The Paris Attack Debate Thread

[derspiess]

If you replace Allah with God then it fits with a lot of fundamentalist North American apocalyptic nonsense too 

Moral equivalence FTW!!!

[Valmy]

If you replace Allah with God then it fits with a lot of fundamentalist North American apocalyptic nonsense too 

Yeah and we generally hold those people in contempt and say they are dangerous. Not sure what your point is.

[Valmy]

If you replace Allah with God then it fits with a lot of fundamentalist North American apocalyptic nonsense too 

Moral equivalence FTW!!!

I think CC is under some sort of bizarre delusion this is a fanatically Christian board that loves to sing praises to Jesus. It is not like we have had numerous virulent anti-Christian threads over the years or anything.

[Grey Fox]

It is YI & Spellus's fault.

[Admiral Yi]

Lord God omnipotent,
Reigneth forever.

[Martinus]

The kind of person who would decide all brown people are terrorists is rather a binary equation.

But it isn't just that. There's the degrees of being afraid of a brown person, or someone wearing a turban, even if you aren't at the stage of all brown people are terrorists. Hell, there is even just the basic stance of being negatively predisposed against brown people.

It makes a great deal of difference. Many people say angry things online. But when a person who fits the profile of 90% of the people who take those angry things and turn them into mass shootings do so I think that justifies some extra vigilance.

Surely whether or not a threat is credible hangs more on just one's skin color?

I think the key is proper implementation and proper profiling.

Treating every Muslim as a potential threat/high risk is both discriminatory and useless - since you still end up with a group that is too large to properly monitor.

However, it is undeniably the case that there are certain profiles/combinations of traits (e.g. young lower middle class, religious, second generation immigrant), where if you add "Muslim" to a mix it significantly increases the security risk such person poses. In such cases, we should be free to "single out" such Muslim sub-groups for closer surveillance/monitoring and not have to equally closely monitor, say, young lower middle class religious second generation immigrant Christians (for fear of not appearing bigoted).

I hope you agree.

[Martinus]

Surely whether or not a threat is credible hangs more on just one's skin color?

No angry lonely and politically extreme are more important. Likewise I don't think we should be monitoring every single Islamic monday morning lady's tea group but ones who fit the profile.

Anyway was this quoted in this thread? Sounds like ISIS kind of thinking:



I think he is on to something here.

I think he is on to something there, but (based on some posts on Facebook) I think there is also a risk of treating what he is saying as the only thing that should inform our response.

I think we should respond in a manner that is most efficient, rational and ruthless in eliminating the threat these extremists pose to us. Whether, by doing so, we give ISIS more potential recruits should be a consideration - but it should not be the *sole* consideration. We should definitely not settle for doing nothing only because doing something could "play into the terrorists' hands".

Edit: Besides, you should also bear in mind that our own populaces are also prone to emotions that need to be channelled somehow. After this kind of atrocity, failure to respond with force because "this would be what terrorists wants" would lead to further radicalisation of our own people. In other words, we are not all fully evolved into balls of light yet.

[The Brain]

You should always strike back hard at the ones responsible, THEN you can sit down and think about carrots etc.

[Josquius]

Could it be they are willing their prophecy to get a move on?

[jimmy olsen]

I have to agree with this guy. As long as we let the Gulf States slide on their funding and support of jihadist movements, these kinds of attacks will not end.

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a39727/paris-attacks-middle-eastern-oligarchies/

There Is Only One Way to Defeat ISIS

We must hold accountable our Middle Eastern "allies"—the states and bankers and political elites—who persist in funding mass murder.

By Charles P. Pierce
Nov 14, 2015 @ 1:57 PM

​There was a strange stillness in the news on Saturday morning, a Saturday morning that came earlier in Paris than it did in Des Moines, a city in Iowa, one of the United States of America. The body count had stabilized. The new information came at a slow, stately pace, as though life were rearranging itself out of quiet respect for the dead. The new information came at a slow and stately pace and it arranged itself in the way that you suspected it would arrange itself when the first accounts of the mass murder began to spread out over the wired world. There has been the predictable howling from predictable people. (Judith Miller? Really? This is an opinion the world needed to hear?) There has been the straining to wedge the events of Friday night into the Procrustean nonsense of an American presidential campaign. There will be a debate among the three Democratic candidates for president in Des Moines on Saturday night. I suspect that the moderators had to toss out a whole raft of questions they already had prepared. Everything else is a distraction. It is the stately, stillness of the news itself that matters.

The attacks were a brilliantly coordinated act of war. They were a brilliantly coordinated act of pure terrorism, beyond rhyme but not beyond reason. They struck at the most cosmopolitan parts of the most cosmopolitan city in the world. They struck out at assorted sectors of western popular culture. They struck out at sports, at pop music, and at simple casual dining. They struck out at an ordinary Friday night's entertainment. The attacks were a brilliantly coordinated statement of political and social purpose, its intent clear and unmistakable. The attacks were a brilliantly coordinated act of fanatical ideological and theological Puritanism, brewed up in the dark precincts of another of mankind's monotheisms. They were not the first of these. (The closest parallel to what happened in Paris is what happened in Mumbai in 2008. In fact, Mumbai went on alert almost immediately after the news broke.) They, alas, are likely not going to be the last.

The stillness of the news is a place of refuge and of reason on yet another day in which both of these qualities are predictably in short supply. It is a place beyond unfocused rage, and beyond abandoned wrath, and beyond unleashed bigotry and hate. It is a place where Friday night's savagery is recognized and memorialized, but it is not put to easy use for trivial purposes. The stillness of the news, if you seek it out, is a place where you can think, sadly and clearly, about what should happen next.

These are a few things that will not solve the terrible and tangled web of causation and violence in which the attacks of Friday night were spawned. A 242-ship Navy will not stop one motivated murderous fanatic from emptying the clip of an AK-47 into the windows of a crowded restaurant. The F-35 fighter plane will not stop a group of motivated murderous fanatics from detonating bombs at a soccer match. A missile-defense shield in Poland will not stop a platoon of motivated murderous fanatics from opening up in a jammed concert hall, or taking hostages, or taking themselves out with suicide belts when the police break down the doors. American soldiers dying in the sands of Syria or Iraq will not stop the events like what happened in Paris from happening again because American soldiers dying in the sands of Syria or Iraq will be dying there in combat against only the most obvious physical manifestation of a deeper complex of ancient causes and ancient effects made worse by the reach of the modern technology of bloodshed and murder. Nobody's death is ever sacrifice enough for that.

Abandoning the Enlightenment values that produced democracy will not plumb the depths of the vestigial authoritarian impulse that resides in us all, the wish for kings, the desire for order, to be governed, and not to govern. Flexing and posturing and empty venting will not cure the deep sickness in the human spirit that leads people to slaughter the innocent in the middle of a weekend's laughter. The expression of bigotry and hatred will not solve the deep desperation in the human heart that leads people to kill their fellow human beings and then blow themselves up as a final act of murderous vengeance against those they perceive to be their enemies, seen and unseen, real and imagined. Tough talk in the context of what happened in Paris is as empty as a bell rung at the bottom of a well.

Francois Hollande, the French president who was at the soccer game that was attacked, has promised that France will wage "pitiless war" against the forces that conceived and executed the attacks. Most wars are pitiless, but not all of them are fought with the combination of toughness and intelligence that this one will require. This was a lesson that the United States did not learn in the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001. There are things that nations can do in response that are not done out of xenophobic rage and a visceral demand for revenge. There are things that nations can do in response that do not involve scapegoating the powerless and detaining the innocent.  There is no real point in focusing a response on the people whose religion makes us nervous. States should retaliate against states.

It is long past time for the oligarchies of the Gulf states to stop paying protection to the men in the suicide belts. Their societies are stunted and parasitic. The main job of the elites there is to find enough foreign workers to ensla...er...indenture to do all the real work. The example of Qatar and the interesting business plan through which that country is building the facilities for the 2022 World Cup is instructive here. Roughly the same labor-management relationship exists for the people who clean the hotel rooms and who serve the drinks. In Qatar, for people who come from elsewhere to work, passports have been known to disappear into thin air. These are the societies that profit from terrible and tangled web of causation and violence that played out on the streets of Paris. These are the people who buy their safety with the blood of innocents far away

It's not like this is any kind of secret. In 2010, thanks to WikiLeaks, we learned that the State Department, under the direction of then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, knew full well where the money for foreign terrorism came from. It came from countries and not from a faith. It came from sovereign states and not from an organized religion. It came from politicians and dictators, not from clerics, at least not directly. It was paid to maintain a political and social order, not to promulgate a religious revival or to launch a religious war. Religion was the fuel, the ammonium nitrate and the diesel fuel. Authoritarian oligarchy built the bomb. As long as people are dying in Paris, nobody important is dying in Doha or Riyadh.

Saudi Arabia is the world's largest source of funds for Islamist militant groups such as the Afghan Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba – but the Saudi government is reluctant to stem the flow of money, according to Hillary Clinton. "More needs to be done since Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qaida, the Taliban, LeT and other terrorist groups," says a secret December 2009 paper signed by the US secretary of state. Her memo urged US diplomats to redouble their efforts to stop Gulf money reaching extremists in Pakistan and Afghanistan. "Donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide," she said. Three other Arab countries are listed as sources of militant money: Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. The cables highlight an often ignored factor in the Pakistani and Afghan conflicts: that the violence is partly bankrolled by rich, conservative donors across the Arabian Sea whose governments do little to stop them. The problem is particularly acute in Saudi Arabia, where militants soliciting funds slip into the country disguised as holy pilgrims, set up front companies to launder funds and receive money from government-sanctioned charities.

It's time for this to stop. It's time to be pitiless against the bankers and against the people who invest in murder to assure their own survival in power. Assets from these states should be frozen, all over the west. Money trails should be followed, wherever they lead. People should go to jail, in every country in the world. It should be done state-to-state. Stop funding the murder of our citizens and you can have your money back. Maybe. If we're satisfied that you'll stop doing it. And, it goes without saying, but we'll say it anyway – not another bullet will be sold to you, let alone advanced warplanes, until this act gets cleaned up to our satisfaction. If that endangers your political position back home, that's your problem, not ours. You are no longer trusted allies. Complain, and your diplomats will be going home. Complain more loudly, and your diplomats will be investigated and, if necessary, detained. Retaliate, and you do not want to know what will happen, but it will done with cold, reasoned and, yes, pitiless calculation. It will not be a blind punch. You will not see it coming. It will not be an attack on your faith. It will be an attack on how you conduct your business as sovereign states in a world full of sovereign states.

And the still, stately progress of the news from Paris continues. There are arrests today in Brussels, of alleged co-conspirators. The body count has stabilized. New information comes at its own pace, as if out of respect for the dead. In the stillness of the news itself, there is refuge and reason and a kind of wounded, ragged peace, as whatever rolled up from the depths of the sickness of the human heart rolls back again, like the tide and, like the tide, one day will return.

[Martinus]

Yup, the argument is both moral and rational.

[garbon]

I don't understand the ISIS thinking of wanting to keep pushing the West until we are prodded into taking a firm stance against them. It doesn't appear to be a war they are equipped to win.

Well, their land grab in Syria/Iraq was a very nice coup on their part...but I have a feeling they'll be just as happy as a typical underground terrorist whack-a-mole group operating at large in the ME and Europe.

No they could never operate that way. Their existence depends on territory to control.

You are correct.  They can't out al-Qaeda al-Qaeda, they have to be the Islamic State or they are nothing.  That's both the key to their success, and their great weakness.

Yeah, that's how it seems to me - which is one of the problems of actually whipping the West into a real frenzy. They'll find it difficult to maintain their state in the face of that.

[Warspite]

I agree that working to cut off the Gulf money sloshing around is an important part of the solution. For too long in particular Saudi has been allowed to export its problems of radicalisation to the rest of the world.

[Martinus]

What are the chances of the British government doing something about it, seeing how it has been probably most shameless in palling around with the Saudis?

[Liep]

So the biggest party behind our right wing government has just said this on national tv: "We need to bomb civilians in the fight against IS, that includes women and children."