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350 points tepidandroid | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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gcatalfamo ◴[] No.21023650[source]
This is how you create terrorists. What do you think the children and friends feelings towards the US will be from now on? People get radicalized for much less than that.
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draugadrotten ◴[] No.21023867[source]
Their feelings will be affected and rightly so, it is a tradegy. However the feelings of a few people about an error can not be the single parameter to decide if drone strikes are used. War have casualties.

What about the feelings of the children and friends after 9.11, Charlie Hebdo, Bataclan, Nice, Stockholm, Trèbes, Paris, Liège and Strasbourg? I could go on. Of the 24 jihadist attacks in the EU in 2018, 10 occurred in France, four in the United Kingdom, four in the Netherlands, two in Germany and one each in Belgium, Italy, Spain and Sweden. In 2017, a total of 62 people were killed in ten completed jihadist attacks in the European Union, according to Europol figures. The number of attempted jihadist attacks reached 33 in 2017.

If a single drone strike is how you create terrorists, what is being created in Europe?

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EliRivers ◴[] No.21023896[source]
I think that there is an inherent difference between drone killings and atrocities committed by people.

The drone killings are anonymous, out of the sky, with no idea who the guilty party is besides a nebulous "USA" or "the West"; a vacuum of information besides a robotic, faceless apology in a press release (that is itself just more insult, more humiliation), and the knowledge that a foreign country can reach out and murder people living next door to you without consequence. The humiliation and rage and sense of powerlessness and living every day knowing that they'll do it again and nobody will do anything about it simply festers. These are key ingredients in growing terrorists. This is how you make terrorists. Humilation and anger and a sense of powerlessness and that the perpetrator will face no justice.

When some idiot boy shoots up an office in Paris there's a guilty party, a reckoning with a body (or an arrest), a name, an investigation and professional state employees actively going after someone, actively pursuing justice (very different to the state doing no more than shrugging and saying "yeah, that's the USA for you, they murder you and your neighbours, nothing we can do about it"). There is a qualitative difference; the key ingredients above aren't present. Even if the terrorist gets away, it's recognised that it was an individual(s) and that they are being pursued; someone is seeking justice on your behalf.

If a single drone strike is how you create terrorists, what is being created in Europe?

On the face of it, not terrorists.

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luckylion ◴[] No.21023935[source]
> Even if the terrorist gets away, it's recognised that it was an individual(s).

That's a tough sell when (large) parts of communities are complicit, hiding, funding, supporting the individuals.

It's my impression that the primary difference is that we expect better from advanced nations and their citizens, not that there's a large difference in behavior. Denmark officially murdering people because of their sexual identity would be a shock. Saudi Arabia doing the same isn't, because we don't see SA anywhere near the level of (cultural, social, civilizational) development of Denmark. A child throwing a temper tantrum is normal, an adult doing the same raises suspicion of delayed development.

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1. black_puppydog ◴[] No.21024084[source]
> when (large) parts of communities are complicit

you put parentheses around the "large" but I'm still gonna pick on this. For my part, I have yet to hear of a major jihadist attack in the west in which the perpetrators and their supporters were not completely surrounded by police and intelligence personel. In Germany we're watching a parliamentary commission pick apart what happened in the "lone wolf" case where someone drove a truck into a christmas market in Berlin. "You can't do anything about these things!" people exclaim. They're lone wolves after all. BS. That guy, and his supporters, were in constant contact with embedded sources around their milieu. I'm not a big friend of the police state as it is, and especially of intelligence services. And this story and others like it make it really hard to still believe in incompetence and bad coordination as the sources for all the fuck-ups that lead to him succeeding in the first place, and then the crucial witnesses being conveniently deported days after.

But my real point (sorry for digressing here for a bit) is that even in this in-depth investigation, the number of active supporters was tiny. And they were not even really organized. It was more like "I have a friend here ho will help me out, and one here, and one here." Your statement (even with parentheses) does not reflect how small these "parts" are.

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2. luckylion ◴[] No.21024450[source]
Certainly, intelligence services do play a role, both in pushing actors over the threshold and in hindering investigations. In the case of the Bataclan attacks, the perpetrators fled to Belgium and hid in their local communities. It's also where they recruit, get support from and funnel funding through. Obviously it's not "everybody there is on board", but there is an enabling base and little push back from those opposed to the measures chosen by radicals.