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Apparent Islamic Terrorism Strikes Sydney
An anonymous reader send this link to a developing situation in Sydney, Australia, being reported on via live feed at the Guardian, and covered by various other news outlets as well. According to CNN's coverage, "CNN affiliate Seven Network said that at least 13 people are being held at the Lindt Chocolate Cafe. It published a photograph of people inside the cafe holding a black flag with Arabic writing on it. The flag reads: "There is no God but God and Mohammed is the prophet of God."
From The New York Times' coverage: The police have shut down parts of the city’s transport system, and closed off the mall area. They would not confirm how many people were being held hostage inside the cafe, nor whether those inside are armed.
Local media reports said that the airspace over Sydney had been closed and the famed Sydney Opera House evacuated. Television images showed heavily armed officers with their weapons trained on the cafe.
That's why there were raids at 149 locations this morning in Australia too. It's only one...yep. And that's why if you go look at the studies on "who supports fundamentalism" and "jihad to install islam" you'll find that in western countries 8-25%(sometimes more) support the use of violence to do so, that includes suicide bombings.
Just a few links:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories...
http://pewresearch.org/assets/...
http://www.pewforum.org/upload...
Om, nomnomnom...
If you can get through, 2GB has excellent rolling coverage on their radio station. Ray Hadley (the presenter) has had various calls throughout the morning from one of the hostages who speaking on behalf of the terrorist wants to speak to Tony Abbott (Prime minister) live on air.
http://2gb.com/listen-live
Getting data on these issues is complicated. If one restricts to the US, then about 10% of all terrorist attacks are Islamic. See http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/05/muslims-only-carried-out-2-5-percent-of-terrorist-attacks-on-u-s-soil-between-1970-and-2012.html. But not only is this restricted to the US, it uses a very broad notion of what counts as terrorism. If one weighs in the US by total deaths, then Islamic terrorism swamps everything else primarily due to 9/11. Worldwide, about 70% of all terrorist attacks are by Sunni Muslims but this varies from year to year. See for example the 2011 report NCTC report http://fas.org/irp/threat/nctc2011.pdf. Again, definitional issues can move this number up or down by a lot.
The Crusades were a backlash against Muslim invasion nitwit.
You can get enlightened here. I quote:
The First Crusade (1096–1099) ... ended as a military expedition by Roman Catholic Europe to regain the Holy Lands taken in the Muslim conquests of the Levant (632–661), ultimately resulting in the recapture of Jerusalem in 1099. It was launched on 27 November 1095 by Pope Urban II with the primary goal of responding to an appeal from Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos, who requested that western volunteers come to his aid and help to repel the invading Seljuq Turks from Anatolia.
Of FFS. Please stop spreading your ignorance.
You can easily obtain a firearm in Australia. In fact I own multiple. The thing is you have to be licensed and have a valid reason for owning one, and self defence is not a valid reason. You need to be a member of a club, pass a police check and have some character references. Then you need to wait a year after getting your license. It's a bit of a pain in the arse but it is far from impossible.
I own multiple semi-automatic pistols for competition shoots and a bolt action rifle for bench rest shooting.
Whether you agree with the gun laws in Australia, and as a shooter I do, to say they are near impossible to own is complete crap. What I would say is that Australia is a very safe place to live and your chances of getting shot here is almost zero. You don't ever hear about kids getting shot cause the knocked on the wrong house door during Halloween.
Might be referring to the numerous sting operations bordering on entrapment where the prime impetus for a group of would-be terrorists turns out to be an undercover federal agent encouraging them to cause trouble.
The police here were using illegal spyware to infiltrate peoples computers to capture data, instead of using the legal processes available to them, to reveal some "potential" attacks.They then whipped up a media frenzy to garner support to pass new security legislation that would legalize the use of such methods. Of the 16 "suspects" 15 were released without charge and a 16th on a minor charge.
This sort of thing is what that legislation was supposed to prevent.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
In the book of Numbers, chapter 31, Moses orders the murder of every man, woman, and child in a city that was promised to his own people. When his army came back with children prisoners of war, he rebuked them, ordered them to slay the male children on the spot, and allowed them to keep the female children for themselves as spoils of war (there are plenty of other stories similar to this about the OT, and involving Moses specifically).
So, yeah, warlord.
And about Constantine founding Christianity...
When the religion was illegal by Roman law, there were many separate Christianities with very different beliefs (and they quarreled with one another, as well as with the Jews that wanted to stay Jewish). Once Constantine decided to make Christianity the official religion of Rome, he also picked the specific set of churches that he agreed with and established their representatives as the proper religious authorities. They promptly declared the other varieties of Christianity to all be heresy, had their books burned (some recently recovered in the Nag Hammadi library revealing just how different these Christianities were).
So, Christianity (or at least Catholicism) as we know it today was very much the work of Constantine.
There were two incidents of violence against abortion-clinics in Australia, neither of them obviously motivated by Christian faith.
You don't have to be a Christian to consider fetus a human — it is a rather common opinion, even I personally do not share it.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Its a lone gunman.
Police arent calling it a terrorism, it wasnt an IS flag being waved, airspace wasnt closed.
But hey, why not use criminal activity to drum commercial media activity.
If you want proper coverage journalism go to ABC (Australian Broadcasting Commission), its govenment funded but independently operated.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/201...
In retrospect, I should not have posted the "brick testament" link. It was needlessly snarky.
Here are a few passages about Moses' military exploits, without the snarky lego commentary.
The slaughter of women and children at Midean: http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=28...
The slaughter of women and children at Bashan: http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=28...
The slaughter of women and children at Heshbon: http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=28...
Only fully automatics and semi-automatics are banned here. That is a good thing because this tool walked into a cafe with a shotgun, not an AK47. At worst it's a double barrel sawn off
Just to clarify this as it is a little more fine grained that an outright ban. To own a semi-automatic rifle you need to be in a career which requires it. So culling from a helicopter is one of the few occupations which allows you to own a semi-auto rifle. Semi-auto pistols though are a standard item in IPSC and ISSF competitions so you are able to own them without a problem but the size of the magazine is restricted to 10 shots. There is however no restriction on the number of mags you carry (odd I know).
Pistol ownership also requires you to actually use the weapons rather than just say that you do. So if you own just 1 pistol you must do a minimum of 6 competitive shoots with that weapon each year. If you own 2 or more you must do a minimum of 4 with each. I own a .22 semi an air and a .32 semi so I need to do a minimum of 12 competition shoots per year.
Fully automatic rifles or pistols are outright banned. As are self-loading and pump action shotguns.
Constantine did not found the RCC. He just changed Roman law so that it would be legal. The RCC predates Constantine, and was solidly entrenched in Roman society by the time Constantine made it a legal religion. Constantine's change in Roman law wasn't proactive; it was reactive.
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