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Just finished a conference by phone, and it was chaos. There has been a stabbing, shooting and murder-by-car at our Parliament, and many of the people I was talking to were in lockdown, literally. Everyone I know (including one member of the House of Lords) in the area is safe.
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Comments
But ...
Our thoughts should go to the woman mown down by the attackers car and the policeman he then stabbed to death.
Injuries
Now standing at four dead, including the attacker, and twenty injured
we need
To employ some Ninjas so these tosspots die by the blade instead of wasting the bullets.
The sad thing is that this will turn out once again to be someone the authorities are aware of as a risk. We need to take a more proactive stance.
Thoughts go of course to the innocent victims.
Madeline Anafrid Bell
I'm horrified by the reports I've heard on the radio
and seen on the net. I simply don't understand why these things happen. They achieve nothing except pain and misery for all concerned and show how little humans have evolved from the stone age except in the technology of hatred and killing. How can we look for intelligent life in space when there appears to be very little of it on this poor planet.
My thoughts are with the victims of this pointless atrocity, their families and friends and those who have to deal with the aftermath.
Angharad
Unfortunately, it's what they want
"They achieve nothing except pain and misery for all concerned"
except that causing pain and misery is their actual objective
Looking for intelligent life is all the more important because of them, get those of us that aren't crazy away from this insane deathworld
what they want is for us to change our lives
They don't need to actually attack. Just the threat makes us change.
We fear the threat of an attack more than the actual thing itself.
That means that the terrorists have won.
Samantha
Victims
Several of the injured were French school kids.
Prayers from Florida
My prayers go out to your country
Prayers
Prayers of support being sent for those injured and the family of the Policeman who died.
When these attacks happen it is always horrendous, when it happens in our own country ...
Cant form the correct wording to comment more
xxx
SamanthaAnn
All of the
Dead and injured were people, isn't that what's really important? Man's inhumanity to man. If we can so easily butcher our own species is it any surprise how easy it is for us to destroy the ecosystem around us, even though we depend on it to exist?
“When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus.” - Turkish Proverb
The Goal
Is the destruction of Western civilisation (such as it is) but our mostly liberal values and the rule of law. The terror organisations have worked out that so called "lone wolf" attacks do not need trained "soldiers" but can be carried out by totally untrained operators who are much harder to detect. I prefer to call them "rabid dog" attacks.
Nasty as they may be, similar attacks have been going on since at least the 1970s. Think IRA, for example, and the Palestinian hijacking of the Achille Lauro, etc, etc. We have to keep our responses measured and not succumb to the tactics used by these idiots, however tempting that may be.
Talk is the only solution
It needs both sides to understand the other's objectives and issues, and the west is as guilty as the so-called Islamic State in this respect. We won't talk to terrorists so their only option is more terrorism. It's a no win situation for both sides.
Every time we deploy a new super tank to use in mainstream conflict, they use more terrorism.
Perhaps if we got right out of their countries which we invaded, it might be a start. And before the hysterical outburst, just imagine if your country had been successfully invaded by another country - say Russia. Would you be one of those who meekly accept Russian rule, or would you be doing everything you could, including giving your own life and bombing Russians, to defend your country?
Keep in mind
Most of these terrorists represent minority groups trying to impose an unpalatable way of life on the majority. They seek to curtail the rights of the citizens and impose a theocracy that wants to force an extreme version of their religion on the citizens. And quite often these groups are composed of people from outside the country. They are not citizens of that country fighting for their beliefs, they are foreigners fighting to impose another country's government on the populace.
And before you say that is the same thing the U.S. and its allies are trying to do, you have to consider the ultimate goals. The U.S. is trying to support democracy and the rights of the people. ISIS and Al Queda wishes to impose a religious dictatorship and curtail the rights of the people. No, the U.S. is not the good guy in the white hat, our policy in the middle east has been corrupted and coopted by special interest groups such as the oil companies. The U.S. has cynically supported dictatorships to "preserve stability" in the region, a code phrase for keeping the friends of the U.S. oil companies in control so they can get the best return on their investments.
Beyond supporting Israel when the arab nations attempted to destroy them, I wish we had never gotten involved in the middle east. Like other areas of the world, the middle east isn't interested in democracy - western style. The whats and whys of this could take several theses just to outline and are beyond the scope of this topic. All we really have been able to accomplish has been the complete destabilization of the region.
“When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus.” - Turkish Proverb
Sadly, the person concerned
appears to have been a native who was radicalised in prison. Basically, he was a known thug with a history of violence who knows what his motivation was in killing innocent bystanders or even a policeman. I don't understand why these people do what they do because I don't think like them. The really saddest thing is that it gives the extremists in our political systems an opportunity to paint everyone but themselves or their crazy hate-filled views, as a threat to their sort of democracy.
Angharad
Don't mention Israel
For I suspect we would quickly get into a debate that would get this blog removed. Existence is one thing, expansion into other's territories is quite another.