2 Explosions at Zaventem Airport (Brussels)

[MC Prussian]

Just waiting for all of my meme-consuming, Trump supporting, under-educated hometown Facebook friends to start posting stupid shit about it. 

 

 

I'm sure it won't be long. The opening salvos have been fired on here already.

 

 

Time to do some friend deleting!

 

 

I've seen someone say it was a conspiracy to gain Trump more support..

 

 

Have to laugh at people who think Donald Trump would magically stop all of this.

 

 

He would probably make a joke about it.

 

Let the Master of Political Idiocy speak for himself:

 

I saw this Tweet earlier today and my first thought was: "How can these few sentences put together make any sense at all? Where's the correlation?"

 

When's the last time Trump was in Brussels? How can he now what it was and what is is now?

And what's the situation in Belgium got to do with the US?

Mind-boggling nonsense from a person that should be thoroughly parodied and exposed for the fraud he is!

[Carl the Llama]

Let the Master of Political Idiocy speak for himself:

 

I saw this Tweet earlier today and my first thought was: "How can these few sentences put together make any sense at all? Where's the correlation?"

 

When's the last time Trump was in Brussels? How can he now what it was and what is is now?

And what's the situation in Belgium got to do with the US?

Mind-boggling nonsense from a person that should be thoroughly parodied and exposed for the fraud he s!

He is.  Constantly.  Yet somehow people still defend him.  You just need to look at the USA election thread to see one forum regular in particular making an arse of himself by denying the man's love of violence towards protesters.  Very upsetting.

[UPinCarolina]

Trump is the American equivalent of Silvio Berlusconi except he's not half as good at business and 2x more terrifying.

[Carl the Llama]

Johnny until the UK signs the Schengen agreement, something which is unanimously not going to happen, your statements claiming our borders with Europe are a terrorist threat make no sense.  

[Ghost Troop]

These killers are not some bunch of rank amateurs, they are skilled and meticulous. In or out of the EU these people will get where they want to be to perpetrate their terror. I met their ilk in Iraq and Afghanistan, they are single minded, ruthless, fanatical but cool and methodical and above all patient. Try all the 'prevention' tactics you like you wont get them all. In the end we have to defend ourselves and that will mean being ever so un-PC.

[Guest MattP]

Blimey, there is actually more hate for Donald Trump in this thread than the people who murdered a shit load of innocent people today.

I think he'll actually be being blamed for it by page 5.

[Carl the Llama]

Blimey, there is actually more hate for Donald Trump in this thread than the people who murdered a shit load of innocent people today.

I think he'll actually be being blamed for it by page 5.

I think people have a right to use a thread dedicated to these attacks to condemn such inane politicising of them.  Instead of defending him in here why not actually respond to the many comments showing your stance up in the USA thread.

[MC Prussian]

Blimey, there is actually more hate for Donald Trump in this thread than the people who murdered a shit load of innocent people today.

I think he'll actually be being blamed for it by page 5.

 

Let's leave it at ridiculing an incoherent and babbling billionaire coming from a rather rich family who gets so much hot wind blown up his ass by the US media right now that he could buy all ads for the Superbowl in five consecutive years.

[bovril]

These killers are not some bunch of rank amateurs, they are skilled and meticulous. In or out of the EU these people will get where they want to be to perpetrate their terror. I met their ilk in Iraq and Afghanistan, they are single minded, ruthless, fanatical but cool and methodical and above all patient. Try all the 'prevention' tactics you like you wont get them all. In the end we have to defend ourselves and that will mean being ever so un-PC.

 

You may have done tours of Iraq and Afghanistan matey but I think I prefer the confused arguments of some bloke on a Leicester City forum with a tenuous grasp of English grammar.

[Guest MattP]

I think we should leave it at that as well, I doubt all posters will though.

[benpicko]

Btw the point in my post wasn't 'ARGHH MUSLIMS' it was that my friend was shut down for bringing up Molenbeek as a legitimate concern

[Lionator]

The arguing and further things on here reflect society well in general in response to these events. We're all guilty of getting caught up in arguments about refugees/immigration/politicians and we overlook every time why these people turn to violence and extremism. Being a psychology student, this is something of interest to me but this is the one thing that's truly going to beat this viscous ideology, not banning immigrants, not fixing governments/blowing up the middle east. 

[Rincewind]

It is a natural reaction though. To see why you need to look at root causes not just one. But that is easier said than done if you are not closely involved or have lost family members or friends. 

[ceredigion]

Don't panic Jeremy Corbyn supporters. Any minute now Yvette Cooper, Nicola Sturgeon, ''Sir'' Bob Geldof et al will be along to assure you that we brought everything on ourselves and that nobody has anything to fear from Islam.

 

They must know because they've all welcomed Muslim refugees into their own homes and nothing has gone wrong as far as I'm aware.

[Carl the Llama]

Don't panic Jeremy Corbyn supporters. Any minute now Yvette Cooper, Nicola Sturgeon, ''Sir'' Bob Geldof et al will be along to assure you that we brought everything on ourselves and that nobody has anything to fear from Islam.

 

They must know because they've all welcomed Muslim refugees into their own homes and nothing has gone wrong as far as I'm aware.

People have done this, and those refugees are all registered with voluntary and governmental organisations and are certainly not the ones shacked up in some dive in Schaerbeek plotting mass murder.

 

Before you start thinking that everyone who lives in Schaerbeek is a terrorist - I used to live in a shitty basement there myself a minute's walk from the best durum place in all of Brussels.  The rental costs are amongst the lowest in the city hence the large immigrant population which the terrorist minority uses as a screen.

[inckley fox]

you cannot reason or educate fanatics .. Our Governments first duty is to defend us..the only logical and obvious way to start is to take control of who we allow into our country.. this is war,  you have to grab the enemy by the bollocks then their hearts and minds will follow..

 

Three of the four July 7th bombers were born in the UK, coming from a Muslim community of around three million people, the last I heard. It's hard to argue that the UK would have been a great deal safer if it had tightened its border controls.

 

If you see terrorism as 'an overseas concern' which we should slam the door shut on, then it's worth remembering the number of home-grown terrorist attacks. Not only were most of the perpetrators of the UK's biggest ever terrorist attack home grown, but in the fifteen major terrorist attacks since Good Friday there have been five by Islamic extremists (five English-born Muslims - one of which was mentally ill and whose family warned the police of his intentions, three British Muslim converts, and only two non-EU residents), one by a conspiracy theorist (UK born), two by Neo-Nazis (one from the UK, one from the Ukraine) and seven by the Real IRA.

 

And if you're worried by what happened in, say, Paris, well most of the attackers were born in either France or Belgium. So, while it makes no sense for people to suggest ethnic cleansing or religious persecution on home soil as a solution, it's still - bizarrely - a more logical solution to the terrorist problem than seizing control of our borders.

 

As for border control, any migrant who is not an EU citizen (as is the case and will remain the case for a long time to come with Syrian refugees) can be denied entry to the UK should we see fit to deny it. Our borders aren't open to non-EU citizens travelling through Europe, and the EU's borders aren't open to non-EU nations either. Little would change in that regard if we left the EU, so I wouldn't let that sway your opinion, even if Nigel Farage says you should. Wasn't it him who hailed the example of Norway without bothering to check their immigration stats first?

 

Obviously I want to see an end to this problem too. Maybe the solution is 'cutting off the serpent's head' in Syria, as Cameron put it, though I'm not convinced. Maybe it's dealing with the poverty problem, or working towards greater integration, or giving greater powers and budgets to schools and social services in dealing with 'problem cases', maybe it's through abolishing faith schools and the religious indoctrination of the young by teachers and even parents. I don't know. But hauling the floodgates shut definitely isn't our answer.

 

you cannot reason or educate fanatics .. Our Governments first duty is to defend us..the only logical and obvious way to start is to take control of who we allow into our country.. this is war,  you have to grab the enemy by the bollocks then their hearts and minds will follow..

 

I think you can educate anyone if you start early enough. Presumably these people weren't born with a deeply-entrenched Jihadist mentalities, so they were school-able somewhere along the line. Of course if they're mentally ill, beyond education and have severe violent tendencies then their religion is probably irrelevant, as with the guy who committed the Tube attacks in December. They'd probably end up stabbing someone anyway. 

 

When you talk about 'our' government it's worth remembering that the majority of Islamic terrorists in the UK - and the majority of 'thwarted' terrorists - were UK born, so it's their government too. If we're at war, then presumably we're at war with ourselves. Or is it just Islam, and predominantly Islam in the UK, that we're supposed to be 'grabbing by the bollocks'? How do you propose we do this? Alternatively, if the 'bollocks' you're clutching at are in Syria or Iraq, how do you imagine you'll go about reaching them without sparking a new surge of emigrants, or further civil unrest (which is what happened the last hundred times we did this)?

 

If your answer isn't 'nuke Mecca', 'drop a load of suspicious-looking British people off on a rock in the Atlantic' or 'persecute Muslims' then I can only guess at what it might be.

[Guest MattP]

Btw the point in my post wasn't 'ARGHH MUSLIMS' it was that my friend was shut down for bringing up Molenbeek as a legitimate concern

 

It's a good job people aren't doing that anymore.

 

Obviously I want to see an end to this problem too. Maybe the solution is 'cutting off the serpent's head' in Syria, as Cameron put it, though I'm not convinced. Maybe it's dealing with the poverty problem, or working towards greater integration, or giving greater powers and budgets to schools and social services in dealing with 'problem cases', maybe it's through abolishing faith schools and the religious indoctrination of the young by teachers and even parents. I don't know. But hauling the floodgates shut definitely isn't our answer.

 

I think you can educate anyone if you start early enough. Presumably these people weren't born with a deeply-entrenched Jihadist mentalities, so they were school-able somewhere along the line. Of course if they're mentally ill, beyond education and have severe violent tendencies then their religion is probably irrelevant, as with the guy who committed the Tube attacks in December. They'd probably end up stabbing someone anyway. 

 

When you talk about 'our' government it's worth remembering that the majority of Islamic terrorists in the UK - and the majority of 'thwarted' terrorists - were UK born, so it's their government too. If we're at war, then presumably we're at war with ourselves. Or is it just Islam, and predominantly Islam in the UK, that we're supposed to be 'grabbing by the bollocks'? How do you propose we do this? Alternatively, if the 'bollocks' you're clutching at are in Syria or Iraq, how do you imagine you'll go about reaching them without sparking a new surge of emigrants, or further civil unrest (which is what happened the last hundred times we did this)?

 

If your answer isn't 'nuke Mecca', 'drop a load of suspicious-looking British people off on a rock in the Atlantic' or 'persecute Muslims' then I can only guess at what it might be.

 

Some excellent points made in this post, the education point being the most interesting one as unlike usual cases it's not a lack of education of integration that appears to be the problem here. Recruits from places like north and central Africa have very low levels of education, however many recruits from western countries are well educated by western standards, many more then the average. This conforms to a long trend of Jihadists being comparatively extremely well educated.  All 12 men involved in the 9/11 attacks were graduates from western universities; an impressive and rare distinction in their home countries.  2 had doctorates, two more were working on them.

 

https://themuslimissue.wordpress.com/2014/07/09/british-isis-fighters-not-poor-and-deprived-but-educated-and-very-religious/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-32026985

 

The most worrying thing about all this is that the people who have left Britain to fight for ISIS are often educated and well to do youngsters who have actually done well (according to this week most British Jihadi's who have gone to Syria are university educated), I certainly can't agree that they are mentally ill and the system hasn't failed them at all, they've just decided they would rather live under a regime like Islamic State than in the West, we can't really do too much about that, the idea that every person in the World wants to live like us with a fag in one hand and a bottle in the other is an idea we have to get rid ourselves of, an inconvient truth but there is no point lying to ourselves anymore. (More British Muslims have joined Jihadi groups than there own countries armed forces - http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/magazine/her-majestys-jihadists.html?_r=0 )

 

I don't think there actually is an answer to this, it's not the IRA or ETA, there is no political solution, it's with us now and it will never go away whatever we try to do, a small percentage of people will always twist religion to commit henious acts and it's just something that we'll have to live with.

 

There were 5 months between the Paris and Brussels attacks, that's a pretty good effort from the security services when you see how many people are jailed for terrorism offences across Europe every month. We have to hope they can keep on managing to stop as many of these as possible.

[MC Prussian]

Some excellent points made in this post, the education point being the most interesting one as unlike usual cases it's not a lack of education of integration that appears to be the problem here. Recruits from places like north and central Africa have very low levels of education, however many recruits from western countries are well educated by western standards, many more then the average. This conforms to a long trend of Jihadists being comparatively extremely well educated.  All 12 men involved in the 9/11 attacks were graduates from western universities; an impressive and rare distinction in their home countries.  2 had doctorates, two more were working on them.

 

https://themuslimissue.wordpress.com/2014/07/09/british-isis-fighters-not-poor-and-deprived-but-educated-and-very-religious/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-32026985

 

The most worrying thing about all this is that the people who have left Britain to fight for ISIS are often educated and well to do youngsters who have actually done well (according to this week most British Jihadi's who have gone to Syria are university educated), I certainly can't agree that they are mentally ill and the system hasn't failed them at all, they've just decided they would rather live under a regime like Islamic State than in the West, we can't really do too much about that, the idea that every person in the World wants to live like us with a fag in one hand and a bottle in the other is an idea we have to get rid ourselves of, an inconvient truth but there is no point lying to ourselves anymore. (More British Muslims have joined Jihadi groups than there own countries armed forces - http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/magazine/her-majestys-jihadists.html?_r=0 )

 

I don't think there actually is an answer to this, it's not the IRA or ETA, there is no political solution, it's with us now and it will never go away whatever we try to do, a small percentage of people will always twist religion to commit henious acts and it's just something that we'll have to live with.

 

There were 5 months between the Paris and Brussels attacks, that's a pretty good effort from the security services when you see how many people are jailed for terrorism offences across Europe every month. We have to hope they can keep on managing to stop as many of these as possible.

I read an article in another newspaper today that listed the amount of Jihadists in comparison to their respective country's size.

You may be right about the UK "offering" the most Muslim warriors in absolute numbers, but in relative terms, Belgium tops Denmark, Sweden, France, Austria, the Netherlands or Finland. The UK comes in 9th place.

 

You're also right about a minority using religion in order to incite hatred and to cause havoc and/or trying to take a commercial advantage. The Holy Crusades were comparable back in the days and the Western World has for most part learned from it.

My hope is that the Islamic communities across the globe at one point come to a similar conclusion in order to overcome hatred, fear and violence aimed at "infidels".

[Guest MattP]

My hope is that the Islamic communities across the globe at one point come to a similar conclusion in order to overcome hatred, fear and violence aimed at "infidels".

 

That's probably the only hope we have now. I just wish we had waited for that to happen (and ourselves not to bomb the shit out of the middle East) before we decided to import millions of Muslims to the continent, it just doesn't seem well thought out.

 

The majority are obviously fine and always will be, because the majority of people are always good people, but there will always be a significant minority of extremists within a large Islamic population if history is anything to go by.

[Finnegan]

I just think the longer we keep getting hung up on Islam, the more we play in to their hands. It's not about religion, it's never been about religion, it's about power and hate.

Islam is just a handy tool for these wankers to recruit and we play massively in to their hands by making a big deal out of it.

[shen]

That's probably the only hope we have now. I just wish we had waited for that to happen (and ourselves not to bomb the shit out of the middle East) before we decided to import millions of Muslims to the continent, it just doesn't seem well thought out.

 

The majority are obviously fine and always will be, because the majority of people are always good people, but there will always be a significant minority of extremists within a large Islamic population if history is anything to go by.

 

Urgh... so much wrong with that statement.

[Guest MattP]

I just think the longer we keep getting hung up on Islam, the more we play in to their hands. It's not about religion, it's never been about religion, it's about power and hate.

Islam is just a handy tool for these wankers to recruit and we play massively in to their hands by making a big deal out of it.

 

Come on mate, you don't seriously believe that last line do you? Of course to them it's about religion, these people aren't blowing themselves up because it's a "handy tool" - they genuinely believe they are going to a better place for committing these acts. If they were just using the religion to cause some carnage they'd be dropping the bombs and running away, not allowing themselves to die with it, no one is that desperate to cause some chaos they'll sacrifice their own life for it, the reasoning they give for doing it is the West's actions towards people of the same faith as them.

 

Islam is not a race so we can talk about it without any fear of being branded with "isms" or phobias. It's not an unchangeable biological feature determined by birth, it's a collection of ideas that one chooses to accept and adhere to.

We should always protect individual Muslims from collective judgement (something I have occasionaly failed to do) or from attacks in retaliation. But we can't continue pretending that Islamic terrorism has nothing to do with Islam. It evidently does and people who would rather brush this little fact under the carpet rather than address it inadvertently enable the ultra-conservative status quo in Islam. A status quo that continues to breeds fundamentalism and sometimes violent extremism.

[MC Prussian]

Come on mate, you don't seriously believe that last line do you? Of course to them it's about religion, these people aren't blowing themselves up because it's a "handy tool" - they genuinely believe they are going to a better place for committing these acts. If they were just using the religion to cause some carnage they'd be dropping the bombs and running away, not allowing themselves to die with it, no one is that desperate to cause some chaos they'll sacrifice their own life for it, the reasoning they give for doing it is the West's actions towards people of the same faith as them.

 

Islam is not a race so we can talk about it without any fear of being branded with "isms" or phobias. It's not an unchangeable biological feature determined by birth, it's a collection of ideas that one chooses to accept and adhere to.

We should always protect individual Muslims from collective judgement (something I have occasionaly failed to do) or from attacks in retaliation. But we can't continue pretending that Islamic terrorism has nothing to do with Islam. It evidently does and people who would rather brush this little fact under the carpet rather than address it inadvertently enable the ultra-conservative status quo in Islam. A status quo that continues to breeds fundamentalism and sometimes violent extremism.

I think we need to distinguish here.

The martyrs that blow themselves up, committing a sacrifice for IS for instance, are mere pawns in the game. The real leaders and instigators get away scotch-free and remain in a hiding place. They are the ones that should be targeted and held accountable.

 

I don't see Islam per se as being violent. It's the (mis)interpretation of the Qur'an that becomes the issue and has been for quite some time.

Let's not forget the Islamic world in itself is essentially divided into Sunnis (Salafists, ISIS) and Shiites (who are less active on a global scale) and those two groups tend to have a complicated relationship also.

[Guest MattP]

It was years ago when I read a lot of it for a school project but I don't think anyone can seriously deny the Quran, like most religious texts is a pretty violent book.

You are right on the last point though, the Islamic World is pretty much at war with each other in different factions, one day we might see some serious reform in the religion that will bring a lot of countries in line with the rest of the World but it won't be in our life time.

[Guest MattP]

Finally around to reading the Times from yesterday and it's absolutely chilling reading the headline story in the World section.

 

All about Najib Laachraoui, why we are looking for him and what he is capable of, little did they know when this was being read over breakfast the same guy had just orchastrated the events that occured yesterday, he is already wanted for recruiting people to Syria, he went there himself in 2013 and snuck back into Europe before meeting Absalem in Budapest before heading back to Molenbeek, how did these guys slip through the radar for so long and manage to avoid being arrested? Abboaud managed to get back into Europe having travelled with a boatload of refugees, Coukri came to Europe after arriving in Lesbos on a fake Syrian passport.

 

The authorities have some serious questions to answer.