Pickering Angels

Brussels attack - 31 dead

Previous Thread Next Thread
S

SkyRider

Banned
Mar 31, 2009
17,557
2
0
Belgians protesting terrorism in front of the stock exchange to-day are called "right wing extremists" and I think some are being arrested.
 
S

SkyRider

Banned
Mar 31, 2009
17,557
2
0
basketcase said:
Putin's bombing campaign created peace (according to notty) but the American bombing campaign was ineffective?


p.s. The Russian boots on the ground were actual Assad's troops telling which targets were 'bad guys'.
Click to expand...
Assad's troops with Russian air support have retaken Palmyra. That is how you defeat ISIS. Western countries pussyfoot around too much.
 
C

Conil

Well-known member
Apr 12, 2013
4,470
1,335
113
At least 66 people were killed by a suicide bomber in a crowded public park in Lahore, most were women and children enjoying an Easter picnic.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — At least 44 people were killed in an explosion in a crowded public park in the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore on Sunday evening, media reports said, quoting security officials.

The attack appeared to have been carried out by a suicide bomber in the parking area of Gulshan-e-Iqbal Park, where families were picnicking for the Easter holiday, a senior police official told the Associated Press. More than 100 people were injured.

“Most of the dead and injured are women and children,” said Mustansar Feroz, superintendent of police for the area, according to the news agency Reuters.

Salman Rafiq, the health adviser to the chief minister of Punjab province, where the attack occurred, said 44 people were killed, according to the Associated Press.

Witnesses described body parts scattered in the park in the wake of the attack, which occurred near an exit gate, Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper reported.

Lahore is the capital of Punjab province, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s stronghold.

Pakistan has suffered for years from Islamist militancy, including a Taliban insurgency in the tribal areas along the Afghanistan border.




https://www.washingtonpost.com/worl...e-11e5-958d-d038dac6e718_story.html?tid=sm_tw
 
Last edited:
F

FAST

Banned
Mar 12, 2004
10,065
1
0
Any minute now.

Cue the,... Islamist militancy and Taliban sympathizers.

Maybe we can send the idiot PM over there, to give the terrorists a hug ?

FAST
 
C

Conil

Well-known member
Apr 12, 2013
4,470
1,335
113
MrMessi said:
Were they practicing Muslims? All of them had criminal backgrounds, so they are criminals that happened to be Muslims highlighted by the western media.
Click to expand...
The goal of common criminals is to profit, by either selling drugs. robbing banks etc. They don't murder people for no reason.
 
A

AK-47

Armed to the tits
Mar 6, 2009
6,696
1
0
In the 6
FAST said:
Cue the,... Islamist militancy and Taliban sympathizers
Click to expand...
Whats wrong with you. Dont you get it, Islam is a religion of peace.
This is all just a big misunderstanding
 
F

franz888

Member
Mar 4, 2015
127
0
16
Just saw these today, not sure if he really said these, under what context.

Justin Trudeau: "If you kill your enemies, they win." "Honor killings shouldn't be called barbaric."
 
F

Frankfooter

dangling member
Apr 10, 2015
97,382
25,624
113
Glenn Greenwald discusses the west ignoring victims of western violence.

Highlighting Western Victims While Ignoring Victims of Western Violence

Glenn Greenwald
Mar. 25 2016, 4:17 p.m.
FOR DAYS NOW, American cable news has broadcast non-stop coverage of the horrific attack in Brussels. Viewers repeatedly heard from witnesses and from the wounded. Video was shown in a loop of the terror and panic when the bombs exploded. Networks dispatched their TV stars to Brussels, where they remain. NPR profiled the lives of several of the airport victims. CNN showed a moving interview with a wounded, bandage-wrapped Mormon American teenager speaking from his Belgium hospital bed.


All of that is how it should be: That’s news. And it’s important to understand on a visceral level the human cost from this type of violence. But that’s also the same reason it’s so unjustifiable, and so propagandistic, that this type of coverage is accorded only to Western victims of violence, but almost never to the non-Western victims of the West’s own violence.

A little more than a week ago, as Mohammed Ali Kalfood reported in The Intercept, “Fighter jets from a Saudi-led [U.S. and U.K.-supported] coalition bombed a market in Mastaba, in Yemen’s northern province of Hajjah. The latest count indicates that about 120 people were killed, including more than 20 children, and 80 were wounded in the strikes.” Kalfood interviewed 21-year-old Yemeni Khaled Hassan Mohammadi, who said, “We saw airstrikes on a market last Ramadan, not far from here, but this attack was the deadliest.” Over the past several years, the U.S. has launched hideous civilian-slaughtering strikes in Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, Libya, and Iraq. Last July, The Intercept published a photo essay by Alex Potter of Yemeni victims of one of 2015’s deadliest Saudi-led, U.S.- and U.K.-armed strikes.


You’ll almost never hear any of those victims’ names on CNN, NPR, or most other large U.S. media outlets. No famous American TV correspondents will be sent to the places where those people have their lives ended by the bombs of the U.S. and its allies. At most, you’ll hear small, clinical news stories briefly and coldly describing what happened — usually accompanied by a justifying claim from U.S. officials, uncritically conveyed, about why the bombing was noble — but, even in those rare cases where such attacks are covered at all, everything will be avoided that would cause you to have any visceral or emotional connection to the victims. You’ll never know anything about them — not even their names, let alone hear about their extinguished life aspirations or hear from their grieving survivors — and will therefore have no ability to feel anything for them. As a result, their existence will barely register.

That’s by design. It’s because U.S. media outlets love to dramatize and endlessly highlight Western victims of violence, while rendering almost completely invisible the victims of their own side’s violence.

Perhaps you think there are good — or at least understandable — reasons to explain this discrepancy in coverage. Maybe you believe humans naturally pay more attention to, and empathize more with, the suffering of those they regard as more similar to them. Or you may want to argue that victims in cities commonly visited by American elites (Paris, Brussels, London, Madrid) are somehow more newsworthy than those in places rarely visited (Mastaba, in Yemen’s northern province of Hajjah). Or perhaps you’re sympathetic to the claim that it’s easier for CNN or NBC News to send on-air correspondents to glittery Western European capitals than to Waziristan or Kunduz. Undoubtedly, many believe that the West’s violence is morally superior because it only kills civilians by accident and not on purpose.

But regardless of the rationale for this media discrepancy, the distortive impact is the same: By endlessly focusing on and dramatizing Western victims of violence while ignoring the victims of the West’s own violence, the impression is continually bolstered that only They, but not We, engage in violence that kills innocent people. We are always the victims and never the perpetrators (and thus Good and Blameless); They are only the perpetrators and never the victims (and thus Villainous and Culpable). In April 2003, Ashleigh Banfield, then a rising war-correspondent star at MSNBC, returned from Iraq, gave a speech critiquing the one-sided, embedded U.S. media coverage of the war, and was shortly thereafter demoted and then fired. This is part of what she said:

That said, what didn’t you see? You didn’t see where those bullets landed. You didn’t see what happened when the mortar landed. A puff of smoke is not what a mortar looks like when it explodes, believe me. There are horrors that were completely left out of this war. … It was a glorious, wonderful picture that had a lot of people watching and a lot of advertisers excited about cable news. But it wasn’t journalism, because I’m not so sure that we in America are hesitant to do this again, to fight another war, because it looked like a glorious and courageous and so successful, terrific endeavor, and we got rid of horrible leader: We got rid of a dictator, we got rid of a monster, but we didn’t see what it took to do that. …

I think there were a lot of dissenting voices before this war about the horrors of war, but I’m very concerned about this three-week TV show and how it may have changed people’s opinions. It was very sanitized. … War is ugly and it’s dangerous, and in this world, the way we are discussed on the Arab street, it feeds and fuels their hatred and their desire to kill themselves to take out Americans.

In other words, the death, carnage, and destruction the U.S. invasion was causing was generating huge amounts of anti-American hatred and a desire to bring violence to Americans, even if meant sacrificing lives to accomplish that. But the U.S. media never showed any of that, so Americans had no idea it existed, and were thus incapable of understanding why people were eager to do violence to Americans. They therefore assumed that it must be because they are primitive or inherently hateful or driven by some inscrutable religious fervor.

That’s because the U.S. media, by showing only one side of the conflict, by presenting only the nationalistic viewpoint, propagandized — deceived — American viewers by making them more ignorant rather than more enlightened. As a result, when the trains of London and Madrid were attacked in 2004 and 2005 as retaliation for those countries’ participation in the invasion of Iraq, that causal connection (which even British intelligence acknowledged) was virtually never discussed because Western media outlets ensured it was unknown. The same was true of attempted attacks on the U.S.: in Times Square, the New York City subway system, an airliner over Detroit, all motivated by rage over Western violence. In the absence of any media discussion of those victims and motives, these attacks were simply denounced as senseless, indiscriminate slaughter without any cause, and people were thus deprived of the ability to understand why they happened.

That’s exactly what’s happening still. Because I was traveling in the U.S. this week, I was subjected to literally dozens of hours of cable and network news coverage of the Brussels attacks. The most minute angles of the attack were dissected. But there was not one moment devoted to the question of why Belgium — and the U.S., France, and Russia before it — were targeted by ISIS (as opposed to a whole slew of non-Muslim, democratic countries around the world that ISIS doesn’t target), even though ISIS explicitly stated the reason and it is, in any event, self-evident: because those countries have been bombing ISIS in Syria and Iraq and these bombings were intended as retaliation and vengeance. Nor was there any discussion of why ISIS seems to have little trouble attracting support among some in Western countries: As even a Rumsfeld-commissioned study found in 2004, it is in large part because of widespread anger among Muslims over ongoing Western violence and interference in that part of the world.

The point, as always, isn’t justification: It is always morally unjustified to deliberately target civilians with violence (see the update here on that point). Nor does it prove that the bombing of ISIS in Iraq and Syria is unjustified or should cease. The point, instead, is that the war framework in which much of this violence takes place — one side that declares itself at war and uses violence as part of that war is inevitably attacked by the other side that it targets — is completely suppressed by one-sided media coverage that prefers a self-flattering, tribalistic cartoon narrative.

The ultimate media taboo is self-examination: the question of whether there are actions we take that exacerbate the problem we say we are trying to resolve. Such a process would not dilute the evil of ISIS’s civilian-targeting violence, but it would enable a more honest and complete understanding of the role Western governments’ policies play and the inevitable costs they entail. Perhaps those costs are worth enduring, but that question can only be rationally answered if the costs are openly discussed.

But whatever else is true, if we are constantly bombarded with images and stories and dramatic narratives highlighting our own side’s victims, while the victims of our side’s violence are rendered invisible, it’s only natural that large numbers of us will conclude that only They, but not We, are committing civilian-killing violence. That’s a really pleasing thing to believe, no matter how false it is. Having media outlets perpetrate self-pleasing and tribal-affirming — but utterly false — narratives is the very definition of propaganda. And that’s what largely drives Western media coverage of these terrorist attacks every time they occur in the West.
Click to expand...
https://theintercept.com/2016/03/25...s-while-ignoring-victims-of-western-violence/

The west is killing more then the terrorists are.
Just remember that.
 
J

james t kirk

Well-known member
Aug 17, 2001
24,072
3,992
113
Frankfooter said:
Glenn Greenwald discusses the west ignoring victims of western violence.



https://theintercept.com/2016/03/25...s-while-ignoring-victims-of-western-violence/

The west is killing more then the terrorists are.
Just remember that.
Click to expand...
When was the last time Westerners walked into a busy airport in a Muslim country and detonated bombs that blew up citizens just on their way through the airport?

Or, when was the last time fundamentalist Christians living in a Muslim country went into a theatre and machine gunned down 100 people?

Or, when was the last time any Christian strapped on a suicide vest and blew himself up in market place in a Muslim country (or any country for that matter) and killed 75 people in the name of Christ?
 
F

FAST

Banned
Mar 12, 2004
10,065
1
0
His reputation precedes him

james t kirk said:
When was the last time Westerners walked into a busy airport in a Muslim country and detonated bombs that blew up citizens just on their way through the airport?

Or, when was the last time fundamentalist Christians living in a Muslim country went into a theatre and machine gunned down 100 people?

Or, when was the last time any Christian strapped on a suicide vest and blew himself up in market place in a Muslim country (or any country for that matter) and killed 75 people in the name of Christ?
Click to expand...
Plus,...when an idiot makes the statement,..."the west" when justifying Islamic and Taliban terrorism,...goes to show were the idiot's sympathies lie,...and it isn't with Canada,...but of coarse we all know the idiot is pro Islamic and Taliban terrorist,...and anti-Canadian.

Proves this over and over again.

FAST
 
B

basketcase

Well-known member
Dec 29, 2005
62,644
7,076
113
Frankfooter said:
Why is it not fair to point out the deaths caused by Western interventions while talking about terrorism?
Click to expand...
Because misguided attempts to improve the world or profit are in no way comparable to someone intentionally deciding to murder a bunch of random civilian who had nothing to do with any 'intervention'.

It is also quite a Victorian style racism to act like brown people are incapable of making moral decisions and are simply innocent pawns of the white man's actions. People in the middle east have been killing and screwing each over for much longer than the 100 years or so since the West joined in.
 
F

Frankfooter

dangling member
Apr 10, 2015
97,382
25,624
113
james t kirk said:
When was the last time Westerners walked into a busy airport in a Muslim country and detonated bombs that blew up citizens just on their way through the airport?

Or, when was the last time fundamentalist Christians living in a Muslim country went into a theatre and machine gunned down 100 people?

Or, when was the last time any Christian strapped on a suicide vest and blew himself up in market place in a Muslim country (or any country for that matter) and killed 75 people in the name of Christ?
Click to expand...
Bush stated that God told him to invade Iraq.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/oct/07/iraq.usa

As for citizens tallies, check the tallies from drone killings by the US.
Nearly 90 Percent Of People Killed In Recent Drone Strikes Were Not The Target
U.S. drone strikes have killed scores of civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.
Click to expand...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/civilian-deaths-drone-strikes_us_561fafe2e4b028dd7ea6c4ff

From the point of view of those living there, that probably looks like terrorism to them.

At least there aren't suicide bombers from the west.

But if you're going to discuss terrorism, you need to look at the possible causes.
And that includes looking at how many people are killed by western interventions/invasions.

This thread should probably be moved to the politics forum, though.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Ashley Madison
Previous Thread Next Thread
Toronto Escorts
Top Bottom