up for months, the bully doesn't get much sympathy. The stabber goes to counseling/jail depending on the age, but the bully is still a fucking bully.
    Are you shitting me? EVERY time there's a radical Islamist attack on the West, there's always people like you who wring their hands and say "oh maybe it's our fault we're getting blown up".

    No. That is unfair to the actual victims of the attack and it's a bullshit argument besides. I'm sure there are poor Buddhists and Hindus in Europe, but they're not committing terrorist attacks. There are no Buddhist bombings. There are no Hindus strapping bombs to themselves and detonating them in bus stations while screaming a chant to Vishnu. Why is it only Islam?

    Despite what my conservative colleagues think, it's not because of the beliefs or teachings of Islam itself. It's because there are multiple organizations dedicated to promoting terror and Wahhabist hatred and they're pouring money, agents, and materiel into Europe. They need to be cut off. Interpol needs to step up its game, known radicals should be tracked, mosques that teach hate and radicalism should be shut down and their imams deported- there's a precedent for this in Frances anti-cult laws. Think Scientology. Importantly, Europe's police should be given the latitude, laws, and funding needed to do their job properly, instead of relying on patchwork jurisdictions and antiquated laws- radicals willing to come back to the light can't even plea bargain to inform on their cronies.

    And perhaps most importantly of all, Europe should stop whistling past the graveyard on this one. The more bombings, the more massacres, the more beheadings- all of those feed into the anti-Muslim elements. The proper response is not to tell those elements to shut up, the proper response is to stop the bombings. Singing "Kumbaya" is not going to stop a single bombing and there will always be young idiots willing to bomb, no matter how well treated they are. Remember, most of the terrorists have been middle-class kids from good families.

    You come close to arguing against your point here. Yes, these protections can and should be done. Yes there are precedent.

    Why are these attacks being funneled towards Europe rather than, say, China or Russia or Brazil or even the US? Lax security isn't the reason, if that were the case any number of tiny western countries would have been hit first across the globe, and not jest in Western Europe. Generally speaking these attacks are performed by people of the states they attack, driven to these attacks as their only form of outlet for systematic othering and discrimination.

    This isn't blame the victim. The ~400 Belgians that were hit by these attacks are not to blame, but Belgian culture and government does have a broken system for handling their immigrant populations which makes finding the saps willing to kill themselves much, much easier for extremists. Part of the reason you dont find Buddhist or Hindu or Sikh or Shinto militants in Europe is that those of these backgrounds generally are more tolerated and better integrated by the societies they represent. If you looked back in the 1890s there were actually considerable elements of Hindu protest for the time in London. However, in the modern world we as western culture are both friendly and accepting of these groups more than Islam. This is due to many, many complicated historical problems between the west and Islamic culture which cannot be ignored.

    No one is suggesting to not take reasonable actions to stop attacks. Security services should do what they can. But this isn't a simple issue and without understanding just how people actually get to the point of becoming radicalized you cannot truly make effective efforts to prevent it. It's ignoring the housefire while extinguishing the bedroom. Yes, you solved all of your immediate fire problems, but they will only get worse unless you deal with the source.

    No, Belgium was targeted because their security sucks:
    U.S. counterterrorism officials are frustrated and angry at Belgium’s inability to tackle ISIS terror cells that are successfully plotting murderous attacks on the West from inside the country’s tiny capital city.

    The twin terror attacks in Brussels that left at least 30 dead and 230 injured on Tuesday, despite repeated warnings from Washington, left U.S. officials fuming.

    A senior U.S. intelligence officer likened the Belgian security forces to “children.”

    “It’s really shitty tradecraft,” the agent told The Daily Beast.

    Brussels has become a hotbed of terrorism—concentrated in the Molenbeek district near the city center—and yet the Belgians have made little progress in disrupting a network of violent extremists linked to last year’s Paris attacks that killed 130 people.

    Even before the arrest last week in Brussels of Salah Abdeslam, a suspected terrorist behind the Paris attack, there were worries among many U.S. counterterrorism officials of an attack in Belgium. The Belgian authorities had long struggled to resource a counterterrorism campaign. At the same time, it ostracized its burgeoning minority communities, creating isolated enclaves like Molenbeek where potential jihadists could easily hide.

    After Abdeslam’s arrest, many in Belgium feared a retaliatory attack. But while U.S. officials sought to help as part of a growing push for U.S. and European cooperation, there were limits, given Belgium’s limited security resources and amid a growing migration community from places like Syria.

    News of Tuesday’s attack was met in some parts of Washington with resigned frustration.

    “There was only so much we could do to help,” one official explained to The Daily Beast.

    “Belgium has been stepping up the amount of people they’re devoting to intelligence and law enforcement but they’re playing catch-up and we’re seeing the terrible results of that today,” Rep. Adam Schiff, the senior Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said on MSNBC.

    Indeed, an official said there were warnings as recent as this weekend.

    A frustrated U.S. intelligence official bemoaned the state of the counterterrorism apparatus in Belgium and across Europe.

    “Even with the EU in general, there’s an infiltration of jihadists that’s been happening for two decades. And now they’re just starting to work on this. When we have to contact these people or send our guys over to talk to them, we’re essentially talking with people who are—I’m just going to put it bluntly—children. They are not pro-active, they don’t know what’s going on. They’re in such denial. It’s such a frightening thing to admit their country is being taken over.”

    The end result is that Belgium has been targeted as a base camp for violent extremists.


    “Jihadists think that Europe is the soft underbelly of the West and Belgium is the soft underbelly of Europe,” said French terror expert Gilles Kepel.

    Many of the major recent attacks in Europe have clear links to Belgium. In May 2014, French ex-Syria jihadist Mehdi Nemmouche went to the Belgian capital to attack the Jewish museum in Brussels. There are Brussels links to the weapons used by Amedy Coulibaly in his attack on a Jewish supermarket on Jan. 9, 2015, shortly after the Jan. 7 attacks on Charlie Hebdo, and the Paris attack in November last year has clear ties to the Molenbeek neighborhood specifically. Many of its attackers either resided or grew up in the borough.

    Jean-Charles Brisard, the author of a biography of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of ISIS’s earlier incarnation al Qaeda in Iraq, said it’s more useful to think about the ISIS phenomenon in Western Europe as a Francophone network because the operatives in Brussels are a mix of French and Belgian nationals.

    Brisard calculates that 534 Belgians have gone to Syria and about 200 have returned; he believes the French-Belgian ISIS apparatus is much greater than European security officials initially thought.

    Tracking the individuals is a mammoth task.

    “For now, the networks comprise basically 20 individuals around the 10 [Paris] terrorists,” he said. “So it’s least 30. It’s still looking like four or five connected but there might be more that we don’t know yet.” For every terror suspect being surveilled it takes between 20 and 25 counterterrorism officials to track him. Coulibaly, for example, was using 20 different phones, according to Brisard, and each required a different officer to monitor the incoming and outgoing calls.

    The Belgians are unwilling or unable to commit that kind of manpower, one of the country’s counterterrorism officials told BuzzFeed a week before the attack.

    “Frankly, we don’t have the infrastructure to properly investigate or monitor hundreds of individuals suspected of terror links,” he said.

    The problem is exacerbated in Brussels because the local police force is divided into six police corps spread over 19 boroughs (particularly odd since the population is only 1.3 million). Sharing intelligence is complicated by the silos.

    Robin Simcox, a British-born specialist on European terror networks who now works at the conservative Heritage Foundation, says the Paris and Brussels attacks prove that European intelligence agencies have been comforting themselves—and their constituencies—with a fallacy for a decade.

    “What have they been saying since 7/7?” Simcox asked, referring to the al Qaeda bombings in London in July 2005. “‘Oh, those kinds of attacks are not possible anymore. Any time a network gets too big, we find out about it. Anyone tries to construct a suicide vest, we’ll get it. The attacks will be knives and guns.’ Well, it’s the emperor has no clothes, isn’t it? It happened in Paris, now Brussels; it nearly happened in Verviers back in January [2015]. All kinds of assumptions about the kind of threat we were going to be facing in coming years. And we were all too complacent about it.”

    The Belgian field commander, if not quite the “mastermind” of the Paris attacks, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, had previously been linked to four separate terror plots in Europe. He got away each time.

    He was thought to have “guided” Nemmouche, the Frenchman who shot up the Jewish museum in Brussels. In the attack planned but later aborted in Verviers, Abaaoud had remotely instructed two Belgian nationals, Sofiane Amghar and Khalid Ben Larbi, who fought with ISIS’s elite Battar Brigade.

    Abaaoud had been in Greece at the time, and subsequently returned to Syria after Belgian commandos raided Amghar and Ben Larbi’s safe house in Verviers. (The operation constituted the largest firefight in Belgium since the end of World War II.) Abaaoud was also involved in the failed attack on a high-speed train from Paris to Amsterdam in August 2015. It failed only because three American tourists, two of them in the Oregon National Guard, wrestled the AK-47-wielding gunman to the ground before he could kill anyone.

    In a February 2015 issue of ISIS’s propaganda magazine Dabiq, Abaaoud boasts about being able to slip by a continent-wide dragnet for him, despite the fact that European security services all had a recent photograph of him, which had been published by a Western journalist.

    “I suddenly saw my picture all over the media, but… the kuffar were blinded by Allah. I was even stopped by an officer who contemplated me so as to compare me to the picture, but he let me go, as he did not see the resemblance! This was nothing but a gift from Allah!”

    Abaaoud’s turn from first-generation Belgian into international terrorist follows an all-too-familiar script to those who monitor European jihadism. Although he was once enrolled in the Catholic college Saint-Pierre, an elite school in a tony suburb of Brussels, he dropped out and took to a life of gangsterism and petty crime.

    He met Salah Abdeslam and Abdeslam’s brother Brahim (another one of the Paris attackers) when all three were in their late teens or early twenties, hanging about Molenbeek. In 2010, Abaaoud and Salah Abdeslam were convicted of armed robbery after they tried to break into a garage in Ottingnes, a town southeast of Brussels. In 2012, Abaaoud went to jail again for hitting someone in the town of Dendermonde.

    Abaaoud apparently radicalized in prison and upon his release, he fell in with a crowd of Islamists, including a veteran of the Afghan jihad against the Soviets in the 1980s, a Moroccan called Khalid Zerkani. The man went by the sobriquet Papa Noel (Santa Claus), owing to his generosity with money: he’d disburse as much as 4,500 euros for aspiring mujahidin seeking to travel to Syria.

    Many of those wandering mujahidin have now returned to Brussels; and there is little confidence that the Belgian authorities will be able to stop their murderous plots against the West.

    http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/03/22/u-s-officials-bash-shitty-belgian-security-forces.html

    Also, since Erdogan is human trash, I want independent confirmation, but Erdogan claims Belgium was outright specifically warned about one of the terrorists after they were deported, likely trying to join ISIS in Syria, so case in point.

    Moreover, that is absolutely victim blaming, and it's wrong. These are shitty people who are being radicalized by a dangerous ideology, intentionally. It's not Belgium's fault that Wahhabism and some other strains of Islam are morally bankrupt, and are used as a foreign policy tool / weapon by major regional powers. Terrorism isn't the fault of all Muslims, but it sure is the fault of reactionary Muslims, because they encourage a pre-modern and dangerous ideology that causes these conflicts with the west.

    http://www.reuters.com/article/us-belgium-blast-usa-intelligence-idUSKCN0WQ0BU

    It seems that Belgium have had a tough time coordinating efforts between agencies and frankly underestimating the problems with suburbs like Molenbeek for far too long.

    PS4 - Mrfuzzyhat
  • programjunkieprogramjunkie Registered User regular
    In their defense, it's legitimately very difficult from an organizational perspective, a technical perspective, a moral perspective, and legal perspective.

  • Kipling217Kipling217 Registered User regular
    Not helped by Belgium being a very dysfunctional state. Its essentially two states Flanders and Wallonia tied together by the barest of threads and at time actively working against each other. It took 18 months after the federal election of 2010 for a working government to form.

    Initiatives to maintain a functioning Belgian state is opposed by a significant minority. Initiatives like a strong federal police force that can investigate terrorism. Initiatives like helping poor immigrants assimilate. They don't want to be in the same state as those Flemish/Wallons, much less the musslemen.

    Its

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  • The EnderThe Ender Registered User regular
    edited March 2016
    As suspected, the bombs used in Brussels have been identified as acetone based homemade liquid bombs; they can be made very cheaply & without buying a surplus of the active ingredients, with the trade-off being that they can be unreliable if the components aren't mixed in the correct proportions. Lax security can't really be faulted in terms of blocking logistics on that one.

    EU is holding a 'crisis meeting' to see what kind of extra intra-coalition resources it's member states are willing to pool (if any) to help alleviate understaffing in some intelligence & policing agencies. Apparently the talks are not expected to be very cordial. :|

    The Ender on
    With Love and Courage
  • Panda4YouPanda4You Registered User regular
    The Ender wrote: »
    EU is holding a 'crisis meeting' to see what kind of extra intra-coalition resources it's member states are willing to pool (if any) to help alleviate understaffing in some intelligence & policing agencies. Apparently the talks are not expected to be very cordial. :|
    Is anything in the EU these days? :lol:

  • LeitnerLeitner Registered User regular
    ...
    The Ender wrote: »
    As suspected, the bombs used in Brussels have been identified as acetone based homemade liquid bombs; they can be made very cheaply & without buying a surplus of the active ingredients, with the trade-off being that they can be unreliable if the components aren't mixed in the correct proportions. Lax security can't really be faulted in terms of blocking logistics on that one.

    EU is holding a 'crisis meeting' to see what kind of extra intra-coalition resources it's member states are willing to pool (if any) to help alleviate understaffing in some intelligence & policing agencies. Apparently the talks are not expected to be very cordial. :|

    Cries for greater access to Five Eyes and SSEUR incoming, despite how unilateral any benefit there would be.

  • Emissary42Emissary42 Registered User regular
    The Ender wrote: »
    As suspected, the bombs used in Brussels have been identified as acetone based homemade liquid bombs; they can be made very cheaply & without buying a surplus of the active ingredients, with the trade-off being that they can be unreliable if the components aren't mixed in the correct proportions. Lax security can't really be faulted in terms of blocking logistics on that one.

    EU is holding a 'crisis meeting' to see what kind of extra intra-coalition resources it's member states are willing to pool (if any) to help alleviate understaffing in some intelligence & policing agencies. Apparently the talks are not expected to be very cordial. :|

    Just a correction, the compound is a solid precipitate. It's also basically impossible to keep someone from making it due to the common uses of its components; I won't say how it's done, but looking at the Wikipedia page on it for about five seconds is about all it takes to figure it out.

  • PaladinPaladin Registered User regular
    Emissary42 wrote: »
    The Ender wrote: »
    As suspected, the bombs used in Brussels have been identified as acetone based homemade liquid bombs; they can be made very cheaply & without buying a surplus of the active ingredients, with the trade-off being that they can be unreliable if the components aren't mixed in the correct proportions. Lax security can't really be faulted in terms of blocking logistics on that one.

    EU is holding a 'crisis meeting' to see what kind of extra intra-coalition resources it's member states are willing to pool (if any) to help alleviate understaffing in some intelligence & policing agencies. Apparently the talks are not expected to be very cordial. :|

    Just a correction, the compound is a solid precipitate. It's also basically impossible to keep someone from making it due to the common uses of its components; I won't say how it's done, but looking at the Wikipedia page on it for about five seconds is about all it takes to figure it out.

    Also all it takes for the department of Homeland Security to register your IP

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  • The EnderThe Ender Registered User regular
    The Belgian Minister of the Interior and Minister of Justice have both offered to resign after conceding that there were significant failures in security (mostly surrounding the fact that the suspects were all known to Interpol and were on multiple terrorist watch lists), and those failures helped to facilitate the attacks.


    The Belgian PM has thus far refused to accept the resignations.

    With Love and Courage
  • Emissary42Emissary42 Registered User regular
    Yet more wonderful details: the two brothers in the Brussels attack had been surveilling the country's top nuclear official. The goal: kidnap him in an attempt to obtain access to nuclear material for a dirty bomb.

  • m!ttensm!ttens he/himRegistered User regular
    Emissary42 wrote: »
    The goal: kidnap him in an attempt to obtain access to nuclear material for a dirty bomb.

    That's like 80s action movie plot bad... Do they think the Top Nuclear Official™ spends his Saturday nights in his basement tinkering with fissile material? Or that any nation-state would trade said material for safe return of a hostage??

  • Emissary42Emissary42 Registered User regular
    m!ttens wrote: »
    Emissary42 wrote: »
    The goal: kidnap him in an attempt to obtain access to nuclear material for a dirty bomb.

    That's like 80s action movie plot bad... Do they think the Top Nuclear Official™ spends his Saturday nights in his basement tinkering with fissile material? Or that any nation-state would trade said material for safe return of a hostage??

    No one said they were particularly intelligent.

  • evilthecatevilthecat Registered User regular
    sadly they gave it an honest go:

    http://www.independent.ie/world-news/europe/brussels-attacks-nuclear-alert-after-security-officer-found-dead-with-his-pass-stolen-34574232.html

    They theoretically had access to certain parts of a nuclear plant.

    tip.. tip.. TALLY.. HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
  • IncenjucarIncenjucar VChatter Seattle, WARegistered User regular
    evilthecat wrote: »
    sadly they gave it an honest go:

    http://www.independent.ie/world-news/europe/brussels-attacks-nuclear-alert-after-security-officer-found-dead-with-his-pass-stolen-34574232.html

    They theoretically had access to certain parts of a nuclear plant.

    Well, that's one way for them to increase oil profits for the people who recruited them. :(

  • wiltingwilting I had fun once and it was awful Registered User regular
    edited March 2016
    So I just saw a report on BBC news about how a "group calling themselves 'Fascists against terrorism'" disrupted a vigil for the bombing victims and accosted muslim women at the scene before being dispersed by police.

    Except I could clearly see in the pictures that the banner the protesters were holding said "Casuals against terrorism" and some digging revealed that 'Casuals' is a term for football gangs that don't wear club colours. I wouldn't be surprised if fascist was an accurate moniker for these protesters, but the way it was reported came across as more interested in making it clear that these are bad people than with the facts on the ground, and made me doubt the veracity of other reported details (such as trampling on flowers etc).

    It just felt a bit dishonest, like an example of the kind of thing that turns people against the "elites" and drives them into the arms of extremist groups.

    wilting on
  • Zilla360Zilla360 21st Century. |She/Her| Trans* Woman In Aviators Firing A Bazooka. ⚛️Registered User regular
    edited March 2016
    Incenjucar wrote: »
    evilthecat wrote: »
    sadly they gave it an honest go:

    http://www.independent.ie/world-news/europe/brussels-attacks-nuclear-alert-after-security-officer-found-dead-with-his-pass-stolen-34574232.html

    They theoretically had access to certain parts of a nuclear plant.

    Well, that's one way for them to increase oil profits for the people who recruited them. :(
    It's good that they followed recommended IT security protocol(s) and revoked a whole bunch of ID/swipe/RFID access cards following the murder.

    We're only lucky that ISIS/Daesh are so dumb.

    Zilla360 on
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  • descdesc Goretexing to death Registered User regular
    wilting wrote: »
    So I just saw a report on BBC news about how a "group calling themselves 'Fascists against terrorism'" disrupted a vigil for the bombing victims and accosted muslim women at the scene before being dispersed by police.

    Except I could clearly see in the pictures that the banner the protesters were holding said "Casuals against terrorism" and some digging revealed that 'Casuals' is a term for football gangs that don't wear club colours. I wouldn't be surprised if fascist was an accurate moniker for these protesters, but the way it was reported came across as more interested in making it clear that these are bad people than with the facts on the ground, and made me doubt the veracity of other reported details (such as trampling on flowers etc).

    It just felt a bit dishonest, like an example of the kind of thing that turns people against the "elites" and drives them into the arms of extremist groups.

    There are leftist / socialist / antifa casuals and football clubs too -- you can't assume one way or another without knowing the team and the club in question.

  • RchanenRchanen Registered User regular
    wilting wrote: »
    So I just saw a report on BBC news about how a "group calling themselves 'Fascists against terrorism'" disrupted a vigil for the bombing victims and accosted muslim women at the scene before being dispersed by police.

    Except I could clearly see in the pictures that the banner the protesters were holding said "Casuals against terrorism" and some digging revealed that 'Casuals' is a term for football gangs that don't wear club colours. I wouldn't be surprised if fascist was an accurate moniker for these protesters, but the way it was reported came across as more interested in making it clear that these are bad people than with the facts on the ground, and made me doubt the veracity of other reported details (such as trampling on flowers etc).

    It just felt a bit dishonest, like an example of the kind of thing that turns people against the "elites" and drives them into the arms of extremist groups.

    BBC already corrected the story.

  • wiltingwilting I had fun once and it was awful Registered User regular
    Thumbs up!

  • NSDFRandNSDFRand FloridaRegistered User regular
    Preacher wrote: »
    Terrorist org's always claim responsibility immediately following something, doesn't mean they actually did it. I believe ISIS claimed San Bernadino was theirs as well when it was just a wannabe.

    While they weren't directly responsible, the "cyber Caliphate" can and does have a huge influence "lone wolf" and "lone wolf pack" (not the kind from The Hangover) attacks.

    That's part of the difficulty in fighting groups: even their messaging can inspire others who are either directly radicalized (social media* makes this even easier) or "self radicalized" to conduct attacks by proxy.

    *Social media in particular is a "new" animal, and very few on the academic side are looking at how it is changing the face of terrorism. Luckily I was able to meet with (and take a class with) a person who happens to have been on the academic side of social media + terrorism since 2007 or so, and got some great insight into how it works.

  • NSDFRandNSDFRand FloridaRegistered User regular
    edited March 2016
    The thing eye in the sky pointed out in its trailers is that something need not be true for ISIS and their ilk to claim an information victory.

    This is a very important point. IO has been a key to "victory" for groups like this for a long time, but it was very easily observable at the height of the GWOT.

    Even in the age of instant information availability IO victories can still be had, especially when you take cognitive shaping and captology into consideration.
    The Ender wrote: »
    Savge wrote: »
    The Ender wrote: »
    Savge wrote: »
    mRahmani wrote: »
    Savge wrote: »
    Maybe Trump was right

    Oh fuck off

    Trump is these asshole's dream candidate.

    Here's what I see, no matter what we do — they win.

    Do nothing? They win.
    Tighten security? They win.
    Blow them away? They win.

    The majority of the Muslim world understands ISIS is bullshit. Anyone who can be radicalized at this point can probably be swayed no matter what we do, so let's do the one thing we still do best and end these fuckers.

    The guy who made these bombs is still on the loose.

    It's certainly a problem that their goals & methods are so low bar, but the idea that, "Well, we just need to go all Terminator on their asses already!" is just an emotionally satisfying response that has been touted as the 'obvious' solution ever since Castille crossed swords with the Moors.

    Killing jihadists and/or deciding to escalate the level of brutality against radicalized Muslims, even if somehow we want to claim that we don't care about the ethical ramifications of that kind of activity, does not work.


    Long term solutions involve opening new ventures & opportunities that youth that feel isolated / disaffected / insignificant and want something greater to aspire to. Obvious things that could be on offer are interesting career paths, specialized study, role models & job opportunities in popular culture, etc. Short term solutions mostly involve reaching out to Imams & other religious leaders, who are some of the only people known to have a proven track record for steering teenagers who feel lost away from violent radicalization.

    Do you know why those teenagers feel lost?

    Many of the same reasons any teenager can feel lost / isolated (...and on top of that, there can be extra complications for immigrants experiencing culture shock and/or feeling left out of the greater story their new country is telling, since they may not see the surrounding culture celebrating anything they identify with).

    Here is Maysa's story. Note the appeal of finding new friends, joining exclusive / secret clubs, doing something that is really special / romantic & feels like you're blazing a new trail in your life. Those can all be healthy & positive things, and I think most people can identify with at least some of them - but they can also be leveraged by gangs / cults / fundamentalists / etc to attract new recruits. That's much of the same story seen with ISIS (and other jihadist groups).

    Constructive outlets that can fill the same role but with different outcomes should be our focus, IMHO (again, long term).

    This is a great point, I wish my stuff was better organized so I could find some more academic writing on the subject (will return after going through my stuff) but socialization is a huge motivator for terrorist group cohesion, and is one of the reasons that groups may remain intact or active even after meeting their stated political goals.

    As far as providing other "socialization" outlets, that may work for some potential recruits, but one of the most influential factors of radicalization is social proximity to those who are already radicalized (friend, family member) and proximity to these groups and individuals (and violence) during childhood.

    NSDFRand on
  • NSDFRandNSDFRand FloridaRegistered User regular
    Prohass wrote: »
    How do these guys keep getting explosives?

    From what I had seen the claim is that the explosives were TATP (Tri Acetone Tri Peroxide), which can be made at home from products you can buy from beauty supply outlets and Walmart.

    ANFO (Ammonium Nitrate + Fuel Oil) can be made at home too, but you need access to chemical fertilizer (AN).

  • SanderJKSanderJK Crocodylus Pontifex Sinterklasicus Madrid, 3000 ADRegistered User regular
    Dutch newspapers definitely stand by calling them rightwing. They apparently yelled "Time to torch all mosques"

    Steam: SanderJK Origin: SanderJK
  • Dizzy DDizzy D NetherlandsRegistered User regular
    Enc wrote: »
    Also, a populace that stomps on another and then gets attacked isn't "Blame the victim" when we point out they were stomping on another. I'd say 99% of time the use of terroristic force is unjustified, but when a kid brings a knife to school and stabs the bully who has been stealing his lunch money and beating him up for months, the bully doesn't get much sympathy. The stabber goes to counseling/jail depending on the age, but the bully is still a fucking bully.
    Are you shitting me? EVERY time there's a radical Islamist attack on the West, there's always people like you who wring their hands and say "oh maybe it's our fault we're getting blown up".

    No. That is unfair to the actual victims of the attack and it's a bullshit argument besides. I'm sure there are poor Buddhists and Hindus in Europe, but they're not committing terrorist attacks. There are no Buddhist bombings. There are no Hindus strapping bombs to themselves and detonating them in bus stations while screaming a chant to Vishnu. Why is it only Islam?

    Despite what my conservative colleagues think, it's not because of the beliefs or teachings of Islam itself. It's because there are multiple organizations dedicated to promoting terror and Wahhabist hatred and they're pouring money, agents, and materiel into Europe. They need to be cut off. Interpol needs to step up its game, known radicals should be tracked, mosques that teach hate and radicalism should be shut down and their imams deported- there's a precedent for this in Frances anti-cult laws. Think Scientology. Importantly, Europe's police should be given the latitude, laws, and funding needed to do their job properly, instead of relying on patchwork jurisdictions and antiquated laws- radicals willing to come back to the light can't even plea bargain to inform on their cronies.

    And perhaps most importantly of all, Europe should stop whistling past the graveyard on this one. The more bombings, the more massacres, the more beheadings- all of those feed into the anti-Muslim elements. The proper response is not to tell those elements to shut up, the proper response is to stop the bombings. Singing "Kumbaya" is not going to stop a single bombing and there will always be young idiots willing to bomb, no matter how well treated they are. Remember, most of the terrorists have been middle-class kids from good families.

    You come close to arguing against your point here. Yes, these protections can and should be done. Yes there are precedent.

    Why are these attacks being funneled towards Europe rather than, say, China or Russia or Brazil or even the US? Lax security isn't the reason, if that were the case any number of tiny western countries would have been hit first across the globe, and not jest in Western Europe. Generally speaking these attacks are performed by people of the states they attack, driven to these attacks as their only form of outlet for systematic othering and discrimination.

    This isn't blame the victim. The ~400 Belgians that were hit by these attacks are not to blame, but Belgian culture and government does have a broken system for handling their immigrant populations which makes finding the saps willing to kill themselves much, much easier for extremists. Part of the reason you dont find Buddhist or Hindu or Sikh or Shinto militants in Europe is that those of these backgrounds generally are more tolerated and better integrated by the societies they represent. If you looked back in the 1890s there were actually considerable elements of Hindu protest for the time in London. However, in the modern world we as western culture are both friendly and accepting of these groups more than Islam. This is due to many, many complicated historical problems between the west and Islamic culture which cannot be ignored.

    No one is suggesting to not take reasonable actions to stop attacks. Security services should do what they can. But this isn't a simple issue and without understanding just how people actually get to the point of becoming radicalized you cannot truly make effective efforts to prevent it. It's ignoring the housefire while extinguishing the bedroom. Yes, you solved all of your immediate fire problems, but they will only get worse unless you deal with the source.

    No, Belgium was targeted because their security sucks:
    U.S. counterterrorism officials are frustrated and angry at Belgium’s inability to tackle ISIS terror cells that are successfully plotting murderous attacks on the West from inside the country’s tiny capital city.

    The twin terror attacks in Brussels that left at least 30 dead and 230 injured on Tuesday, despite repeated warnings from Washington, left U.S. officials fuming.

    A senior U.S. intelligence officer likened the Belgian security forces to “children.”

    “It’s really shitty tradecraft,” the agent told The Daily Beast.

    Brussels has become a hotbed of terrorism—concentrated in the Molenbeek district near the city center—and yet the Belgians have made little progress in disrupting a network of violent extremists linked to last year’s Paris attacks that killed 130 people.

    Even before the arrest last week in Brussels of Salah Abdeslam, a suspected terrorist behind the Paris attack, there were worries among many U.S. counterterrorism officials of an attack in Belgium. The Belgian authorities had long struggled to resource a counterterrorism campaign. At the same time, it ostracized its burgeoning minority communities, creating isolated enclaves like Molenbeek where potential jihadists could easily hide.

    After Abdeslam’s arrest, many in Belgium feared a retaliatory attack. But while U.S. officials sought to help as part of a growing push for U.S. and European cooperation, there were limits, given Belgium’s limited security resources and amid a growing migration community from places like Syria.

    News of Tuesday’s attack was met in some parts of Washington with resigned frustration.

    “There was only so much we could do to help,” one official explained to The Daily Beast.

    “Belgium has been stepping up the amount of people they’re devoting to intelligence and law enforcement but they’re playing catch-up and we’re seeing the terrible results of that today,” Rep. Adam Schiff, the senior Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said on MSNBC.

    Indeed, an official said there were warnings as recent as this weekend.

    A frustrated U.S. intelligence official bemoaned the state of the counterterrorism apparatus in Belgium and across Europe.

    “Even with the EU in general, there’s an infiltration of jihadists that’s been happening for two decades. And now they’re just starting to work on this. When we have to contact these people or send our guys over to talk to them, we’re essentially talking with people who are—I’m just going to put it bluntly—children. They are not pro-active, they don’t know what’s going on. They’re in such denial. It’s such a frightening thing to admit their country is being taken over.”

    The end result is that Belgium has been targeted as a base camp for violent extremists.


    “Jihadists think that Europe is the soft underbelly of the West and Belgium is the soft underbelly of Europe,” said French terror expert Gilles Kepel.

    Many of the major recent attacks in Europe have clear links to Belgium. In May 2014, French ex-Syria jihadist Mehdi Nemmouche went to the Belgian capital to attack the Jewish museum in Brussels. There are Brussels links to the weapons used by Amedy Coulibaly in his attack on a Jewish supermarket on Jan. 9, 2015, shortly after the Jan. 7 attacks on Charlie Hebdo, and the Paris attack in November last year has clear ties to the Molenbeek neighborhood specifically. Many of its attackers either resided or grew up in the borough.

    Jean-Charles Brisard, the author of a biography of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of ISIS’s earlier incarnation al Qaeda in Iraq, said it’s more useful to think about the ISIS phenomenon in Western Europe as a Francophone network because the operatives in Brussels are a mix of French and Belgian nationals.

    Brisard calculates that 534 Belgians have gone to Syria and about 200 have returned; he believes the French-Belgian ISIS apparatus is much greater than European security officials initially thought.

    Tracking the individuals is a mammoth task.

    “For now, the networks comprise basically 20 individuals around the 10 [Paris] terrorists,” he said. “So it’s least 30. It’s still looking like four or five connected but there might be more that we don’t know yet.” For every terror suspect being surveilled it takes between 20 and 25 counterterrorism officials to track him. Coulibaly, for example, was using 20 different phones, according to Brisard, and each required a different officer to monitor the incoming and outgoing calls.

    The Belgians are unwilling or unable to commit that kind of manpower, one of the country’s counterterrorism officials told BuzzFeed a week before the attack.

    “Frankly, we don’t have the infrastructure to properly investigate or monitor hundreds of individuals suspected of terror links,” he said.

    The problem is exacerbated in Brussels because the local police force is divided into six police corps spread over 19 boroughs (particularly odd since the population is only 1.3 million). Sharing intelligence is complicated by the silos.

    Robin Simcox, a British-born specialist on European terror networks who now works at the conservative Heritage Foundation, says the Paris and Brussels attacks prove that European intelligence agencies have been comforting themselves—and their constituencies—with a fallacy for a decade.

    “What have they been saying since 7/7?” Simcox asked, referring to the al Qaeda bombings in London in July 2005. “‘Oh, those kinds of attacks are not possible anymore. Any time a network gets too big, we find out about it. Anyone tries to construct a suicide vest, we’ll get it. The attacks will be knives and guns.’ Well, it’s the emperor has no clothes, isn’t it? It happened in Paris, now Brussels; it nearly happened in Verviers back in January [2015]. All kinds of assumptions about the kind of threat we were going to be facing in coming years. And we were all too complacent about it.”

    The Belgian field commander, if not quite the “mastermind” of the Paris attacks, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, had previously been linked to four separate terror plots in Europe. He got away each time.

    He was thought to have “guided” Nemmouche, the Frenchman who shot up the Jewish museum in Brussels. In the attack planned but later aborted in Verviers, Abaaoud had remotely instructed two Belgian nationals, Sofiane Amghar and Khalid Ben Larbi, who fought with ISIS’s elite Battar Brigade.

    Abaaoud had been in Greece at the time, and subsequently returned to Syria after Belgian commandos raided Amghar and Ben Larbi’s safe house in Verviers. (The operation constituted the largest firefight in Belgium since the end of World War II.) Abaaoud was also involved in the failed attack on a high-speed train from Paris to Amsterdam in August 2015. It failed only because three American tourists, two of them in the Oregon National Guard, wrestled the AK-47-wielding gunman to the ground before he could kill anyone.

    In a February 2015 issue of ISIS’s propaganda magazine Dabiq, Abaaoud boasts about being able to slip by a continent-wide dragnet for him, despite the fact that European security services all had a recent photograph of him, which had been published by a Western journalist.

    “I suddenly saw my picture all over the media, but… the kuffar were blinded by Allah. I was even stopped by an officer who contemplated me so as to compare me to the picture, but he let me go, as he did not see the resemblance! This was nothing but a gift from Allah!”

    Abaaoud’s turn from first-generation Belgian into international terrorist follows an all-too-familiar script to those who monitor European jihadism. Although he was once enrolled in the Catholic college Saint-Pierre, an elite school in a tony suburb of Brussels, he dropped out and took to a life of gangsterism and petty crime.

    He met Salah Abdeslam and Abdeslam’s brother Brahim (another one of the Paris attackers) when all three were in their late teens or early twenties, hanging about Molenbeek. In 2010, Abaaoud and Salah Abdeslam were convicted of armed robbery after they tried to break into a garage in Ottingnes, a town southeast of Brussels. In 2012, Abaaoud went to jail again for hitting someone in the town of Dendermonde.

    Abaaoud apparently radicalized in prison and upon his release, he fell in with a crowd of Islamists, including a veteran of the Afghan jihad against the Soviets in the 1980s, a Moroccan called Khalid Zerkani. The man went by the sobriquet Papa Noel (Santa Claus), owing to his generosity with money: he’d disburse as much as 4,500 euros for aspiring mujahidin seeking to travel to Syria.

    Many of those wandering mujahidin have now returned to Brussels; and there is little confidence that the Belgian authorities will be able to stop their murderous plots against the West.

    http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/03/22/u-s-officials-bash-shitty-belgian-security-forces.html

    Also, since Erdogan is human trash, I want independent confirmation, but Erdogan claims Belgium was outright specifically warned about one of the terrorists after they were deported, likely trying to join ISIS in Syria, so case in point.

    Moreover, that is absolutely victim blaming, and it's wrong. These are shitty people who are being radicalized by a dangerous ideology, intentionally. It's not Belgium's fault that Wahhabism and some other strains of Islam are morally bankrupt, and are used as a foreign policy tool / weapon by major regional powers. Terrorism isn't the fault of all Muslims, but it sure is the fault of reactionary Muslims, because they encourage a pre-modern and dangerous ideology that causes these conflicts with the west.

    Not independent confirmation, but there is an ongoing investigation over here regarding that the terrorist that was deported from Turkey.

    The only fact that is not disputed so far: He was deported to the Netherlands, despite having a Belgian passport.

    What happened then is still not proven either way (as said, ongoing investigation): the dutch government claims that turkish sent an e-mail to Dutch law enforcement/border patrol./customs (not sure of the right translation at the time and it's too late over here to look up the correct term, you get the idea) that the man in question was deported (standard procedure is to phone), but didn't state the reason why he was deported in that mail. The mail then never was forwarded by border patrol to various law enforcements. The opposition over here is sceptical and still has questions.

    So mostly "he said, she said" so far.

    Steam/Origin: davydizzy
  • Captain MarcusCaptain Marcus now arrives the hour of actionRegistered User regular
    hippofant wrote: »
    Please don't talk about the lack of Buddhist terrorism or Hindu terrorism when you clearly don't know the history of these religions. They might not happen in the West, but they absolutely happen in other parts of the world.
    ...if you read it again I clearly was referring to Europe in regards to Buddhist/Hindu terrorism, not Burma or India. The point was "here are a bunch of non-Christian non-white immigrants who don't blow up citizens in their new home, the difference between them and Muslims is that they don't have the equivalent of Saudi Arabia egging on the nutjobs."

    The Ender wrote: »
    But that is kind of besides the point, because this is not some conventional war being fought. Most of the martyrs are proxy agents that are born again and then wrap themselves into the mess. Most are entirely disconnected from what is happening in Syria / Iraq; they just want to do something (because they feel alienated / marginalized, for any number of reasons), they end-up reaching out to the wrong people and become radicalized as a result (the process of buy-in to violent action is often a little more involved, but nevertheless rarely follows a traditional logistics chain).
    Agreed. Islamic terrorism in the West today is not due to foreign policy decisions ala Pan Am Flight 103, it's because young, educated men become disaffected with their lives and make horrible decisions. Fitting in with peers is a powerful motivator, as is the desire to make your mark on the world.

    You probably won't agree with me on this but this is why I stress the removal of those imams and organizations which preach Wahhabist sentiments. Europe has far stricter free speech laws than America does, and if it's illegal to preach kill-the-gays sentiments then it's illegal to preach jihadism. Committing acts of violence is psychologically easier when you have someone in authority telling you it's okay. See: Milgram.

  • programjunkieprogramjunkie Registered User regular
    hippofant wrote: »
    Please don't talk about the lack of Buddhist terrorism or Hindu terrorism when you clearly don't know the history of these religions. They might not happen in the West, but they absolutely happen in other parts of the world.
    ...if you read it again I clearly was referring to Europe in regards to Buddhist/Hindu terrorism, not Burma or India. The point was "here are a bunch of non-Christian non-white immigrants who don't blow up citizens in their new home, the difference between them and Muslims is that they don't have the equivalent of Saudi Arabia egging on the nutjobs."

    The Ender wrote: »
    But that is kind of besides the point, because this is not some conventional war being fought. Most of the martyrs are proxy agents that are born again and then wrap themselves into the mess. Most are entirely disconnected from what is happening in Syria / Iraq; they just want to do something (because they feel alienated / marginalized, for any number of reasons), they end-up reaching out to the wrong people and become radicalized as a result (the process of buy-in to violent action is often a little more involved, but nevertheless rarely follows a traditional logistics chain).
    Agreed. Islamic terrorism in the West today is not due to foreign policy decisions ala Pan Am Flight 103, it's because young, educated men become disaffected with their lives and make horrible decisions. Fitting in with peers is a powerful motivator, as is the desire to make your mark on the world.

    You probably won't agree with me on this but this is why I stress the removal of those imams and organizations which preach Wahhabist sentiments. Europe has far stricter free speech laws than America does, and if it's illegal to preach kill-the-gays sentiments then it's illegal to preach jihadism. Committing acts of violence is psychologically easier when you have someone in authority telling you it's okay. See: Milgram.

    Agreed. Hell, even if every violent individual still ended up a violent criminal, undirected, unsophisticated violence for the sake of lashing out would still be substantially superior to well coordinate terrorism in pursuit of causing all of destroying civilized society.

    Again, I don't see ISIS ever achieving anything approaching even 1% of genuine global victory, but all considerations of how to react to it, and how to view the morals of all members and collaborators should take into consideration what total victory for them would look like.

  • The EnderThe Ender Registered User regular
    You probably won't agree with me on this but this is why I stress the removal of those imams and organizations which preach Wahhabist sentiments. Europe has far stricter free speech laws than America does, and if it's illegal to preach kill-the-gays sentiments then it's illegal to preach jihadism. Committing acts of violence is psychologically easier when you have someone in authority telling you it's okay. See: Milgram.

    Which Imams? Most of the Wahhabi leadership is not hanging out in a European mosque; they're broadcasting from remote locations in the Persian Gulf and/or Africa.

    Can you name a specific individual whom is evangelizing the happiness that is martyrdom that you feel European authorities should be investigating?


    I don't think anyone has objections to arresting Islamic religious leaders that are promoting violence / participating in jihadist recruitment. The more contentious issue is how much we are / aren't willing to give up in terms of civil rights to accomplish the otherwise uncontroversial goal of arresting bomb makers & plotters and to what degree do we want / not want the state to treat muslims with special prejudice to afford it the means of monitoring for jihadist activity?

    With Love and Courage
  • evilthecatevilthecat Registered User regular
    The Ender wrote: »
    You probably won't agree with me on this but this is why I stress the removal of those imams and organizations which preach Wahhabist sentiments. Europe has far stricter free speech laws than America does, and if it's illegal to preach kill-the-gays sentiments then it's illegal to preach jihadism. Committing acts of violence is psychologically easier when you have someone in authority telling you it's okay. See: Milgram.

    Which Imams? Most of the Wahhabi leadership is not hanging out in a European mosque; they're broadcasting from remote locations in the Persian Gulf and/or Africa.

    Can you name a specific individual whom is evangelizing the happiness that is martyrdom that you feel European authorities should be investigating?


    I don't think anyone has objections to arresting Islamic religious leaders that are promoting violence / participating in jihadist recruitment. The more contentious issue is how much we are / aren't willing to give up in terms of civil rights to accomplish the otherwise uncontroversial goal of arresting bomb makers & plotters and to what degree do we want / not want the state to treat muslims with special prejudice to afford it the means of monitoring for jihadist activity?

    There's that fat one handed one in london.
    goddammit what's his name?!
    someone help me out here.

    tip.. tip.. TALLY.. HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
  • HonkHonk Honk is this poster. Registered User, __BANNED USERS regular
    evilthecat wrote: »
    The Ender wrote: »
    You probably won't agree with me on this but this is why I stress the removal of those imams and organizations which preach Wahhabist sentiments. Europe has far stricter free speech laws than America does, and if it's illegal to preach kill-the-gays sentiments then it's illegal to preach jihadism. Committing acts of violence is psychologically easier when you have someone in authority telling you it's okay. See: Milgram.

    Which Imams? Most of the Wahhabi leadership is not hanging out in a European mosque; they're broadcasting from remote locations in the Persian Gulf and/or Africa.

    Can you name a specific individual whom is evangelizing the happiness that is martyrdom that you feel European authorities should be investigating?


    I don't think anyone has objections to arresting Islamic religious leaders that are promoting violence / participating in jihadist recruitment. The more contentious issue is how much we are / aren't willing to give up in terms of civil rights to accomplish the otherwise uncontroversial goal of arresting bomb makers & plotters and to what degree do we want / not want the state to treat muslims with special prejudice to afford it the means of monitoring for jihadist activity?

    There's that fat one handed one in london.
    goddammit what's his name?!
    someone help me out here.

    Anjem Choudary, Omar Bakri are two names I've seen mentioned in media.

    PSN: Honkalot
  • Panda4YouPanda4You Registered User regular
    edited March 2016
    The Ender wrote: »
    You probably won't agree with me on this but this is why I stress the removal of those imams and organizations which preach Wahhabist sentiments. Europe has far stricter free speech laws than America does, and if it's illegal to preach kill-the-gays sentiments then it's illegal to preach jihadism. Committing acts of violence is psychologically easier when you have someone in authority telling you it's okay. See: Milgram.
    Which Imams? Most of the Wahhabi leadership is not hanging out in a European mosque; they're broadcasting from remote locations in the Persian Gulf and/or Africa.

    Can you name a specific individual whom is evangelizing the happiness that is martyrdom that you feel European authorities should be investigating?
    It doesn't need saying that salafist sympathisers are a minority amongst muslims, but you're intentionally misrepresenting the facts if you pretend these views and activities aren't very much ongoing in Europe.
    Sweden, a tiny little country: And you can find uncomfortable details about congregations like these in many european nations these days.

    Panda4You on
  • HonkHonk Honk is this poster. Registered User, __BANNED USERS regular
    It surely happens, but the most prevalent recruiters for extremist groups are still probably random 20 year olds who hang around on the corner.

    PSN: Honkalot
  • ZythonZython Registered User regular
    hippofant wrote: »
    Please don't talk about the lack of Buddhist terrorism or Hindu terrorism when you clearly don't know the history of these religions. They might not happen in the West, but they absolutely happen in other parts of the world.
    ...if you read it again I clearly was referring to Europe in regards to Buddhist/Hindu terrorism, not Burma or India. The point was "here are a bunch of non-Christian non-white immigrants who don't blow up citizens in their new home, the difference between them and Muslims is that they don't have the equivalent of Saudi Arabia egging on the nutjobs."

    The Ender wrote: »
    But that is kind of besides the point, because this is not some conventional war being fought. Most of the martyrs are proxy agents that are born again and then wrap themselves into the mess. Most are entirely disconnected from what is happening in Syria / Iraq; they just want to do something (because they feel alienated / marginalized, for any number of reasons), they end-up reaching out to the wrong people and become radicalized as a result (the process of buy-in to violent action is often a little more involved, but nevertheless rarely follows a traditional logistics chain).
    Agreed. Islamic terrorism in the West today is not due to foreign policy decisions ala Pan Am Flight 103, it's because young, educated men become disaffected with their lives and make horrible decisions. Fitting in with peers is a powerful motivator, as is the desire to make your mark on the world.

    You probably won't agree with me on this but this is why I stress the removal of those imams and organizations which preach Wahhabist sentiments. Europe has far stricter free speech laws than America does, and if it's illegal to preach kill-the-gays sentiments then it's illegal to preach jihadism. Committing acts of violence is psychologically easier when you have someone in authority telling you it's okay. See: Milgram.

    I'd be willing to do that if you're willing to have all the white nationalists deported, as well.

    Switch: SW-3245-5421-8042 | 3DS Friend Code: 4854-6465-0299 | PSN: Zaithon
    Steam: pazython
  • The EnderThe Ender Registered User regular
    Panda4You wrote: »
    The Ender wrote: »
    You probably won't agree with me on this but this is why I stress the removal of those imams and organizations which preach Wahhabist sentiments. Europe has far stricter free speech laws than America does, and if it's illegal to preach kill-the-gays sentiments then it's illegal to preach jihadism. Committing acts of violence is psychologically easier when you have someone in authority telling you it's okay. See: Milgram.
    Which Imams? Most of the Wahhabi leadership is not hanging out in a European mosque; they're broadcasting from remote locations in the Persian Gulf and/or Africa.

    Can you name a specific individual whom is evangelizing the happiness that is martyrdom that you feel European authorities should be investigating?
    It doesn't need saying that salafist sympathisers are a minority amongst muslims, but you're intentionally misrepresenting the facts if you pretend these views and activities aren't very much ongoing in Europe.
    Sweden, a tiny little country: And you can find uncomfortable details about congregations like these in many european nations these days.

    Yes, and all of the mosques cited are / were already under investigation, and a few of them did successfully defend themselves in court (and those persons who weren't able to defend themselves were charged with crimes & given the associated penalties).

    So... what is the issue? The investigations are not being thorough enough, or some part of due process is insufficient for this particular problem, or...?

    With Love and Courage
  • Captain MarcusCaptain Marcus now arrives the hour of actionRegistered User regular
    The Ender wrote: »
    Yes, and all of the mosques cited are / were already under investigation, and a few of them did successfully defend themselves in court (and those persons who weren't able to defend themselves were charged with crimes & given the associated penalties).

    So... what is the issue? The investigations are not being thorough enough, or some part of due process is insufficient for this particular problem, or...?
    I'd pick the first one. Europe's had a troubled history recently with enforcing its laws due to fear of being called racist, and I would not be surprised if its investigative divisions are pulling punches due to powerful "progressive" politicos peering down at police. I certainly get the fear of unfairly picking on minorities, but Islamic terrorism hurts Muslims as well, and it's in everyone's best interest if radical elements are minimized.

  • The EnderThe Ender Registered User regular
    The Ender wrote: »
    Yes, and all of the mosques cited are / were already under investigation, and a few of them did successfully defend themselves in court (and those persons who weren't able to defend themselves were charged with crimes & given the associated penalties).

    So... what is the issue? The investigations are not being thorough enough, or some part of due process is insufficient for this particular problem, or...?
    I'd pick the first one. Europe's had a troubled history recently with enforcing its laws due to fear of being called racist, and I would not be surprised if its investigative divisions are pulling punches due to powerful "progressive" politicos peering down at police. I certainly get the fear of unfairly picking on minorities, but Islamic terrorism hurts Muslims as well, and it's in everyone's best interest if radical elements are minimized.

    Do you have a source that backs this claim up?

    The most recent attack was conducted by a group making acetone nail bombs in an apartment. They didn't need to buy anything other than some household materials in not-unusual proportions. The suspects were known to police, but only because they had been previously arrested for different crimes.

    Is there a proposed investigative method that would've likely spoiled that plot without violating people's rights before we knew a crime was occurring?


    You say with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight that well obviously the Belgian police shouldn't have 'pulled their punches' and obviously a more hard nosed approach is needed, when we don't even know if such an approach would be effective & have no reasonable way to implement such policy without it likely becoming a tool ripe for prejudice, corruption & abuse.

    A trade-off for living in open society may be that the same privacy protections that allows said society to function & flourish also allow the occasional radical to do something atrocious. We can (and IMHO should) mitigate that trade-off by regulating how easily people can access certain things, but at some point further regulation & policing becomes impractical and/or defeats the entire 'open society' concept, and I've yet to see a good argument for how the airport & tube bombings could've been prevented by reasonable policing.

    With Love and Courage
  • NSDFRandNSDFRand FloridaRegistered User regular
    The Ender wrote: »
    The Ender wrote: »
    Yes, and all of the mosques cited are / were already under investigation, and a few of them did successfully defend themselves in court (and those persons who weren't able to defend themselves were charged with crimes & given the associated penalties).

    So... what is the issue? The investigations are not being thorough enough, or some part of due process is insufficient for this particular problem, or...?
    I'd pick the first one. Europe's had a troubled history recently with enforcing its laws due to fear of being called racist, and I would not be surprised if its investigative divisions are pulling punches due to powerful "progressive" politicos peering down at police. I certainly get the fear of unfairly picking on minorities, but Islamic terrorism hurts Muslims as well, and it's in everyone's best interest if radical elements are minimized.

    Do you have a source that backs this claim up?

    The most recent attack was conducted by a group making acetone nail bombs in an apartment. They didn't need to buy anything other than some household materials in not-unusual proportions. The suspects were known to police, but only because they had been previously arrested for different crimes.

    Is there a proposed investigative method that would've likely spoiled that plot without violating people's rights before we knew a crime was occurring?


    You say with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight that well obviously the Belgian police shouldn't have 'pulled their punches' and obviously a more hard nosed approach is needed, when we don't even know if such an approach would be effective & have no reasonable way to implement such policy without it likely becoming a tool ripe for prejudice, corruption & abuse.

    A trade-off for living in open society may be that the same privacy protections that allows said society to function & flourish also allow the occasional radical to do something atrocious. We can (and IMHO should) mitigate that trade-off by regulating how easily people can access certain things, but at some point further regulation & policing becomes impractical and/or defeats the entire 'open society' concept, and I've yet to see a good argument for how the airport & tube bombings could've been prevented by reasonable policing.

    I agree with the rest of your post, but it's not an unprecedented idea.

    That's not to say it happened in this case, it's likely it didn't. But it's apparently an opportunity cost assessment that law enforcement in Europe have made before.

  • CornucopiistCornucopiist Registered User regular
    In the latest news, apparently a second bomber was on the Metro but disappeared when the Metro was shut down. So there's a big nailbomb still at large in Brussels. This does not make me feel all cosy.

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