Terrorist attack at London Bridge and Borough Market

Did the Mayor of London do something to piss off Trump? WTF is he on about? Even May was sticking up for Khan in her speech earlier.

Trump: never met a Khan he didn't think wasn't a terrorist.

Saying yesterday he had better things to do than to reply to Trump probably set him off even more.

I still can't believe we're giving him a royal welcome.

Garth wrote:Did the Mayor of London do something to piss off Trump? WTF is he on about? Even May was sticking up for Khan in her speech earlier.

Sadiq Khan is Muslim.

It's all the reason Trump thinks he needs.

Garth wrote:I still can't believe we're giving him a royal welcome.

That'll be scrapped if Corbyn gets in. Relations between the US and UK will be beyond dire. Putin will again be overjoyed.

The negative welcome he's going to receive though if he does come will be immense.

Blue Eyes wrote:Oh my God!!!

twitter.com/DanielHarris/status/871728108134694912

twitter.com/DanielHarris/status/871728569466187776

It's ok, he's got black friends!

What a moron.

I was at a wedding that night and was quite happy. This sucks, only heard on the car radio back. It'll be the talk and that's a shitty thing for them.

It was a beautiful double wife (i.e. gay) wedding too. It was really something special. Total opposite of this gooseberry fool.

London Bridge attacker, known as 'Abs', was extremist who had been reported to authorities and featured in documentary

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/www.standard.co.uk/news/london/london-bridge-attacker-known-as-abs-was-extremist-who-had-been-reported-to-authorities-and-featured-a3557001.html%3Famp

Has anyone noticed that The Jihadis Next Door has been taken off Netflix now? I (re)watched it only recently. Is it due to censorship or a legitimate security measure?

I imagine the film might be in breech of laws against promoting terrorism now. It's probably a bit of a grey area and well in bad taste

twitter.com/nycmayor/status/871768812894531584

lex-man wrote:I imagine the film might be in breech of laws against promoting terrorism now. It's probably a bit of a grey area and well in bad taste

Not trying to be antagonistic but have you watched the program? The reporter clearly makes his feelings known that their views are twisted/disturbing. I really hope it's been taken down only temporarily on the advice of the security services not that it's been deemed 'in bad taste' or that our 'hate speech' laws have been effectively tightened.

jamcc wrote:

lex-man wrote:I imagine the film might be in breech of laws against promoting terrorism now. It's probably a bit of a grey area and well in bad taste

Not trying to be antagonistic but have you watched the program? The reporter clearly makes his feelings known that their views are twisted/disturbing. I really hope it's been taken down only temporarily on the advice of the security services not that it's been deemed 'in bad taste' or that our 'hate speech' laws have been effectively tightened.

I would have guessed that the program took a pretty dim view and I'm only speculating. I know there are a bunch of laws that stop people producing things that encourage crime and they get interpreted very broadly, so it may be enough just to have footage of the guy saying it's OK to do those kinds of things even if that wasn't the position of the program.

It's still on YouTube by the way.

Karl wrote:

Rightey wrote:To address your example of what if Iraq was full of Hindu's, let's look at South America. This was a region that is pretty similar to the Middle East in that it's had a lot of outside interference for a very long time with dictatorships being propped up by the west which has led to all sorts of rebellions and terrorists groups.

Jesus Christ, Rightey. You're surely better than this. Do I need to post my Big List Of Non-Muslim Terrorist Groups again?

Sorry Karl, I don't understand your issue here with my statement. I'm not saying that all terrorists are muslim, or even that all religious terrorists are muslims, I know most religious denominations are represented. But what I took your statement to mean was that it is impossible to imagine Iraq being any different than it's current state regardless of what the peoples religion is. I tried to give a counter point to that by using South America.

- Both regions have generally been run by dictatorships for the last 50 years
- Those dictatorships have generally been supported by foreign powers
- As such both regions have developed a strong animosity for the West

However in South America terrorists were focused on political goals (government reform or revolution), and because of that they tended to focus their attacks on the government, whereas in Iraq we're seeing a much bigger emphasis on targeting civilians and the reason for that is because they are trying to impose their version of Islam on the population.

I'm not saying that things would be perfect, they might not even be greatly better, but I don't think we'd see constant waves of suicide bombings targeting markets, restaurants, schools etc.

Qikz wrote:It's wonderful, because saying Muslims are perpetrating most of the worlds violence (yes I understand you mean just terror attacks) is wrong. Look at Africa and hell even parts of Europe and South America where people are being killed in the thousands by corrupt extremist catholic and christian governments. Also see Palestine where innocent women and children are indiscriminantly bombed by Jewish people every time there's an election coming up in Israel.

Islam isn't the only religion where there are extremists who take the religious text and bend it for their own purposes and goals. Hell, even Hitler claimed that God was on his side during WW2 and managed to justify everything he was doing with the bible.

So you're argument is that because there are some groups that commit violence in the name of other religions we should completely ignore this particular group? Wouldn't a better idea instead be to call out all these different groups and as Karl mentioned reach out to the communities and make sure they don't become radicalized?

Rightey wrote:
So you're argument is that because there are some groups that commit violence in the name of other religions we should completely ignore this particular group? Wouldn't a better idea instead be to call out all these different groups and as Karl mentioned reach out to the communities and make sure they don't become radicalized?

Sorry I completely misconstrued what your comment was. It is important to reach out to the communities, but for people to start saying this entirely the fault of the muslim community is wrong.

These people were already on the terror watchlist after they were reported by the muslim community. The issue was with police cuts police numbers are so low that they can't properly keep tabs on these people. The exact same thing happened with the bomber in Manchester.

Rightey wrote:Sorry Karl, I don't understand your issue here with my statement.

Err, my issue is that you seem to genuinely believe that the reason South America hasn't produced ISIS-level terrorists is because of their glorious Christianity? The real answer is nothing to do with religion: South America produced bad but less extreme criminals because the political and economic situation there was bad but less extreme. The president of Argentina is going to be the next chair of the G20; the region was clearly never a write-off economic clusterfuck like much of the Middle East is.

Nothing would change if the Middle East had a different religion or a mix of religions or whatever. If your instinct is to think otherwise then you need to do some serious reflection on how you justify that, because from where I'm sitting it's bigoted nonsense.

Karl wrote:

Rightey wrote:Sorry Karl, I don't understand your issue here with my statement.

Err, my issue is that you seem to genuinely believe that the reason South America hasn't produced ISIS-level terrorists is because of their glorious Christianity? The real answer is nothing to do with religion: South America produced bad but less extreme criminals because the political and economic situation there was bad but less extreme. The president of Argentina is going to be the next chair of the G20; the region was clearly never a write-off economic clusterfuck like much of the Middle East is.

Nothing would change if the Middle East had a different religion or a mix of religions or whatever. If your instinct is to think otherwise then you need to do some serious reflection on how you justify that, because from where I'm sitting it's bigoted nonsense.

I mostly agree with Karl.

The history of South America is very different to that of the Middle East. Sure they have both had dictatorships and interference from the West, but the differences are extreme.

The history of violence in the Middle East goes back a lot further than S America.

The ME does not have a blanket religion covering the whole region like S America, the ME has tensions between Islam, Judaism and Christianity. Hell, they have plenty of tension just between the various Islamic groups even if we just ignore the Jews and Christians.

S America is mostly the descendants of colonisers who decided for themselves (at the expense of the natives) the borders of their lands. The population (and the grievances!) of the ME goes back thousands of years but had its current borders drawn by the European powers.

In modern times, S America has not had a religious power like Saudi backed Wahhabism spreading religious extremism amongst the region.

Personally I think Karl is wrong that a difference mix of religions wouldn't change anything. If the entire ME was Catholic then the entire history of the religion (from the crusades onwards) would be different. Without the Ottoman caliphate, who knows how the religion would have developed? But that's not the world we live in and it's pointless speculation to imagine what could have been rather than what is.

^ Agreed.

Moggy wrote:Personally I think Karl is wrong that a difference mix of religions wouldn't change anything. If the entire ME was Catholic then the entire history of the religion (from the crusades onwards) would be different. Without the Ottoman caliphate, who knows how the religion would have developed? But that's not the world we live in and it's pointless speculation to imagine what could have been rather than what is.

I mean, you have to be willing to indulge the hypothetical a little bit. I wasn't saying history wouldn't have changed if we had decisively won the Crusades; I'm saying that the details of the religion could be totally swapped out without really affecting ISIS' formation or behaviour (apart from being called 'the Scientology State of Iraq and Syria', or whatever). There's nothing special about Islam that's making them behave like animals; they would be behaving like animals just the same if they were Mormon because the cause is actually the complete lack of any stable politics or economic activity anywhere in that huge region.

Karl wrote:^ Agreed.

Moggy wrote:Personally I think Karl is wrong that a difference mix of religions wouldn't change anything. If the entire ME was Catholic then the entire history of the religion (from the crusades onwards) would be different. Without the Ottoman caliphate, who knows how the religion would have developed? But that's not the world we live in and it's pointless speculation to imagine what could have been rather than what is.

I mean, you have to be willing to indulge the hypothetical a little bit. I wasn't saying history wouldn't have changed if we had decisively won the Crusades; I'm saying that the details of the religion could be totally swapped out without really affecting ISIS' formation or behaviour (apart from being called 'the Scientology State of Iraq and Syria', or whatever). There's nothing special about Islam that's making them behave like animals; they would be behaving like animals just the same if they were Mormon because the cause is actually the complete lack of any stable politics or economic activity anywhere in that huge region.

If Mohammed had never been born, or the Christians had won the crusades or whatever, then the whole region (indeed, the whole world!) would be so different that it would be impossible to say how things would look. If the ME was all Catholic then I would imagine that a group like ISIS would never have formed, the entire last millennium of relations between Europe, North Africa and Asia would be vastly different.

I am not saying that there is something unique in Islam that makes people more violent or more likely to commit terrorism. What has led to a group like ISIS is a unique combination of religion, location, history, etc, etc. Remove any one of those elements and things would be different. Not necessarily in a good way though, if the whole ME was Catholic then instead of ISIS we might be in a world where the inquisition was still burning heretics and the holocaust had killed every Jew. Who knows?

I agree with you Moggy, I just think you're stretching the metaphor a little bit -- I kind of meant if you could somehow 'lock' history so that everything happens the same, and just change the name and text of which religion(s) were dominant in the Middle East, and then 'unlock' history in the year 2001, I don't think much would go do down very differently.

Obviously in the real world outside of Karl's imagination the changes to make Christianity or Judaism or Hinduism (probably the only contenders, historically) dominant over Islam in the Middle East would be so huge that I have no idea what kind of world we would be living in now. For example, if we had decisively crushed the Middle East during the Crusades, then the Islamic Golden Age might have ended prematurely, which could have stunted Europe's entry into the Renaissance. With Europe stuck in the dark ages, perhaps China would have been the first industrial power, or something. This is all really interesting alternate-history stuff but not really what I had in mind a few posts ago.

It's my fault, given the thought experiment was quite esoteric I could have probably outlined it better.