World Politics

[theyoungest]

pim fortuyn theo van gogh gert wilders

elected politicians. in the lowlands.

What's with them? Fortuyn was killed by a leftist nut, Van Gogh by an Islamic nut, and Wilders is still alive.

BTW Van Gogh wasn't a politician, but a film director.

 

[del1962]

pim fortuyn theo van gogh gert wilders

elected politicians. in the lowlands.

Wasnt he the one that did a film with Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Now there is a woman badly let down by the Netherlands establishment

 

[The Hitch]

Thanks for this. It's good to know that there's still some sane people on this forum.

So. what is the "injustice" the shooters were protesting against?

 

[ray j willings]

I note that a shout that I left on a private shoutbox somewhere else is now disclosed in public here. Always the same indecent methods by the same people. But well I said the exact same thing here. So that means that that poster can't read...


And obviously it's not an excuse at all, for those who have more than 2 brain cells.

Beside I'm just listening again to an interview by Jean Bricmont, back in August 2012. Bricmont is a Belgian physicist, at the University of Leuven. He's anti-religion, so normally a "good guy" and yet Charlie Hebdo treated him as a "Brown support of Assad", so a Fascist (a bit like I'm called a Himmler, here), just because he was against a foreign military intervention in Syria at the time of the crisis. These people were just insane fanatics. They supported all the recent dirty wars. That's why they really put their lives at risk. A lot of people had warned them for many years. They wouldn't listen to. If you think that a few Islamophobic cartoons were the problem ... A lot of comedians in France crack jokes on Islam and they don't risk anything because they are not political activists like these people and certainly not warmongerers. They are. I am francophone and am very well informed about this crap "newspaper".

Does not matter what you or I think of their opinion. You seem to be hinting that they got what they deserved.
Murder is not the solution.

 

[theyoungest]

Wasnt he the one that did a film with Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Now there is a woman badly let down by the Netherlands establishment

Yes, he was. And yes, she was let down to some extent, although as I remember she positioned herself very much in the role of the victim of everything and everyone, which became quite annoying at some point. On top of that, she lied about her background, which made her Dutch nationality legally void, although it was never taken from her.

 

[sniper]

Anders Breivik was also a good Christian who hated Muslims... Foxxy, are you sure you want to lump yourself in with his lot?

In reality, this is a criminal act. The criminals will be caught or killed and then put on trial. Condemning 23% of the world's population based on the criminal acts of a few people (who have not even been identified, let alone designated as belonging to a particular group) is bigoted and hateful.

More nuanced - in the history of "terrorism", the perpetrators are usually acting out against a real or perceived injustice by a powerful force. An example could include the ETA, PIRA, ELF, or maybe even Greenpeace. It's often enlightening to try and figure out why these groups are so p1ssed off. Yelling hatred on cycling forums... not so much.

John Swanson

+1
great post.
all of this gets lost, unfortunately, in the hollow discussion about freedom of speech.

 

[del1962]

+1
great post.
all of this gets lost, unfortunately, in the hollow discussion about freedom of speech.

Why is the discussion of freedom of speech hollow?

 

[sniper]

Why is the discussion of freedom of speech hollow?

indeed i should specify.
freedom of speech is certainly not a hollow topic in itself.
but to discuss yesterday's attack only in those terms is, imo, pretty pointless as long as there is no broader discussion about what is causing anti-western sentiments among muslims.
i've been listening CNN and BBC yesterday and today, and it's pretty much all about how this was an attack at freedom of speech. No broader reflections on where the deep frustration underlying islamist terrorism comes from.

 

[del1962]

indeed i should specify.
freedom of speech is certainly not a hollow topic in itself.
but to discuss yesterday's attack only in those terms is, imo, pretty pointless as long as there is no broader discussion about what is causing anti-western sentiments among muslims.
i've been listening CNN and BBC yesterday and today, and it's pretty much all about how this was an attack at freedom of speech. No broader reflections on where the deep frustration underlying islamist terrorism comes from.

Here is a quote from a former Islamist Maajid Nawaz

When I was still a member of what is probably best termed the British Jihadi Network - a series of British Muslim terrorist groups linked by a single ideology - I remember how we used to laugh in celebration whenever people on TV proclaimed that the sole cause for Islamic acts of terror like 9/11, the Madrid bombings and 7/7 was Western foreign policy.

By blaming the Government for our actions, those who pushed this "Blair's bombs" line did our propaganda work for us.

More important, they also helped to draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology.

The reason for these attacks is more simple than deep frustration, we should take the terriorist at their word, they want to establish the rule of their brand of Islam and they are quite willing to use any terror tactics to meet their ends.

 

[Amsterhammer]

Wasnt he the one that did a film with Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Now there is a woman badly let down by the Netherlands establishment

I totally fail to see what point you think you are making with this comment.

Hirsi Ali can best be compared to Mia Love. She was a poster woman for the Dutch right, but had to resign from parliament after it was discovered that she had lied on her application for citizenship.

 

[rhubroma]

 

[thirteen]

amen!

je suis charlie

 

[Echoes]

A pub in Villefranche sur Saone exploded, closed to a mosk. The mosk was the target.

Gunshots against a mosk in Port-la-Nouvelle (Aude, Southern France) and in Le Mans.

tags full of hatred on the mosk of Poitiers.

http://www.leparisien.fr/faits-dive...bab-pres-d-une-mosquee-08-01-2015-4428491.php

Only the beginning, I guess. French equivalents to Brown one one one are waking up and got what they wanted probably.



------
I reiterate. Charlie Hebdo was NOT in favour of freedom of speech for those who don't share their opinion. They once portrayed Mrs Le Pen as a piece of turd...

 

[del1962]

I totally fail to see what point you think you are making with this comment.

Hirsi Ali can best be compared to Mia Love. She was a poster woman for the Dutch right, but had to resign from parliament after it was discovered that she had lied on her application for citizenship.

Your response appears to confirm my point.

 

[rhubroma]

De tout coeur avec Charlie Hebdo. The Hammock: by Michele Serra

I would have wanted to leave this cubical of ink space empty today, as a sign of mourning and disconsolate impotence; but then I thought that terrorism has an invincible enemy, and this enemy is the normalcy of our daily lives. That is the habits, the useful and useless gestures, the banal tasks, work, reading, writing, the exchange of words: in short the dense and super powerful social plot we weave that the terrorist intends to lacerate. Its objective is to render us different than we are: either more afraid, or meaner, or more disoriented. If, to the contrary, we are able to—in the case of terrorism—remain unchanged, well then we cannot but be victorious, like an enormous and pacific river that submerges each malevolent asperity. My job is to write every day and I want to and must do so. We imagine—like what happened at London after the Islamic carnage in the subway—the confusion, the dismay, a brief flash of panic, and then the city restarted chewing its day. Each one of us—not only the satirical cartoonists—is a potential target of a bomb or shooting. However, we are so, so many and so, so alive and so, so busy, that to stop us is impossible. It’s like stopping time that ineluctably passes by.

In the pencil massacre young fanatics slaughter old libertines, by Michele Serra

It’s not true that for Charlie Hebdo nothing is sacred. Sacred, in that old Parisian news magazine, is liberty. Liberty danced, naked and happy like Wolinsky’s ladies, around the fragile journalistic trenches of desks covered with paper, pens and pencils, dailies, black magic markers (the arsenal of the victims) upon which the unrepentant French satire artists, most of whom were old, have fallen: old libertines murdered in cold blood by their bigoted young assassins. Seasoned veterans like Georges Wolinsky, Charb, Cabu, who were unscathed after numerous court hearings for obscenity, who had evaded being censored time and time again and experienced failures, had even survived many bitter quarrels within the most adversarial world of satirical journalism; to then die thusly, slaughtered by two blood thirsty and craven imbeciles who of liberty they can’t and don’t want to know anything about. Liberty is to fanatics what fish are to dry. land.

The stock of Charlie Hebdo and of its precursor, Hara Kiri, is that of the rational secularism and fervent laicism, which is so deep rooted in France, of the République: with a strong constitution of sexual freedom, anarchic and anticlerical imprint that blossomed, though was already present back in the Belle époque and dada eras, with the 1968 generation of social revolution. The undisputed inspirer of the magazine was Francois Cavanna (of Piacenza origins), an old-timer, rebellious hippy author of hilarious and merciless lines about all the people who fall into the clutches of power and religion, which demand no less than total submission. Cavanna died in his bed about a year ago, ninety years-old, pail and thin like a guru, spared from this horror and the agony of knowing about the macabre offense, so deeply inflicted, his jolly tribe has had to sustain.

The trademark of that satirical milieu, unaltered over the last decades despite being the target of numerous warheads, is a sort of sacrosanct freedom of expression extremism, which even irritated the self-righteous and decency-minded left and was always loathed by the traditionalist right. The gay chief editor of the news magazine, Philippe Val, just a few years ago, following a television debate was followed and beaten-up by a group of homophobic Christians who wanted to teach him the correct way of existing in the world. It was a humiliating vendetta, though nothing before the monstrous outcome of the new conflict in which Charlie Hebdo, let’s say by its very nature, could not have not gotten itself embroiled in the thick of the battle: that between liberty of expression and Islamic fundamentalism. It is a long war that “officially” began in 1989 with the fatwa against Salman Rushdie and his Satanic Verses. It is a domestic war within Europe; let’s not forget that, from its very first act. For it appears that the death sentence placed on Rushdie was inspired by the London radical Islam matrix, as if the stubbornness of that part of Islam against the freedom of expression were sharpened, irreparably, by the promiscuity with our customary ways, including our (sacrosanct) shameless rudeness.

Satire, by its very nature, is a language of boundaries; is extreme in its discipline and is not concerned with making people feel comfortable. Remaining (and unfortunately we are obliged to do so) within the bellicose metaphor, it is like a platoon of party-poopers, who inevitably break up the ranks, disrupt the established order and destabilize the roles. It would be totally immoral to, here and now, reopen the debate about blasphemy, or if you like insolence before the religious dogmas. It would be the most blasphemous thing to do before those innocents killed, who certainly died for liberty (in the name of liberty and for the cause of liberty). It would be as if from backstage, and with our asses safe and sound, we idiotically were to permit ourselves the right to evaluate the risk these fallen had placed upon themselves for defending all of our freedom to independent thought and expression.

Let us thus limit ourselves to certify that, on the battlefield of freedom of speech and liberty of expression, satire cannot but be at the front line, and that Charlie Hebdo decided not to take one step backwards. This while knowing all too well—let’s not forget that—that even just being a news magazine substantially comprised of a few jolly-minded, mostly senior hippy cartoon illustrators, a collision with the Islamic iconoclasts was inevitably part of the game at stake. The victims of this massacre all wielded, metaphorically, or in reality, their drawing pencil in hand. The pencil, in this veritable Ground Zero of freedom of the press, was the minimal, yet supper imposing, skyscraper that was knocked down. Put a pencil in your pocket over the next few days to feel yourselves closer to Charlie Hebdo, even if you never read it, even if you don’t like satire very much and you find it excessive, upsetting and provocative.

Let us thus salute them with an open smile—they wouldn’t want anything better—those passionate guys, just as intelligent as they were harmless: the chief editor Charb (Stéphane Charbonnier), Cabu (Jean Cabus), Tignous (Berdard Verlac), Georges Wolinsky, ravaged by the black hole of political-religious hatred, along with the journalist, Bernard Maris, in addition to five other colleagues and two policemen. Try to imagine, to get a grasp on the import of the massacre of Rue Nicolas-Appert, if the cartoonists each day who in the satirical vein make you reflect upon things, or laugh over the stupid follies of humanity in your own news sources, were to be slaughtered by a pogrom of fanatics, creating an emptiness on those so whimsical, but oh so indispensable, pages. Let us never forget, not even for a second, the perfumed scent of liberty, and how much we are indebted, as Europeans, to France and Paris

 

[Amsterhammer]

Word. 10 char

 

[The Hitch]

indeed i should specify.
freedom of speech is certainly not a hollow topic in itself.
but to discuss yesterday's attack only in those terms is, imo, pretty pointless as long as there is no broader discussion about what is causing anti-western sentiments among muslims.
i've been listening CNN and BBC yesterday and today, and it's pretty much all about how this was an attack at freedom of speech. No broader reflections on where the deep frustration underlying islamist terrorism comes from.

What deeper frustration? You mean the fact that women are allowed to.vote and walk the streets, or that a cartoonist is allowed to write "Mohammed" under some squiggles?

Yep, real legitimate reasons to turn up with firearms and start randomly shooting people.

 

[Amsterhammer]

Another excellent one!

 

[sniper]

Here is a quote from a former Islamist Maajid Nawaz



The reason for these attacks is more simple than deep frustration, we should take the terriorist at their word, they want to establish the rule of their brand of Islam and they are quite willing to use any terror tactics to meet their ends.

interesting quote. I disagree with your conclusion.
But whether i agree or not, this is what I think the discussion should be about (admittedly in addition to a discussion of freedom of speech).

 

[rhubroma]

Another excellent one!

Mercì Charlie.

 

[Bustedknuckle]

indeed i should specify.
freedom of speech is certainly not a hollow topic in itself.
but to discuss yesterday's attack only in those terms is, imo, pretty pointless as long as there is no broader discussion about what is causing anti-western sentiments among muslims.
i've been listening CNN and BBC yesterday and today, and it's pretty much all about how this was an attack at freedom of speech. No broader reflections on where the deep frustration underlying islamist terrorism comes from.

There is more frustration between different groups of muslims than with the west. Shia<->sunni<->kurd..

 

[sniper]

What deeper frustration? You mean the fact that women are allowed to.vote and walk the streets, or that a cartoonist is allowed to write "Mohammed" under some squiggles?

Yep, real legitimate reasons to turn up with firearms and start randomly shooting people.

with all respect, this is the recurring populist strawman that kills any real discussion about deeper motives and about ways in which the civilized west might be propelling certain forms of terrorism.

there are no reasons for freakish gunnings.
we didn't need yesterday's tragedy to realize that.

 

[sniper]

There is more frustration between different groups of muslims than with the west. Shia<->sunni<->kurd..

there are frustrations between different groups of muslims, yes.
they add to many other frustrations, such as widespread poverty, the palestina conflict, USA bombings, etc.
More or less frustration about X than about Y or Z...
do we have any real idea?
In any case, none of these things should be regarded in isolation.

 

[hrotha]

An already radicalized jihadist doesn't need much to justify his own actions. But there *are* socio-political factors in how a Muslim youth becomes radicalized and turns to jihadism.

This kind of attack is meant to polarize France by pitting everyone else against the Muslims, thus isolating them, creating grievances for them and increasing the odds that they'll turn to jihadism. Wanna lash out against Islam as a whole? Good job, that's just what the jihadists want.

 

[rhubroma]

indeed i should specify.
freedom of speech is certainly not a hollow topic in itself.
but to discuss yesterday's attack only in those terms is, imo, pretty pointless as long as there is no broader discussion about what is causing anti-western sentiments among muslims.
i've been listening CNN and BBC yesterday and today, and it's pretty much all about how this was an attack at freedom of speech. No broader reflections on where the deep frustration underlying islamist terrorism comes from.

Let's n say it baldly, shall we? Freedom of speech is only hallow in the West (I don't even count the Middle East, where no such freedom exists and for the known reason), so long as it doesn't touch the ultra-sensitive nerve of religion (I'm not taking about racial slurs, minority discrimination, offending those based on various social phobias and paranoia, frequently by the way religiously driven).

But I say it’s the religious that need to get over themselves, grow-up, and stop placing their damn irrational beliefs before my freedom of independent thought and expression. The level of which, in any given society, the necessary art of satire is tolerated, or not; is a demonstration of the civility and maturity of that society. To place that in doubt, or to question it, means caving into a world of obscurantism, irrationality, arrogance, violence, baseness. It isn't an attack against religion, or anyone’s right to believe in whatever they like, but an appeal to that independence of any dogmatic viewpoints, without which civilization rests firmly in a decidedly less comprehending and crueler Middle Ages.