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Over 200 dead in [Sri Lanka] Easter attacks
Henroid
Mexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered User regular
Mexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered User regular
This morning several bombs detonated at churches in Sri Lanka, killing 207 (at the time of this post) and injuring more. There were also explosions at some hotels, totaling 8 explosions according to this article.
There's no known culprits yet, as far as the public is concerned, but several arrests have been made at the cost of some police lives during a raid (also noted in the article link above).
In response, the Sri Lankan government has blocked social media sites, specifically to stop the spread of misinformation AND hate rhetoric, the latter of which could cause more attacks.
As far as Christian population there goes, it's pretty small, but they were very clearly the target of all this.
There's no known culprits yet, as far as the public is concerned, but several arrests have been made at the cost of some police lives during a raid (also noted in the article link above).
In response, the Sri Lankan government has blocked social media sites, specifically to stop the spread of misinformation AND hate rhetoric, the latter of which could cause more attacks.
As far as Christian population there goes, it's pretty small, but they were very clearly the target of all this.
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Read this on cnn coverage
https://twitter.com/sanjanah
https://twitter.com/tingilye
The prime minister has stated that information on the attacks was received in advance, but it's unclear what that info was or how it was handled.
Not to be an insensitive jackass, but that was assuredly the point.
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I'm looking for updates on the situation and there isn't anything out there right now. I guess we'll find out overnight here as more details come about.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/22/world/asia/sri-lanka-bombing-explosion.html
Three of his four children died in the attacks.
For the record, Sri Lanka is ca. 70% Buddhist, 13% Hindu, 10% Islam and 7% Christian.
Sri Lanka also had a bloody 26-year civil war between the Tamil minority (ca 15%) (rebel faction was the Tamil Tigers) and the Sinhalese majority (ca 75%). (The remaining 10% of the population are mostly muslim Moors). The civil war ended in 2009. Sinhalese are mostly Buddhists, and Tamil mostly Hindu (I believe), so I don't think this is related to the terrorist attacks.
What will be deeply concerning is how incredibly coordinated these attacks were.
Multiple bombings at multiple locations spread across wide geographic areas. That's not a small cell or even just a small network, that's a serious and large terrorist organisation (for terrorist standards) with access to resources and critical skills, international support according to some reports as well. They'll be a crackdown obviously, but how did they manage to launch such a large and coordinated bombing campaign? This must have been planned for months, maybe even years, and obviously there's been a dropping of the board by the Sri Lankan security services if they knew about it weeks in advance.
I feel bad for the Sri Lankans because this isn't getting the news traction that NZ or even the ND fire got. These people deserve that same outpouring of love and donations and mind space that the other two tragedies got.
Also, this is a big worry to me as well. This was a very coordinated attack which indicates a potential greater threat and possibly repeat activity from that threat.
Today's news is that the terrorist group that carried this out in Sri Lanka received help from an international terrorist organization, which lends even more credence to that worry.
Doubtful.
This attack has probably been planned out among others for months, even years, and was probably chosen as most likely to succeed. Your mistake is thinking they give a shit if the Christians they blow up are alt-right or not.
ISIS is a lot of things, but considering they keep changing their tactics to keep the most well funded army in the world playing catch up, "fucking morons" is not one of them.
Ok, now a real post
Before they switched topics, CNN reporter said one of the suspected terrorists did go to Syria to fight for ISIS and then returned to Sri Lanka. In the report they said there were 32 confirmed Sri Lankans that went to fight and an unknown number have returned.
And I believe the idea behind why this is in retaliation for Christchurch isnt about the attacker being an alt righter, but him being a Christian extending a stochastic holy war. A Christian attacked Muslims, so the Muslims attacked Christians.
Indeed. Groups like ISIS or AQ don't care about things like "alt right" or even about racial/ethnic identity. They want to divide society along religious lines - Muslim vs. non-Muslim. It is abstractly similar to the alt-right goal of dividing the world into white vs. non-white, but the line of division is different. The attack itself might have little or nothing to do with Christchurch, but the act of saying that it did is part of their propaganda war, meant to instill anti-Muslim sentiment among Christians generally.
Also, while there have been some false ISIS claims, they don't really claim responsibility for everything and their claims have been true a high enough percentage of the time that they shouldn't be dismissed. Plus, it fits their style of terrorism.
I mean the point isn't to kill all Christians, the point is to increase their own notoriety and keep donations coming in. For that they just want to hit someone and make the news, it doesn't really matter who they hit.
They aren't trying to convince Christians, if every Christian in the world just insta-converted to Wahabi islam it would be a disaster for groups like ISIS. Their purpose is to grift Muslims, and to facilitate that grift every once in a while they have to convince some poor low-rank sucker who drank too much of the kool aid to kill some Christians or members of another sect of Muslims.
Always
So they take action to try to provoke violence, prevent government functions, destroy employment opportunities and job security and so on. You create an environment that lends itself to people joining extremist groups to build your recruitment, and the best way to do that is to get your enemies to kill the people of the guys you're trying to recruit
That's amazing
Although the hashtag made me feel like I might be losing my mind there for a second. I had to read it an embarrassing number of times to get it because I kept getting to #terroristhaven and then staring staring at the screen dumbfounded because no that can't possibly be right
Following up, at least one alleged ISIS member has been arrested in Turkey accused of planning to target the Anzac Day celebrations in Gallipoli.
So similar attack averted, thankfully.
3 of them were from an extremely wealthy family
Isn't distributing knowledge of these types of people something that research has shown tends to encourage more instances of it? Maybe we can just leave out the background info on the terrorists in this thread, at least? (I'm not a mod, just my take.)
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You know, I was actually wondering the same thing after I asked.
For an academic discussion and deconstruction of motivations, and how one might build an extremist the details of their background seems somewhat vitally important.
However mass distribution of that information has itself been acknowledged as a means by which extremism spreads. Maybe as amateurs in the space vague details are all we should be able to get our hands on. I certainly don't need their names or anything, some folks might, and we probably shouldn't make a habit of memory holing dissidents, but I can probably live on not knowing who these folks were specifically.
Like I don't really need the details to know that extremism breeds in isolation and that any life can be isolating no matter how privileged.
This type of terrorism doesn’t really have a dangerous exposure aspect to it. The majority of the world knows the motivations and ideas behind it, at least I think. The point is to create strife which will lead to discrimination which will lead to new recruits. The act is the recruitment, and not the publicity after (although the act for alt-right folks can be the recruitment as well).
Edit: well, the publicity after does work for those discriminating against others while using this as fuel. However, the fact that the guy is from “the poor country” and is from “bad race” is more important than who he is. It is complicated and I can now see how exposure can indirectly feed the idea of recruitment so hmm.
https://i.stuff.co.nz/world/asia/112256421/new-details-emerge-about-the-sri-lankan-bombers?rm=m
https://i.stuff.co.nz/national/christchurch-shooting/112265006/the-hazy-link-between-the-attacks-in-sri-lanka-and-new-zealand?rm=m
This article is a pretty good look at the links (or lack of links) between this attack and the NZ attack.