You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘Terrorism’ tag.
. The FAFO factor often involves the highest of stakes. The people who support Hamas really ought to give their head a shake because most of their activities place them firmly in the useful idiot category.
These excerpts from Susie Linfield‘s essay on called The Return of the Progressive Atrocity.
“In 1979, leftists who supported the Iranian Revolution had a rude awakening when the mullahs came to power and promptly executed them, along with secularists, union organizers, intellectuals, feminists, and everyone else who fit into the enormously capacious category of a counterrevolutionary. There was a lesson here: Activists have the responsibility to know who and what they support, and to separate themselves—openly and decisively—from programs and regimes that are predicated on violence and repression. Similarly, those who imagine that Hamas’s slaughters may have promoted “liberation,” “justice,” and “freedom” for Palestinians, as the banners demand, have a big surprise in store.
Unlike Iran in 1979, though, there’s no mystery as to what kind of state Hamas (an acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement) aims to create; we need only look at what it already has created. This time, no one can plead ignorance. There’s little liberation, justice, or freedom to be found in Gaza, where there are no opposition political parties, no elections, and no freedom of religion, the press, or protest. Opponents are arrested, tortured, and sometimes executed. (Yahya Sinwar, a head of Hamas’s armed wing, was known as “the butcher of Khan Younis” for his brutality toward other Palestinians.) Abortion and homosexuality are outlawed (what are those protestors with “Queers for Palestine” signs thinking?); mentioning trans rights would be unwise. It is legal for husbands to beat their wives, and so-called honor killings go unpunished. The ruling clique is notoriously corrupt, and though Gazans are very poor, Hamas is a very rich organization. “I Stand with Palestine!” demonstrators and writers proudly proclaim while lauding Hamas for having “rejuvenated a sense of political possibility” and hastening “the hour of liberation.” But what, exactly, are they standing for? And what kind of liberation will this be? Aside from the Taliban, Hamas has established the least progressive pseudo-state on Earth. The lesson of Iran has apparently not been learned; history is repeating itself not as farce but as tragedy.”
[…]
“Oppression is not a carte blanche for severing heads from bodies, shooting hundreds of young festival-goers, bludgeoning people to death, murdering children in front of parents and vice versa, killing naked women point-blank, and kidnapping babies and the elderly; there is no universe in which these are revolutionary, emancipatory, or anticolonialist acts, much less “beautiful” ones. Sadism and violence are not synonyms. Sexual torture cannot be anti-imperialist—nor is it an understandable, much less inevitable, response to oppression. An eliminationist program is not a freedom charter. History has proved, again and again, that terrorists and freedom fighters aren’t the same, which is why the former never achieve anything approaching either liberation or justice. There is no room for “yes, but.” Why, when it comes to the deaths of Israelis, is this so hard to understand? “
I’m chilled when I see so many members of our intelligentsia support and excuse heinous crimes against humanity. The Left when blinded by power-dynamics can be just as bloodthirsty as the Right.
The Western world needs to give its collective head a shake and *not* celebrate terrorism. The conclusion from Benjamin’s essay published on The Free Press.
“How wrong I was. This past week, as over 1,300 Jews were slaughtered, the most murderous attack on Jews since the Holocaust, I saw the true face of Palestinians and their allies. All around the world, they celebrate. They gloat. They mock our tears. They do not protest against Hamas. They embrace pure evil.
And so, to the terrorists I now say:
When you killed my family, I forgave you. When you killed my people, I forgave you. But when you killed my idealism, I had no forgiveness left.
To non-Jewish friends who have reached out, thank you. It is simply the human thing to do. To friends who dare justify what has happened, you are not friends. You are nothing but Nazi supporters dressed up in leftist intellectual language. To the Palestinians: you have lost all moral authority to claim victimhood. I will never advocate for you again. To my family, friends in Israel, and Jews around the world hurting right now, I love you. Stay safe.
In Berlin, where I live today with my German-Ukrainian Jewish wife, Germans love to say “Never Again.” Right now, Never Again is happening again in real time, livestreamed for the whole world to see. I find myself looking up my military number in case the IDF reserves call for me. Unlike our enemy, I feel no joy at the prospect of going to war. But if our people’s existence is at stake, I will do what I must. I will be the world’s favorite villain: the Jew who has the audacity to defend his people.”
Safety? Security? – A window into our fearful past and what we’ve lost of our privacy.
Even before the terror attacks in Paris last week, the possibility of terrorists was the reason the Harper government gave for being so incredibly slow to accept Syrian refugees. When the news of the attacks broke Friday afternoon my time, it was literally minutes before I heard it in the office water cooler talk: “No wonder, there’s so many refugees there.” And of course we have the Governors of Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Texas, saying their states will not accept refugees, and the Premier of Saskatchewan asking our Prime Minister to put his ambitious refugee resettlement program on ice.
This is racist, indecent and inhumane garbage, and pants-on-head levels of stupid.
As a pacifist-leaning liberal arts major, I am pretty much the opposite of a military strategist. And if somebody like me can see how low the ROI is for terrorists to try to infiltrate foreign countries under the guise of refugees, then I have to conclude wilful ignorance (or worse) on the part of officials in higher levels of government, whose job it is, last I heard, to think strategically.
Radicalizing and training up a terrorist is an investment. Are you seriously going to put that investment on a leaky boat that may or may not reach its destination, and then, assuming the boat makes it, have your investment walk for months, sleeping rough, with little to eat, and provisioned with only what he can personally carry, only to have his route to the target country barred by intermediary countries that may or may not let him through? Then, assuming he reaches his destination, he still needs to learn to fit in with the society he intends to attack, enough to walk the streets unnoticed, and you still have to arm him, because he probably opted to carry food rather than explosives on his long walk.
The refugees fleeing IS are unlikely to be a useful source of terrorist recruits – if they agreed with IS, they would presumably be staying and fighting under their banner.
As the attacks on Paris demonstrate, there’s a much higher-ROI way of blowing up people in a foreign country: have their own citizens do the dirty work for you.
The narrative emerging after these attacks is that IS wants to create division and hatred. That they want to destroy what they call the “grey zone” of society, where Muslims and non-Muslims live and work together productively and peacefully. What will ultimately destroy IS, is expanding and solidifying those grey zones.
Domestically, it means combating Islamophobia and the othering of Muslims, and ensuring that Muslims are not excluded from the benefits and opportunities inherent in living in a well-to-do secular democracy. Failure to do so will only produce disaffected angry youth who feel like they have nothing to lose, a rich recruiting ground for induction into radicalism and ultimately terrorism.
When it comes to the refugees fleeing Syria, we need to get them safe, get them homes, and provide them all the support they need to adapt to their new countries and become full and contributing citizens.
Or, we can do IS’s radicalization work for them. All we have to do is watch while more children drown; let children freeze this winter; not find a place for all these families to be safe and call home; not give them full opportunity to belong when they get here.
Oh, those wacky religious Muslim terrorists are at it again going all murder happy on people who dare to make fun of their religion.
This event is completely ludicrous and, in 2015, should not be happening, some reasons off the top of my head:
1. Mohammad, Jebus, Krishna, Sif – pick your imaginary friend – they all don’t fucking exist.
2. If they did exist wouldn’t there be some godly smiting going on, like all the time? Being immortal and all powerful and all that shite, you would think that they could take care of business without the help of mere mortals.
3. How can you, a mere mortal, even think that you can contemplate what your Godhead wants, never mind what she’s offended by?
4. How does killing Western journalists advance your cause by even one micrometer? Not all journalists are card carrying lackeys of empire yet, but with doing shit-for-brains (shit for brains is my new term for “stupid” because I’ve been informed by certain elements that “stupid” is ablest slur) wankery like mass murder how is the non-wanking western media supposed to put forward the case for Islam not being full of yahoos ready to kill people for shit-for-brains reasons?
If you think this is going to be all about bashing the religious and the Muslims, you’d be wrong. Let’s get a little context on the situation from Ziauddin Sardar:
“I would argue that western imperialism has not so much forged an alliance with radical factions, as created them”, I was told, in London, by my friend, and leading progressive Muslim intellectual, Ziauddin Sardar.
And Mr. Sardar continued:
“We need to realize that colonialism did much more than simply damage Muslim nations and cultures. It played a major part in the suppression and eventual disappearance of knowledge and learning, thought and creativity, from Muslim cultures. Colonial encounter began by appropriating the knowledge and learning of Islam, which became the basis of the ‘European Renaissance’ and ‘the Enlightenment’ and ended by eradicating this knowledge and learning from both Muslim societies and from history itself. It did that both by physical elimination – destroying and closing down institutions of learning, banning certain types of indigenous knowledge, killing off local thinkers and scholars – and by rewriting History as the history of western civilization into which all minor histories of other civilization are subsumed.”
Of course our hands are dirty on this one most of the terrible shit going on in the world can be directly or indirectly attributed to putting our state interests (see colonialism, empire, and name your flavour of exceptionalism et al.) ahead of the needs of other people who happen to be living in their own countries.
Andre Vltchek continues:
“From the hopes of those post-WWII years, to the total gloom of the present days – what a long and terrible journey is has been!
The Muslim world is now injured, humiliated and confused, almost always on the defensive.
It is misunderstood by the outsiders, and often even by its own people who are frequently forced to rely on Western and Christian views of the world.
What used to make the culture of Islam so attractive – tolerance, learning, concern for the wellbeing of the people – has been amputated from the Muslim realm, destroyed from abroad. What was left was only religion.
Now most of the Muslim countries are ruled by despots, by the military or corrupt cliques. All of them closely linked with the West and its global regime and interests.
As they did in several great nations and Empires of South and Central America, as well as Africa, Western invaders and colonizers managed to totally annihilate great Muslim cultures.
What forcefully replaced them were greed, corruption and brutality.
It appears that everything that is based on different, non-Christian foundations is being reduced to dust by the Empire. Only the biggest and toughest cultures are still surviving.
Anytime a Muslim country tries to go back to its essence, to march its own, socialist or socially-oriented way – be it Iran, Egypt, Indonesia, or much more recently Iraq, Libya or Syria – it gets savagely tortured and destroyed.
The will of its people is unceremoniously broken, and democratically expressed choices overthrown.”
[Source]
Picture is unrelated. I need some awesome in this post, because otherwise it is too damn depressing.
You’ll see the word “stability” crop up when you begin to examine the officially accepted version of history we all know and love. Stability used in the geopolitical exceptional context is anti-democratic and anti-nationalist – pretty much the exact opposite of the flowery boilerplate about human rights and democracy promotion that is exuded from ‘top government’ officials.
It is usually about here I get painted as a part of the I hate america/canada crowd – but that shit can frack-off before it starts. I am not about hating my country, I’m about this country looking at our history without the friendly blinders on and owning up and taking responsibility for the horrible shit we have done/continue to do in the name of the ‘national interest’.
So ya, wanna fix the terrorism problem? Lets start at home ,with us, like this:
“If we seriously want to end the plague of terrorism, we know how to do it. First, end our own role as perpetrators. That alone will have a substantial effect. Second, attend to the grievances that are typically in the background, and if they are legitimate, do something about them. Third, if an act of terror occurs, deal with it as a criminal act: identify and apprehend the suspects and carry out an honest judicial process. That actually works. In contrast, the techniques that are employed enhance the threat of terror. The evidence is fairly strong, and falls together which much else. ”
Thank you Mr.Chomsky for that gem of a quote. Thank you dear readers for taking the time to listen to me rant.
Arbourist out.
The overarching apparatus of state is plainly evinced by the actions of one president elected on Hope and Change.
Truth is hard to come by when it comes to international relations and geopolitics. Noam Chomsky fashions an argument based on reciprocal morality, one of the tenets of the majority of prescriptive moral systems.
Also, Noam weighs in on Obama on RT.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
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