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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.
The airspace over Sydney isn't closed, nor is its airport. Flights are being diverted around the CBD (both by order from the authorities and voluntarily from the main domestic airlines agreeing to divert).
There is only a Spaghetti Monster! He is going to meat ball you!
I'm skeptical of the peaceful nature of a religion founded by a warlord; but at this stage we don't know that it's not some nut-job who is trying to capitalise on the ISIS popularity.
(I'm writing from one of the buildings currently in lock-down because of this situation)
Two men claimed to have walked into a bar. Only one had the bruises to prove it.
There are about 500,000 Muslims in Australia.
1 of them is committing this crime.
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.
Some people consider it a "hate site" for some reason, but so far, nobody explained away the list.
Ezekiel 23:20
You dignify the human waste who perpetrate such idiocy by calling them "terrorists".
They are much more likely to be some loser who has no idea what else to do with
their miserable piece of shit lives, so they decide to do bad things.
Calling them an asshole is much more likely to be accurate. Calling them a terrorist
gives them more credit than all but a tiny fraction of such scum remotely deserve.
didn't expect that...
Islam is a peaceful religion, that's why followers just went out of their way to do this. And in Canada we had two terrorist attacks(one in Quebec), and another on Parliament Hill in two days.
My interpretation is that Islam is just like any other religion. A bunch of people who think their religion wants them to be perfectly nice and peaceful, and a bunch of others who think it demands they cleanse the Earth of non-believers.
If you followed the attacks in Canada you noticed that the attackers were recent converts to Islam. Their attacks weren't motivated by Islam, they were motivated by ISIL's culture of terrorism and enabled by whatever personal demons caused them to jump headlong into a new religion. Islam is just the language that ISIL uses to communicate that culture.
I stole this Sig
As a former Muslim who lives in western country:
1. Islam is not a peaceful religion, and to believe so you must either be a Muslim or a very naive person. Peaceful Muslims exist of course, but simply because they do not follow Islam strictly enough.
2. Conservative western politicians who make use of terrorism to their own political benefit are not much better than the terrorists, in that both sides have no problem using people's safety to advance their own agenda. Typically they are also the ones that support wars worldwide.
Look man, even Bush said, "The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam.....Islam is peace." He was something of a warmonger, but even he realized that you shouldn't go to war against an entire religion. The enemies are easy to recognize, they're the ones who are trying to kill us, no matter what religion they profess.
Seriously, when you're more irrational than Bush, it's time to stop and think if you have a problem in your head.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
Both of the people were mentally ill. Bibeau, the homeless Ottawa killer, had a history of violence, drug addiction, and mental instability, including 12 convictions in Quebec between 2001 and 2011 for crimes including drug possession, impaired driving, weapons offences, assault causing bodily harm, theft, and possession of break-in tools, which started long before he converted to islam.
Rouleau, the Quebec killer, had been taken to a psychiatric hospital by his father, but they couldn't keep him when he said he wanted to leave. He had drug problems, had to be in a special school for kids with discipline problems when he was younger, his personal life had fallen apart, his business had failed and last year at 24 he turned to islam, looking for something to cling to where he wouldn't feel like an inadequate failure, and was attracted to the extremists on the net and in the media.
Most people are able to make the distinction between a nutbar using a religion as a smokescreen to their using violence to escape their own failures or shortcomings, and the majority who peacefully practice that same religion. This applies equally to muslims, christians, atheists, or whatever your personal preference or poison.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
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.
Sorry to hear this unfolding :(
An unarmed populous is easier to terrorize. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G... When being armed is illegal (or restricted to the point of being nearly that), only the bad guys will be armed in such situations. Waiting for the police to come save you is often an ineffective endeavor.
Australia's gun laws are what has prevented this person from having an assault rifle. He's armed with a small single barrelled shotgun. Having more armed people will ensure that more incidents like this will occur and a lot more often.
And I am an Australian. Our gun laws have prevented things like this as criminals cant get easy access to guns.
We are not terrorised here I can assure you.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Oh, by the way, the Breivik argument is just hilarious. He's the one guy who tripled Norway's homicide statistics for one year. That alone should tell you something about Norway. And the fact that Breivik is even newsworthy after three years when something like six acts of Muslim religious violence on average end up with death daily really drives my point home. The same week that Breivik killed 77 people, Muslims around the world killed at least another 95 (just for religious reasons, mind you - that's what we're counting here). But one Breivik is newsworthy only because it's such a rare occurrence. Norway doesn't have low homicide rate because it's Christian - it really isn't, it has a low homicide rate because it's not chock-full of crazy brainwashed wackos.
Ezekiel 23:20
But that isn't your argument.
Your argument is that Islam is inherently violent (which is what the site you linked to is trying to say). Dont try to change the argument to all religions because you've been proven wrong (you want a list of attacks, the IRA did over 10,000 bombings on its own).
Extremism is bad and causes people to do irrational things. Your brand of extremism is as bad as any other.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
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.
Moving the goal posts means you've lost the argument.
You said it yourself, this guy trippled Norways yearly homicide rate in 3 days. How many of the Muslim incidents you allude to occur in war zones or countries that have an open revolution? Most of them. It's like saying all Christian nations are unsafe by Colombia as an example. The difference between us is that I can recognise BS and you cant.
Norway is an extremely safe country and a rational one. The way Norway picked up and carried on After Breivik is a shining example to us all. No fear mongering or revenge wars.
But where are the extremist Islamic attacks in Norway... at least one per week please.
And this makes you a xenophobe.
Which was the point of my argument, you aren't interested in the truth, you're interested in things that agree with you.
Now here's the kicker, I'm an Australian, I live in Australia and I know a hell of a lot more about this than you do considering how biased and inaccurate your sources are.
This guy is simply not right in the head. It's not that he's a Muslim that caused this, its the fact he's mentally ill. He's already lost 5 of his hostages (they escaped out the back door) he's that incompetent. This is more an indication of Australia's failing mental health care than the rise of Islamic extremism.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Well we know it wasn't the US or everyone would have whipped out a 44 magnum and the running gun battle consuming the entire suburb would still be going on.
You jest... but in Texas, we have over 800,000 concealed carry permit holders... and gun battles don't break out, well, ever between them...
And I notice that they don't try this stuff here either...
You would be hard pressed to walk into a busy Starbucks here without a dozen people carrying guns, the terrorists wouldn't have hostages, they'd have a fight on their hands, and frankly they are cowards anyway, so they won't do that here.