Slashdot Mirror
Islamic State Claims Responsibility for Paris Attacks; Death Toll At 127
The L.A. Times reports that Islamic State, the group variously known as ISIL, ISIS, and Daesh, has claimed responsibility for the multi-pronged terror attack yesterday in Paris which left at least 128 people dead, most of them from among the audience of a rock concert at the Bataclan theater, in the heart of the city. Details of how Friday’s assaults were carried out remained hazy. It was still unclear, for example, whether the restaurants and concert theater were attacked by two separate teams of militants or one group that went from one place to another. ...
Attackers opened fire on the crowd with automatic weapons, shouting “God is great!” or blaming France for airstrikes on Islamic State in Syria, according to some reports. Dozens of concert-goers were killed before French forces stormed the theater.
Many Parisians posted appeals and photos on social media asking for news of friends or loved ones whom they had not heard from since the attacks. One man said on Twitter that a government hotline set up to inquire about missing persons was so overloaded that calls could not get through.
In the wake of the attacks and with an overloaded public infrastructure, Facebook activated its post-disaster check-in tool for Parisians to notify loved ones that they are safe. According to Reuters, French President Francois Hollande has vowed to undertake a "mercliess" response to the attacks.
Of course they would claim it. Even if they didnt do it.
They did warn the world they had ISIS operatives mixed in with refugees. So its not truely surprising.
One thing that makes us better than them is....we try hard to limit civilian causalities when striking military targets.
Except the leaked Collateral Murder video shows Americans deliberately attacking and killing civilian first responders. America considers this a war crime when our enemies do it. None of the killers were ever charged with a crime, and neither were any of the officials who covered it up and lied about the existence of the video before it was leaked.
"No, Iraq fell apart and ISIS rose because Obama prematurely pulled the plug on the stabilizing presence of the US military. That was years too soon."
But...!
"I can't tell you if the use of force in Iraq today would last five days, or five weeks, or five months, but it certainly isn't going to last any longer than that."
--Donald Rumsfeld, November 14, 2002
"It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months"
-- Donald Rumsfeld, February 7, 2003
"I think it will go relatively quickly. Weeks rather than months."
-- Dick Cheney, March 16, 2003
"No one is talking about occupying Iraq for five to ten years."
-- Richard Perle, March 9, 2003
http://www.ontheissues.org/Archive/Doonesbury_Quotes_Dick_Cheney.htm
Immediately after UK citizens were disarmed, murder, rape, and total violent crime DOUBLED. Yes, they were murdered with knives, hammers, etc - twice as many people murdered. Not exactly what I'd call a resounding success.
Did you know that if you ban food, removing all public access to food, far fewer violent crimes will be committed with food as the weapon? Did you also know crime will skyrocket? That's precisely what has happened in the UK. Twice as many murders and rapes, and those (like you) who disarm the victims are now directly responsible because this pattern has been repeated enough times that the deadly results of the actions you advocate are entirely predictable.
What motivates educated people to sit in front of a keyboard for 40 minutes composing a thousand-word defense of the disgusting mass murder Islamists committed in Paris today?
Pics or it didn't happen. Do you actually have any examples of "the left" defending these attacks, or are you just finding someone to hate?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Hitler embraced the Catholic church and they embraced him back. Does "Gott Mitt Un" ring a bell?
I am taking no side on the current "religious assholes kill lots of people" vs. "atheist assholes kill lots of people" war. I just noticed the above statement, which I see a lot, and wanted to provide some historical context to it.
I have seen it frequently mentioned on the Internet that Hitler was Catholic and/or had a close relationship to the church. While Hitler may have been born to a Catholic family, he was never visibly religious throughout his life one way or another. Also, despite his Wagner fetish, he was not a devotee of the old Germanic paganism that mystic fringe elements of the SS seemed intent on reintroducing to German society. He never disavowed religion publicly, but it never played any role in his life either, at least according to modern Hitler scholarship.
Hitler's relationship to the Catholic church oscillated between uneasy truce and outright hostility throughout the time the Third Reich was in power. Germany was majority Protestant in the north, and majority Catholic in the south, and the Catholic church (which even had its own political party, the Center Party) was a useful ally at times. It disagreed with Hitler on many issues (primarily social), but Hitler showed no compunction about shutting down Protestant churches that preached against the excesses of its administration, and the Catholic hierarchy in Germany was perfectly willing to make a deal with the devil to avoid being shut down or expelled. There is also strong evidence (though not 100%) that the Pope (who had previously been Papal Legate in Germany) and his representatives made a deal with Hitler to turn a blind eye to Jews trying to flee the country in exchange for a continued presence in the country.
However, Hitler and the Catholic authorities in the Third Reich frequently clashed as well. Many Catholic priests spoke out against the human rights abuses of Hitler, and it was only through continued wrangling and negotiation with Hitler that priests weren't bundled off by the Gestapo en masse. Many politically active priests were nonetheless. And at times Hitler talked about putting the whole church on his "enemies" list and shutting it down for stirring up anti-government feeling (which wasn't hard to come by from 1942 onwards).
Long story short: Hitler wasn't a Catholic, and they weren't really allies. But the Catholic church did make deals with Hitler to preserve their power and legitimacy which are shameful in retrospect. If you're interested in more details, read the first volume of Ian Kershaw's excellent Hitler or Richard Evans's The Coming of the Third Reich.
"95% of all Slashdot
Yes it does, actually more than one in 2015. As of August 26th the number of "mass shootings" (defined there as at least four people getting shot) had passed the number of days in the year. Multiplied out that's 247 shootings * 4 people == 988 minimum but those stats are for "at least" four people: each incident could have had more than four. So it's in reality higher.
So that's say around a thousand people, vs 129 people in this Paris attack. It simply is not comparable. Your attempted rebuttal is based on fiction, which is never a good start.
You seem to think that gangs are somehow special. The UK has gangs too. They're the ones renting the same gun to shoot at each other with because they can't obtain their own. Gun control, properly implemented, takes guns away from everyone. Or did you not read any of what I wrote above?
You are delusional. What do you think is going to happen, some sort of mass EU-initiated genocide? Although the events in Paris are tragic, they don't fundamentally change anything: Europe isn't about to experience a "vastly higher death toll at the hands of guns". Even if the occurrence of Paris-style attacks becomes 10x more frequent, that'd merely bring it into the range of US mass shooting deaths, not exceed it.
This is probably not worth my time, but let's try:
Reading this thread and the last, I am struck by how the Left is not just defending Islamism
Why does the Left defend Islamism like this?
Congratulations! You have just demonstrated the breakdown of reasonable dialogue by imposing your view of the world in your queries.
You made a general statement without addressing any specific comments. According to you, people are defending Islamism. Not just people, but "the Left".
Beetle B.
I was hoping you'd ask.
http://972mag.com/report-detai...
You can find more examples by Googling "double tap bombing".
You are welcome on my lawn.
The claims of WMDs came from someone on the ground in Iraq, someone whom is believed to have been a member of Saddam's Revolutionary Guard. It's even possible that such existed and were moved to (thoughts were/are) Syria. It's also possible that it was a lie. It's also possible that the powers that be believed it to be unreliable intelligence. Except...
There were, indeed, WMDs in Iraq. The narrative that such did not exist is odd. We have search engines. It's pretty easy to find a LOT of information concerning this. Here is one such link - if you'll accept Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
For some additional reading (those injured by chemical weapons during the Iraq War) then I find this to be a fairly well balanced article:
http://www.nytimes.com/interac...
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Do you actually live there, or are you a victim of confirmation bias?
"The 2007 CIA World Factbook lists the religion of France as: Roman Catholic 83–88%, Protestant 2%, Jewish 1%, Muslim 5%–10%, unaffiliated 4%."
"The mood in Paris following the worst attack in peacetime history, is something of bewilderment, numbness but also huge outpouring of grief with locals openly weeping and making signs of the cross as they pass the many street fronts where their country men and women died."
http://edition.cnn.com/2015/11...
The article they refer to is this one:
https://azelin.files.wordpress...
Didn't have the stomach to read it in one go. It's written from a revanchist religious point of view and it lays every single failure since the fall of the Ottoman empire of the Islamic world to get its house in order and rise from a violently squabbling mob at the West's door. Apparently we have been doing Satan's work on them.
Their preferred response is "savagery", according to the author of that pamphlet. I think we can see what he means..
Somehow I don't see us working out our differences with them through reasoned debate.
It's a religious sect writ large, and it's one huge pitcher of cool-aid they've got there.
The only good news seems to be that this little masterpiece doesn't seem to base itself on the authority of Islamic texts per se. As far as I can see, it's based on an interpretation of Islam that's driven by an revanchist view of history.
That ought to give us something to work with when dealing with radicalising youths (their main supply of manpower).
Revanchism and envy are probably easier to deal with than straight-up religion.