Refugees are victims of the war. If they wanted to involve violence, they would not be refugees looking for home. Why to see them as potential terrorists ?
It's much more likely that the terrorists come from the frustrated youth born and raised in France, than some fresh immigrants.
The events are most likely unrelated, but there is a habit to generalize. And escalation of that generalization is what is a concern to me.
The political establishment in France is in thrall to a radical, globalist agenda that seeks to increase its power by performing 'divide and conquer'.
A multicultural society has many more fault lines that can be exploited for political gain. One has only to look at how miserably the US is faring and how Americans are getting it good and hard from the donor class..
We don't know if the attackers had anything to with the flux of Syrian migrants moving across Europe now, but my guess would be: they had nothing to do with it.
There are about 5 million Muslims in France, which accounts for about 7 percent of France's total population. France has deep, long-standing and often troubled ties to several Muslim nations, notably Algeria. The French presence in Algeria lasted from 1830-1962.
During the Algerian civil war of the 1990s, France was targeted by terrorist attacks several times. One of those bombings EDIT: injured more than 100 people, which may be the number lost in the attacks today.
There are several basic facts that may help people understand why these attacks happen in France (I'm going to make some crude and unsympathetic generalizations that stem from the years I spent there):
* It's close to Middle Eastern and North African countries torn by conflict, notably Libya and Syria. These are training grounds for would-be attackers, many of whom originate in the west.
* Because of that, and of the fact that France rejoined NATO in 2009 and put itself firmly on the side of the US, it is also a proxy for the US, and will be targeted by those unhappy with American policies.
* It's racist. France has not dealt with the fact that people other than the French live on its soil. If you are the child of immigrants who were invited to France to help its post-War growth, you soon learn that a Muslim name will exclude you from many opportunities.
* Its economy is stagnant. France is no country for young men. They will face limited opportunities regardless of their ethnicity, unless they belong to the elite passing through the grandes écoles. This leads to a lot of frustration. When people cannot build a life in one direction, sometimes they are susceptible to morbid, violent ideologies.
* It's sloppy. I lived in France for 14 years, on either side of the 9/11 attacks on Manhattan. The French were really slow to put respectable security systems in place. CDG airport leaked like a sieve for years and I have no reason to believe that has changed.
Anyone who wants to know more about Islam in France should read Gilles Kepel:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilles_Kepel
He wrote a particularly good book in the 1980s called "The suburbs of Islam".
Their problems are rooted in abuse of power.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2015/nov/11/...
http://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2015/nov/12/...
http://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2015/nov/13/...
Not hard to get, but when you're talking about dozens of assault rifles, someone somewhere will know what is going where. If your intelligence people are worth their salt, of course.
> whether some of those people were let in under the guise of "refugees".
Yeah, because it's extremely effective to drop your people for months in a Turkish refugee camp, hoping that 1) they will survive in shocking conditions, 2) they will be processed and sent to France, or 3) they will jump on a dinghy and make it to the other side (when chances are that they will just sink), or 4) they will walk through half a dozen borders on high alert and across unsympathetic countries. Pure tactical genius.
More likely, these people had good passports and went through friendly airports smelling of roses. Once on-site, they were armed by existing networks that the French security apparatus still doesn't know how to infiltrate effectively. That's so much easier than leaving people to their own devices across two continents and hope they'll somehow manage to make it to la Gare du Nord at 10 o'clock on Friday morning.
Cross border travel within the EU is like moving between states in the US, easy to miss.
If you know the attacks were carried out by Muslims, there's no reason to assume these attacks were carried out by refugees.
[1] http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/calais-migrant-camp-...
In the 70s, European communist terrorism was widespread because of support from the Soviet Union. Now, European islamist terrorism is widespread because of support from the middle east. I'm aware that the CIA et al. have been doing exactly the same thing, but it's just a sad pattern.
You don't even have to imply that they are intentionally up to no good.
Groups of young men without possibilities of pairing off with young women are far more prone to crime and violence.
Nevermind refugees. People everywhere are much more dangerous than any terrorists. Somehow we don't like the idea of banning everyone from everywhere so we feel justified in judging one group as more dangerous than another to give us a sense of safety.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Rainbow_Warrior
It is the central dynamic that perpetuates all this violence. Someone from Group A kills dozens or hundreds of Group B, which uses the violence as an excuse to oppress thousands of Group A, which uses the oppression as an excuse to kill more of Group B, and this goes on and on for decades long after everyone's forgotten who "started" it or why, because both sides have convinced themselves, against all logic and evidence of history, that if they just hurt the other guys enough they'll give up and be nice.
It is never going to end until we find a way to break the cycle. The only way I can think of to contribute is to be a voice condemning the violent bigots on both sides, and trying to separate them from the millions of innocents that they claim to represent. It's not much. It probably isn't anything at all. But what else can I do?
You're just perpetuating the nonsense. Yes, you're against it, but your comment is little more than the sentiment you're against, plus a statement of opposition.
Yes, they will make those comments. They always do, even if nothing is happening.
It's like being mugged for your wallet and then when someone comes to help you mug them for their wallet, then you wonder why no one wants to help you.
So that's one. And one overseen and enforced by an autocrat.
There was a lot of mess already with the current immigration crisis. Now add that attack, and like you said, it's a powder keg, except I'm afraid that this shooting may have just lit the fuse. People will be connecting those two issues. They already are, judging from things that start popping up on my Facebook feed.
I fear the overreaction coming, of both citizens and governments. I fear the Europe will split, or start a war with someone, or draconian security measures will be introduced by the government. Charlie Hebdo was symbolic. This was a real terror strike. I just hope that sanity prevails and we won't amplify the damage further.
But it doesn't change the fact that general population will say these things, and it's them, not HN crowd, that shapes policy. I am seriously, true to God, afraid of what's going to happen now - afraid of overreaction of people and governments.
https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/dt https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2009/september/domterror_09...
I would send the wife and kids first before going myself.
I know that for me it would depend a lot on circumstances. Is the current refugee camp safe? Is the trip overseas that dangerous? Can my family handle it there, maybe caring for our grandparents while being protected by our parents? Then I would probably, with my heart broken, go alone to safeguard a place to live for them. I know I would be the kind who's naive enough to play by the books instead of just showing up in another country. But if my family staying would put them in danger, I'd definitely take them with me.
But I guess my point is that the amount of young males among the refugees can be explained by them going to secure a place for their entire family, and not willing to risk taking kids and grandparents on such a dangerous trip.
eg lets say we load a bunch of shrapnel into a tree so it maims or permanenly injures whoever the next logger is...tha is basically the same thing as lobbing hand grenades into the public square. the attacks are meant to target random people, caught unawares, in a way that conveys a persistant threat of continued, scalable future action.
Now lets take some other shady randome violence like the KGB assinating a civilian in London with radioactive isotopes in his tea. Is that terrorism? No, its a specific threat carried out in a limited capacity against a designated target. It might be criminal or a war crime or wahatever bad thing describes it, but its not "anti civilian warfare", in the same way that not all war casualties are "war crimes" in the normal usage.
Is it derived from the slang term that train hoppers and other people in hobo culture use for the temporary, makeshift residences they hold in the woods near train yards during travel?
It goes away and you realize that the equilibrium in a civil society is normalcy, and to give in to fear is to lose. Recency bias, forgetting your math/probability/statistics--you're smarter than that. Lead the way for others to keep calm and carry on.
http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/...
Trains are a tiny 6%.
> THE senior British official was unequivocal. The murder of the former KGB man Alexander Litvinenko was "undeniably state-sponsored terrorism on Moscow's part. That is the view at the highest levels of the British government".
http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/world_news/article6...
You might think that some forms of terrorism are worse than others, but that doesn't mean that those are the only forms of terrorism.
so... As an American who is old enough to very clearly remember America both before and after the 9/11 attacks? to the extent that America is like France, I can speak some to those fears.
We did several of those things. We massively overreacted; I mean, we didn't split, but we did pick a war with a country who's people kind of looked like the people who attacked us (and another war with a country we had some evidence that they had something to do with the attack) - and yes, both wars were pretty costly in terms of money, geopolitical power and credibility, commodity prices and world stability, but it didn't break us, and it didn't spill out into a major war between industrial powers. It didn't turn into Vietnam, or even something as bad as the CCCP's experience in Afghanistan. I'm not saying it was a good experience, just that it's survivable, and not as life changing as you seem to think. This isn't a war of the 19th or 20th century between major powers. This is a 21st century asymmetrical war, and while that's still pretty bad for whoever ends up getting blamed for these attacks, it's not the end for Europe.
Yes, the security measures were very costly. Airplane travel is dramatically less convenient, which means more traffic. Lots of lost productivity. We've lost so many human-years standing in line, waiting to be groped... or driving instead of flying; that has caused who knows how many extra deaths. (re-reading this... while I logically stand by the idea that we've lost more to the security measures than to the original attacks... on an emotional level, I feel shame for saying so out loud.) Personally, my perception is that this is slowly getting better with the pre-groping of the 'tsa pre-check' or the straight up money check of the "CLEAR" program. I mean, air travel is never again going to be as easy as it was when I was 19 during my lifetime, but it's not as bad as it was when I was 22, let me tell you, and it's getting better.
But... even at it's worst? This wasn't world war two. This wasn't even the Crimean war, at least on my side of the conflict. I mean, I don't want to diminish the sacrifices of our soldiers, it's not a job I would want to do, but being deployed in the wars we engaged in after 9/11 was less dangerous than delivering pizzas, if you only count the chance of getting killed or maimed, rather than harder to quantify mental traumas associated with fighting a war (which personally, I find to be a much larger deterrent to becoming a soldier than the danger. I was... just about at prime recruiting age on September 11th, 2001.
And for the rest of us? Yeah, 9/11 was a big deal. A bigger deal than I understood it to be at the time. A much bigger deal. but... it wasn't the end of life as we know it.
That was the weird thing about my 9/11 experience. So I had a dot-com job, and my boss was watching the news on a very early live-streaming website. (I want to say it was CNN or something, but I don't remember) I was mildly annoyed with her for not working and instead subjecting me to, you know, video news.
My thoughts at the time were the opposite of yours. It did not occur to me that this was going to change my country; It took me quite some time to understand that this was hugely impactfull.
> I fear the overreaction coming, of both citizens and governments.
This is pretty much the standard official and media reaction to these kind of events. You're supposed to fear the "backlash" more than the terrorism. Yes, dear French people, this was bad, but the real catastrophe would be voting for Le Pen or ending Mid-East and African immigration.
That's what the OP probably meant. If you think about it, don't you think it is a somewhat unnatural reaction to being under attack, to always end up fearing those who didn't initiate the attack?
It is, but natural reaction is wrong. I still have much bigger chance of dying in a car accident than a terrorist attack. In general, the natural reaction to such events was fine 6000 years ago, but in today's hyperconnected, media-driven society, awareness of a danger is usually inversely proportional to the chance of it happening to you.
But I also know that general population has this natural reaction, and - as politicians follow the voice of people, instead of the voice of reason - it leads to very bad outcomes. I am afraid of those bad outcomes.
> I mean, we didn't split, but we did pick a war with a country who's people kind of looked like the people who attacked us
The problem here is that 'people who kind of look like the people who attacked us' are not foreign, they're here, in Europe. The hot topic of past months was the waves of immigration, and before that it was Islam minorities. I fear that people will retaliate on those communities and it will turn into a civil war. Or even if not, the tension between policies of various European countries RE immigration were high, and overreaction here may just be enough to split us apart.
> My thoughts at the time were the opposite of yours. It did not occur to me that this was going to change my country; It took me quite some time to understand that this was hugely impactfull.
My experiences are informed by what happened to your country over the last 14 years. I've learned that such events can be very impactful.
This is of course a slightly academic use of the word. Many people have a hard time seeing even traditional domestic terrorism (like the unabomber) as terrorism.
What a load of complete and utter nonsense. I am embarrassed to even see that link on this site.
Multiculturalism is working just fine in Australia right now. In fact it is largely how this country was built. And just like most Western countries we have a fringe right who are xenophobic and anti immigrant but by and large the population welcomes different cultures and the benefits they bring.
If said young male gets to the country on the other side they are probably the most employable too.
Thanks to military defeats at the hands of Americans, English, and Dutch.
When people like, say, Angela Merkel, advocate blindly accepting all those thousands of refuges smuggled to the EU, I just can't really understand - what's the point?
This isn't "end of story." These ISIS guys aren't just buying tickets to CDG airport. How are they getting into Europe? What's the easiest way to get into Europe if your from Syria? It isn't going through traditional entry routes, it's blending in with refugees.
Why are so many people attempting to vindicate the refugees? If the bad guys are from Syria and 38% of the hundreds of thousands of refugees are Syrian, then wouldn't it follow that some percentage of those refugees could logically be nefarious actors? To think otherwise is to be incredible naive and perhaps blinding by an ideological desire for these refugees to not be part of the problem.
Sure there's tragedy in Syria, however, I'm unwilling to open my home if that exposes my family to any risk. There's no upside for me. There are plenty of poor people here in France that could use my help -- my capacity to care deeply about every single person in every single war zone is limited.
Let's export 50,000 Syrian refugees and dump them in the Mission District in San Fran and see how opinions change.
What about thought leadership? I know its a cliche beaten to death perhaps, but still I think people are able to see a raised level of discourse, than theirs, while they may not always leave their hard positions and immediately agree.
But there's also this balancing act, that we need to do, of not wanting to get into an argument of certain kinds.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/europes-small-arms-plague/ (1998)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/getting-a-gun-le...
And many many others, unfortunately. It's a very nasty thing and it will take an extraordinary effort to put this genie back into the bottle.
Open borders has been a blessing in many ways but at the same time it has caused a whole bunch of un-intended side effects and this one and cross border heavy crime are two of the not so nice ones, to put it very mildly. We now have actual gangs with heavy arms in Amsterdam which was a fairly peaceful city not all that long ago.
Well, ok. It took me a while after I posted my responses to (sort-of) understand where 'mikeash was going. I initially thought he was disputing the existence or possibility of those comments, so me and others were providing proofs and arguments that they in fact exist.
I think now that 'mikeash wanted us to not accidentally fall from quoting some arguments to actually using and discussing them, but I also still think the meta-level issue is something worth thinking about. We all know general population will say stupid things, because GenPop always says stupid things in situations like that, and those calls will drown reasonable public discussion and they will shape public policy - so it is worth asking, what to do about it? How to prevent this situation from spiralling out of control?
Wrong, those taxes were already used to pay the pensions in the same year they were collected. Now the shrinking work force is straining itself to pay for the increasing number of old farts, and the future is bleak.
We need young immigrants in Europe. We need them to work for us and make children for us. At least until they get rich and complacent like us and settle for 1 child per family.
There are ways to integrate them culturally, once their children are in our school system. And there are ways to avoid the chronic poverty and marginalization that plagues french banlieues. What we don't have is a way to keep paying those pensions with more and more pensioners leeching on fewer and fewer workers.
I realize that life in Germany is more pleasant than life in a refugee camp in Turkey (or has been, historically... that seems to be changing), but that's an entirely different thing.
You raise a good point, though. I would ask, where do you have reasonable public discussions? I want to see reasonable discussions here, but it's purely selfish, and I don't think it matters much in the bigger picture. Popular media is full of idiots, because they're pandering to the loudest idiots in the population. What alternative venues could there be?