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623 points franzb | 6 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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djfm ◴[] No.10563795[source]
I live in Paris and was spending the night in the middle of the hot zone. I was a few hundred meters from the Bataclan but fortunately the area I was in was spared. I tried to get a Uber but they were unavailable, "State of emergency, please stay home", the app said. I took a city bike home, rode about 10kms and barely saw anyone in the streets all the way home. It was really, really weird. I'm awfully sad that people can be proud of having killed a hundred innocents. I'm not afraid, I'm just terribly sad. Please stop this pointless killing.
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bedhead ◴[] No.10563844[source]
You are trying to rationalize with people who are irrational. They don't reconcile. It sucks. It's depressing.
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rquantz ◴[] No.10563887[source]
Terrorism is usually a rational act. It is terrible, but it has political goals. This, for instance, may be aimed at ending the European involvement in Syria and their taking in refugees.
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n0us ◴[] No.10563970[source]
The data on terrorist attacks does not support this conclusion. Terrorism is rarely effective in its political goals and studies have concluded that it is not a rational or cost effective strategy.
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1. ojbyrne ◴[] No.10564052{3}[source]
Citation needed. The US and Israel are 2 rather successful examples of countries born out of terrorism.
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2. plonh ◴[] No.10564366[source]
Terrorism (attackif civilians to upset people) or asymmetric warfare against a ruling power apparatus?
3. mc32 ◴[] No.10564380[source]
An insurrection might include some terrorism but they also include a swell and majority of guerrilla foot soldiers whose purpose is to bring their agenda to a close. They don't just go about rampaging and killing without strategy.
4. YZF ◴[] No.10564549[source]
If you're referring to attacks against Britain I don't recall any cases of Americans or Israelis randomly killing civilians in the UK.

I don't see any parallel whatsoever to the events of today.

No one can predict the outcome of today's events so by definition they are irrational. I would bet that no good would come out of this to anyone.

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5. ojbyrne ◴[] No.10567451[source]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_David_Hotel_bombing
replies(1): >>10568057 #
6. YZF ◴[] No.10568057{3}[source]
Did you even read this before hitting the reply button? No parallels whatsoever.

- The King David hotel is in Jerusalem. Not in the UK.

- Warnings were given before the explosion.

- The hotel was housing the occupying British government, military and police. This isn't blindly targeting civilians in an attempt to terrorize the population.

There are a lot more details that make this very different. This is not to say that the outcome was not terrible in cost of human lives or that the perpetrators aren't responsible. It's just very different.

From the article: "American author Thurston Clarke's analysis of the bombing gave timings for calls and for the explosion, which he said took place at 12:37. He stated that as part of the Irgun plan, a sixteen-year-old recruit, Adina Hay (alias Tehia), was to make three warning calls before the attack. At 12:22 the first call was made, in both Hebrew and English, to a telephone operator on the hotel's switchboard (the Secretariat and the military each had their own, separate, telephone exchanges). It was ignored.[5] At 12:27, the second warning call was made to the French Consulate adjacent to the hotel to the north-east. This second call was taken seriously, and staff went through the building opening windows and closing curtains to lessen the impact of the blast. At 12:31 a third and final warning call to the Palestine Post newspaper was made. The telephone operator called the Palestine Police CID to report the message. She then called the hotel switchboard. The hotel operator reported the threat to one of the hotel managers. This warning resulted in the discovery of the milk cans in the basement, but by then it was too late.[5]"

...

"Security analyst Bruce Hoffman has written that the hotel "housed the nerve centre of British rule in Palestine".[13]"

...

Security analyst Bruce Hoffman wrote of the bombing in his book Inside Terrorism that: "Unlike many terrorist groups today, the Irgun's strategy was not deliberately to target or wantonly harm civilians. At the same time, though, the claim of Begin and other apologists that warnings were issued cannot absolve either the group or its commander for the ninety-one people killed and forty-five others injured ... Indeed, whatever nonlethal intentions the Irgun might or might not have had, the fact remains that a tragedy of almost unparalleled magnitude was inflicted ... so that to this day the bombing remains one of the world's single most lethal terrorist incidents of the twentieth century."[13]