Nice and ongoing terror attacks in W Europe

[droid]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...ing-loner-facebook-ali-sonboly-bullied-killer

lol, yeah: 'no clear political motivation' and 'no links to terror groups' is the colloquial for 'not a Muslim terrorist'. The same thing happened immediately after Brevik.

 

[vimothy]

Brevik wrote a manifesto. Perhaps Ali Sonboly has done the same?

 

[droid]

ISIS have a manifesto and political agenda, not sure how many inspired by ISIS have the same.

 

[vimothy]

So there's no argument except "tu quoque". It would certainly be an interesting act of desperation if this atrocity were spun as a right-wing act of terror, to deflect attention (and blame) from all the other acts of terror that seem to be occurring on a daily basis.

 

[droid]

Uh-huh

 

[sadmanbarty]

This is a genuine question (I haven't really followed this news) did the Munich attacker express any political goals?

 

[Corpsey]

I read that he had targeted Turkish people specifically but I feel like this is an American style revenge of the nerd thing more than anything particularly political. He admired Breivik but he also admired other, non-political, school shooters.

The Iranian/Aryan thing is interesting, though.

 

[Mr. Tea]

The first major right wing act of terror since Brevik

I think you mean the first major act of non-Islamist right-wing terror since Breivik (assuming Jo Cox's murder doesn't count as a 'major attack'). There's a widespread assumption that the left-right axis only applies to white people's politics, but if militant Islamism can be fit anywhere on this axis, it pretty clearly occupies a position on the extreme right.

 

[Mr. Tea]

The guy in nice, like the guy in Orlando, sounds like he was a violent non-practising muslim who found a decent excuse to perform a real life GTA massacre. The kid in Munich was just an Iranian-German version of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.

I read that he had targeted Turkish people specifically but I feel like this is an American style revenge of the nerd thing more than anything particularly political.

This is astute. The Orlando massacre also fits into an established (and by now decades-hallowed) American tradition of mass shootings in public places. But I wonder if these kinds of attacks lie at one end of a continuum, with 'authentic' jihadi attacks at the other, or if they're better dealt with as a separate phenomenon.

 

[sadmanbarty]

if militant Islamism can be fit anywhere on this axis, it pretty clearly occupies a position on the extreme right.

Not really a racial or nationalist component to Jihadi ideology, whereas those are associated with, if not implicit in, far right ideology.

 

[sadmanbarty]

But I wonder if these kinds of attacks lie at one end of a continuum, with 'authentic' jihadi attacks at the other, or if they're better dealt with as a separate phenomenon.

Olivier Roy's 'Islamisation of Radicalism' might be of interest to you.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Not really a racial or nationalist component to Jihadi ideology, whereas those are associated with, if not implicit in, far right ideology.

True, but consider: the fanatical desire to return to the imagined purity of the distant past, coupled with a willingness to use up-to-the-minute technology to achieve this; the belief in the terminal decadence and corruption of liberal democracy; views about women that we might euphemise as robustly traditional; views about gays and Jews that are nothing short of murderous - I think the similarities considerably outweigh the differences.

Or to put it another way, there's certainly precious little to recommend Islamism to anyone who professes to belong to the political Left, is there? At least, for anyone for whom there's more to being 'left-wing' than hating Israel.

 

[vimothy]

So far, [Germany] has been spared the kind of atrocities visited on France and Belgium but security officials have repeatedly warned that is just down to luck. They say there are currently 708 investigations into suspected Islamist terrorism in Germany involving 1,029 suspects.

Hans-Georg Maassen, head of the domestic intelligence service, has stressed that Germany is just as vulnerable to Isis attacks as France. He has singled out the tens of thousands of unaccompanied youths arriving from Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq who are believed to be easy prey for homegrown jihadi networks.

Such concerns were fuelled by an attack just four days before the Munich shootings by a 17-year-old Afghan refugee, who rampaged through a train near the Bavarian town of Würzburg, attacking fellow passengers with an axe and a knife. Five people were injured. The suspect was later shot dead by police. Isis claimed responsibility, releasing a video of the man vowing to kill “infidels” and brandishing a knife.

Meanwhile, in a sign of the new type of danger Germany faces from within, authorities in June said they had broken up a suspected Isis sleeper cell that was planning a terror attack in Düsseldorf. Three Syrian men were arrested: two of them, identified only as Hamza C and Saleh A, joined Isis in 2014 and moved to Germany via Turkey, Greece and the Balkans, a route used by tens of thousands of other refugees with no links to terrorism. At the time of his arrest Hamza C was living at a migrant hostel in the town of Bliesdorf.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/93fe54b8-5181-11e6-9664-e0bdc13c3bef.html#axzz4FRDBQ5EA

 

[Mr. Tea]

Two knifemen plus a hostage dead at a church in Rouen.

Fucking hell, this is actually happening on a daily basis now.

Not Europe, but a guy in America has been arrested for shooting at some Somali men driving to prayers, there's been *another* fatal nightclub shooting in Florida and someone in Japan has gone nuts and stabbed a load of disabled people to death.

Fucking hell.

 

[sufi]

Yes, Jeremy Kyle's headline this morning was "is mass murder contagious?" or something along those lines

 

[Mr. Tea]

There does seem to be something in the air right now that goes way beyond the Islamist and what you might call quasi-Islamist attacks. The massacre in Japan is particularly shocking as it has one of the lowest murder rates in the world.

 

[luka]

hell in a handcart. me and my fellow 'psychic sensitives' are having some scary dreams.

 

[droid]

First mass murder in Japan decades.

As has been pointed out by many people in relation to the RNC - Im pretty sure a statistical analysis (excluding acts of war & terror) would probably show an overall drop in crime and murder... you just hear more about them now (and more quickly and viscerally).

 

[Mr. Tea]

First mass murder in Japan decades.

As has been pointed out by many people in relation to the RNC - Im pretty sure a statistical analysis (excluding acts of war & terror) would probably show an overall drop in crime and murder... you just hear more about them now (and more quickly and viscerally).

Right, but satellite TV and the internet weren't invented yesterday. I don't think events like these would have passed us by, say, ten years ago and I can't help but feel there's been an upswing in the last couple of years. Also I'm not sure how useful it is to distinguish between acts of terror and 'traditional' mass murders, especially considering events like the Orlando club shooting and the truck attack in Nice that blur the line between the two.

 

[droid]

You seemed quite upset. Im simply trying to comfort you in these times of crisis.