Woolwich Islamic Terrorist Attack

[theskull1]

Man walking along street gets knocked down and then is hacked to death by radical islamists who are not afraid to die themselves. Someone take me through how arming police has anything to do with this story?

And what is a monkey religion?

[seafoid]

Allow me if you will to state my dire and depressing synopsis of what we saw yesterday and matters relating to it.

In recent years especially post 9/11 in multicultural England towns with large Muslim communities have seen the slow entrenching and segregation of cultural and religious groups. One in particular being Luton. This town by no coincidence has spawned both radical islamist groups and the EDL. Coupling multicultural society with post-colonialism and the wests insatiable need for oil it is inevitable that there would be conflict abroad and resentment at home.

One gets the sense that the decent into sectarian violence almost on a level with that of the troubles is not all that far away. The economic depression in Europe is starting to put a strain on community relations and given that loyalty to a state is usually low within immigrant communities and particularly those from very different cultural backgrounds and possibly coming from the poorer side of history, it should not surprise us to see rioting and other outbursts against states they may feel they owe nothing to. See Stockholm.

Only a few weeks ago a group of young muslim men were arrested for planning a terrorist attack. Their target was an EDL march.  While we may revile the EDL, they did not fall out of a tree and they do have the right to march and protest within certain limits. We can only imagine what the reprisals may have been for a successful attack on this march. You get the feeling that tit-for-tat violence may spiral out of control and who knows where that may lead.

Also recent events and challenges to traditions has brought thinkers on the right to start calling into question what is happening to European society. They have accused liberalism of having lead us into being unable to define ourselves and defend ourselves. Last week in what some thought was an act against gay marriage, Dominique Venner placed an envelope on the altar at Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. He then shot himself in the head in front of startled tourists. Venner was, as he wrote in his letter, for a common, greater good removing his own life, hoping younger men will be inspired to reverse Europe's decline and secure its destiny. Venner hoped, and we may yet see, that right wing opposition may take radical action in future to achieve this. Of course Brevik got there first.

We supposedly live in an age of tolerance. But tolerance is a dangerous word, for what does it really mean. That we do not love but merely put up with that which we'd rather not have in our midst. So now we lie with the strangest of bedfellows, I hate to be so pessimistic but we may find that tolerance has its limits and the multicultural ideology while it seemed like a nice idea back in the 1960's may not be worth all the trouble.

I think that's a good summary juice but if you look at the North the cost of allowing the society to slip into nihilism is too high and in nobody's interest. It is not like some switch that can be reversed either.
It isn't good for business and those are the ones who decide most things.

I was at a conference on the banks yesterday and Ajay Chopra from the IMF was talking about a system for bank resolution. Needs to be credible and have enough resources behind it. The same goes for integration of poor Muslims into British society.   

Any work with disadvantaged sectors needs money . You can't tell 10 year olds with behavioural problems to cop on and do their homework like the middle class kids.
They need one on one support and people who can show them an alternative path.

A lot of the more radical Muslim stuff that draws disaffected people in is bollocks but of course it's not helpful either for the Yanks and the Brits to bomb Pakistan and Afghanistan whenever they fancy.

[EC Unique]

To murder a random stranger in cold blood hacking off his body parts and then speak calmly to bystanders would be clean nuts in my book.....

Feck me can I not even express my opinion on something....

So the movers and shakers who inflict the same fate on countless thousands at arms length from a desk are what???

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4CQ_1GWn4w

I believe to be able to butcher someone on the street, have their blood dripping off your hands and be calmly talking to the public and the media shortly thereafter would indicate some level of insanity or pure evil. I am not saying someone who commits a horrific crime like that should receive lesser punishment on grounds of insanity but I don't believe a "normal" human being has the capacity to do what those guys did, whether it was to a random stranger or not.....

I haven't thought much about the people who make the arms length decisions. I can imagine they have great responsibility weighing down on them and suffer afterwards from regret or remorse for the atrocities. I can imagine too they would try to offset this through some sense (be it false or not) of having done it for the greater good.

Personally I am not equipped to kill en masse as these politicians and "movers and shakers" are. Nor am I equipped to carry out those orders and kill people and write it off as "just doing my job".
Thankfully and unfortunately there are people in this world who can make decisions and others who can carry them out.

You'd be surprised what 'normal' human beings can do. Butcher someone on a London street, walk out of a bar leaving a bomb under the table, shoot someone in front of their children...

The thing that hasn't been mentioned so far is the fact that unarmed police had to wait at the bottom of the street for the peelers with the guns to arrive. What if the two murderers had started on someone else, what would they have done? Would they have been expected to tackle two armed men with only truncheons to protect themselves and the public? Time the British police moved with the times and carried side arms as a matter of course.

Yes, because that works so well in the USA.

It works well enough in most European countries - why focus on the USA?

Have to agree with Myles on this one. If it is fair game for criminals to carry guns then....

[theskull1]

Man walking along street gets knocked down and then is hacked to death by radical islamists who are not afraid to die themselves. Someone take me through how arming police has anything to do with this story?

Have to agree with Myles on this one. If it is fair game for criminals to carry guns then....

WT....fffff (I'll not say it  ) ...are you lot gun shop owners trying to drum up trade?

Please answer the question above and start a new thread on a different topic if the answer is ..."It has nothing to do with it"

[naka]

Britain is reaping what it has sown....far too liberal in who it allows into the country.....and then look at the saga of Abu Qatada and Abu Hamza......all paid for by the tax payer....you couldn't make it up!

actually i would have to agree with this.
Britain is probably  the most liberal of all democracies
that is why they are inundated with illegal immmigrants every year
to be fair that shouldmnt be a reason to criticise them

[give her dixie]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/23/woolwich-attack-terrorism-blowback

Was the London killing of a British soldier 'terrorism'?

Two men yesterday engaged in a horrific act of violence on the streets of London by using what appeared to be a meat cleaver to hack to death a British soldier. In the wake of claims that the assailants shouted "Allahu Akbar" during the killing, and a video showing one of the assailants citing Islam as well as a desire to avenge and stop continuous UK violence against Muslims, media outlets (including the Guardian) and British politicians instantly characterized the attack as "terrorism".

That this was a barbaric and horrendous act goes without saying, but given the legal, military, cultural and political significance of the term "terrorism", it is vital to ask: is that term really applicable to this act of violence? To begin with, in order for an act of violence to be "terrorism", many argue that it must deliberately target civilians. That's the most common means used by those who try to distinguish the violence engaged in by western nations from that used by the "terrorists": sure, we kill civilians sometimes, but we don't deliberately target them the way the "terrorists" do.

But here, just as was true for Nidal Hasan's attack on a Fort Hood military base, the victim of the violence was a soldier of a nation at war, not a civilian. He was stationed at an army barracks quite close to the attack. The killer made clear that he knew he had attacked a soldier when he said afterward: "this British soldier is an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth."

The US, the UK and its allies have repeatedly killed Muslim civilians over the past decade (and before that), but defenders of those governments insist that this cannot be "terrorism" because it is combatants, not civilians, who are the targets. Can it really be the case that when western nations continuously kill Muslim civilians, that's not "terrorism", but when Muslims kill western soldiers, that is terrorism? Amazingly, the US has even imprisoned people at Guantanamo and elsewhere on accusations of "terrorism" who are accused of nothing more than engaging in violence against US soldiers who invaded their country.

It's true that the soldier who was killed yesterday was out of uniform and not engaged in combat at the time he was attacked. But the same is true for the vast bulk of killings carried out by the US and its allies over the last decade, where people are killed in their homes, in their cars, at work, while asleep (in fact, the US has re-defined "militant" to mean "any military-aged male in a strike zone"). Indeed, at a recent Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on drone killings, Gen. James Cartwright and Sen. Lindsey Graham both agreed that the US has the right to kill its enemies even while they are "asleep", that you don't "have to wake them up before you shoot them" and "make it a fair fight". Once you declare that the "entire globe is a battlefield" (which includes London) and that any "combatant" (defined as broadly as possible) is fair game to be killed - as the US has done - then how can the killing of a solider of a nation engaged in that war, horrific though it is, possibly be "terrorism"?

When I asked on Twitter this morning what specific attributes of this attack make it "terrorism" given that it was a soldier who was killed, the most frequent answer I received was that "terrorism" means any act of violence designed to achieve political change, or more specifically, to induce a civilian population to change their government or its policies of out fear of violence. Because, this line of reasoning went, one of the attackers here said that "the only reasons we killed this man is because Muslims are dying daily" and warned that "you people will never be safe. Remove your government", the intent of the violence was to induce political change, thus making it "terrorism".

That is at least a coherent definition. But doesn't that then encompass the vast majority of violent acts undertaken by the US and its allies over the last decade? What was the US/UK "shock and awe" attack on Baghdad if not a campaign to intimidate the population with a massive show of violence into submitting to the invading armies and ceasing their support for Saddam's regime? That was clearly its functional intent and even its stated intent. That definition would also immediately include the massive air bombings of German cities during World War II. It would include the Central American civilian-slaughtering militias supported, funded and armed by the Reagan administration throughout the 1980s, the Bangledeshi death squads trained and funded by the UK, and countless other groups supported by the west that used violence against civilians to achieve political ends.

The ongoing US drone attacks unquestionably have the effect, and one could reasonably argue the intent, of terrorizing the local populations so that they cease harboring or supporting those the west deems to be enemies. The brutal sanctions regime imposed by the west on Iraq and Iran, which kills large numbers of people, clearly has the intent of terrorizing the population into changing its governments' policies and even the government itself. How can one create a definition of "terrorism" that includes Wednesday's London attack on this British soldier without including many acts of violence undertaken by the US, the UK and its allies and partners? Can that be done?

I know this vital caveat will fall on deaf ears for some, but nothing about this discussion has anything to do with justifiability. An act can be vile, evil, and devoid of justification without being "terrorism": indeed, most of the worst atrocities of the 20th Century, from the Holocaust to the wanton slaughter of Stalin and Pol Pot and the massive destruction of human life in Vietnam, are not typically described as "terrorism". To question whether something qualifies as "terrorism" is not remotely to justify or even mitigate it. That should go without saying, though I know it doesn't.

The reason it's so crucial to ask this question is that there are few terms - if there are any - that pack the political, cultural and emotional punch that "terrorism" provides. When it comes to the actions of western governments, it is a conversation-stopper, justifying virtually anything those governments want to do. It's a term that is used to start wars, engage in sustained military action, send people to prison for decades or life, to target suspects for due-process-free execution, shield government actions behind a wall of secrecy, and instantly shape public perceptions around the world. It matters what the definition of the term is, or whether there is a consistent and coherent definition. It matters a great deal.

There is ample scholarship proving that the term has no such clear or consistently applied meaning (see the penultimate section here, and my interview with Remi Brulin here). It is very hard to escape the conclusion that, operationally, the term has no real definition at this point beyond "violence engaged in by Muslims in retaliation against western violence toward Muslims". When media reports yesterday began saying that "there are indications that this may be act of terror", it seems clear that what was really meant was: "there are indications that the perpetrators were Muslims driven by political grievances against the west" (earlier this month, an elderly British Muslim was stabbed to death in an apparent anti-Muslim hate crime and nobody called that "terrorism"). Put another way, the term at this point seems to have no function other than propagandistically and legally legitimizing the violence of western states against Muslims while delegitimizing any and all violence done in return to those states.

One last point: in the wake of the Boston Marathon attacks, I documented that the perpetrators of virtually every recent attempted and successful "terrorist" attack against the west cited as their motive the continuous violence by western states against Muslim civilians. It's certainly true that Islam plays an important role in making these individuals willing to fight and die for this perceived just cause (just as Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, and nationalism lead some people to be willing to fight and die for their cause). But the proximate cause of these attacks are plainly political grievances: namely, the belief that engaging in violence against aggressive western nations is the only way to deter and/or avenge western violence that kills Muslim civilians.

Add the London knife attack on this soldier to that growing list. One of the perpetrators said on camera that "the only reason we killed this man is because Muslims are dying daily" and "we apologize that women had to see this today, but in our lands our women have to see the same." As I've endlessly pointed out, highlighting this causation doesn't remotely justify the acts. But it should make it anything other than surprising. On Twitter last night, Michael Moore sardonically summarized western reaction to the London killing this way:

I am outraged that we can't kill people in other counties without them trying to kill us!"


Basic human nature simply does not allow you to cheer on your government as it carries out massive violence in multiple countries around the world and then have you be completely immune from having that violence returned.

[rosnarun]

Its Terrorism when some one does it to the english and Nation Building when they do it to Johnny Foriengner

[give her dixie]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/23/woolwich-attack-british-foreign-policy-role

Woolwich attack: of course British foreign policy had a role

Joe Glenton

I am a former soldier. I completed one tour of duty in Afghanistan, refused on legal and moral grounds to serve a second tour, and spent five months in a military prison as a result. When the news about the attack in Woolwich broke, by pure coincidence Ross Caputi was crashing on my sofa. Ross is a soft-spoken ex-US marine turned film-maker who served in Iraq and witnessed the pillaging and irradiation of Falluja. He is also a native of Boston, the scene of a recent homegrown terror attack. Together, we watched the news, and right away we were certain that what we were seeing was informed by the misguided military adventures in which we had taken part.

So at the very outset, and before the rising tide of prejudice and pseudo-patriotism fully encloses us, let us be clear: while nothing can justify the savage killing in Woolwich yesterday of a man since confirmed to have been a serving British soldier, it should not be hard to explain why the murder happened.

These awful events cannot be explained in the almost Texan terms of Colonel Richard Kemp, who served as commander of British forces in Afghanistan in 2001. He tweeted on last night that they were "not about Iraq or Afghanistan", but were an attack on "our way of life". Plenty of others are saying the same.

But let's start by examining what emerged from the mouths of the assailants themselves. In an accent that was pure London, according to one of the courageous women who intervened at the scene, one alleged killer claimed he was "... fed up with people killing Muslims in Afghanistan ...". It is unclear whether it was the same man, or his alleged co-assailant, who said "... bring our [Note: our] troops home so we can all live in peace".

It should by now be self-evident that by attacking Muslims overseas, you will occasionally spawn twisted and, as we saw yesterday, even murderous hatred at home. We need to recognise that, given the continued role our government has chosen to play in the US imperial project in the Middle East, we are lucky that these attacks are so few and far between.

It is equally important to point out, however, that rejection of and opposition to the toxic wars that informed yesterday's attacks is by no means a "Muslim" trait. Vast swaths of the British population also stand in opposition to these wars, including many veterans of the wars like myself and Ross, as well as serving soldiers I speak to who cannot be named here for fear of persecution.

Yet this anti-war view, so widely held and strongly felt, finds no expression in a parliament for whom the merest whiff of boot polish or military jargon causes a fit of "Tommy this, Tommy that ..." jingoism. The fact is, there are two majority views in this country: one in the political body that says war, war and more war; and one in the population which says it's had enough of giving up its sons and daughter abroad and now, again, at home.

For 12 years British Muslims have been set upon, pilloried and alienated by successive governments and by the media for things that they did not do. We must say clearly that the alleged actions of these two men are theirs alone, regardless of being informed by the wars, and we should not descend into yet another round of collective responsibility peddling.

Indeed, if there is collective responsibility for the killings, it belongs to the hawks whose policies have caused bloodbaths – directly, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, and indirectly in places as far apart as Woolwich and Boston, which in turn have created political space for the far right to peddle their hatred, as we saw in the immediate aftermath of the Woolwich attack.

What we must do now is straightforward enough. Our own responsibilities are first of all to make sure innocents are not subject to blanket punishment for things that they did not do, and to force our government – safe in their houses – to put an end to Britain's involvement in the vicious foreign occupations that have again created bloodshed in London

[omagh_gael]

Couldn't agree more with those articles GHD. Absolutely horrendous act carried out by those two men but you can be sure that we won't see the grotesque images of innocent men, women and children mutilated by drone strikes carried out from 20,000 feet on ITV or BBC.

The parallels with the troubles are clear. Oppression will always cause resistance, unfortunately some people's resistance will be violent in nature.

A line from Joe McDonnell springs to mind; "You dare to call me a terrorist, while you look down your gun."

[Syferus]

Just because he has a gun in your face doesn't change the babarity of his acts and ideology. That mini-parable defeats itself.

Every side has blood on their hands. Compromise is a foreign concept to a lot of those involved, and I don't just mean right-wing nuts and religious fundamentalists running about chopping peoples heads off.

[seafoid]

Just because he has a gun in your face doesn't change the babarity of his acts and ideology. That mini-parable defeats itself.

Every side has blood on their hands. Compromise is a foreign concept to a lot of those involved, and I don't just mean right-wing nuts and religious fundamentalists running about chopping peoples heads off.

War is barbaric, Syferus.  The weapon used is irrelevant.
It would be of no comfort to the bereaved if their relative was killed with a pencil rather than a knife. 

[Count 10]

An Imam from that "monkey" religion

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00WRRD7Yud4

[stew]

Allow me if you will to state my dire and depressing synopsis of what we saw yesterday and matters relating to it.

In recent years especially post 9/11 in multicultural England towns with large Muslim communities have seen the slow entrenching and segregation of cultural and religious groups. One in particular being Luton. This town by no coincidence has spawned both radical islamist groups and the EDL. Coupling multicultural society with post-colonialism and the wests insatiable need for oil it is inevitable that there would be conflict abroad and resentment at home.

One gets the sense that the decent into sectarian violence almost on a level with that of the troubles is not all that far away. The economic depression in Europe is starting to put a strain on community relations and given that loyalty to a state is usually low within immigrant communities and particularly those from very different cultural backgrounds and possibly coming from the poorer side of history, it should not surprise us to see rioting and other outbursts against states they may feel they owe nothing to. See Stockholm.

Only a few weeks ago a group of young muslim men were arrested for planning a terrorist attack. Their target was an EDL march.  While we may revile the EDL, they did not fall out of a tree and they do have the right to march and protest within certain limits. We can only imagine what the reprisals may have been for a successful attack on this march. You get the feeling that tit-for-tat violence may spiral out of control and who knows where that may lead.

Also recent events and challenges to traditions has brought thinkers on the right to start calling into question what is happening to European society. They have accused liberalism of having lead us into being unable to define ourselves and defend ourselves. Last week in what some thought was an act against gay marriage, Dominique Venner placed an envelope on the altar at Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. He then shot himself in the head in front of startled tourists. Venner was, as he wrote in his letter, for a common, greater good removing his own life, hoping younger men will be inspired to reverse Europe's decline and secure its destiny. Venner hoped, and we may yet see, that right wing opposition may take radical action in future to achieve this. Of course Brevik got there first.

We supposedly live in an age of tolerance. But tolerance is a dangerous word, for what does it really mean. That we do not love but merely put up with that which we'd rather not have in our midst. So now we lie with the strangest of bedfellows, I hate to be so pessimistic but we may find that tolerance has its limits and the multicultural ideology while it seemed like a nice idea back in the 1960's may not be worth all the trouble.

I think that's a good summary juice but if you look at the North the cost of allowing the society to slip into nihilism is too high and in nobody's interest. It is not like some switch that can be reversed either.
It isn't good for business and those are the ones who decide most things.

I was at a conference on the banks yesterday and Ajay Chopra from the IMF was talking about a system for bank resolution. Needs to be credible and have enough resources behind it. The same goes for integration of poor Muslims into British society.   

Any work with disadvantaged sectors needs money . You can't tell 10 year olds with behavioural problems to cop on and do their homework like the middle class kids.
They need one on one support and people who can show them an alternative path.

A lot of the more radical Muslim stuff that draws disaffected people in is bollocks but of course it's not helpful either for the Yanks and the Brits to bomb Pakistan and Afghanistan whenever they fancy.

[stew]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/23/woolwich-attack-terrorism-blowback

Was the London killing of a British soldier 'terrorism'?

Two men yesterday engaged in a horrific act of violence on the streets of London by using what appeared to be a meat cleaver to hack to death a British soldier. In the wake of claims that the assailants shouted "Allahu Akbar" during the killing, and a video showing one of the assailants citing Islam as well as a desire to avenge and stop continuous UK violence against Muslims, media outlets (including the Guardian) and British politicians instantly characterized the attack as "terrorism".

That this was a barbaric and horrendous act goes without saying, but given the legal, military, cultural and political significance of the term "terrorism", it is vital to ask: is that term really applicable to this act of violence? To begin with, in order for an act of violence to be "terrorism", many argue that it must deliberately target civilians. That's the most common means used by those who try to distinguish the violence engaged in by western nations from that used by the "terrorists": sure, we kill civilians sometimes, but we don't deliberately target them the way the "terrorists" do.

But here, just as was true for Nidal Hasan's attack on a Fort Hood military base, the victim of the violence was a soldier of a nation at war, not a civilian. He was stationed at an army barracks quite close to the attack. The killer made clear that he knew he had attacked a soldier when he said afterward: "this British soldier is an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth."

The US, the UK and its allies have repeatedly killed Muslim civilians over the past decade (and before that), but defenders of those governments insist that this cannot be "terrorism" because it is combatants, not civilians, who are the targets. Can it really be the case that when western nations continuously kill Muslim civilians, that's not "terrorism", but when Muslims kill western soldiers, that is terrorism? Amazingly, the US has even imprisoned people at Guantanamo and elsewhere on accusations of "terrorism" who are accused of nothing more than engaging in violence against US soldiers who invaded their country.

It's true that the soldier who was killed yesterday was out of uniform and not engaged in combat at the time he was attacked. But the same is true for the vast bulk of killings carried out by the US and its allies over the last decade, where people are killed in their homes, in their cars, at work, while asleep (in fact, the US has re-defined "militant" to mean "any military-aged male in a strike zone"). Indeed, at a recent Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on drone killings, Gen. James Cartwright and Sen. Lindsey Graham both agreed that the US has the right to kill its enemies even while they are "asleep", that you don't "have to wake them up before you shoot them" and "make it a fair fight". Once you declare that the "entire globe is a battlefield" (which includes London) and that any "combatant" (defined as broadly as possible) is fair game to be killed - as the US has done - then how can the killing of a solider of a nation engaged in that war, horrific though it is, possibly be "terrorism"?

When I asked on Twitter this morning what specific attributes of this attack make it "terrorism" given that it was a soldier who was killed, the most frequent answer I received was that "terrorism" means any act of violence designed to achieve political change, or more specifically, to induce a civilian population to change their government or its policies of out fear of violence. Because, this line of reasoning went, one of the attackers here said that "the only reasons we killed this man is because Muslims are dying daily" and warned that "you people will never be safe. Remove your government", the intent of the violence was to induce political change, thus making it "terrorism".

That is at least a coherent definition. But doesn't that then encompass the vast majority of violent acts undertaken by the US and its allies over the last decade? What was the US/UK "shock and awe" attack on Baghdad if not a campaign to intimidate the population with a massive show of violence into submitting to the invading armies and ceasing their support for Saddam's regime? That was clearly its functional intent and even its stated intent. That definition would also immediately include the massive air bombings of German cities during World War II. It would include the Central American civilian-slaughtering militias supported, funded and armed by the Reagan administration throughout the 1980s, the Bangledeshi death squads trained and funded by the UK, and countless other groups supported by the west that used violence against civilians to achieve political ends.

The ongoing US drone attacks unquestionably have the effect, and one could reasonably argue the intent, of terrorizing the local populations so that they cease harboring or supporting those the west deems to be enemies. The brutal sanctions regime imposed by the west on Iraq and Iran, which kills large numbers of people, clearly has the intent of terrorizing the population into changing its governments' policies and even the government itself. How can one create a definition of "terrorism" that includes Wednesday's London attack on this British soldier without including many acts of violence undertaken by the US, the UK and its allies and partners? Can that be done?

I know this vital caveat will fall on deaf ears for some, but nothing about this discussion has anything to do with justifiability. An act can be vile, evil, and devoid of justification without being "terrorism": indeed, most of the worst atrocities of the 20th Century, from the Holocaust to the wanton slaughter of Stalin and Pol Pot and the massive destruction of human life in Vietnam, are not typically described as "terrorism". To question whether something qualifies as "terrorism" is not remotely to justify or even mitigate it. That should go without saying, though I know it doesn't.

The reason it's so crucial to ask this question is that there are few terms - if there are any - that pack the political, cultural and emotional punch that "terrorism" provides. When it comes to the actions of western governments, it is a conversation-stopper, justifying virtually anything those governments want to do. It's a term that is used to start wars, engage in sustained military action, send people to prison for decades or life, to target suspects for due-process-free execution, shield government actions behind a wall of secrecy, and instantly shape public perceptions around the world. It matters what the definition of the term is, or whether there is a consistent and coherent definition. It matters a great deal.

There is ample scholarship proving that the term has no such clear or consistently applied meaning (see the penultimate section here, and my interview with Remi Brulin here). It is very hard to escape the conclusion that, operationally, the term has no real definition at this point beyond "violence engaged in by Muslims in retaliation against western violence toward Muslims". When media reports yesterday began saying that "there are indications that this may be act of terror", it seems clear that what was really meant was: "there are indications that the perpetrators were Muslims driven by political grievances against the west" (earlier this month, an elderly British Muslim was stabbed to death in an apparent anti-Muslim hate crime and nobody called that "terrorism"). Put another way, the term at this point seems to have no function other than propagandistically and legally legitimizing the violence of western states against Muslims while delegitimizing any and all violence done in return to those states.

One last point: in the wake of the Boston Marathon attacks, I documented that the perpetrators of virtually every recent attempted and successful "terrorist" attack against the west cited as their motive the continuous violence by western states against Muslim civilians. It's certainly true that Islam plays an important role in making these individuals willing to fight and die for this perceived just cause (just as Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, and nationalism lead some people to be willing to fight and die for their cause). But the proximate cause of these attacks are plainly political grievances: namely, the belief that engaging in violence against aggressive western nations is the only way to deter and/or avenge western violence that kills Muslim civilians.

Add the London knife attack on this soldier to that growing list. One of the perpetrators said on camera that "the only reason we killed this man is because Muslims are dying daily" and "we apologize that women had to see this today, but in our lands our women have to see the same." As I've endlessly pointed out, highlighting this causation doesn't remotely justify the acts. But it should make it anything other than surprising. On Twitter last night, Michael Moore sardonically summarized western reaction to the London killing this way:

I am outraged that we can't kill people in other counties without them trying to kill us!"


Basic human nature simply does not allow you to cheer on your government as it carries out massive violence in multiple countries around the world and then have you be completely immune from having that violence returned.

Michael Moore is a first class, multi millionaire, hypocritical ****!

Liberals sicken my shite, what these fcukers did had nothing to do with the USA, can the bleeding hearts please find the balls to actually look at what they did and condemn them for it without blaming America, Drones, W, Plankton, Salman rushdie, Holly aged 8, from Kent or ken Dodd and the diddymen!

I was glad to see the Muslim community leaders come out and tell the world these two idiots "Betrayed Allah" They hammered them and  hopefully that helps in some small measure, to reduce the number of hate crime attacks on Muslim's because of what they did.

[EC Unique]

Some sh1t going down in England at present. Fighter jets scrambled to a passenger jet approaching London that should be going to Manchester.  Pakistan airways!