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Terrorist Attack In Brussels Airport and Metro Station: At Least 34 Dead (mirror.co.uk)
SomeoneFromBelgium writes: This morning there was a double bomb explosion in Brussels, Belgium. In the National Airport entrance hall an estimated 13 people were killed by a big explosion; around the same time another bomb exploded in Metro station 'Maalbeek,' close to the financial district, killing an estimated 10 persons.
Note: story updates bump this figure ot at least 34 deaths. Reader jones_supa adds Shots were fired and Arabic shouted before the blasts,
suggesting a terrorist attack. Video and images on social media showed smoke rising from an airport building and shattered windows. Confused and shocked passengers fled the terminal to safety as they were evacuated by armed police. Footage showed rubbish littered across the floor. All traffic from and to the airport has been suspended. The airport is monitoring the situation closely and will deliver further announcements in Twitter. Update: 03/22 13:06 GMT by T : According to the New York Times and other sources, at least one of the explosions was set off by a suicide bomber. Slate has an actively updating stream of updates about the attack, too.
More than 50 people die in accidents on European roads on average per day. These terrorist attacks are horrible, but we need to deal with them as a problem, not let our countries deteriorate in a frightened panic. Any one of us is still far more likely to die in a number of ways that we have long accepted as risks which are ultimately unavoidable if we want to sustain our way of life. We can't stop driving just because people die in road accidents, and we can't stop being free just because people die in terrorist attacks. If you advocate for more surveillance and the erosion of civil liberties in response to these attacks, you are cooperating with the terrorists in their attempt to undermine the fundamental values of our society.
Perhaps it's time to ban ALL religions?
The man sounds on target to me.
We won't win war on terror: Former French PM
" Europe is taking the wrong approach to fighting terrorism, former French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin has told CNBC.
Speaking immediately after a series of explosions rocked the Belgian capital of Brussels, de Villepin said that they were "tragic events" but added that Europe should be showing that it is sticking to its rule of law and can only "reduce" the threat of terrorism.
"I do believe that our strategy should be very different than the one it is. Much less a military approach than a political approach, trying to find solutions in the Middle East and we are far from doing that," he said."
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
I abolutely agree with the above... We don't need our freedom to be restricted because of occasional terrorist attacks. If we allow that then they win, we lose. And as stated above, a lot more people die on the road each day, and nobody cares..
Also note that they didn't need to get anything past airport security to do this.
Remember that, next time you're being groped by a TSA agent.
No sig today...
You mean like have a Secret Police sneak in and quietly arrest people at night without anyone knowing? Europe has tried that in the past.
You know who doesn't have this kind of broblem ? Israel.
I don't know. Ask the Palestinians in Israel and they might tell you they have a very big terrorism problem.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Only certain 'Christian' factions in the USA.
Yeah, it's always "only some Christians but all Muslims", isn't it?
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
While I agree with you re: no more mass surveillance, let's be clear: terrorism isn't like car accidents, at all. It's not a random event that just happens. It's the end result of conscious human decision-making to murder as many innocent civilians as possible and to scare the shit out of everyone so their very way of life is affected. It's isn't neutral, natural happenstance; it's the deliberate conducting of the worst kind of evil. And because it's the result of human decision-making -- meaning, someone is actually *deciding* to kill these innocent people -- it's preventable and it can and must be addressed by us, by civilized people. Absolutely, we cannot throw away any more rights -- but we can't stand by and let this become the "new normal." That's what those evil fuckers want, and we cannot let them win.
Stopping terrorism means stopping Islam.
Oh totally. But we can't stop there, because there should be no half measures. We need to ban Christianity because look at what happened in Colorado with that Planned Parenthood. Terrorism. Also, we need to ban Atheism because the "dark knight" guy in Aurora was an Atheist.....I bet that's where he got the ideas. See, if only the non-violent Christians and non-violent Atheists had done something to prevent this type of terrorism, it'd be OK. But, they don't stop it, so we need to ban their philosophies as well. So glad someone had the courage to say it.
/bitter sarcasm
Seriously, how in the fuck is this moderated as "Insightful". You sir, are an idiot.
Would you just shut up with your pathetic bleating.
It's stuff that matters and slashdot has never ever ever been nothing but tech.
What's is with all the whiners about topicality recently?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
In Europe we have Catholics, Lutheran protestants, a small amount of Calvinists, and then the Orthodox church in Eastern Europe. Those can all be denominated under the name of Christians, but as far as I know we do not have any of them running around killing people under the guise of pro-life. That really seems to be a US-only problem.
When the Christians are in the news EVERY FUCKING DAY -- right now, in 2016 -- shooting innocent civilians, blowing up car bombs, bulldozing and dynamiting the cultural treasures of other religions, raping children, beheading people for drawing pictures of Christ, etc., all in the name of Jesus, and trying to establish a worldwide Christian nation (and telling people that's what they're doing), then I'll agree. And I mean now. Not hundreds of years ago during the Crusades and not during the Inquisition. I might right fucking now in 2016 in the modern, civilized world. Until then, quit trying to equate what these 7th Century barbarians are doing with any other modern religion, because it's complete bullshit.
Yeah, because when Europe had border controls, there was no terrorism. Period.
Yes, because putting a lock on your door and having a criminal break in your house anyway is EXACTLY the same as leaving your door wide open with a big sign in your front yard reading "Free cash and valuables inside!"
I mean, are you seriously arguing that because an odd terrorist might get in anyway, that we should just say "fuck it" and open the borders up to invite them in? Because, if that's what you're saying, I want you to call your mother up and tell her that she raised a dumb fuckwad.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Um, Irish Republican Army ring any bells?
Monstar L
Freedoms are not taken away by terrorists. They are taken away by power-hungry politicians who see opportunity to do so when a terrorist event happens. Get your facts straight.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
No, GP is right, Islam needs a schism between moderate and fundamentalist. Both Shia and Sunni are fundamentalist movements. A moderate Islam would be neither Shia nor Sunni.
I understand your point, but can you point to the last time that a baptist blew themselves up?
Suicide bombing has long been used.
The Chinese suicide squads during the 1911 revolution and again during the second Sino-Japanese war.
Another famous example us the Japanese Kamikaze pilots in WW2.
Hell, even the Germans did it during the battle of Berlin.
In all those cases, one group was at war with the target group.
You cannot deny that Radical Islamic terrorist are at war with you. You are their enemy. Do you think that because you have nothing against them that they dont want you dead?
Sure, we have our brand of crazies who see the US government as a target. The uni-bomber for example.
But when was the last time that one of these guys went to a mall or shopping center and detonated a vest to blow up women and children?
What do you call a man with a hotel on his head?
Normal Tebbit.
The IRA in Britain, the RAF/Baader-Meinhof Group in Germany, and the ETA in France and Spain are just three of many major terrorist groups who committed wide ranging atrocities in Europe between WW2 and the late 90s. The IRA even managed to kill several members of Margaret Thatcher's cabinet, maiming many others including her right hand man Norman Tebbit (hence the above joke, popular in school yards throughout the UK after it happened), in one bombing in the mid-eighties. What Western Governments have the Islamic terrorists tried to wipe out?
Kinda tired of hearing this "Islamic Terror is a special kind of threat" nonsense from the usual suspects. No, it's not. Some of what they've done is worse, but in the grand scheme of things they're still pathetic and minor compared to the home grown conflicts that have plagued Europe for centuries.
Stop being scared of these cretins.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I run the IT for an organisation that I am not going to link to here because we're already having trouble dealing with the load today. We're based out of the International Press Center, a small tower behind the Berlaymont that also houses the local branches of Bloomberg and the BBC. Half of us (including myself) go through Maelbeek every day since it's the stop before Schuman, the other half come from the other direction. I was in the subway before the one that blew up; I heard the thump and saw the smoke from Maelbeek as I was getting out of the subway at Schuman; I assumed it was an electrical fire or something and went on to work. We are still on "lock down" in our tower, some of the journalists have been here since 6:00AM and nobody in the building has anything to eat.
You won't see many pictures of this in main stream media, but this is what happened to the subway that was bombed. The cars in the Brussels subway are arranged with blocks of four seats on either side of a central aisle. There is a door and standing space between each set of 8 seats. The blocks are very solid and designed to protect the passengers in them in the event of a subway crash. During rush hour the seats are full and you usually have about twice as many people standing in the open space. In the picture you can see that the bomb went off in the middle of one of these blocks of eight. I can just about guarantee that those seats were full, so we know where half the subway dead came from right there. It looks like the block of seats just behind that block held together (to the right of the image), even though the shifted some, so I would suppose that those people in that set of 8 survived. It looks like the areas between the explosion row and the surviving row and the explosion row and the bulkhead to the left of the image were not very survivable. I guess it would depend on how much shrapnel was in the bomb and how many bodies were shielding you.
I go into this detail because I want to make a point: the terrorist will always get through. We cannot get around this situation with more security. There will always be places where people are forced to congregate and you can't secure them. We can't even get people to buy tickets reliably in the subway; forget about frisking everybody with bulky clothes who rides the subway. True, you can't bomb an airliner anymore, but you sure as hell can bomb the new bottleneck at airport security. Yet the PM of France is already calling for greater intelligence cooperation, which we all know is a euphemism for greater surveillance.
This could have been me: I missed this train by less than five minutes. As one of the people who was targeted today, I would like to ask all Europeans on this forum to make their voices heard in their own countries: WE WILL NOT BE TERRORIZED! We know that the world is a risky place. Don't ruin our liberty and solidarity trying to legislate that risk away.
I've long said that it wouldn't be long before terrorists blew themselves up before the security checkpoint. I figured they would do it on line for security during a busy day, but the check-in line was (in hindsight) another target likely to cause maximum casualties with minimal risk of being stopped. Are they going to move the checkpoints to the airport entrances now? (Somehow accounting for the fact that people won't have boarding passes.) Then the attacks will just happen in the inevitable line leading up to the checkpoint. That's the main trouble with TSA-style checkpoints: No matter where you place them, there's always another target.
Of course, the risk of being killed by a terrorist is very low. Worldwide, there were 32,727 terrorism related fatalities in 2014 (the most recent statistic I could find). This is out of about 7 billion people, so your risk of being killed by a terrorist was about 0.0005%. Even if we doubled the terrorism fatalities (perhaps to account for other deaths weren't labeled as terrorism but might be stretched to fall under that), we'd only get to a 0.001% risk.
Obviously, living in different areas of the world gives you a greater or lower risk. If you live in Iraq, you likely have a higher risk than if you live in Smalltown, Kansas. However, you have a far greater risk of dying in a car accident (1.25 million deaths worldwide in 2013, or a 0.02% risk) than by terrorist.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
The Christians only stopped being in the news in the UK every day killing each other for being the wrong flavour of Christian when some time around 2001 the citizens of New York suddenly decided that funding terrorism wasn't cool anymore.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
No it's not. There's no evidence that it's a peaceful religion. It has never been a peaceful religion, and it won't be until it is reformed or destroyed.
We are not at war with Radical Islam. Radical Islam is however at war with us.
Radical Islam is the snake. "Regular" Islam is the grass.
Unless we fight back, we are going to lose.
Every civilization that has insufficiently resisted Islam has fallen to Islam.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
This could have been me: I missed this train by less than five minutes. As one of the people who was targeted today, I would like to ask all Europeans on this forum to make their voices heard in their own countries: WE WILL NOT BE TERRORIZED! We know that the world is a risky place. Don't ruin our liberty and solidarity trying to legislate that risk away.
Very well said, and stay safe.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
Remember, people have committed atrocities in the name of Jesus Christ.
Give me a single quote by Jesus Christ, telling his people to "Kill infidels" or its equivalent. Just one.
People kill. Some religions promote killing, others do not. Religions that promote killing ("Smite them in the neck" ) are not peaceful. Those that promote peace ("Turn the other cheek") do not.
Moral equivocation is why you cannot distinguish the difference between Islam and Christianity (or Judaism, Buddhism, Taoism).
And yes, all religions have followers that committed horrible crimes, even atheism has, It doesn't excuse it or make them morally equivalent,
But here is a test, pee in a cup with a crucifix (or bible or ...) and see what happens. Pee on a Koran, and see what happens. Go ahead, I dare you. One would be called "art" and the other "Racist bigotry", morally equivalent ... right?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Islam is as peaceful as christianity and judaism.
Actually all those religions (and a few more) believe in the same god
You are an Idiot!
Great work mentioning two that went through reforms.
*5 stars. Would laugh at stupid comment again*
But on a more serious note: The god they believe in has zero to do with anything. But thanks for playing.
Luke 19:27 is a parable. It wasn't a command given to his believers.
Oh, it's always a "parable" when you don't like what it says or when the content is blatantly hateful or doesn't jibe with your personal interpretation of what you think is right. But the rest is always to be taken literally, right? It's the "literal WORD OF GOD", right? lol
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The other two are NOT Jesus commands to his followers either.
Umm, but Jesus is God, isn't he? That's what your bible says, over and over. That's what all the preachers and priests say. Are they wrong, or are you?
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Be honest, there are plenty of Atheists who would kill religious people if given a chance.
Sure, I'll be honest- I've never known an atheist who says he or she would like to "kill religious people", not one. We would be happy if religion died and took all of its hatred and bigotry with it, but no atheist I know has ever said they'd like to kill religious people.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...