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Oh, and btw, with the Greek election results, should we then expect massive act of terrorism against them so that conservatives can be back there ?! In one year, two year, five years ? Or I-will-never-give-a-date-but-when-it-happens-I'll-say-I-predicted-it ?
Sir Winston Churchill if you don't mind @Getafix I wish we had more "Common" people like him.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill
That is so cowardly.
Having just watched a re-run of W1A , I can believe this. It would be funny if it were not for the fact that I am assisting to fund it.
I agree the term fits, particularly in this context. I just wonder if 'terrorist' becomes lazy shorthand for all sorts of stuff though, and gets the journalists and media off the hook of analysing what is going on and actually giving some real insight.
There are 'terrorists' all over the world, but that description does not help our understanding of what they are or what their motivation is. Even amongst Islamic terrorists there are so many factions and sub-groups with different motivations and contexts.
I did not see any of this hand ringing when the IRA were at their peak. Nobody , including the IRA, objected to the word. It is an indication of how much uncertainty within our society we have that we cant even agree on what word to use to describe these guys.
Well exactly. Wording is so important, I understand the debates that go on about how these people should be described.
I do actually think a lot of the people who do this are probably just psychotic and they have found an outlet for their murderous tendencies that gives them some legitemacy.
I read an interesting artlcie the other day about Islamic terrorists, immigration, the European fear of Islamic take over etc. It was written by a Muslim and it pointed out that the most murderous act of 'terrorism' in Europe this decade has not come from Islamists, but a right-wing anti-Islamic, anti-immigration nutter in Norway - Anders Behring Breivik .
I am not saying there is not a major threat - obviously there is. But I wonder if we play into the extemists hands by exagerating it. In the US, generally speaking, you are much more likely to be killed deliberately or by accident by a fellow citizen with a gun than you are by 'terrorists'. In Europe, we obviously must not be complacent, but the fact is this attack was by 3 disillusioned individuals. To what extent should we let 3 lunatics dictate our response and attitude to an entire group who are loosely defined as 'Muslims'.
Not completely. There were right wing homophobic and anti-immigrant bomb attacks in London in 1999: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Copeland
And until 911 the Oklahama bombing in the US was I think one of the worst, if not the worst terror attack there.
I accept that the Islamist threat today is much greater though.
But in the 1970s and 80s in the UK the main threat was the IRA. In Spain for years it has been ETA.
I just don't think we should overreact and allow ourselves to marginalise all Muslims because of the acts of a few nutters.
I hope that in 30 years from now the Islamist threat will have subsided and we'll be probably be facing the latest bunch of loons with a blood lust.
They are terrorists (in the sense that they are causing terror) and they are also murderers.
However using the terrorist term opens the door to justifying all kinds of overreactions, snooping on innocents, clampdowns etc. because it subconsciously implies something more than it could be. The murderer classification does not (because then it is just a crime that must be investigated and solved).
So it is the implication of using the word terrorist for our freedoms that gives me concern. The fact that the word can be 'hijacked' for other purposes, just like 'Islam' has been hijacked by others for nefarious purposes.
Of that magnitude maybe, but massacres are not such an unusual scenario world wide. In addition to homophobic attacks there's been several school massacres in the US for instance. Once in a while people perform insane violent acts. And (importantly) Islam is not always involved...
Well put. The bigger threat arguably is not from murdering nutters themsevles (although this is of course very serious) but from our own governments and to our own civil liberties. We have to walk that line between countering the extremists, while not allowing our governments to use 'terror' as an excuse for trampling on our own freedoms.
In the Ch massacre, the term terrorist was, is entirely justified. Trying to forget this label is a cheap attempt to dilute the gravity of their crime and its core motivation: religious zeal of the Islamist kind. I think this is what the BBC is shying away from.
There were Jewish Zionist 'terrorists' in the 1940s who attacked the British Army in Palestine because they thought the British stood in the way of the creation of their Jewish state. Just calling them 'terrorists' wouldn't have realed anything about their motivations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_David_Hotel_bombing
Speaking of which, Netanyahu doesn't even consider the King David Hotel bombing (one of the most fatal bombings in the history of the Middle East) a terrorist attack at all. Funny that.
It tells a lot about their motivations, if the term is used properly. The terrorists who did the massacre in Paris did not want respect, did not fight for freedom, for justice, for money or whatever: they murderer to strike the fear of God into hearts and minds of citizens of a democratic society. Kill their freedom by striking terror. This is what the aim of a terrorist is: terror.
By that definition the USA's 'shock and awe' offensive on Iraq was a terrorist act.
The more I think about a lot of these issues the more I think they're not remotely as simple as some make out.
In the 1950s and 60s and 70s we were told 'Communists' were the epitomy of evil. But many of those people who embraced Communism did so because they saw it as the best way of opposing colonialism and western imperialism. Mao said this quite explicitly.
A lot of the Vietnamese who fought the Americans in Vietnam were not ideologically communist - they just wanted foreign powers out of their country. And I think the same is true to an extent today. Ideology is important, but I think of a lot of people have turned to Islamist extremism because they see at the only way to oppose western interference in the Middle East.
Not that I am a big fan of the Bush administration or the Iraq war, but no. The Iraq war was a war. And, while I don't think it was a justified war, it was a war taken for a bad cause, motivated by greed and a Messianic sense of entitlement, it was still a war and against a nasty dictatorship. However morally wrong it was, it was not exactly the gratuitous murders of artists living in a free, democratic society whose sole crime was was to have been using their liberty to mock a man dead a few centuries ago.
And equivocating the Iraq war to the CH terrorist attacks is utterly ridiculous.
Beside, whether or not the Iraq war was terrorism is beside the point. The Charlie Hebdo massacre most definitely is.
The man was a clever but conceited and rather intellectually lazy alcoholic with an excessively high opinion of himself.