Explosions at Zaventem Airport (Brussels airport)/Brussels metro

[derspiess]

I would take such reports with a grain of salt.

Absolutely.  But at the same time I wouldn't dismiss them out of hand. 

[derspiess]

Same reason Muslims in New Jersey were cheering in the streets to celebrate the 9/11 attacks.

... except, of course, that didn't actually happen in spite of it being widely reported in the media at the time.

Actually it did happen, according to news reports at the time.  Just possibly not as widespread as Trump seemed to claim.

[Jacob]

Dutch. Breda is still located in the Netherlands.

Right. Thanks.

that said: In Brussels two pupils are now under investigation for supposed pro-attack expressions.

The upside to this, at least, is that with an actual investigation there's a little more substance to the conclusion (whatever it is) compared to tweets of things friends said.

Personally, my expectation is that a few random idiots, sick people, and deliberate iconoclasts might say such things to make themselves feel special, but to the extent that anyone in the local area are actually sympathetic to the terrorists they'll express that sympathy in private.

[Valmy]

Same reason Muslims in New Jersey were cheering in the streets to celebrate the 9/11 attacks.

... except, of course, that didn't actually happen in spite of it being widely reported in the media at the time.

I recall being shown pictures of Palestinians celebrating but the New Jersey Muslims was not reported by anybody at the time that I can remember. I only heard about that from Donald Trump last year.

In any case Muslims in the West celebrating either in private or public strikes me as pretty unlikely considering what bad news each terrorist attack is for them personally. Might ISIS guys in Syria be celebrating? Sure.

[Jacob]

Actually it did happen, according to news reports at the time.  Just possibly not as widespread as Trump seemed to claim.

You have a different understanding of that than I do. As I understand it news reports at the time did indeed report, but there was never any actual evidence provided.

Snopes has the status of cheering down as being debunked: http://www.snopes.com/2015/11/22/donald-trump-cheering-911/

More on debunked "they were cheering": http://www.snopes.com/rumors/dunkin.asp

There was images of Palestinians in the Middle East celebrating the attack, however: http://www.snopes.com/rumors/cnn.asp (which I thought was an unrelated celebration erroneously shown, but according to Snopes it's legit).

[Valmy]

It is not news that plenty of Palestinians hate the United States 

Though they certainly would not have done that if they thought we would ever see it. It was a different world back in 2001, less paranoia about camera phones.

[Eddie Teach]

Though they certainly would not have done that if they thought we would ever see it. It was a different world back in 2001, less paranoia about camera phones.

Guess they weren't paying attention to the Rodney King hoopla.

[Habbaku]

So Flemish teacher's class had his students cheering the attacks and then his tweet about it had him harassed by the cops in some fashion? Is that what is going on there?

That's what the dude said.

Ok just checking. The translation was a bit rough.

  "If I now prefer no longer want to do..." is very clear.  Just ask DerSpeiss.

[Razgovory]

Actually it did happen, according to news reports at the time.  Just possibly not as widespread as Trump seemed to claim.

You have a different understanding of that than I do. As I understand it news reports at the time did indeed report, but there was never any actual evidence provided.

Snopes has the status of cheering down as being debunked: http://www.snopes.com/2015/11/22/donald-trump-cheering-911/

More on debunked "they were cheering": http://www.snopes.com/rumors/dunkin.asp

There was images of Palestinians in the Middle East celebrating the attack, however: http://www.snopes.com/rumors/cnn.asp (which I thought was an unrelated celebration erroneously shown, but according to Snopes it's legit).

There was supposedly some videos floating around conservative sites that showed this, but they such poor quality you'd think they were trying to film Bigfoot.

[CountDeMoney]

Same reason Muslims in New Jersey were cheering in the streets to celebrate the 9/11 attacks.

... except, of course, that didn't actually happen in spite of it being widely reported in the media at the time.

Actually it did happen, according to news reports at the time.  Just possibly not as widespread as Trump seemed to claim.

No, no it did not happen, and not even according to news reports at the time--especially considering the non-stop live television coverage by all 4 networks' news divisions for 96 consecutive hours.   None.  Nothing.  Nada--other than a minor and unsubstantiated mention of how I heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend who heard it from another that you've been messing around with celebrations on WCBS-TV. 

Now, there were some issues in Gaza and West Bank regarding some celebrations;  however, despite their many similarities, in the end Gaza is not New Jersey.

So knock it off with the bullshit.

[Berkut]

I don't think we should let concerns over whether it actually happened or not interfere with the compelling story of how it really did happen...

[DGuller]

Just possibly not as widespread as Trump seemed to claim.

"Possibly"?  "Seemed"?  Could you be any more of a weasel?  Yeah, yeah, I know, you're "kidding"/"exaggerating"/"trolling", sure thing.

[jimmy olsen]

Regarding the statistics on muslim support for terrorism, found this research from the Pew Research Center:

http://www.pewglobal.org/2006/05/23/where-terrorism-finds-support-in-the-muslim-world/

It's about 10 years old (pre-ISIS), so possibly not up to date.

It notes that support for suicide bombings and the killing of civilians had declined, but in all countries those that said that violence against civilians is often/sometimes justified is always in the double digits (all the way up to 57% in Jordan).

Syrian civil war was caused by famine which was caused by drought which was caused by global warming. So all the combat, attrocities, refugees and terrorist attacks that have occured as a result of that conflict all can be traced to global warming.

The Syrian Civil War stems from the Arab Spring.

The overthrow of the Tunisian dictator encouraged the populations of other states to try to bring down their oppressive regimes.

In Syria, there was the fear that al-Assad would have enough support to keep them down, as most of the revolts were benefitting Turkey, who happened to have a deal with Iran to keep the Alawites (a shia sect) of Assad in power in exchange for no Iranian interference in the affairs of Sunni states to the West of Iraq.

But when the West intervened in Lybia - and by this I especially mean France, who went forward without telling her partners and basically forced most of NATO to follow suit - the Syrian sunnis believed they could get western support if they rose against the Allawites, so a uprising started to take place.

There was never a unified command, so things got dicey, with hundreds of rebel groups getting support from several sources, including France and Saudi Arabia, though not as the direct military intervention the initial rebels had hoped, so the situation turned into a stalemate (this is what Assad has been referring to when he denounces/threatens 'foreign support for terrorists').

Surprising no one, Silva and Despeiss are wrong. In the beginning the protests were about aid to farmers that the government was only giving to Alawites because it just couldn't afford to help everyone. Why couldn't it afford to help everyone? Because the country was being hammered by the worst drought in 900 years.

https://news.vice.com/article/the-drought-that-preceded-syrias-civil-war-was-likely-the-worst-in-900-years

The Drought That Preceded Syria's Civil War Was Likely the Worst in 900 Years
By Elaisha Stokes

March 4, 2016 | 1:05 am

VICE News is closely tracking global environmental change. Check out the Tipping Point blog here.

Syria's civil war has left 250,000 people dead, according to the latest UN count, and millions more are either displaced within the country's borders or have sought refuge abroad. And, while the proximate causes were largely political — primarily grievances with President Bashar al Assad, new scientific research adds support to the argument that climate change helped to trigger Syria's descent into violence.

Researchers from NASA and the University of Arizona studied tree rings — a reliable proxy for measuring precipitation — going back several centuries and found that the recent Syrian drought was likely the worst in at least the past 900 years and almost definitely the worst in 500 years.

"We wanted to know how the current drought compared to past droughts," said Benjamin Cook, a climate scientist at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the lead author of the study. The current drought, which has lasted about 15 years "really is the worst, far outside of natural climate cycles."

Cook and his colleagues found that mega-droughts — those that last thirty years or longer — were absent from the tree ring record. The last major drought began in 1807 and lasted fourteen years.

"We are starting to push the [climate] system outside of what it would normally do," said Cook. "That really points to climate change playing a role. The big uncertainty is how we will deal with the amplified stresses.

The drought caused 75 percent of Syria's farms to fail and 85 percent of livestock to die between 2006 and 2011, according to the United Nations. The collapse in crop yields forced as many as 1.5 million Syrians to migrate to urban centers, like Homs and Damascus.

The drought had displaced Syrians long before the conflict began," said Francesco Femia, president of the Center for Climate Security. "And what is frightening is that analysts who study the region completely missed it."

More hungry and homeless families in Syria's big cities created stress, said Femia. "There are only so many resources to go around."

Abeer Etefa, a communications officer with the United Nation's World Food Program, said the agency was concerned about the country prior to the outbreak of war.

"The situation was already bad," he said. "We had an operation in 2010 for farmers that were suffering from the drought."

The World Food Program is currently providing food aid to over 300,000 Syrians in the country's northeast, which is the epicenter of agricultural production. Grain yields last year were half of what they were in 2011.

The Pentagon has long identified climate change as a "threat magnifier," a factor that can aggravate already existing political fault lines. And the G7 issued a report in June warning that climate change "will aggravate already fragile situations and may contribute to social upheaval and even violent conflict."

In this way the Syrian civil war and the hundreds of thousands of displaced, who are seeking refuge in Turkey and Europe, could be seen as a foreshadowing of a much more alarming humanitarian situation should nation's fail to keep global temperature rise under control.

Christian Parenti, author of Tropic of Chaos, a book that examines the links between climate change and violence around the world, said that nations need to address climate change, but improved energy and environmental policies, however important for avoiding future conflicts, won't help Syria's growing ranks of displaced and undernourished.

"By emphasizing regime change, US foreign policy has helped to produce this disaster," he said. " From the Iraq invasions, to the Libyan war, to aiding Salafist rebels in Syria, US-sponsored violence has made it harder for people to adapt to a warmer, drier Middle East. But, without a peace settlement in Syria, there will only be more refugees headed to Europe."

[Josquius]

Fwiw I've heard similar stories second hand from a school near The Hague. Kids went round going "isn't it great what happened on Paris?". Just parroting their fathers of course, but still chilling.

It seems hard to believe people would be happy about something so dangerous for them personally. A lot of terrorist attacks is something almost 100% likely to put those people and their families in danger. So why would they be happy about that? The idea of right wing nationalists winning elections all over Europe is appealing to them?

These people are the young and stupid who know nothing of life outside their bubble.
In time they will know better.

[Martinus]

Tim, this is a really silly argument.

Even if the drought was a contributing factor to the Syrian civil war and the resulting terrorism wave, so what? This is an irrelevant factoid that should not substantially inform our policy about either global warming or terrorism. It's like arguing that the 1930s global crisis and the Versailles treaty contributed to the rise of nazis and the Holocaust - this may be true, but we did not put French diplomats on trial in Nurnberg nor carpet bomb Wall Street (perhaps we should have?).