Currently running through a terrorists’ heads - “Hmm… I can hide my entire terrorist activities from my friends and neighbors, but how can I hide them from a single government bureaucrat? Oh no, they have foiled my plans again!!” Yep, terrorists are thinking we must be stupid or suicidal or both.
This reminds me of a Key and Peele skit about TSA passenger vetting (screening) - very funny:
^awcnrdb: I suggest you read The Fifth Wave and The Infinite Sea .
BTW, post #456 is exactly what I was talking about upthread, right after the attacks, when I spoke about the risk of irrationality taking over, similar to the “he may be a communist” craze in the late 40s early 50s. In a nutshell: you can’t tell, so you must suspect everyone, because truly anyone might be your enemy.
Yes, terrorists are told to shave their beards, drink alcohol, and party, as I said in one of my first posts. If they walked around with a sign reading “I’m a murderer wannabe” they wouldn’t get far. And YET they all had an S-form, meaning they were watched and on a special list of dangerous individuals.
The fact their neighbors thought they were sweet isn’t news. I mean, how often do you hear neighbors of known criminals say they were nice, polite, quiet, etc?
And what are the French doing? They’re going out, drinking, etc. They’re deliberately sitting at the cafés’ tables that are on the sidewalk.
They’re not giving the stink eye to every dark-skinned young man who goes out to party, thinking he may be a terrorist trying to pretend he’s not a terrorist.
Thanks for the correction there.
Isis has a huge amount of money. There are other, much easier ways, for them to get terrorists into this country then having them sit in a refugee camp for 18-24 months hoping the will be one of the lucky ones to get chosen to come to the US.
This country always makes the worst decisions when faced with fear. I’m just glad there are still some adults left in the room who are capable of rational deliberation.
The humanitarian crisis we need to focus on first and foremost is the society we leave our grandchildren. We see what has happened in Europe in the past several decades, and do we really want to sentence our kids to that?
The important thing to realize is that someone who’s a victim of a bad guy isn’t necessarily a good guy - he could be worse. There are huge numbers of ISIS supporters who have been attacked and killed by Assad’s supporters and likewise many Assad supporters who have been killed by ISIS. In both cases, they hate each other, are victims, but hate our societies even more. And if they’ve been briefed on what to say to play victim, do you seriously think they won’t hesitate to mouth all the right things to qualify as a gentle victim? If they’ve demonstrated so much violence with each other, when they have so much in common, and have grown up in a culture of violence against civilians they disagree with, why does anyone think there won’t be a significant percentage who’ll perpetually be disillusioned with Western values and use the same techniques regardless of how much we’ve supported them - like the Ft Hood doctor or the Boston bombers, and those in Europe?
If we want to be humanitarian, ruining our kids’ lives is not the answer - we can allocate a sum which will be less than what we’re spending now to be used in shelters in the middle east or Africa where they can stay till the situation improves and go home - something they’ll never do if they come to the West.
I will never forget that months after 9/11, some idiot at INS approved the hijackers visas to take flight training in the US. Doesn’t inspire much confidence on a bureaucrats ability to screen.
Atta, the 9/11 leader, was in this country for 15 months before 9/11 and had been planning the attack for months before that. Terrorists don’t mind long timelines.
curious to know what you mean by that. European life doesn’t seem something you’re “sentenced to” to me. I may be opening pandora’s box so feel free to ignore.
I want to remind everyone that the refugees have NOTHING to do with what happened in Paris. Absolutely nothing. he terrorists were French and Belgian lowlives who went to Syria to fight the Djihad after being persuaded via Youtube and Facebook.
There’s no correlation between the refugees’ arrival (of which, by the way, there are only 519 in France right now - and, as I said, some 3 miles from my relatives) and the terror attack. It’s as logical as to think that a dark-skinned guy who goes out to drink and flirt is a terrorist in disguise, because that’s what terrorists tell their followers to do to mimick the heathens and the apostates. Right now there could be a terrorist anywhere, doing anything. The whole POINT of that attack was to make us turn against each other, suspect everyone and everything, and stop doing what we’re doing. The French aren’t reacting like that. I’m glad to see that. So why should we reacting to their tragedy in a way that plays into the terrorists’ hands?
Beside the novels The Fifth Wave and The Infinite Sea , I’d like to recommend the movie Dheepan, which got the Palm D’or in Cannes this year. It’s very good at explaining how refugee aren’t all innocent, but are nevertheless deserving of help and compassion, because you have murky situations, bad decisions, and decent people, vs. evil people operating within an evil worldview.
I know that not everyone will take away the same thing from the trailer and the excerpt, but I do believe this is both a masterpiece and urgently relevant to today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qB8_Q9oTuw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekJf6YipKRM
@MYOS1634 I agree with your post, but even though the French government doesn’t think like that, many French citizens do. There has been a dislike of the muslims by a segment of the population and that is sure to be fanned by the latest attacks. There is a fair amount of discrimination and tension not only in Paris but in southern France.
I agree with something I heard Sen. Warner say today, that the Syrian refugees we let in - grandparents, toddlers - are a lower risk than adult males coming in on visitor or education visas.
Start by looking up rape and other crime statistics in a place like Stockholm.
What happened in Paris was by Muslims influenced by organizations with roots in the middle east (unless you want to make excuses like Ft Hoold “workplace violence”). Every “refugee” is a product of the same society who’ve been raised with the same influences. A significant percentage of them will have the same dislike of Western ideas, Jews, etc., Do you really think these “refugees” share views similar to the average American, regarding, say Hamas?
Keep in mind that every society has disgruntled and dissatisfied people - even kids here living in expensive houses who are unhappy about things like tuition debt. But they’re most likely to just follow our norms in protesting. When you have created an infrastructure of madrassas and people like Choudary to fan the flames, it’s inevitable that a few of them will be recruited to use their resources and techniques to commit acts like in Paris.
Yes, of course, but do some statistics. What percentage of acts of religious terrorism in the US are committed by those in the majority and what percentage are done by a tiny fraction - very very ORM.
“Keep in mind that every society has disgruntled and dissatisfied people… But they’re most likely to just follow our norms in protesting.”
Except for those disgruntled, young, isolated white boys. They like to shoot up kindergarten classrooms, churches, and high schools.
It strikes me that only accepting Christian refugees makes it a lot easier for a bad guy masquerading as a refugee to get picked. There are millions of Syrian refugees. The vast majority are Muslim. Let’s say you’re a terrorist, and you want to sneak into the United States as a refugee, so you can commit acts of terror. How do you make sure you get picked? Among millions of refugees, the US is probably not going to pick you, even if they are unable to discover that you are a terrorist.
But suppose the US decides to pick only Christians. You are a conscienceless terrorist, so you are happy to say you’re a Christian if it’ll get you here. Most genuine Muslim refugees don’t want to abandon their faith. So the US is now picking among far fewer potential refugees, tens of thousands instead of millions, and the terrorists disguised as Christians have a much much better chance of getting here to the US.
So only picking Christians sounds like a bad idea to me. Plus, as someone upthread pointed out, those ISIS b****** think that virtually all other Muslims are not Muslims, and are therefore candidates for execution.
ISIS released a video last week of them executing over 200 Christian children. Iraq had around 1.5 million Christians. There are fewer than 400k left and the government is considering, over their objections, creating a “Christian region”. That would in essence allow them to be driven even more completely out of the cities into this place they don’t want. Syria’s Christian population was around 1.8 million and now is under 500k.
The comment that Christians have to live in their areas and that Muslims under ISIS may have it worse because they have to follow rules is one of the most obtuse things I’ve ever read on this site. Christians are being murdered for being Christian. Young girls are being raped. Families are forced into conversion at gunpoint. Muslims can choose to stay and follow rules. This isn’t true, of course, for Shia but then they have the Alawite (Shia) areas within Syria and, of course, Iraq is majority Shia and Lebanon is substantially though not majority Shia, so they have places to go. Christians have nowhere to go and there is no future for them in the region.
@Dadof3 Why do you have refugees in quotes? Do you think the Syrians are not really refugees and that they’re playing some hardcore game of pretend where they blow up their own country to infiltrate the West? And tbh, it’s them who have to be more worried if they gain entrance to the US. They’ll have to deal with swarms of Islamophobes and xenophobes who unfortunately form a significant portion of the population. Hell, they may be even killed by gun nuts like all the innocent Muslims murdered post 9/11. Why would they come to the US if it’s so dangerous then? Answer: they are fleeing something worse, and war does not provide you with much choices - especially if you are an innocent civilian.
@doschicos:
Oh yes, I know that. Discrimination is rampant. I do believe that numbers, right now, indicate inequality’s worse in the US, but at least here racism and sexism have been relegated to dark corners. One film I saw when I was over there was La vie en Grand, which is about two French African boys, probably 11 and 13, living in the ghetto. One is not interested in school and weighted down by being far away from his siblings and father, the other one is bright and loves school. The drug dealers make their own rules in the street. (The school’s pretty preserved from it). The only way they can think of reaching their goals, which are, respectively, to become the president of the French republic, and to become an engineer, is to sell drugs. It’s not a sad film at all but the context is terribly sad because these two bright kids can’t imagine a way out except by making money illegally.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ywzftP3cQQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSQFALw30Es
“Diversity” is seen as something negative in France. It always takes me aback. As in, some French students who apply to US colleges can’t comprehend the question that some colleges ask about diversity. Many, as a reflex, write about assimilation, or simply try to avoid any college that asks the question, assuming it means the college’s bad (I’m not kidding, alas). So, yes, not all is good in France for minorities.
But I’d still not sure what the poster who wrote about ‘what happened in Europe over the past decades’ and how ‘we shouldn’t sentence our children’ to that. If anything, things are a bit better now than they were before in terms of discrimination, although I don’t have much of a time frame for comparison.
It isn’t true for any muslim. I don’t recall any Sunni doctrine that says you can kill and rape with impunity. ISIS are a breed of their own - regardless of whatever religious text they quote. I wouldn’t consider them Christian if they waved the bible under my nose. @Lergnom ISIS has killed more Muslims than any other group. Fact. To think that all Sunnis have to do to stay safe is “follow the rules” is beyond obtuse. This selective view on things helps nobody.
You do know that Assad’s people belong to what’s essentially a different religion from the Isis people? That the former are Alawite Shia of the “Twelver School,” and the latter are Sunni who are even more extreme than the Wahhabi school? And that in any event Assad’s people haven’t even really been fighting Isis nearly as much as other rebel groups (not to mention killing huge numbers of civilians, just like his father used to do)? And where in the world do you get the idea that Assad and his people “hate our societies even more” than they do other Muslim groups? What? They’re known as relatively secularist. Bashar wears suits, and is a London-educated ophthalmologist married to an investment banker. So I don’t think what you’re saying makes too much sense.
@Dadof3: hm, let’s not bring rape into this. Not with what’s been going on in the US for decades.
As for the over represented group most likely to shoot me, statistically, it’s a white male in his 20s, who considers himself Christian.
The odds of being killed by a refugee or someone who doesn’t fit the above profile (ie., Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Atheist, women, older people) are even more minuscule than those of being killed by aforementioned white guy who considers himself Christian. None of this changes anything about my life. If fear seizes me and makes me act irrational such as not getting aboard a plane (it might be highjacked), in a car (car crash), in a school (school shootings)… that’s not life. I’m all in favor of the Je suis/En terrasse movement. 
As for the culture refugees, the currently dead French/Belgian terrorists, and ISIS are supposed to share, no they’ve not been raised in the same way and with the same influences at all.
First, ISIS is a relatively recent ideological and military construct, so that no one’s been “raised” in it. It’s a death cult that controls a territory. It is NOT a culture. I liked when President Hollande said “This is not a clash of civilizations, because they aren’t one.” Terrorism isn’t a civilization. Terrorism isn’t a religion.
(The references to excellent, informative articles about Daesh have already been given if you check upthread and want to return to discuss them, but I won’t rehash them here).
Their theology and ideology are not at all the same as those of regular Syrians. In addition, there are several groups of Syrians, who have some cultural common points and some significant differences - none of which are shared by those in ISIS. Furthermore, ISIS is not entirely made of Syrians - there are a lot of people from the entire region, Iraqis, and of course Westerners. And neither ISIS ideology nor Syrian culture can be said to be at all like those in which the Frenchmen and Belgians have been raised. Both cultures are primarily atheist, at the very least strongly secular, with secular schools. The terrorists are said to have radicalized along a well-known path, although typically it includes prison, which here wasn’t the case: drop outs after middle school, petty crime drug dealing, an inflated sense of self worth, facebook/youtube, preachers’ podcasts, finding kindred spirits to justify every criminal endeavor, encouraging each other to go to “Sham” where it’s Paradise, etc, etc. So they built their new, radical self in opposition to the culture in which they’d grown up. In short, there is no cultural commonality between Isis and either regular Syrians or regular French or Belgian people.
I cannot speak for the person who posted than line but I will gladly add a couple of my own. To offer a bit of perspective, the street where the terrorist probably planned the attacks in Paris was part of my childhood playground. Most of the area was still populated by middle class with quite some range from high to low. Not every street was attractive but many were with parks and stately homes. By the time I left for an overseas adventure, the municipalities of Anderlecht and Molenbeek had seen a profound change in population during the Jewish and established Belgian community moved out to be replaced by the growing immigrants’ families. In the early stages, they were mostly Italians, Spanish, and Turks. Over time, the population changed again with more and more Muslims. Add two or three decades and the cities are not recognizable and now form one of the famous “no zones” that CNN was forced to pretend do not exist.
In close to 50 years, through waves of immigrants, a great and wonderful place has been transformed a hotbed for radical Islamism. The first immigrants who preached integration and assimilation have been replaced by hordes of young minds who actively support the messages of ISIS/ISIL and other lunatics.
The reason why this happened are multiples and there are many culprits who should shoulder the blame. The reality, however, is inescapable and tangible. The city has lost its soul and almost every ounce of western civilization and it has not been replaced by a community in which there is any quality of life. Just danger, desolation, and a hopeless quagmire.
The US can and should learn from this. It starts slowly but never ends. It starts with cries for more tolerance, the waiving of laws precluding certain clothing elements, and from there it turns in hostility or outright terrorism.
That is the story of Brussels and one that most tourists marveling at the Grand Place will never see. And a story that all the people who are determined to find excuses or push for more “bleeding hearts” policies will never acknowledge. Belgium failed its people and failed its peaceful immigrants by leaning too heavily on liberal policies.
Other than perhaps a teenager who lived on the same block as I did and whose family I knew personally, I wouldn’t hire a babysitter from anywhere without doing some kind of check. I wonder why you happened to pick Compton? Just a random city, I suppose? I must say your choice doesn’t create much confidence in your assertion that “[f]or crying out loud, race has nothing to do with it”!