I'VE SEEN THIS MOVIE BEFORE

No Politics Friday is canceled.
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For obvious reasons.

I'm not the smartest person in the world, but I've read enough to know where this is going. To know how it ends. To see what happens when people become sufficiently fearful of The Other to weaken their attachment to civil liberties and embrace authoritarianism as it seduces them with promises of greater security. We've seen this before and I don't like where we're heading at all.

In Mexico, for example, the insane levels of violence that have resulted from the so-called Drug War have left better off Mexicans more than willing to give up rights, freedoms, and liberties (at least in theory) in exchange for greater security. In Europe, no matter how much they enjoy looking down their noses at the United States for our obvious problems with race and state-administered violence, their commitment to cultural liberalism crumbles fairly easily in the face of non-European immigration.

The ISIS plan all along – and without commenting on the morality of it, it's hard not to recognize its brilliance – has been to radicalize European Muslims by provoking extreme reactions from European non-Muslims. Despite the prejudices and social isolation they no doubt encounter, European Muslims have developed an appreciation for life in Europe over the last three decades. Yes, there is no doubt that they experience prejudice and racism and the sharp end of the stick of xenophobia, but if you asked the average Muslim immigrant to Europe how life there compares to life in Syria or Turkey or Iraq, they're going to look you in the eye and say "This is just fine.
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" So ISIS endeavors to create enough chaos to provoke a far-right reaction from European governments which will allow them to tell European Muslims, "See? We told you so! Look at how these white Europeans treat you!"

I'm afraid, given the number of major terrorist attacks in Europe over the past year, that the strategy is on the verge of working. Far-right nationalist parties have been doing better than usual in European elections for the past few years, and xenophobia is on the rise everywhere.
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A nation partial to cultural hegemony like France is not far away from getting a decent amount of public support behind an idea like "Let's round up all the Muslims and put them in camps." It's plausible because there really is no means for a modern nation-state to stop attacks as low tech as what we've seen lately. The attack in Nice required nothing more than access to a truck. The pool of people in Europe who meet that stringent criteria number in the tens of millions.

What has been seen recently in Europe is not 9/11, not the London 7/7 bombings, not the Madrid train attacks. We have seen attacks lately that literally cannot be stopped because they are so low tech. It takes no sophistication, no ISIS coordination, no detailed planning to mount an attack along the lines of, "Let's go somewhere with lots of people and shoot a bunch of them" or "Let's find a big crowd and drive a truck into it.
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" As people across Europe try to come to grips with the inability of states to grapple with these one- or two-man terrorist attacks, far right wing authoritarianism is going to appeal to more and more of the population. There is no way to stop one man acting alone driving a truck into a crowd of people; so, anyone pushing the message, "Let's get rid of all of Those People" will have the upper hand.

I do not like where this is headed. I do not like it one bit.

65 thoughts on “I'VE SEEN THIS MOVIE BEFORE”

  • The world fucking sucks this Thursday night. So I ate some bbq, drank a bottle of wine, and just ordered some My Neighbor Totoro vinyl stickers from Malaysia off eBay. What does it show me on checkout success? Suggestions based on your purchase:
    "Happy Flower Tree Bird Wall Art."
    "Dream Catcher Wall Vinyl Art"
    "Super Mario Bros Wall Sticker"
    "Glenn Frey #Eagles decal"
    "3x5inch POLICE LIVES MATTER STICKER"
    "Cute owls wall decals sticker"
    "DONALD TRUMP FOR PRESIDENT 2016 STICKER"

    Fuck I can't get away from this shit.

  • It is rather problematic.

    I suppose one could point out that while the means are within the reach of any idiot who cares to, they are still in a numerical sense quite isolated – while any fool can get in a car and drive through a crowd, very, very few people are actually willing to do such a thing. Or any of the other ways someone can make a huge mess with nothing more than readily available odds and ends.

    But I doubt most of the general public will find the idea that since rampant politically motivated arson, blackouts, and the like aren't happening, they should take that as an encouraging sign. I can't really see too many people being sold on the notion that really vicious nutjobs are considerably rarer than they think. And reminding them of all the ways any sufficiently motivated loon could have harmed them but hasn't is more likely to make twitchy folks twitchier, rather than reassure them at how atypical such attacks are in their area.

  • "[T]he dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe." — Tom Wolfe, "The Intelligent Co-Ed's Guide to America," 1976

    Goes to show everything old is new again, I guess. Sure hope that if he isn't completely wrong then he got this right. It's really going to suck if it lands here there and everywhere.

  • Burning River says:

    @Major Kong

    I was thinking more or less the same thing. Between this sort of thing, the recent race-related conversations here in the US and just social media in general lately, I'm struggling to think of how I explain the world to my 2 year old when she starts asking in the next few years.

  • JFC Ed, I came here first thing this morning to get some kinda semi-funny essay about your latest trip to the Cheyenne nuclear bunker or something, and there's this. No wonder I drink.

    I could definitely see people here in the USA deciding to vote for That Guy With The Stupid Hair if this keeps happening. I wanna be sedated.

  • It's depressing how ready people are to give up some of their civil liberties in response to fear, especially when they're badly miscalculating their risk.

    But what most of them really seem to want is to give up *other people's* liberties. There's an unseemly eagerness for that, even (or especially?) among the "patriotic Constitution-defending" crowd.

  • Another big concern (Josh Marshall pointed this out yesterday) is the passing of the 1930s/40s experience of right-wing authoritarianism from living memory into just another chapter in the history books. The long cultural taboo against shading into Nazism, fascism, and round-em-all-up eliminationism is breaking down. Our political system was helped immensely over the last 75 years by vivid memories of the horrors of WWII and what led up to it, and those memories are fading away.

    Even more concerning (if much less visible, at least now) is the potential breakdown of the NUCLEAR taboo which kept those weapons off the table as memories of Nagasaki and Hiroshima and the terror of Mutual Assured Destruction placed them outside the realm of consideration. Well, as the decades tick on, and the policymakers who trained and worked in the bad old days retire and are replaced, I'm not sure the reflexive "what, are you crazy?" response to suggestions about using or threatening to use nuclear weapons is going to endure.

    We've already seen how the children and grandchildren of the people who fought and bled and sacrificed to build labor unions and a little bit of middle-class prosperity for themselves traded those things away in exchange for the promise of slightly lower tax rates.

    There really is no long-term learning, and we really are condemned to keep making the same mistakes and fight the same battles over and over again, aren't we?

  • I'm not advocating this position at all but it seems getting rid of all those people would do a lot to stop these things from happening. Saying to the people of Europe, 'sorry you're just going to have to accept massacres every few months because Merkel says so' is not going to fly. I have a very bad feeling about the future of all this.

  • c u n d gulag says:

    Oy…

    I have nothing to add – just more depression.

    Take a moment this week to smell a flower, gaze at the grass, let the sun shine on you and your – if it's not too hot and humid – and enjoy some wine, beer, or the beverage of your choice.

  • defineandredefine says:

    As a brown person, I have to admit that, selfishly, I was hoping the perpetrator was some crazy Front Nationale right-wing xenophobe, a la Anders Breivik. I really, honestly hoped for that.

    …which is essentially the same thing as saying that I was hoping to be spared the rhetoric that inevitably follows these attacks. Rhetoric like "where are the moderate Muslims?" "Why aren't Muslims condemning these attacks?" "Why aren't Muslim communities doing more to prevent these kinds of attacks?" Etc, etc, etc, ad nauseum. And these days, we have the vomit icing on the shit cake of Drumpf crowing "I told you so!!!"

    Incidentally, didn't Hollande declare an extended state of emergency after the November attacks? How'd that work out for them?

    http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/02/france-extends-state-emergency-late-160216194739343.html

  • defineandredefine says:

    @NYD3030 –

    How would you propose we go about getting rid of "all of those people"?

    Better question – wouldn't it be better to try to NOT play into ISIS's propaganda by not engaging in policies that isolate European Muslims, both socially and economically?

  • I'd like to point out that it's been much much worse. quoting the NYT "January 1969 to April 1970, the United States sustained 4,330 bombings". Not that it helps today, but just to give a little perspective.

  • @defineandredefine I don't propose that, it's just the only solution being proposed by anyone that sounds to Joe schmoe like a solution to the problem. A final solution if you will.

    My point is that each massacre makes our side look like it's proposing to do nothing. Which, maybe we are proposing that, but I think we need to put forward a plausible alternative to shit like eliminating Muslims, because people are not going to just be cool with public massacres committed by brown people.

    White people, sure.

  • NYD3030, sorry for the aside, but I couldn't help but notice an eerie familiarity with your "sorry you're just going to have to accept massacres every few months because Merkel says so" because if you substitute NRA for Merkel, you see the USofA has done just that.

  • U.S. in the EU says:

    The liberal conundrum…immigration. that's why the right gets to push the ball twenty yards every time. There is no liberal/left response that satisfies the majority.

    That doesn't make the right right. It is the one probkem the left – the international left – has no real answer for.

  • I found this passage curious: " if you asked the average Muslim immigrant to Europe how life there compares to life in Syria or Turkey or Iraq, they're going to look you in the eye and say "This is just fine.""

    So maybe we should try that with the BLM people — ask them how life here compares to life in Sudan or Somalia. They're probably going to say "fine." So what's their beef?

    In short, I don't think you can ask people to accept intolerable conditions where they are just because they happen to be worse somewhere else.

  • Emerson Dameron says:

    @Blankenator:

    Read your Constitution, son. Our best constitutional scholars know that there's nothing in there about life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, or the free exercise of religion. It's almost entirely about the coolness of guns.

  • Well, for one thing, they aren't even sure this cat was committing an act of terrorism–yes, there are reports he hollered "Allahu Akbar!" as he was driving over people, but so did a deranged dude in Dijon in December 2014. Everyone assumed he was a terrorist, but the investigation concluded that no, he was unhinged and went off the deep end. Just hollering "Allahu Akbar!" does not make one a terrorist, by the way.

    Also, he was a French citizen. So cracking down on immigrants really doesn't solve anything. However, as a brown person with an Arabic name in France, he probably could only get the most marginal of jobs because he was brown. There is MASSIVE discrimination against brown people with Arabic names in France and to get a job, most of them change their names so as to even get in the door. At the interview, however, the gig is up and they are most often not hired. Just guessing, but I am thinking that when 12% of people in a country are unable to get jobs or only can find marginal jobs, this leads to a lot of disgruntlement. And maybe anger. You can only marginalize people so long before they get restive. See, e.g. Palestine.

    However, again, we don't know. Maybe he had a fight with his wife/girlfriend/boyfriend/mother/father that night and just went off the deep end. Not sure we will ever know, really. Just like the dude who shot up Pulse, who seemed to be a hot mess of anger.

  • Two things:

    One, there's got to be some German compound word from Hell that describes the irony and horror that describes the realization that Daesh (ISIS/ISIL) is losing, albeit much more slowly than any of us would like, on the ground in Iraq and Syria, and almost all of its success is happening in the West.

    Two, serious counterterror fighters (not the ones you'll see on TV) have got to be pulling their hair out both about the way terrorism has blended casually, softly into mere madness, and about the spittle-flecked proposals by right wing nut drivers who think the answer to every problem is more force, more guns, more violence.

  • Take a moment this week to </blockquote
    Interact positively with a person of color.
    Watch a few Tim Wise videos.
    Consider this;

    "…White people have to do the hard work of figuring out the best ways to educate themselves and each other about racism. And I don't know what that looks like, because that is not my work. or the work of other black people, to figure out. In fact, the demand placed on black people to essentially teach white folk how not to be racist or complicit in structural racism is itself an exercise of willful ignorance and laziness".
    Quote from Darnell L. Moore

  • Burning River, I faced this problem in the early 60's when I had to try to explain to my daughter why all those mommies and daddies were screaming at those kids and trying to make them not go to school.

    And that was just the beginning.

    My stint as a parent lasted a long time, and there was always some unpleasant and confusing thing happening that I had to discuss with my kids.

  • Michael Furlan says:

    There is an alternative end game. We, or a coalition of Muslim states eliminate Saudi Arabia as a source of funds for the terrorists. If we are lucky low oil prices may cause the kingdom to implode all by itself.

    BTW the missing pages of the 9/11 report has just been released.

  • Gerald McGrew says:

    @US in the EU

    "The liberal conundrum…immigration. that's why the right gets to push the ball twenty yards every time. There is no liberal/left response that satisfies the majority.

    That doesn't make the right right. It is the one probkem the left – the international left – has no real answer for."

    Good point. As xenophobic and simplistic as the "round 'em all up" right-wing proposed solution is, it kinda exists in a vacuum. What exactly is the left's proposed solution?

  • ConcernedCitizen says:

    You're right; there is no solution, at least not in the short term.

    In the long term, attacks like these will stop under only one condition: not when our societies are completely free from bigotry and prejudice, since, being made up of humans, they never will be–but when ideas justifying such attacks are discredited and absent from people's heads.

  • Chicagojon2016 says:

    Apologies, but can we be honest here…it didn't take THAT much coordination to get a bunch of people piloting lessons and then coordinate multiple hijackings. Sure it's a longer game then rent a truck or get a couple of assault weapons, but it's hardly the work of a mastermind.

    The reality is that the concept of an evil mastermind is and has been bs for a long time — it's no wonder that Al Qaeda or ISIS or the Muslim Brotherhood or whatever manages to go on even though they've collectively lost a thousand "#2 officers". We have cellphones, schedules, the internet, (relative) freedom of movement on a global scale. It's really not that hard to come up with a reasonable plot that can kill dozens of people.

  • I think the left/neoliberal response will be "Technology will save us!" Trucks and cars will be fitted with anti-person running over technology. The panopticon will be everywhere except inside peoples' heads. All your data is belong to the State. Guns will be fitted with wifi microchips that will lock triggers when surrounded by police wifi. Drones and C4 robots will take out the routine terrorists. Acetone and peroxide sales will require retinal scans and invasive body searches. Social media platforms will be "encouraged" by the FTC to open backdoors in their programming. Sound cannons will take out protesters wanting rights back. Violators and suspects will be thrown into technological oubilettes where they will be fitted with skin tags or tattoos that prevent them from using any digital device or going online.

    The possibilities are endless!!

  • defineandredefine says:

    @ Lit3Bolt (and as an answer to NYD3030 and Gerald McGraw) –

    I disagree. I think the left has far better ideas than the expansion of an invasive surveillance state.

    Please see the above posts from Mothra and Michael Furlan as examples.

  • Gerald McGrew says:

    @defineandredefine,

    So the left solution is to end racial discrimination and do away with Saudi Arabia?

    Are either of those at all realistically doable in say, the next 10 years?

    If not, then the right-wing "round 'em up" alternative still wins, by at least being realistically doable. It's still hateful and terrible but it can actually be done, whereas "end racism and Saudi Arabia" are pie in the sky Pollyanna-ish dreams.

  • Michael Furlan says:

    Just end S.A. as a source of funding for Salafi/Wahabi nonsense.

    The Bush crime family has made a great living for generations protecting and promoting it. Maybe start at home.

  • He was not a French citizen, although he legally resided in France. And family members have made a lot of statements about his lack of interest in religion. So yeah, this is a weird one.

  • Michael Furlan says:

    How?

    Decide that beating the Salafi/Wahabi hate is a national priority that will require everyone to sacrifice.

    Fill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

    Crash program to end dependence on oil.

    Then, if they haven't taken the hint, blockade the S.A. ports.

  • Skepticalist says:

    The 19th century was more brutal and filled with whack jobs out to slaughter anybody in their way…or even not in their way, just as today.

    The difference is there was no instantaneous reporting of these events. There was a time delay. This was also was a period when a great deal of information was considered too upsetting or too un-Christian to print. This kind of censorship was welcome at the time by many or even most.

    Be glad this isn't so true today. The kinds of terrifying responses would much easier to get away with. I suppose in today's climate nobody would care anyway but I hope not.

  • Gerald McGrew says:

    @Michael Furlan

    So basically the left's solution is to declare economic war on Saudi Arabia, and that will end/stop terrorism?

    Given that much of the motivation behind Islamic terrorism is resentment over US foreign policy, how does your solution not worsen the situation? I understand the concept behind reducing the economic viability of terrorist organizations, but if you look at the sort of attacks we're seeing, most of them (as Ed notes) are extremely low-budget and simple. A guy with a rental truck, a guy with a rifle, some guys with pressure cookers, etc.

  • "What exactly is the left's proposed solution?"

    That we all pull up our big-boy and big-girl panties and stop running around screaming like we have the fantods when this stuff happens. We keep calm, carry on, and keep patiently working on our own societies in ways that will being the presently marginalized firmly inside. Will this prevent every nutzo from claiming that IS made him do it? No. But it'll help reduce the pool of nutters.

    And we accept that being insane about this stuff is like closing airports because airplanes crash. Yeah, they do…but air travel is still safer than the highways. We don't ban airplanes because one crashes every so often and kills 100+ people in a stroke.

    I love that authoritarians strut and preen about their "toughness"…but their answer to any little problem is to stomp the hell out of it AND everything around it roaring and panicking like a little old lady finding a mouse in her bedsheets.

  • Michael Furlan says:

    Why not Anti-US Mexican terrorism or El Salvador or Nicaraguan or Hatian or Panamanian terrorism. Really what country in this hemisphere haven't we messed with? Why not suicide bombing Cubans?

    Nor do I worry about Anti-US terrorism from Iran or Turkey or Indonesia.

    What we are seeing is specific to the hate comming out of Saudi Arabia.

  • "…will BRING the presently marginalized firmly inside…"

    Now…"end racism"? I won't stockpile party favors for the day. But can we work at doing better? Y'think? Every outside who ends up feeling on the indie is one fewer outsider who becomes disaffected with his society and a rage-filled a-hole.

    As Dean Wormer might have said; turning ourselves into police states and sticking people in concentration camps because of random disaffected, rage-filled a-holes is no way to go through life, son.

  • Gerald McGrew says:

    @Michael Furlan,

    "What we are seeing is specific to the hate comming out of Saudi Arabia."

    So the answer is to declare economic, and perhaps military (per your suggestion to blockade their ports) war on them? Given that Saudi Arabia contains the most holy and revered sites in Islam, and "infidels" (US troops) setting foot in such holy ground fueled much of the anti-US resentment, I fail to see how your proposal is much of a solution.

    @FDChief,

    While I agree with your sentiment of not overreacting, I do think there are common sense, and (some) simple things we can do to reduce the threat. To me that's better than just learning to live with it.

    This article caught my eye today.

    http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/15/opinions/nice-attack-opinion-peter-bergen/index.html

    I do think we have to eliminate ISIS on the ground. If there's no "Islamic State", there's less reason for some Muslims to pledge allegiance to them.

    And I do agree with engaging them on the propaganda front. But do so smartly and with the help of other Muslims, rather than just a bunch of white Americans telling Muslims what WE think they need to hear.

  • Y'know, whenever I had to read some history in high school and college, the thought that always came to mind after reading about some horror or other was, "What was the matter with people that they could allow this kind of disastrous fuck-up to happen?"

    Now I get to live the question.

    Oh, we got trouble, right here in River City….

  • So many things I'd like to say here, but first I'll start with this: Despite the fact that he had an Arabic name and was French-Tunisian, maybe it's possible he had nothing to do with Islamic terrorism, and religion had nothing to do with it; he was having one too many bad days, and he finally snapped, regardless of religion.
    What he did was truly horrible and monstrous, but if no such connections exist, then none exist.

  • Actually it wouldn't be so difficult to isolate Saudi Arabia, we've done it to dozens of other countries on much lesser grounds. You just STOP fucking dealing with them. Revoke their visas. Close the embassy and consular offices. Stop selling them arms. Oh yeah. That. They are one of the biggest buyers of all our nifty death tech. And their checks always clear. Hmm. Money. Morality. Money. Morality. Dang it's a tough choice.

  • defineandredefine says:

    Gerald McGrew –

    Not necessarily economic blockade or military intervention. A good start would be to hold them accountable when they use military hardware we sold them to bomb hospitals and marketplaces in Yemen. Or at least call them out when they attack Yemen instead ISIS, despite claiming that's what they were going to do with the weapons. Or just don't sell them weapons in the first place. Or allowing 9/11 victims to sue SA, since it seems they were pretty well involved. Or call them out for financing terrorism. Or call them out for exporting wahabism. Or. Or. Or.

    There's a lot of wretched shit the Saudis are doing with money and weapons they're getting from us. Other countries (e.g. Britain) have started to question their ties to the Kingdom; it's long past time we followed suit.

  • But then we arrive at another topic that most of the “left” is afraid to touch. Israel. The other 900 pound gorilla in the middle-east zoo that is full of U.S. funded munitions, including several of them there nukes. (And for those of you still paying attention, there is as much danger now as there was during those duck-and-cover days, we just, as mentioned above, don't pay attention any more.) The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.

  • To sort of piggyback what NYD3030 was saying above… saying anything like "sorry, but you're just going to have to deal with it (especially because we refuse to do anything about it)" to any group is NOT a good idea. Would you tolerate any of the following statements from any of the following groups:
    Gun nuts: "Sorry, but you're just going to have to deal with all the shootings and gun violence; we'd rather see a school shooting every year than have any of our precious rights to bear arms infringed or modified."
    College people: "Sorry, but you're just going to have to take out mountains of debt to pay skyrocketing tuition to attend college, especially if you want a shot at getting a job, because we're greedy and we do it because we can."

    I'm sure we can all think of several more examples.

  • I was making this same argument yesterday. The Goose stepping , brown shirts are coming as sure as eggs is eggs. This has to have a solution directed by Muslims. Everything else is doomed to fail. Europe has to empower Muslim communities and protect them from retaliation from within while rooting out the small percentage of radicals from their communities

  • The Palace Cat says:

    I am listening to the program that Dan linked above. It is must-listen. It is about a Danish town where a bunch of kids went missing — and they figured out they were disappearing to Syria. Their successful program to prevent more kids from going Jihadi is based on the concept of non complementary behavior: if someone is hostile to you, most of us react with hostility in return. Non– complementary behavior is to do the opposite: someone approaches with hostility, return with warmth and calmness. It is really challenging. They brought back people they knew had been fighting, and instead of arresting and prosecuting them, they treated their wounds, got job assistance, and talked to them like normal people. It has been stunningly successful.

    @FDChief: agree.

    The Nice attacker sounds more like the Florida dickbag than a terrorist. People shout "Allahu Akbar" at soccer matches; it doesn't mean much. All these jackasses who just want to fuck shit up and get on TV glom onto ISIS for instant notoriety.

  • Bitter Scribe says:

    The only way we will avoid the fate of Europe is if we keep doing what we've (mostly) been doing: Embrace. Assimilate. Make immigrants feel welcome. Give them opportunities to work productively and sustain their families. Give them a stake in America. You don't engage in nihilistic, suicidal violence against a country that has given you a chance and a reason to live.

  • defineandredefine says:

    @ Bitter Scribe –

    Word. It's one of the few things Americans can be proud of these days.

  • Bitter Scribe:

    If people are busy trying to make a good life for them and their families, they tend to have less time to come up with terrorist plots.

  • "The only way we will avoid the fate of Europe is if we keep doing what we've (mostly) been doing: Embrace. Assimilate. Make immigrants feel welcome. Give them opportunities to work productively and sustain their families. Give them a stake in America. You don't engage in nihilistic, suicidal violence against a country that has given you a chance and a reason to live."

    Actually western European countries have given Muslim immigrants and their descendants plenty of chances. They live in countries with tax paid education, tax paid health care, by far the highest pay anywhere in the world for low skilled labor and the highest social mobility in the world.
    The reason the US does not have the same problems its simply because US leaders have been smart enough to restrict immigration from Muslim majority countries to next to nothing.
    No secular country has been able to make mass Muslim immigration work.
    The current disaster was entirely predictable, unfortunately there does not seem to be any cure.

  • How does it feel to see your predictions come to fruition when everyone said you were a pessimistic asshole? Do you feel triumphant or extremely sad? Wendi and Heather want to know.

  • Economically isolating SA? Not going to happen. Given that the preferred Presidential candidate unashamedly took however much from them in campaign donations?

  • This is multi-level issue, but the PC hand ringing is certainly not going solve it.

    But as pointed out above, we don't see pissed off disenfranchised Latinos committing these acts. And apart from say a few groups like the New Black Panthers we don't see the black community going beyond riots and common crime. If there were any communities that should be a hotbed for domestic terror it would be them. But they're NOT.

    On assimilation, the Orlando shooter had been in the US since he was 6 (iirc), and was employed. The San Bernardino shooter was born in the US and had a fairly decent job in a government organisation.

    Europe isn't doing itself any favours by opening up the gates and taking all comers. Then jamming 750 people into villages that previously had 100 residents, and have little infrastructure.

    The governments are especially doing themselves no good by dismissing and downplaying the increase in crime by saying, "Move along, nothing to see here. Nothing happened." Then making a blanket statement that paints the native population as perpetrators of this increase in violence.

    When the immigrants are brought to trial, the criminals are given no punishment whatsoever. A ten yo Austrian boy was raped, but the guy "doesn't understand our culture", so his attacker was let go.

    Out of the estimated 2000 NYE assailants in Germany, six have been brought to trial, four convicted and given a wrist slap—why not deport?

    In the UK a Somali was brought to trial for rape, given a wrist slap—"doesn't understand our culture"—then went out and raped two more women. Again, they should have put the guy on the first plane out of the country.

    In Sweden, politicians are resorting to effectively victim blaming, and telling women to cover up. WT….!?!! Oh, and they intend to increase the surveillance state. Doesn't that make you feel better?

    Germany has now made it illegal to criticise the migration policy and migrants. For Europeans and Westerners to claim any sense of national pride or culture is to be denigrated as racist and xenophobic.

    Given ALL of that, is it any wonder why reasonable people are getting jacked with their governments and turning to the far right? At the very least, make it very clear that if you don't adapt to our cultures, if you commit a crime you and you're family are on the first plane out of the country.

    I don't know what Merkel and Co's end game is, but if it's the collapse of the social state and any European identity, they're sure as hell are going to get it.

  • wereatheist says:

    "Germany has now made it illegal to criticise the migration policy and migrants"
    German from Berlin, Germany here.
    Stop telling lies, Xynzee!

  • Xynzee Says:
    "This is multi-level issue, but the PC hand ringing is certainly not going solve it.

    But as pointed out above, we don't see pissed off disenfranchised Latinos committing these acts."

    And, how many Latin countries is the US and its allies keeping troops and interfering with the government directly (not indirectly like Hillary and the Salvadoran ? As Daniel Pipes notes, once the occupation stops, the terrorism stops. Now, that's a little simplistic, but, that is what Osama wanted. And, seems to work well…

  • "And, how many Latin countries is the US and its allies keeping troops and interfering with the government directly (not indirectly like Hillary and the Salvadoran ? As Daniel Pipes notes, once the occupation stops, the terrorism stops. Now, that's a little simplistic, but, that is what Osama wanted. And, seems to work well…"

    France is the worst hit European country, and they did not participate in either the war in Afghanistan or the one in Iraq.
    The US, on the other hand, which has been by far the biggest military aggressor against the Muslim world since the crusades ended, has been all but spared Muslim terrorism since 9/11.
    Could it be as simple as if you want peace, don't fill up your country with people who hate your way of life?

  • “Even those who have watched the club for centuries agreed that Dortmund has never achieved this kind of intensity.”  corner and we are a bloody big animal. BVB will be stifled, closed in on all sides by an atmosphere probably unique in world football and they will not like how it makes their air taste thinner while breathing fearlessness into the men in red.

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