Terror Attack Kills 11 at French Satirical Newspaper Charlie Hebdo
At least 11 are dead and 10 wounded in an attack on free expression.
At least 11 are dead and 10 wounded in an attack on free expression.
Reuters (“Eleven dead, 10 wounded in Paris shooting: police“):
Eleven people were killed and 10 injured in shooting at the Paris offices of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, already the target of a firebombing in 2011 after publishing cartoons deriding Prophet Mohammad on its cover, police spokesman said.
Five of the injured were in a critical condition, said the spokesman.
Separately, the government said it was raising France’s national security level to the highest notch.
BBC (“Gun attack on French magazine Charlie Hebdo kills 11“):
Gunmen have attacked the Paris office of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, killing 11 people and injuring 10, French officials say.
Witnesses spoke of sustained gunfire at the office as the attackers opened fire with assault rifles before escaping.
Police have launched a major operation in the Paris area in their hunt for the attackers.
Charlie’s latest tweet was a cartoon of the Islamic State militant group leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
The satirical weekly has courted controversy in the past with its irreverent take on news and current affairs.
The magazine was fire-bombed in November 2011 a day after it carried a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad.
President Francois Hollande is at the scene and is planning to hold an emergency cabinet meeting.
‘Black-hooded men’
Two of those killed are police officers, France’s AFP news agency reports, and five of those wounded are critically injured.
An eyewitness, Benoit Bringer, told French TV channel Itele: “Two black-hooded men entered the building with Kalashnikovs.
“A few minutes later we heard lots of shots.”
The men were then seen fleeing the building.
“It’s carnage,” French police official Luc Poignant told another French channel, BFMTV.
Police have warned French media to be on alert and pay attention to security following the attack.
This is a breaking story and details are scant. The government has already declared this a terrorist attack. It is one of the deadliest in French history.
A Google Image search for “Charlie Hebdo” returns all manner of satirical cartoons, with all manner of targets across religious and political lines; there’s plenty to offend everyone. Like the Danish Muslim cartoons controversy, where the publication of images making fun of the Muslim founder Muhammad in a Danish newspaper led to international rioting and mayhem killing more than 200 people, Western traditions of free expression and tolerance have come into violent clash with Islamist sensibilities.
UPDATE: CNN (“At least 11 killed in shooting at office of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo“):
At least 11 people were killed and four were seriously wounded in Wednesday’s attack at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris, French President Francois Hollande told reporters.
“This is a terrorist attack, there is no doubt about this,” he said.
The French government raised the country’s security alert system to its highest level Wednesday after the attack, according to French media.
Two heavily armed men entered the Charlie Hebdo office and opened fire inside, SPG police union spokesman Luc Poignant told CNN affiliate BFMTV.
He said at least three police officers were injured. The Paris mayor’s office said at least six people were wounded, according to BFMTV.
Hollande and other senior government officials were due to arrive at the scene of the shooting, BFMTV said.
A witness who works in the office opposite the magazine’s told BFMTV that he saw two hooded men, dressed in black, enter the building with Kalashnikov submachine guns.
“We then heard them open fire inside, with many shots,” he told the channel. “We were all evacuated to the roof. After several minutes, the men fled, after having continued firing in the middle of the street.”
Witnesses also spoke of seeing a rocket launcher, according to French media reports.
It’s not yet clear what happened to the gunmen or whether they remain at large. There has also been no claim of responsibility.
If witness accounts are correct, this almost certainly qualifies as a terrorist attack. It’s politically motivated and organized, rather than the spontaneous act of a mob or the actions of a lone psychopath.
UK Guardian is reporting it is up to 12 now, 10 reporters and 2 police officers.
That religion of peace is pretty awesome, eh? It’s been reported that the gunmen were yelling “Allahu akbar”.
Find the perpetrators and execute them. Then, maybe, have a fair trial.
Fair trial doesn’t help, they have neither the death penalty nor typically consecutive sentences. Nearly all of the 70’s terrorists have been released by now even with multiple life sentences.
@Mu:
That’s why you execute them before the trial.
@William Teach: probably frances’ “tea party” crowd….
how they got past the tough gun control laws is really something.
This is tragic. I’ll pray for the families of the dead.
It sucks to think about how much pleasure Pinky is going to get out of this.
@bill: France has a “Tea Party”? Well, French people do think they are taxed enough already. Of course, it was Lefties who disarmed the population, but, regardless, the guns used in this horrendous Islamist terrorist attack were outlawed in France.
@Neil Hudelson: This is tragic. I’ll pray for the families of the dead.
It sucks to think about how much pleasure Pinky is going to get out of this.
Your first thought is for the victims. Commendable.
Your second thought is how upset you are that your political opponents might actually have been right.
Let us know when you spare a thought for the monsters who committed this atrocity. I understand that it’s way down your list of priorities (partly because it means having to acknowledge that we, your opponents, were right on something), but I hope it at least makes the list.
Seriously? Can you really be that stupid?
@Jenos Idanian #13:
You misunderstand. I meant the pleasure he takes in innocent lives being lost. He’s indicated that in past posts.
@Jenos Idanian #13:
Seriously? Can you really be that stupid?
His second thought seems more along the lines of how people like Pinky and you and the guy that thinks he is a pirate always see the actions of a few as condemnation of a religion practiced in peace by billions, and will mis-interpret this incident as some sort of vindication of your bigoted views.
Do we really need to run through all the people killed in the name of Christ by Christians?
If you are only going to twist peoples words in order to make a xenophobic argument with no basis in fact…then do us all a favor and just go back into the hole you crawled out of.
I don’t want to live on this planet anymore.
@Jenos Idanian #13: Gosh, you seemed to have skipped right over all the messages in which your ideological compatriots were dancing on the graves in order to use this to push their own little obsessions.
Perhaps had you said something about them, you could have come off as the adult you wanted to, rather than a sanctimonious creep who, as always, lectures others about sins you never stop committing.
Won’t you please just go away?
@William Teach: @bill:
Yeah, if only France had our loose gun laws France could enjoy gun deaths on a daily – even hourly – basis, just like we do.
Morons.
It’s terribly sad. I presume there will be plenty of conclusion-jumping, as exemplified in some of the comments above.
The temperature seems to be rising across the Continent these days considering the demonstrations of the last week or so in Germany and the rise of various populist parties. The anti-immigration Sweden Democrats, for example, have just been temporarily sidelined but I doubt it will be for long.
Let’s please not make this into yet another gun control debate. We’ve beaten that horse beyond dead, and it is utterly irrelevant to what happened in Paris today.
People were murdered in cold blood for drawing satirical pictures of a religious figure. Disgusting. Abhorrent. Beyond the pale in anything approaching civilization.
Al Jazeera’s coverage adds some reaction:
Later in the same article:
I haven’t tracked down the video yet but it will, no doubt, add fuel to the fire.
@Dave Schuler:
Here you go, linked in this Reddit comment.
http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/2rmace/shots_fired_at_french_magazine_hq/cnh7yvx
Be warned, one of those shows the point-blank execution of a wounded, unarmed police officer.
@Mikey:
It’s pretty awful. The police officer was lying on the ground, writhing, and one of the gunmen ran up and executed him. He was no threat to them. He was merely killed for the sake of killing.
No, a cartoon sliming a religion does not justify murder and terror, but that cartoon above is ugly and completely beyond the pale. I wonder how Christians would have reacted if it depicted the Bible being called shit instead of the Koran?
Always it can be depended upon that extremists of all stripes will seize whatever excuse to justify their murderous hatreds. It is sad. Sadder still that in the face of such senseless violence there are calls to inflict the same in revenge.
@Dave Schuler: According to several translations I’ve seen, the dialogue goes like this:
Terrorist: So you wanted to kill us?
Policeman: No, it’s OK, boss (colloquially, “I surrender.”)
Terrorist shoots policeman.
Terrorist: He wasn’t an Algerian, it’s OK.
@Nikki:
That’s a false equivalence, Nikki. We have a pretty good basis for comparison. “Piss Christ” was destroyed by angry demonstrators but there wasn’t any mass murder.
@Nikki:
I imagine there would’ve been a lot of sturm and drang, but I don’t believe there would be the murder of 12 people who were related to the piece.
The “piss Christ” artist is still alive and well, I believe.
@Nikki:
Nikki wins the award for dumbest comment on OTB ever.
@Nikki: They’d probably respond in a way I would object to less than this.
@Nikki:
They are both really bad fiction.
@Nikki: So far, Christians have not responded with extreme violence to denigration of Christianity. We do not freak out in violence, unlike practitioners of Islam. If someone, say, puts a representation of Christ in a jar of urine no one is concerned about extreme violence. Someone publishes a cartoon of Mohammed and everyone is majorly concerned.
Fox military analyst Tom McInerney on Fox & Friends this morning, somehow connecting it all back to de Blasio:
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/fox-guest-blames-paris-attack-on-pol-correctness-warns-communist-de-blasio-will-bring-it-here/
@William Teach:
Not recently, no. This is a very good thing; it indicates that Christianity has matured somewhat from its earlier infatuation with witch hunts, auto-da-fé, burning heretics alive, eradicating the Jews (again), etc.
Christians have an enormous amount of power and comfort in America. Being angry at Andre Serrano or at cultural elites is just sport for imbeciles. No Christian will ever be persecuted in America, not in my lifetime at least.
Meanwhile, it’s quite possible that the next French government will be far-right and anti-immigrant. What does that mean? I don’t know. But let’s not pretend that practitioners of Islam in France are in the same position as Christians in America.
But our government raped prisoners and, according to the latest polls, a majority of us support them. None of us has clean hands.
@William Teach:
So you are just falling back on a complete ignorance of history?
Unlike those cartoonists inside an office building in Paris, they were an existential threat to the Islamic terrorist.
Funny thing happened in the 12th century, the modern world slowly began to evolve in the Western Civilizations that were governed by Christianity.
So yes, Islam in the 21st century is where the Catholic church was in the 12th century. Only the Christians had to figure out individual freedom, free expression and the separation of economic, social, political and ideological/religious spheres from scratch.
The people who attacked this magazine may be Muslims…but what made them attack the magazine is not their religion as the xenophobic commentors above would have you believe. They attacked this magazine because they are extremists and intolerant. Extremists and intolerant people exist in every religion and every race and every walk of life. And there are millions and millions of Muslims who are not extremists or intolerant.
The unfortunate thing here is that this incident gives extremists and the intolerant…like Jenos and bill and Teach and JKB etc…ammunition for their own extremism and intolerance.
Last I checked Christians reacted to the massacre of 3,000 Americans by attacking and invading two countries, only one of which was even involved, and resorting to torture of prisoners. We have jets and drones, they have AK’s.
I’m not drawing an equivalency, I think we were right to attack Afghanistan. I think both 9-11 and 1-7 were despicable and intolerable acts and I popped a bottle of Champagne when OBL was fed to the fishes. But pretending as though we are somehow calm, cool and rational is absurd. We have the examples of some on this thread who respond to three terrorists by suggesting we need all out war on more than a billion people.
If 3 terrorists = All of Islam, I’d say our enemies have a right to suggest that 330 million Americans = All of Christianity.
@JKB:
Your understanding of history would embarrass a high school sophomore.
@JKB:
Yes, aside from slavery, colonialism, and the genocide of native populations, there was a wonderful evolution in Christianity.
Your view of history is basically what a nineteen-year old Jihadist thinks about Islam. It’s just as absurd and has–overall–the same consequences.
@C. Clavin:
Figures you would apologize for terrorists. That’s right fucking Muslim terrorists avenging alleged disrespect to Muhammad. These animals and their ilk are living in the 8th century.
How are these people different than the animals in the syria on both sides of the Civil War?
Did you know There was a Pew poll in Egypt done a few years ago — 82% said, I think, stoning is the appropriate punishment for adultery. Over 80% thought death was the appropriate punishment for leaving the Muslim religion. These are real tolerant folks.
@Mikey:
Hear, hear!
Too bad, then, that it became a discussion about Christianity’s superiority to Islam.
Not possible this event happened, as I have it on good authority France is a gun-free zone.
Actually, there have been multiple Christianity-based terror attacks in the past 5 years alone, with some taking place inside actual churches (the murder of Dr. Tiller and the shootings at the Unitarian Universalist church in Knoxville). However, none were motivated by a desecration of the book considered holy by that religion. Do you believe that Christians would be as sanguine if the Bible were called shit like this cartoon depicts the Koran?
And let’s not forget Eric Rudolph, Paul Hill, Anders Breivik, Frank Roque, James Kopp and John Salvi. All are/were professed Christians who engaged in murderous terrorist acts (and Breivik’s body count FAR exceeded today’s act).
Do their acts of violence mean that the Christian claims to being a peaceful religion are lies, too?
JKB’s last comment is eminently correct. I’m a registered D, but the concept that you have to pretend that there’s no obvious difference between Islam and other religions common in the West at this point in history is just freaking ludicrous.
Moderate Muslim countries fund extreme Muslim groups which leads to this stuff. The Saudis pay for Wahabbi schools which train future militants. There is no corresponding infrastructure (or results) from Christians, Jews, Hindus, or Buddhists.
@M1EK:
Not sure if you’re aware, but Saudi Arabia isn’t a moderate Muslim country.
“There is no corresponding infrastructure (or results) from Christians, Jews, Hindus, or Buddhists.”
Really? Christian terrorist organizations may not have the funding like the Saudi kingdom, but they do exist –the Army of God, the Hutaree, the Lord’s Resistance Army and the Ku Klux Klan, to name a few.
@Al:
France, in 2010, had 2.67 deaths by gun per 100,000 people.
The United States, in 2010, had 10.26 deaths by gun per 100,000 people.
The United States had almost 4 times the rate of death by gun than France.
Did you have a point to make?
@Modulo Myself:
Quite right. As indeed NIkki supra.
@William Teach:
Charming religious bigotry. Ignorant and provincial.
@William Teach:
It’s always wonderful for provincial American ignoramuses to import their unlearned prejudices in speaking to affaires foreign.
As a matter of fact, modern French gun control dates to the early 1939 décret loi du 19 avril 1939 which passed under the centrist government of the Radical Party (generally classic liberal, but which was in preparations for war with Nazi Germany ), but it was the far-right Vichy government that instituted disarmament of the population and draconian gun laws.
The lesson here is American provincial politics and political development (and political / ideological fetishes) are rather poor for understanding or explaining other countries. Your infamous exceptionalism and all that.
Not that ordinary hand guns would have any great utility against attackers armed with Kalash assault riles, notwithstanding romantic American gun fantasies, and fictions.
In any case, a horrid attack, although I can’t say I have ever been a fan of Charlie Hebdo’s ‘humour’ of offence for offence’s sake. I hope the French shoot these scum down and crack the smuggling ring (w/o doubt out of Marseille or Nice) that will w/o doubt be found tied into this.
Slavery, colonialism and genocide of native populations predates the birth of Christ much less the establishment of Christianity as a religion. On the other hand, the teachings of Christ had of influence upon Western Civilizations abandonment of slavery, withdrawal from colonialism and not only refraining from genocide of native populations but now sending their citizens to stop genocides being conducted by others.
Not a bad evolution. I suppose you hoped for an immaculate sudden transformation of humanity?
@C. Clavin:
And, here I thought the unfortunate thing is that 12 people were murdered because they worked for a magazine that printed some cartoons. Thanks for clearing that up.
@M1EK:
Idiot. Saudi Arabia is not a “moderate” Muslim country — far to the contrary, it’s an apartheid fundamentalist state.
Moderate Muslim countries such as Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Bangladesh, and Indonesia, by contrast, do not have fund extremist Muslim groups.
@C. Clavin:
Yeah, that sounds like me. That reads like every third comment I make on this site, that’s for sure. Sometimes I miss meals because I’m too busy posting anti-Islamic comments on this site.
@JKB:
This is actually too stupid to respond to.
@JKB:
Actually, no, I think I can manage:
That’s some powerful religion, that Christianity, that it only took TWO THOUSAND YEARS for it to influence its adherents to stop doing all those things.
The essential difference between Christianity and Islam in the real-world today is that Christianity was fragmented by decades of Christian civil wars, then smacked down hard by the French Revolution – which destroyed church wealth – and the Enlightenment more generally, and by Marxism. None of which Christians liked.
The reason American Christians are not much of a problem is that atheists, agnostics, “deists” and other Enlightenment creatures, joined by cynical slave-holding businessmen, wrote a Constitution that stripped religion of any secular power.
There is a problem in the Muslim world: they have a distinct lack of the very sorts of people and ideas that Christians despise. If there’s anyone who can claim moral superiority here, it’s not Christians or Muslims, it’s secularists.
@M1EK:
Utter tripe as a comment
Sure, there is pray five times a day.
No ‘moderate’ country as such funds extremist groups (unless in some Alice in Wonderland words mean what you want at the moment redefines moderate). This is pure ignorance.
The Saudi government rarely directly funds the a
As for corresponding infrastructure with other religions, you’re frankly utterly ignorant of the radical Buddhist networks in Asian that have led to genocidal attacks on non-Buddhist minorities (Muslim, Hindu and Xian) or the radical networks in India that are anti Muslim and anti Xian and have in fact have targeted – to bring things home, Indian Xians for forced conversion, for example.
Given the proper context, human beings are quite capable of taking any religion and making it murderous and have done so throughout history with great alacrity.
But since these things does not involve tubby provincial Americans… well doesn’t exist does it?
@Nikki:
And yet, while the Klan used Christian imagery, it collapsed not when mainline Christian denominations stopped supporting it as they never did, but when the Democratic Party was forced to abandon their paramilitary arm.
But we might get further if we view the Islamists as Muslim cults, however, they are cults that control a large portion of mainline Islam and mosques.
Kind of like if Jim Jones and the People’s Temple were the dominant force in Christianity. Or if Rev Wright, Sharpton or those loony toons who protest military funerals were considered legitimate representatives of Christian beliefs.
@michael reynolds:
Amen!
@Jenos Idanian #13:
I’m curious what you think you are right about.
@JKB: Queer influence that supposed Xian influence on abolition, coming after literally hundreds of years of quite the opposite effect. Why one might just say that is pure nonsense and abject ahistorical apologia.
@JKB: No, the Salafist – Takfiris do NOT control large portions of the Islamic world nor of mosques – else instead of having such people numbering in the thousands you’d have millions – there being between 1.6 and 2 BILLION Muslims in the world.
Not that I think any of your statements are anything but statements pulled out the arse informed by nothing but uninformed bigotry and Mr Murdoch’s pandering shite.
@Pinky:
A lot of your statements, taken to their logical ends, indicates that C.Clavin is correct.
@JKB:
Man, you really, really need to learn some history, dude. You are clueless. Christianity helped end Colonialism? Local resistance, Marxists and changing economic times ended colonialism. The Catholic church knew perfectly damn well what was going on in the Belgian Congo, to take just one of many, many examples, and said nothing. Good Christian Portuguese were still fighting to hold onto colonies in Angola and Mozambique as late as the 70’s.
Our own American colonialism only ended in our own country when we ran out of people to kill or ethnically cleanse and could rule over our stolen lands without opposition. It was ended in the Philippines by Japanese forces, and in Cuba by communists.
Well, perhaps Islam will demonstrate its superiority by stopping those things sometime in the next 600 years thus beating out Christianity. Of course, the first time around, the ideas had to be developed and the hearts of man changed, as well as, dispersed without modern communications and without the benefit of a common consensus of the superiority of the idea of individual freedom and value.
@Al: As a matter of fact, French gun control is not ‘gun free’ whatever the 2nd rate provincial agitprop for your impoverished domestic politics that may have informed your views
@JKB:
The “ideas” of Christianity were spread by slaughter. Show me a Christian country where Christians did not massacre their way to power? Go ask an American Indian about the gentle spread of Christianity in this country.
You don’t get to strut on some imaginary moral high ground just because you’ve successfully exterminated all opposition.
@lounsbury:
Oh, please share your explanation of the evolution of human society. Include an explanation of why it developed in Western Civilization as opposed to developing and dominating in African, Western Hemisphere or Asian indigenous societies. No fair starting with Christian morality, get your own morality from somewhere else.
@JKB:
Morality precedes Christianity, genius. You don’t even have to strain to read history to figure that out, read your own bible.
@JKB: It doubtless escapes you, but abstractions do not take actions. People do.
Insofar as Xians themselves have not ceased or stopped idiotic religiously motivated violence either, the goal rather seems Quixotic.
There being approaching 2 billion Muslims, a rational analysis rather can understand the problem to be a radical fringe for were it otherwise, you’d be right buggered on the numbers. Since Islam is not a unitary entity, speaking of it as such is utter nonsense, any more than holding Xianity as a whole responsible for the idiocy of American fundamentalist anti-abortian terrorists or the weirdos of the Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army.
@michael reynolds:
Many terrible things happened in opposition to the third commandment not to do evil in God’s name. However, it was the dissonance between the teachings of Christ and the acts of men in the name of Christ that provoked changes in human society that we enjoy today. We are fortunate, those changes went toward the better nature of man illuminated by Christ rather than falling back to the more animalistic nature of historical humanity.
But please, elaborate on where our modern world beliefs in individual rights, the dignity of all, the equality of women and the races came from. No fair citing Marxists since Marx’s beliefs were influenced by the teachings of Christ. His was a new implementation of those beliefs in opposition to those that had been manipulated by religious and political leaders of the time rather than some new development of morality. And even then, millions have been killed in the name of Marx just as millions were killed in the name of Christ. All in all, believers are those you need to worry about.
@michael reynolds:
And at what point did that pre-Christian morality support individual rights, the sanctity of all human life, etc. And why if it was established somewhere, why did it not spread around the Earth?
Morality preceded Christianity, but do we really want to supplant Christian morality with those earlier moralities?
Then perhaps mainstream Muslims should join with the rest of the world to put an end to the Islamic death cults?
And, btw, Xian is a city in China. If you fear writing the word Christian, one must question your superstitious nature.
@JKB:
Evolution of human culture? Aside from the fact that it would be an exercise in the sheerest futility given your impoverished provincialism (the idea one would start with Xian morality is rather laughable and betrays a gross and provincial ignorance), I do not in fact see much ‘evolution’ at all – your American enthusiastic adoption and legitimisation of old school Sov style and Nazi derived torture regimes over a wee bit of terrorism rather demonstrates that none of this is more than a thin veneer. Not that I find Americans peculiar in that, except for the self-delusion about exceptionalism in morality.
As the expression goes in Arabic, Beni Adam, Beni Adam. The children of Adam are the children of Adam (that is people are people).
@JKB:
Yes, and I do worry about all “believers” including people like you. Because I have news for you, pal, as an ethnic Jew it’s not Muslims I worry about, it’s you Christians. Muslims never gassed six million of my people, that was done by Christians.
Oh, wait. . . you don’t think Nazis should be identified as Christians? Then explain please the source of anti-semitism. You’re a big one for claiming Christian influences should get all the credit for everything moral, maybe you can figure out how to credit them with all the good that flows from their ideology and ignore all the evil.
Then, when you get done jesuitically parsing the good and evil that came from Christianity, explain how that is fundamentally different from Islam.
People are aszholes. That’s the truth. And aszholes will use whatever tool is handy – any religion, any ideology – to rationalize evil. Islam=Christianity=Marxism=Naziism when it comes to providing cover for murderous creeps.
The issue is not simply whether religions/ideologies cause evil deeds, but why, despite their protestations of morality, they fail so conspicuously to stop or even to recognize and acknowledge evil deeds. I blame Christians for creating anti-semitism, for supporting it, justifying it, but equally for ignoring it when it was clear that their insanity had bred Nazi Germany. Catholics and Protestants took Nazi money and turned a blind eye to what their own parishioners were doing in Dachau.
History did not start on 9-11. Christians don’t get to puff themselves up as some sort of moral guide just because they were so much better at genocide than Muslims have been.
@michael reynolds:
Marxists ended colonialism? I know some Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Poles, Hungarians, Czechoslovakians, Bulgarians, Romanians, Albanians, and East Germans who would disagree. Also, some Kazakhs, Turkmen, Tajik, Uzbeki, and Kyrgyz might take issue with that statement as well.
@lounsbury:
Serenity Now!!!!
@JKB:
Sure, perhaps the Americans should join the rest of the Western civilized world and ban and prosecute war criminals and torturers, eh?
Or when American Xian evangilists are prosecuted for promoting hate crimes against gays in East African – when you get together and stop them and the Lord’s Resistance Army… eh, fair enough
Of course how a Muslim in Indonesia is going to do anything about the Saudi rather escapes, much like how obese middle class Americans can do very much about the Lord’s Resistance Army… although Americans could certainly intervene on the hate promotion by their evangalist brethern.
Very nice to make fatuous assertions….
@JKB:
Actually, no, the Klan collapsed in 1981 when Beulah Mae Donald, the mother of lynching victim Michael Donald, successfully sued the United Klans of America and won a $7 mil judgement, bankrupting that organization.
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=klan%20sued
By that time, Nixon’s Southern Strategy had already taken place, those racists hooked up with the Republican Party, and that union continues to this day. Proof? The rise in Klan membership since the election of Barack Obama.
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=rise%20in%20klan%20membership%20since%202008
Google and historical truth are your friends.
I feel like why JKB is trying to say is that through slavery, colonial exploitation, and genocide Islam should attempt to reach a point where its most closed-minded members have the luxury to delude themselves into thinking they are lovers of freedom.
Meanwhile, the people murdered today by these terrorists would have thought JKB a sanctimonious dullard, but let’s look beyond that to remember they were killed by Muslims. That’s the important thing.
@Gavrilo:
Yes, as I mentioned, people are aszholes who will use any religion or ideology. But it’s absurd to deny that Marxists had a big role in places like Africa. Were they motivated by idealism? Please. They were motivated by the same things that motivate everyone: greed, fear, hate, the lust for power, and a light sprinkling of idealism.
Same array of human characteristics that motivated Christians to successfully invade, occupy and exterminate the natives in all of North and South America and Australia, and to attempt to invade and occupy the middle east, India. . . The list includes more or less all of planet earth.
@michael reynolds:
Quite right.
One irony about current events – the very existence of religious minorities (non recent immigrant) in the Arab world is a historical marker. Unlike the Xians historically, the Muslims didn’t (as a general rule) engage in systematic and wholesale religious oppression and slaughter. The reason there were – excepting systematically oppressed Jews (who fled to the Islamic world in general) – few non-Xian (aforementioned Jews) and no non-Abrahamic minorities, unlike the Islamic world. The European record in Europe and in the Americas is of outright religiously informed genocide.
Of course the Islamic tradition had some very strong built in tax incentives to provide real economic incentive for theoretical precepts. I always like economic incentives for actualising pious religious theory into practice. I don’t credit the historical Muslims with fundamentally stronger morality, just better structural incentives.
@Nikki:
Not in his case, sadly. His “history” comes from talk radio and Fox News, from cynical millionaires who feed him their offal and laugh at him for lapping it up.
@lounsbury:
We love to talk about Muslims hating Israel while rather ignoring the fact that the only reason Israel exists is because Christians couldn’t stop murdering Jews.
@JKB:
Yes, what sort of sick animals would protest at a funeral…?
Oh, right. The NYPD.
@JKB:
Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, and the rest of the pre-Christian pagan Greeks, basically.
@Nikki:
Yeah! Do you remember all the riots and killing that followed the display of “Piss Christ”?
Neither do I.
@michael reynolds: True enough and then the Arab world largely (excepting Morocco) getting into a fit of sheer idiocy and expelling their own Jewish populations. Incentives in the short term changed.
Beni Adam, Beni Adam.
@BobC:
Actually, Piss Christ was a startlingly beautiful work. The Christians that were offended were so because they were uncivilized and did not understand art.
@BobC So you believe Christians consider artwork of Jesus Christ nailed to the cross to be as holy as the Bible itself?
‘Coz I kinda doubt that.
@Nikki:
Uh…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piss_Christ
@Nikki:
Actually, most Christians don’t venerate the physical object of the Bible itself as a holy object. They do, however, often venerate crucifixes.
@michael reynolds:
I always wondered what the people in the Christian Right who believes in the idea that most Jews have to be regathered to Israel to trigger the second of Christ will do when American Jews continue to prefer to live in the US.
@Rafer Janders:
It’s only Catholics who venerate crucifixes; Protestants do not.
@michael reynolds: Last I checked Christians reacted to the massacre of 3,000 Americans by attacking and invading two countries, only one of which was even involved, and resorting to torture of prisoners. We have jets and drones, they have AK’s.
Check again. It wasn’t just Christians, it was Americans. Christian Americans, Jewish Americans, some Muslim Americans, some atheist Americans, and a whole bunch of other -Americans.
And yes, we have jets and drones, they have AKs. Perhaps they shouldn’t have started the fight with us.
@Jenos Idanian #13: So now you’re arguing that America is NOT a predominantly Christian nation? How about the President, the Vice President and the Congress people who all voted to go to war–they were not predominantly Christian either?
It’s always so predictable. A Muslim-inspired massacre inspires a whole slew of condemnations of all religions, and the rationale for going back centuries for equivalency is “history.”
But what isn’t supposed to be brought up are two simple facts: 1) Each incident in the past few years hasn’t been motivated by “religion,” but one religion specifically, and 2) how common these incidents are becoming.
Egypt’s President Al-Sisi made a truly remarkable speech recently calling for, essentially, a “Reformation” for Islam. It’s gotten very little attention here or in the mainstream media, but it could be a tipping point for Islam. Egypt’s making some very serious moves towards fighting Islamic radicalism, but that news is being blackballed.
@Nikki:
I said “often”, not “all.” And even Protestants frequently display crucifixes in their churches and homes.
@Nikki: Christ, Nikki, don’t be so stupid. michael specifically said that the response to 9/11 was by Christians, and that’s a crock of shit. It was a response by Americans — that was the unifying element.
@Rafer Janders: Protestants also hang black velvet paintings of Jesus in their homes, but they don’t consider those holy either, and certainly not more holy than the Bible itself.
@Jenos Idanian #13: Those who made the decision to go to war were both Americans and predominantly Christian and as a predominantly-Christian nation, the war supporters were mostly Christians as well.
That was Michael’s intent and you know it. Or do you want to continue playing dumb?
@Jenos Idanian #13:
So you are saying America is neither a Christian nation, a nation that is based on Christian values, or is fundamentally Christian in any way?
Is there any point to this little roundabout you three are having?
@Jenos Idanian #13:
Yes, in fact it is. Religious bigots come out and make a lot of bloody ahistorical nonsense statements and derail what could be a condemnation of some fringe criminal extremists into a running demolition of their ignoramus assertions and idiot provincialism.
One merely had to go to current events and some decades for equivalences, despite your bankrupt and typical demarche to pretend otherwise.
That the history and reality doesn’t fit the ideas of the simple minded religious bigot is not my problem.
Utter nonsense and sheer tubby American navel gazing. The massacres of the Lord’s Resistance army, the violence in Myanmar or in Sri Lanka are not done by Muslims at all.
It is simply your provincial bigotry.
Whatever, this is utter tripe you ignorant git. Sisi is simply making a political demarche around his bloody dictatorship and his military autocracy is going to drive radicalism, not fight it you ignorant gullible git.
There is no “tipping point for Islam” – Egypt and the neighbouring Arabs are neither the majority of the Islamic populations nor in any way involved in what is pure Egyptian political posturing over an authoritarian dictatorship that is taking Egypt back decades.
(although again writing ‘reform’ Islam is utter nonsense in and of itself, like writing ‘reform Xianity’ over the bigotry of American evangelicals)
@Ebenezer_Arvigenius:
There are 100 comments on this tread. One of them is mine. I’m not sure I see your point.
@Ebenezer_Arvigenius: The point is, they need to condemn all religion equally, so they find a way to make 9/11 about Christianity. And they will say or do anything to make the false equivalence. Which means they have to ignore that no overtly religious symbols were attacked, that peoples of all faiths died, and how Bush and a whole bunch of other leaders went to great (occasionally ridiculous) lengths to try to separate the terrorists from “mainstream” Islam.
Idiots…
@JKB: Uh, the Roman republic?
You don’t know much about the history of law, it seems. I suggest you look at the charming 3-volume paperweight called the Corpus Iuris Civilis.
@michael reynolds:
Show me a Christian country where Christians did not massacre their way to power?
There are plenty of examples. Christianity spread through the Roman empire for centuries with no state power backing it up and sometimes under persecution. Now I am not naive about what eventually happened – it did become the official state religion (under Theodosius, not Constantine) and that was probably a bad thing that corrupted the church. But state coercion didn’t really take off until the fifth century – so that’s about 300 years before any state support at all (often with persecution) and almost 400 years before any large-scale enforcement by the sword. This was wrong, but by the point is that by the time Roman emperors became more friendly to Christianity, it was already very popular and growing quickly.
Christianity is growing very rapidly in China – by some estimates, China is on track to become the global center of Christianity. There might even be more Christians there than serious Communist party members, though it’s hard to know for sure. The state’s relationship with Christianity is complicated, but there has been official persecution in the past and there still is in some situations, and certainly no state coercion.
About 30% of South Koreans are now Christians – obviously no western colonialism there.
Africa is an interesting and complex case – they were colonized and often horribly mistreated, but much of the growth there took off after colonialism was already on the decline. There were only about 9 million African Christians in 1900, now there’s over 300 million.
So yes, while there have certainly have been great evils done, there are plenty of instances where it spread without violence or colonialism. Sometimes even when persecution has been a disincentive to conversion (just because right-wing Republican Christians have a paranoid persecution complex doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist in some places).
I don’t really have anything to say about the arguments over Islam, by the way – just wanted to comment on this specific thing.
@Modulo Myself:
Even stranger then, the lack of rioting and violence.
Since you seem to have sources of information not available to ordinary humans, perhaps you could comment on the mindset of the attacking Muslims? Were they just too-sensitive art critics?
@BobC:
That Piss Christ didn’t inspire violence does not negate the many other acts of violence committed by Christians in God’s name.
@C. Clavin: I see Clavin is on the Gerbil training wheel again. Hey, Cliffie–there are an estimated 1.6 BILLION Muslims in the world. Let’s say that a mere 10% of them actually condone terrorism in the name of Islam. I’ll do the math for you as we all know that numbers hurt your head. Answer: 160 million crazies. Total number of Germans in Nazi Germany? About 80 million.
Hey, Mikey Reynolds: Continue Obama’s passivity towards today’s Middle East Arab cuckoos and you’ll soon find out who wants to complete Hitler’s “final solution”. Hint: It ain’t Christians. I notice that in other threads you have trashed the Bible as gibberish and more. What say you about the Koran? Care to apply your anti-Bible comments to it too? What condemnation do you have for Mohammed, who married a 6 year old and then had sex with her when she turned 9?
PS: Mike: Care to discuss how the Israelites wiped out all the Canaanites because your/our God commanded them? “All of them” means every man, woman and child, FYI.
We won’t go into how the Israelis launched a pre-emptive strike against the Egyptians in the 6 day war because I was rooting for them. Yad Vashem.
@Nikki: That Piss Christ didn’t inspire violence does not negate the many other acts of violence committed by Christians in God’s name.
Feel free to cite examples from since, say, 1900.
There’s a difference between “History” and “Current Events.”
@Jenos Idanian #13: And in this instance, people of various faiths also died and no overt religious symbols were attacked.
And yet you, and people like you, still continue to claim that Islam itself is responsible for all acts of terrorism committed by its extremist adherents, yet excuse Christianity for the acts committed by its own extremists.
Funny that.
@Nikki:
I don’t know a lot of Christians, but am aware of none who consider any artifact to be holy in itself, including a physical copy of the Bible. My experience hasn’t included anyone from the Eastern Orthodox Churches, however.
I think, however, that we have plenty of evidence that Muslims consider merely making depictions of Mohammed to be worthy of death.
@Jenos Idanian #13:
Feel free to read up about Xian witch killings in Africa (of course Africans being black are not ‘real Xians’) or the Lord’s Resistance army, all in the past two decades. This without bothering to try to look up other religious violence.
Your empty headed hypocrisy is typical of the provincial religious bigot, be he Xian or Muslim or other.
@Jenos Idanian #13:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knoxville_Unitarian_Universalist_church_shooting
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Behring_Breivik
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Rudolph
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Jennings_Hill
Shall I go on?
@BobC:
So…there is NO reason that most KJV’s have HOLY BIBLE printed on the cover, is that what you’re saying? No reason that Christian ministers and pastors tend to refer to it as the Word of God?
@Nikki: The Christian treats the Bible as the word of God. The Muslim treats the Koran as God. If you’re looking for a Christian equivalent, it’d be the Communion wafer among Catholics and some Protestants. To desecrate a Bible is a rude thing to a Christian. To desecrate a Koran is an attack on God to a Muslim.
@Nikki:
No, but it does suggest an answer to your initial question:
I think you would have to honestly say that the likely answer is, “Nothing”.
@Pinky: Riiiiight.
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=bible%20burning
Two separate sentences. Moderate Muslim countries fund extremists. AND the Saudis fund extremists. Apparently some of you need a refresher on what periods mean.
The only true idiots are those who think Pakistan, for instance, is as harmless to us as, let’s say, Ireland. Or those who think our response to 9/11 had anything to do with Christianity.
I hate fundamentalists of the Christian variety as much as any of you do. But they are not, not, NOT, a million times NOT, the same kind of existential threat to secular people that Islamists are.
@lounsbury: I don’t see a lot of support for those groups from other Christians. On the other hand, there are plenty of terrorist apologists like, say, Anjem Choudary, who… well, sound a hell of a lot like some of the commenters here.
And this is making me re-think my long-standing prejudice against the French. The Charlie people had a hell of a lot more testicular fortitude than the majority of the commentariat here.
@Jenos Idanian #13:
Ahh, I was wondering which clown in the car would be the one to step into this.
Why look at all the diversity you found there. Look at all that detail. We’re X and Y and Z, and blah and blah and you could have gone on in great, granular detail.
About us.
They, on the other hand lack any such detail and nuance. They – all 1.6 billion of them – are represented by perhaps a world wide total of what, maybe 50,000 terrorists? That’s 1.6 billion people defined by 0.00003 of the total.
(And by the way, I very much doubt that the number of actual jihadis with a hard-on against the West rises even that high. But I want to be fair to you.)
Just what is the math from your perspective? How many Muslims equals all of Islam? How many black men does it take to equal all black people? How many parts Jew do you need to be to take the one-way train ride? Enlighten us.
This is the essence of a big slice of the bigotry pie. You identify an other, someone different from yourself. In the normal course of things you have some dispute with him, some issue, and from that point forward you go from the specifics of a single disagreement with a single person, to an assumption that he must be his race and his race must be him.
You generalize, and you find yourself despising not one individual but millions and billions of people with whom you’ve had no contact, and about whom you know nothing except that you’ve decided they form a set with some dude you scratched your car or got a job you wanted.
How many people were killed over Kevin Smith’s “Dogma?”
How many people were killed over the opening of “The Book of Mormon?”
When Iran announced a contest for anti-Semitic cartoons, Israel urged its cartoonists to enter the contest.
Excellent.
@Nikki:
You are, I hope, just being deliberately dense. Christians believe that the content of the bible is God’s word, not any specific set of bound, printed pages.
If you own a copy of the Bible, you can do anything you want with it; deface it, burn it, make it into a Transgressive Art display, etc. You will be breaking no laws, and no one will be coming after you with a large knife.
(Don’t try this with the Koran, however.)
@michael reynolds: How you choose to assuage your “white guilt” and self-hatred is your own business. But you ain’t gonna shame or bully or browbeat me into sharing it, ‘cuz it’s a crock.
@Jenos Idanian #13:
I’m curious, how do you define “testicular fortitude”? It takes no courage whatsoever to talk tough on the internet. You have made countless comments about Islamic terrorists. Have you even taken any action at all that you see as fighting terrorism in the real world? Done anything that would put you at even a little teensy tiny bit of personal jeopardy?
@John425:
There are an estimated 320 million Americans in the world. Let’s say that 66% of them actually condone torture in the name of national security. I’ll do the math for you as we all know that numbers hurt your head. Answer: 211 million crazies.
@Jenos Idanian #13:
I don’t want to Godwin the thread, but….
Wow, this thread went into the shitter pretty quick.
There’s a basic principle of free expression and its protection, and it doesn’t matter what our individual religious or political views are, we ALL respect that principle.
We agree on this most basic thing. It’s a shame we can’t even put aside our differences until the sun goes down.
@BobC:
Um, Catholics, for one example, consider the consecrated host at Mass to be the physical embodiment of the actual body and blood of Christ, ergo holy in itself. Many Christian denominations also worship holy relics.
@Jenos Idanian #13:
Brilliant riposte. The entire range of your intellect is on display.
@michael reynolds:
@JKB:
Let’s not put on blinders and pretend that the differences today have anything to do with Christianity and Islam. Christians are mostly contained by the mostly secular societies in which they live. Christian killing for religious reasons continued well past the 12th century and even well past the Enlightenment, which was the root of the solution to that problem. Northern Ireland is a prime example of that being carried forward well into the latter half of the 20th century even within a largely secular society. If you want to see what Christianity unconstrained by secular society looks like visit Uganda or Southern Sudan.
@JKB:
That wasn’t Christianity. You may not have read about this in your history research, but Christianity was used to justify chattel slavery in the US, colonizing of the Americas, and the genocide of the Native Americans. That is just a partial list of things Christianity supported contra your list in what is now the United States and all of that well over 1000 years after his death. It is the ascendance of Enlightenment principles and humanism that accomplished those things, not any religion.
I take it as a Jew you don’t celebrate Passover or any other Jewish holiday that commemorates the events chronicled in the Bible’s book of Exodus?
And thank Allah that the Muslims landed at Normandy, marched across Europe and liberated the Concentration camps in Poland, et al.
And so the bubble people babble on in their bubble…
Just watched Le 20H on TF1 and talked to some people heading out for a vigil in a small city in Languedoc / Roussillon. Based on turn out all over France tonight likely to be a few thousand in the main square in just one small city in France…
This was the biggest attack by Al Quaeda since 9/11. You know, those guys who our illustrious president said did not exist any more. The attack today was a more fundamental an attack on the basis of Western liberal democracy than 9/11.
Americans probably dont get it as they live with such a supine monoculture media. A media that is 90% plus one party. Even Pravda in its heyday was not 90% CPSU. Most other countries have a culture of satirical current affairs magazines that get up the noses of *all* political parties. The UK has Private Eye, France has Le Canard Enchaine and Charlie Hebdo. And the US has….The Onion…
Well today *Islamic* terrorists who identified themselves multiple times as *Al Quaeda* executed one after another the editor and most of the senior staff of one of the most fearless outlets of free speech in the Western media. The name checked them before shooting them.
If any of you out there still dont understand why the attack today is such a serious attack on liberty and freedom then you really are beyond hope. It looks like many tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of ordinary folk France tonight know exactly what was attacked and why.
President Hollande in his rather inelegant way actually did rise to the occasion in his statement to the nation but in the long run it looks like its going to be Madame La Presidente in 2017. Then the hand-wringing liberal white guilt appeasers in the PS and SOS Racism will discover just what ordinary people think of the dysfunctional brave new mulch-cultural world they have created..
@jmc:
Please provide credible proof that this is something Obama actually claimed.
Yes, I am calling you a liar.
And these Enlightenment principles and humanism arose from where? Did people just wake up one day and say “Eureka”? Or was it the dissonance between what Christ taught and what the Church, and subsequently Protestant religions practiced?
Did not the Abolitionists find the fire to act to end slavery come from their understanding of the teachings of the Bible, not withstanding earlier justifications based on religious dogma?
@JKB:
By that monumentally strained logic all Muslim violence comes back to Christ, after all he influenced Muhammad. Carrying it back further, you can’t really grant that to Christ, you have to take it back to Abraham. Then again Abraham was influenced by Sumerian and Egyptian religious practice, so you can’t grant that to Abraham…
This comment was so good I think it deserves to be reposted.
In any case, to get back to the basis of the original post. Today, some, perhaps cultish, Muslims did purposely enter the offices of a satirical magazine to kill the creators of cartoons that violated, not some cult’s interpretation of Islam, but a mainstream Islam precept by drawing pictures of Mohammed for which mainstream Islamic Sharia law mandate death.
The killers may have been extremists but their actions were in accordance with mainstream Islamic teachings.
@JKB:
fixed it for you
@JKB:
You got it half right, it was a reaction against what Catholics and Protestants practiced and had practiced for well over 1000 years after the death of Jesus. You don’t get to credit Christianity because people eventually stood up to the power of the church and said no more. You don’t get to whitewash all the bad done, by saying well some of them turned away from the church and created secular societies. You certainly don’t get credit for the good of those secular societies when they specifically arose in opposition to church power.
The French government should certainly regard this as an attack, an act of war.
@David M: I’m not sure if that was the most brilliant piece of self-parody I’ve seen.
@JKB:
Well since no Muslim country was independent of a colonial power and a party to the war, this is quite the idiotic and empty minded bigotted response of an unlearned provincial.
However, several tens of millions of living sephardic (technically Maghrebi) Jews descended from the Maghrebine Jews owe their lives to the singular refusal of the very Islamic (in fact Sharif and Amir al Muminine – i.e. Commander of the Faithful, a religious function) Sultan of Morocco to accede to the very Roman Catholic traditionalist Vichy French colonial government demands that he approve their collaboration with the Nazi orders to deport ‘his’ Jewish subjects to the death camps.
Not an idiotic pious piece of ahistorical garbage of a comparison like your idiocy, and actual direct bit of courage that risked him getting deposed at gun point by the Vichy.
This is in start, direct, contrast with the behaviour of the great majority of the Xian religious authorities (with outstanding counter examples however particularly among the Dutch and Danish churches of varioius denominations, for example).
Had he not done so, with the solidarity of his religious establishment and his family, some more Millions of Jews would have been off to their deaths (not a particularly new tradition, his family historically also welcomed the Jewish refugees fleeing at various points in time up to the 17th century the liquidation orders of the holy Xian monarchs in Iberian and Europe).
[of course there was quite a lot of ulterior motive, but as I wrote above, Beni Adam, Beni Adam ]
Not abstract posturing, real risk. The Tunisians behaved fairly similarly (of course it is not an accident that these were also the two countries that
The problem here is you have not the slightest bloody clue and are a simple religious bigot of the ordinary unlearned sort.
@JKB:
Really? And how do you know this? I presume you’ve done a survey and like me speak Arabic fluently – read, write, etc.. No – well in that case, utter shite. It is nowhere near “mainstream Islamic teachings” to take law into one’s own hands and kill anyone, even for blasphemy (nor is it universal that blasphemy is punishable by death, etc).
So no, not mainstream and not in accordance with teachings outside of the radical Takfiri Salafiste fringe, who are perhaps 1% of believers in the Arab world at best.
Now the Takfiri Salafists (aka Wahhabis, although these are not actually synonyms despite a large overlap) also enjoy declaring Takfir (i.e. declaring someone Kafir and outlaw) against fellow Sunnis who do not share their views, against Shiites, against Sufis of both Sunni and Shiite persuasions….
The gross ignorance in this commentary is rather typical though of the ill-mannered and unlearned provincial bigot.
@Tyrell:
It’s not a bloody act of war it is a bloody criminal event. The French – being properly educated in higher order thinking if nothing else – will not be so stupid and empty heady as your Bush the Younger as to declare war on an abstraction.
There are unconfirmed reports that three people have been arrested in France.
@lounsbury: Well said.
I’d add that while I have no idea about Normandy, there were large numbers of Muslim troops in the Free French and British Empire armies of WWII.
@JKB:
Yeah….I’m glad I’ve been too busy to wade in today.
Because this is just dumb. Yes, Islam prohibits artistic representations of Mohammed. It does not, however, command premeditated terrorist attacks on people who draw cartoons.
@M1EK:
No, no one needs any such lessons at all, you remain utterly wrong.
Islamic terrorists are not an “existential” threat you pants wetting git, no more than the IRA was nor the various Left terrorist movements of the 1970s and 1980s. They are an annoyance. The existence of overweight Americans slurping maxi sized fast food will never be threatened by these people.
@Jenos Idanian #13:
Of course you don’t since you would refuse to look or recognize and indeed share the silence.
Like yourself evading on the promotion of hateful physical crimes against gays in East Africa, directly supported and promoted by American evangelicals, or the evasive justification of war crimes and torture by principally the morally bankrupt evangelical fundy informed Bolshevik Right in the USA – divorced as it is from the properly morally grounded Burkean conservatism of the rest of the Anglo world.
The French should be so thrilled that a provincial ignoramus is reconsidering one ill-informed prejudice in favour of another. Leaping with joy indeed, that one bigotry is exchanged for another, based on about the same level of thought and understanding.
@anjin-san:
To paraphrase multiple statements made a few years ago – Al Queda leadership is decimated, no longer the threat it once was, no longer able to mount serious operations. Need to refocus US resources on other threats. Yada. Yada.
These statements made by Administration in the lead up to the big blow up in Yemen. When the drone war was upped another few notches. The one that killed a couple of hundred “terrorists” and a couple of thousand civilians that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. You probably did not hear about those either. But a very big story in Europe, the Middle East and South Asia…
Notice how the Administration has been very quite about the defeat of terrorism recently. And what a great job they are doing. Might have something to do with the 300K dead in Syria and the rise of ISIS. And we wont even mention Libya..
Information still sketchy about who trained the two Paris shooters but would not be two surprised if they went off to Yemen or ISIS land to get training and weapons after they got out of prison. They were trying to go to ISIS land back in 2007/2008. You can pick up AK47’s/74’s in Europe on the black market but RPG’s are more of a Middle Eastern thing.
@gVOR08:
Yes, quite right, in fact will into 1944 the majority of Free French troops were in fact African (North and West Africa) Muslims, not Euro French. The mythology of the French resistance passes over in complete silence the Catholic – Vichy collaboration with the Nazis until a very, very late date.
My own grandfather, a colonial naval engineer, participated in the transport Free French troops for the southern France campaign, and wrote to my grandmum that precious few French-French were among the troops dying for Free France, precious few indeed.
But our Bigot Roundtable prefers pseudo history to the more complicated reality.
Rather about the same as their mirror image on the Salafist bigot Islamic side, actually – the ignorance and distortions being really quite similar.
@lounsbury:
What does the Koran say should happen to those who malign Allah and His messenger?
@Another Mike: What does the bible say about wearing mixed fabrics?
@jmc:
While of course none of your comment has any grounding in actual reality out here, as opposed to your idiotic domestic policital posturing and Right Bolshy agitprop parroting, the reality is
(1) Yes indeed, the old al Qaida of Bin Laden’s construction is decimated
(2) The instrumentalisation of the al Qaida name as a brand, quite without central direction, is well know and for people not involved in making idiotic, ill informed domestic political agitprop, well understood
(3) If the group here is in fact ‘al Qaeda’ they are almost certainly from the Algeria / Sahara based Al Qaida fil Maghrib – AQIM – which is nothing other than the old GSPC which was the Takfiri group of several thousands that fought a guerrilla and terror campaign against the Algerian military dictatorship (a civil war of most unloveable sides), which operationally has pretty much f*ck all to do with your Al Qaeda, other than opportunistically adopting the name.
The sheer, grotesque ill informed idiocy and Bolshey type political agitprop going on around this subject is really quite depressing. The Right in America has become an utter embarrassment to proper, morally based conservative aka classic liberal, politics and thinking.
@Dave D: Huh? Nothing about killing people who do, as I recall.
@jmc:
Do you know what “decimated” means”? Obviously not. This is a common mistake we see from the right, where the study of history seems to be out of favor.
You said Obama claimed Al Quaeda “no longer exists” – that is a very specific statement, you are not paraphrasing. You are simply making things up. I note a complete absence of cites in your posts, which are more or less a hash of right wing boilerplate. Do you have any actual insight or original thinking to contribute here?
What do you base this statement on? Obama’s drone war is common knowledge & a topic of ongoing discussion on OTB.
@Another Mike: Neither the Quran nor authenticated Hadith prescribe any particular living world (i.e. man executed) punishment at all.
There is not a single Sharia nor is there a single view on the proper punishment. Even under schools of thought that hold blasphemy can be punishable by death, it is always the case that the punishment is not lawful unless subject to the pronouncement of a judgment by a proper court – i.e. the freelancing of the Takfiri salafists (who invent their own rationales) is in fact “haram.” (and the freelancing that the idiot Pakistanis permit, but then the Pak government are a bunch of two faced hypocritical shites who barely control their own territory).
Of course I don’t have to rely on 2nd and 3rd hand religious bigots spinning on this, unlike the bigot brigade here.
@gVOR08: The alliance of the Arab state and Britain was due in large part to the efforts of General Allenby and Colonel Lawrence.
Errr, I have very limited reading of French, but I still have some reading in French and most people here don´t;
I´ve read some material from Charlie Hebdo, and it´s more complicated than simply depicting the Prophet Mohammed. There is no justification for the brutal murders of these artists, but the idea that they were killed by people simply following a book written centuries ago is simplistic.
@Jenos Idanian #13:
Good for you. I was on vacation the last few weeks, but i see the song remains the same on here.
Liberals apologizing for terrorists and defending Islam is quite funny. Muslims are real tolerant folk. About 80% of Egyptians favor death for someone leaving Islam. I won’t even mention the stats on those who favor stoning of women for adultery.
@Tyrell: What the bloody f*ck are you on about mate? Allenby and Lawrence were WWI, not bloody WWII and quite irrelevant to the point (indeed the colonial machinations that fairly back-stabbed the Hashemite Arab – really Hijazi Arab under Emir Faisal – allies against the Ottomans and established ‘protectorate’ colonies rather well explain the Mashreqi / Eastern Arab sympathies to the Nazis in stark contrast with the Maghrebi hostility. In any case, there was and is no Arab state in the singular, in fact there were no independent Arab states c. 1939 nor c. 1944 (although the Empire did maintain the transparent fiction of quasi independence re Egypt etc pre war).
However, the Muslims in the British forces which were alluded to were not bloody Arabs, they were Indian empire principally (modern Indo-Pak). Arab =/= Muslim. Good numbers of colonial troops served.
Nevertheless, the most important numbers were the North African troops with the Free French -the absolute majority until quite late in the game.
@Will:
Apologizing for terrorists? Where is that occuring? Unless of course one is engaging in the gross provincial religious bigotry of tarring all Muslims with the terror brush – of course then it is quite reasonable to tar in return all Americans with the war criminal and Soviet inspired torturer brush by such logic.
But then, I am no liberal in your American terms, but neither am I Christianist Right Bolshy betrayer of proper Burkean conservatism that historically is the proper Anglosphere conservatism.
@Neil Hudelson: What’s this strange and wondrous place I find myself? Oh, it’s under Neil’s skin!
Congrats to James for the accompanying photo, btw.
This was said by Nikki in regards to Jenos…..”That was Michael’s intent and you know it. Or do you want to continue playing dumb….”
Jenos doesn’t play dumb, he doesn’t have to…it comes naturally.
And Jenos, all those thousands of Christians that died in Normandy are dwarfed by the tens of millions of Soviet Marxists that died fighting the Germans.
@lounsbury:
Thank you and please comment here more often, I am so enjoying your smackdown of the “bigot brigade”. Unlike some of our more regular commenter you treat the “bigot brigade” with the disdain and disrespect that they’ve earned and deserve.
@PJ:
No, Radio France reports the persons have been IDed.
In summary there is a large scale ongoing operation to arrest the suspects in the Reims area, and the suspects are two brothers 34 and 32 and a younger collabo around 18.
@Pinky:
12 people murdered and your takeaway for the day is “I’m annoying liberals! Woo hoo”?
@the Q:
Lets return to this century, shall we. I look at Syria, Sudan, Libya, and Pakistan and
I see savage violence being committed by Muslims towards Muslims. That’s a real peaceful
Religion, isn’t it?
@Rafer Janders: What a genius!! You think that comparing apples to oranges is an apt analysis? Get on the Gerbil roller cage with Clavin..
@Jenos Idanian #13:
As a final comment of this evening, it is worth highlighting and returning to this idiocy from Jenos the gullible git: the idea that Sisi has made any “truly remarkable speech” or that the retunr to the Faux Secularism (if that even) under a corrupt, Statist, rent-seeking vampire military autocracy (the Neo Mamlouks as I call them) that has dominated Egypt since Nasser – the very structure of government that generated the Egyptian intellectual base for modern Takfiri Salafism – is some kind of Beacon of Reform or a dike against them shows how laughably gullible these idiot provincial bigots are.
The Sisi regime will generate renewed Takfiri reaction in Egypt as the grotesquely incompetent military-rentier regime in all its Statist glory continues its lamentable track record, and the hypocritical blithering on about Reform of Islam is nothing more than a sad cover and sop to the Pre Fooled.
These pseudo secular autocracies are among the primary reasons why Takfiri Salafism has been so strong int he Arab region, contra the rest of the Islamic world (ex Pakistan where a remarkably similar not-well-hidden military rent-seeking power structure has generated similar results to Egypt’s). It is grotesque gullibility and ignorance well meriting the old Bolshy phrase “useful idiots” that would lead one to cite this as something remarkable, brave or positive.
For positive one looks to Tunisia and Morocco, not Sisi and Egypt.
@lounsbury: Yah. I guess the part about killing the Jews behind trees doesn’t count, eh? Or the bit about it being OK to lie to a non-believer. EX> Did you say kill Jews? Who me?
@John425:
Eh?
Are you dim or just a dishonest partisan provincial git? Or some combo of the two?
The question replied to was about the punishment for blaspemy.
Any Quranic text about Jews one way or the other has rather nothing to do with that subject to which I replied and which you reference, as such. But perhaps sub literate provincial ignoramuses have a hard time tracking this.
Neither would any supposed bit about lying to Unbelievers as again, that got f*ck all to do with blasphemy. Of course you’re presumably making some kind of ignorant parroting of religious bigots confusion around the concept of Taqqiyah, which is a Shiite concept, although the more general idea and rule within the Sunni world is about the permissibility of concealing one’s faith under the circumstances where one might be killed for it.
As it happens, as in many such concepts, Jewish religious thought also share this on the basis of preservation of life.
There is, however, no Quranic text about lying – the only Quranic text is that someone who pretends to renounce Islam under duress will not be punished by God if they remain true in their heart.
Nothing sinister despite the spin of religious bigots.
It’s really quite fine to see again and again the ignoramus religious bigots showing the rather sad and unlearned state of their comments, which merely parrot 3rd hand received bigotry.
Rather resembles the extremely tedious convos I have had with the Salfists and the ridiculous things they parrot from their favourite bumpkin ill-learned preacher about the West, Xianity etc.
Bloody mirrors, the two sets, bloody mirrors of ignorance and low minded hatred.
@Will:
As peaceful as any human religion, but real pikers compared to the Xian powers in their achievements in slaughter of supposed fellow man and fellow believers. Mere thousands as compared to tens of millions.
Perhaps lacking in fundamental numbers and competency.
@Pinky: “What’s this strange and wondrous place I find myself? Oh, it’s under Neil’s skin!”
See, Pinky, when you decide to troll, it’s important never to admit that you’re trolling, as you just did. Take a few lessons from the most loathesome poster on here. Jenos always pretends he cares what he’s typing about, when really he’s just doing what you’ve apparently decided to do, prove your existence by annoying people.
I was sitting here wondering how so many of you morons can call yourselves ‘conservatives’ without even acknowledging the importance of history, let alone actually knowing any. Then, I realized: the past you imagine yourselves to be ‘conserving’ is entirely fictional. It’s a sort of stew made up of silly Washington-and-the-cherry-tree myths we teach six year-olds, and old war movies, and bumper sticker slogans, all stirred together with the voiced farts of radio con men and Fox News bimbos.
Set aside your stupidity, and your Labrador Retriever level logic skills for the moment, shouldn’t you actually think about, you know, learning something about the ideas and events and traditions you think you’re defending from us wild-eyed liberals?
What bizarre contorted ego allows you to wade out into public and shout the equivalent of “Two plus two makes nineteen?” over and over again like Jethro Bodine doing his ‘gazintas?’ Do you know about this internet thing we have nowadays? Do you know you can actually read stuff right there in another browser window? For free? Try it. Move the little pointy thing and open a new window and then type in a question. You could start with, “Where’s the middle-east?” Or, “What is Islam?” And then, if you just spend even an hour reading, you could come back and not be quite such tedious, clueless ignoramuses.
@jmc: “This was the biggest attack by Al Quaeda since 9/11. You know, those guys who our illustrious president said did not exist any more. ”
You are exactly right. This is the biggest attack by a group calling itself Al Quaeda since the 19 hijackers took down two enormous skyscrapers in Manhattan, causing billions of dollars of damage and killing thousands of people.
And what was this attack that has you pissing your pants in terror? A few guys with guns killed 12 people. A tragedy, sure — but basically what any pissed off teenager in America can do thanks to the obscene gun worship of pants-wetters like you.
And I guarantee that tomorrow is some messed-up teen goes to his father’s office and kills a dozen people with his toy assault rifle, you will be among the first to demand that no one politicize a tragedy.
But since it was scary brown people, you’re ready to go to war. Well, you’re ready for other people to go to war, which you will then refuse to pay taxes for.
It must be painful to be such a coward. Why don’t you try to act like a human being?
@wr: I didn’t aim to annoy anyone, but Neil’s comment was so, I forget if it’s petulent or petulant, that I just pictured him with a big frowny face and a full diaper. It certainly wasn’t my purpose for posting here, and I didn’t realize how comical his comments were until I looked the thread over again. (Awful thread, btw.) But thanks for the insight into trolling.
@michael reynolds: Wow. You talk about me (and, by extension, conservatives) in much the same terms we use for Islamic terrorists. And I think you actually believe what you say.
@Jenos Idanian #13: “You talk about me (and, by extension, conservatives) in much the same terms we use for Islamic terrorists. And I think you actually believe what you say.”
Wait, you call Islamic terrorists whiny babies too stupid or lazy to look up information before blathering on about issues they know nothing about? Could you post a link, because I must have missed that.
But for what it’s worth, I agree with Michael that the pseudo-conservatives around here are lazy, ignorant losers who spew hate without understanding a single thing they’re talking about. So please, do show us where anyone on the left has referred to terrorists that way.
@lounsbury:
Yes, I wrote a comment about that a while ago. 🙂
Then , the Guardian reported that there had been three arrests, but that it was unconfirmed. Seems that it was wrong, unless these three arrested weren’t the attackers.
Now there are multiple reports that the youngest of the attackers have surrendered to the police near the Belgian border. (Also unconfirmed right now.)
I heard there was some workplace violence today at some French magazine. Was it the JV team?
@Jenos Idanian #13:
Yes, I’m constantly saying, “terrorists need to study history.”
You’ve stopped even trying, haven’t you? Now you just sort of sneeze into the comment box and hit “post comment.”
180+ comments and most of them are by the same handful of mostly white guys yelling the same “arguments” at each other, going on what, 3 or 4+ years now? Who, except for the regular OTB crowd will wade through this morass of invective?
The inability to resist rising to the bait from the usual suspects continues to amaze me, but perhaps most are here for catharsis and not persuasion.
@lounsbury: ISIS – just an “abstraction”
@lounsbury:
Of course Al Quaeda is a brand name. That was the idea from the very beginning. Thats how it still operates. Jeeze. Some people..
I’m afraid you are the person living in the fantasy world. Some of us actually grew up with car bombs and sectarian killings as a daily fact of life. Do you get a sick feeling in the pit of you stomach when you see an unattended package in a public place. I still do. Too many of them blew up when I was a kid.
When was the last time you had to run the gauntlet of a group of magrebian ( just like the shooters) projecting pure sectarian and racist hatred towards you just because you were white? I’ve got pretty good at spotting the street signs now but I can point you towards some pretty exciting banlieue out in the ’95’s of Paris were you can discover first hand just how much fun it is. Religion of Peace, my arse. Or as they say in the UK. Total bollocks.
Spend some time out in the banlieue and you’ll soon understand why so many people vote FN.
The two shooters were magrebians. Both had a track record of petty crime. Nothing unusual there. Both had training. Todays massacre was carefully planned. That’s different. Todays attacks were on a very different level from the previous attacks in France over the last few years. Like shooting Jewish kindergarden age children. That attack (in Toulouse) did not get much coverage in the US either. Todays shooters identified themselves several times as “Al Qaeda from Yemen”, you can even hear it clearly in some of the video footage shown on French TV. So let me take a wild guess at who trained and armed them…
So in your bubble world you can live your little fantasies where the world fits the happy clappy little narratives doled out by the Administration and its fellow travelers in the US media. But in my world, where this shit happens on a fairly regular basis in the past and will continue to happen in the future dont be too surprised if we treat you and your facile opinions with the short shrift it deserves..
Because I know your world far too very well (I’m currently in SF, hellooo…Bubble City par excellence) , and I know only too well that people who live in that smug comfortable cossetted world cannot even start to comprehend just what a really nasty world it is out there. And just hate it when those of us who do know the real world in all its nastiness, point out the unvarnished truth.
Maybe thats why so many of that ilk hated Bush and Cheney with such venom. Not so much for their realpolitik policies but because it disturbed too much by introducing reality into the fantasy world of the bubble people.
Todays attack was a really big deal. The President of France gets it, the French people get it, most Europeans seem to get it, but based on his statement today President Pointy * does not get it. Nor does it seem, do most people around here..
* (but some of us do know our Kenyan slang…)
@jmc:
Oh Lord, another internet tough guy who has been there and done that. How very rare…
Someone, way up thread here, said something to the effect that Civilization began with Christians and there is some kind of reason for that. The earliest records we have of mighty civilizations are in Africa (Egypt and Sudan) and Asia (China and India). Of course, there may have been others but records from thousands of years ago only survive in dry climates so any that developed in rainy climes are probably irretrievably lost. What is almost certainly true is that these civilizations had their own religions. If there were no true religion but rather a universal human need for religion then we would expect that each of these cultures would develop completely different religions. And that is what happened. Whatever religion they had didn’t put them on top and it didn’t keep them from falling once they got there.
@jmc:
Well I see you are one dishonest and dimwitted shite and quite the empty headed repater of Fox news spin.
Yes Jeez some people who make utterly false spin statements
But No, Al Qaeda was not a mere name to adopt from the beginning, the great strength of Al Qaeda under Bin Laden until its leadership was decimated was command and control, not mere rental of a brand.
Your statement is sheer empty headed and unfounded invention.
It is rather disgusting this is done in a Neo Bolshevik fashion simply because you do not like a black man in your Presidency.
You’re claiming you grew up in London in the 1970s mate or NI?
I rather doubt that, the fantasy I would expect is in your paragraph supra.
I don’t get any sick feeling about packages because I am not a bloody pants pissing coward and am quite capable of rational threat estimate.
Last time, well never, since it is a fantasy.
Your own evident racism is well noted however.
I hardly need guidance for Paris nor is B
I have and I speak their language so no problem, I can point you to some of the profound racism and FN well FN was anti semitic well back to its pro Vichy roots, so spare. me
I see where you come from, the gutter of racist tripe.
@Tyrell:
No the DAESH is a discrete body of men as an organisation with a defined structure and leadership. DAESH leadership can certainly take decisions. A pure abstraction can not.
Rather different than the inherently amorphous concept of either Xianity or Islam, neither of which are well defined as to boundaries nor leadership nor even precise definition as such relative to membership boundaries.
Rather fundamentally different, but that should be clear enough to anyone capable of adult analytical thinking.
Christians, having conquered and gained power are similar to economic winners who look down from their skyline condos to the poor masses and say tsk tsk. They got where they are through vicious unholy acts, but now claim the moral high ground and suggest we just put all that in the past. Well, the past does not go away unless the ill gotten gains of the past go with it – and that’s just not gonna happen.
@Pinky:
When people post comments rejoicing in the deaths of others, I am usually disgusted. Is that what you mean by “under my skin?”
If so, then yes. Not quite sure why you are proud of it though.
Congrats?
@Dave Schuler: And the poor bastard himself was a Muslim, Maghrebi by his name; just a working class man getting through the day when one of the two scum killed him (their exchange captured per French press did not however reference religion).
@lounsbury: I seem to have read an analysis in the FT at some point that did an analysis of how Al Quaeda has mutated over the year and pointed out that it was at present acting somewhat like a franchise, being very happy to lend its name to any group of rabble-rousers willing to make mischief along certain lines.
@jmc:
“that ilk” “bubble people”
Exactly, if people don’t see it as conservatives do, they’re “that ilk” and “bubble people”
@jmc: Blowing up the Middle East by invading Iraq for no good reason, then failing to manage the situation counts as realpolitik? How’s the weather in your bubble?
@grumpy realist: Al Qaeda, there’s no u in there for f*ck’s sake. And the point is what? Of course it has mutated, everyone knows that. The issue was the original model, which idiot boy was utterly wrong about.
@William Teach: A gaggle of doctors, nurses and such would like to have a word with you about your innocent never commit violence Christians…
In case that’s too subtle I’m pointing towards the violence committed by Christian nut cases against groups they don’t agree with like women’s health providers…
@JKB: Have you never taken a basic philosophy class? That stuff existed hundreds/thousands of years before Christ was created..