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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...
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.
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.
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.
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.