Attacks in Paris

Around 160 dead. Another cowardly butchery of the innocents. At times like these we must all take a deep breath and be thoughtful. Please no knee jerk victimisation of yet more innocents.Vive la France!

Very hard to think of a solution to this.

But open boarders is is not the way forward, and that will be a challenge for the European Community.

Whether we like it or not Sweden is leading the way to the dissolution of much that the “ever closer Union” brigade hold dear, and I suspect within  a year or two Britain will be doing the same thing. 

Not liberal or nice. but that is democracy. It does not always produce liberal or politically correct outcomes.

ATB from George

Peace for Paris people

Well said George. Everyone likes to say soft platitudes but no-one wants to say "enough of your intolerance".

So this will generate saturation media coverage and invoke unwarranted fear and paranoia in the general population, thus perfectly achieving the aims of the cowardly sub-humans who perpetrated this atrocity. Don't give them the oxygen.

Had a member of my family who was dining in a Paris restaurant last night , lucky for her safe , but still shocked..   Glad she wasnt an Eagles of death Metal fan.

Open borders are the single most effective mechanism for reducing global income inequality. That people are intolerant of each other is a regrettable, but completely separate issue. The occassional fanatical attacks like this are associated with intolerance, not place of residence. Few, if any social problems are resolved by splitting people into ever-smaller tribes.

Very true!

Open boarders and the free movement of its citizens and goods within is the fundamental premiss of what constitutes the EU. It is the EU boarders that need controlling. But aren't you mixing up things here George? This is a case of the French government trying to prevent terrorists from leaving France. 

Sweden has introduced temporary controls at its boarders because it can no longer cope with the influx of asylum seekers. This is a very unique situation and ultimately a result of the EU having failed to address the issue appropriately for the past few years.

No it doesn't. But then again we haven't reached the end of the road yet. Or the end of the political process as it were in this case. 

There is still hope.

ATB

tp

How about not bombing the s**t out of their countries?  Libya, Yemen, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Pakistan, Syria - every last one of them a total disaster area post US led intervention.

This in no way is to be construed as excusing or justifying what these human vermin have done.  But I really doubt a lot of this would be going on were it not for interventionist foreign policy.

To paraphrase George Takei, "Seek freedom not just from guns and bombs, but also from hatred and fear".

Horrible events, in the middle of a city many of us know, on a Friday night and people out enjoying themselves.

This follows an airliner over Sinai, bombings in Beirut and of course uncounted dead in Syria in the last few weeks.

People who know me, and my views expressed on here many times before, will not be surprised that what I say now is full of anger.

'We' chose to destabilise a region with trumped up allegations of WMD and on the basis of a 'war on terror' that has as much wit as the 'war on drugs'. In so doing we created a powder keg of factional conflict and a power vacuum. We killed something like 450,000 people in Iraq, and subsequently about 30,00 civilians in Afghanistan. These are nameless and uncounted by us. They won't have public funerals or memorial services, but they are not un-mourned in their own countries, and they leave widows, orphans and families. They leave fractured societies and a generation of disenchantment and bitterness. How can we be surprised that ISIS and other groups have flourished?

Only when the real powers of this world, and of this region in particular, combine to approach the problem at root cause will we achieve anything. Armed security on street corners and concert halls will solve nothing, and fear is victory for terrorists.

I'm sad this morning, but I'm angry and ashamed as I have been all along that my country went to war in Irag and failed, along with so many others, to sit down after 9/11 and ask the question 'why?' as opposed to 'who?'.

Will we learn any lessons; well I don't bet on it. I'm sure the bombers and drones are just as active today as they were yesterday.

Bruce

Terrible, just terrible. Will have a big impact on security. Just imagine what it would do if you have to consider going to a big event that this might happen to you (I am going today to a big Chrismas Market and will not think about such a thing). But this would change when something would happen in Germany.

And it's insane to think that certain people have the feeling that they can kill others just because they have a mission in their heads.

There is no end of the road to be had, humanity is a continual struggle in co-existence. Human history is replete with pivotal events of warfare the causes being religious and cultural differences. To think there can be some end seems naïve or arrogant and the notion of closing borders would only seem to fuel the discord.

@Bruce Woodhouse,

I appreciate your use of the terms "us" and "we" as political finger pointing does no good. Learn from the past, sure, but move forward in the best manner.

It is horrible.

Unfortunately, too, power and control are a ratchet mechanism: once a turn on limits is given, there's usually no going back.

I expect more and more restrictions. We'll all become slaves of security. I am very sorry for the French, but for us all too.

I agree.

This is really awful and a disaster for the french people. There will undoubtedly be revenge attacks against the vast majority of peaceful muslim citizens, which unfortunately is the very thing these murdering swine seek to achieve, hoping to create more extremism.

One factor that seems to have been forgotten in all this, is that to these murderous groups the main conflict isn't with the west it's Shia vs. Sunni.  Western intervention is a side issue; there is nothing we can do to resolve the conflict.  To think that the west is the key factor is western arrogance.

This doesn't just trace back to the first Iraq war (even though that was an appallingly misguided act).

It doesn't just trace back to the rise of a Shia state in Iran.

It doesn't just trace back to the formation of the modern state of Isreal.

It goes back more than 1000 years to a religious schism in what became a militaristic people who couldn't separate religion from politics, and still can't.

Have looked around the web this morning, I find this thread on the Naim forum commendably wise and compassionate - I stress - IMHO.

And, as ever, Bruce's words are particularly wise.

Such a varied community this is - ranging from this example of cool reasoning to the near international incident when a piece of wire was omitted from an amplifier box.

Donuk, drab downtown York.

'Another cowardly butchery of the innocents' - yes, indeed. A vile and heinous attack. But it has yet to reach anywhere near the numbers killed in Iraq or in Palestine. This is payback. It will continue. As for finding a solution, well its a bit late for that but we could start by kicking the Israelis out of the occupied territories. We could stop meddling and interfering and destabilising the Middle East. If 160 Palestinians died as a result of illegal Israeli bombing of Gaza it would be forgotten in a week. The hypocrisy of the West is truly jaw droppingly vast.

Muslims and minorities of all faiths and cultures could go some way to defusing that by making their voices of condemnation for the atrocities heard above that of Le Pen. Unfortunately certain groups are only loudly heard from when the normal laws and customs of a country are 'a provocation' to their personal belief systems, like drawing a cartoon. This is not a cartoon.

How about an acknowledgement of the role of militant Islam? 

The problem with this handwringing "Oh it's all our fault" approach is that it utterly fails to acknowledge the fact that the danger presented to the civilised world by Islamic militancy dates back about 15 centuries, long before wicked Western interventions. Back in the 1980s - long before Bush, Blair, Gulf War I and II, etc Muslim extremists were murdering people because someone wrote a book they didn't like. So-called "mainstream" Muslims were burning copies of said book in the streets while their more vocal co-religionists were calling for the author's death.

Even in its so-called "moderate" forms Islam is an expansionist, aggressive doctrine that seeks to conquer, dominate and subjugate. In its extremist form it is the most toxic and dangerous ideology since Nazism.

I'm afraid that anyone who thinks that the atrocities would stop if "we" only stopped doing drone attacks and drawing cartoons of the "prophet" is seriously deluded.

ISIL or whatever they are called this week would like to establish a worldwide caliphate based on their contemptible dark age "morality". Of course, they will not succeed but do not underestimate their and their supporters' abilities to spread death and mayhem.

Every last ISIL fighter and leader must be killed, and their supporters and funders exposed and punished.

I'm calling BS on that Kevin - and not because i don't acknowledge the existence of militant and extremist Islam.  And I do not suggest that the world would be Shangri-La were the west (and primarily the USA) not engaging in their particular brand of interventionist foreign policy.  But I think the whole Shia vs Sunni thing would be a much more "local" event.  And I feel pretty safe in betting that if there was no oil in the region we wouldn't care a wit what was going on there.

The US (and its vassals) are seen as propping up Israel, supplying them unofficially with nukes (and they do not sign on the the nuclear treaties because they don't officially have them), we bend over backwards to accommodate the Suadis despite a HORRIBLE human rights record (which proves that "human rights" has NOTHING to do with our foreign policy), and we continue to destabilize the region ad nauseam.  We create vacuums and then sectarian chaos ensues.  We annihilate countries and then wonder why there are streams of refugees that want to leave them.

And when it inevitably goes wrong, we do double down on the same inflammatory, losing strategy.  This shite for brains in the White House gloats over killing Jihadi John and just the day before these attacks in an  interview with George Stephanopoulos pronounced that ISIL was "contained."  (And make no mistake, his predecessor was also a shite for brains, lest I be accused of being a damn republican.)

It has been so wrong for so long that there is no graceful exit, so as someone above indicated there doesn't appear to be an easy answer.  And no one can say what that answer could be with certainty, but you know what they say about doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result...

I'm calling BS on that Doc. I agree with you about the vile Saudi regime, and to some (small) degree about Israel, but you have not given us your outline for your "winning" strategy. How do you deal with the problem, apart from blaming the West?

It is clear that bungled Western intervention and the ongoing sore that is Israel-Palestine has obviously provided an effective recruiting officer for jihadism but, regardless of the causes, fascism is fascism is fascism. Western intervention provided the growth medium for ISIL and other Islamist strands (just as the Versailles settlement, establishment complacency and the Great Depression provided the medium for Nazism to grow), but the fact is that ISIS is a creation of the so-called "religion of peace", not the West; similarly, Nazism is a product of totalitarian nationalism, racism and extreme state socialism, not the Allies post the Great War.

If history teaches us anything, it tells us that expansionist fascist barbarism (eg Nazis and Islamism) must be met with unyielding resistance (ie force).

Perhaps as an American you do not understand that, but here in Europe, and in Britain especially, we do, having learned a very hard lesson back in the 1930s and 40s.

On the subject of Jihadi John, how else would you deal with that particularly nasty piece of work? Give that nice Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi a call and ask if he minds awfully handing over JJ so that we can try him? Or perhaps we could enter ISIL territory and grab him ourselves (but I expect you oppose any sorts of "boots on the ground" strategy). Or perhaps we could have just let him carry on. 

At least now that he's dead, he can't saw off the heads off any more aid workers or journalists. For most people I suspect that this will be good enough. He may not have been of much strategic or military value to ISIS  but he was certainly a powerful propaganda tool (emphasis on tool, of course)

Agree with DrMark here on the need to get out of the Middle East - there's no benefit to the United States, strategic or otherwise, at this point.

To that end-leave the Saudis and the Emirates to fend for themselves (read: let them struggle with transforming their economies from theocratic, 20th-century petrogarchies into something more useful for successive generations), stop using regime change as a diplomatic tool(!) worldwide and, frankly, stop pandering to the theo-conservatives here at home.

The money that is rumored to flow from the Gulf states to ISIS/ISIL will run out (some say that it is already doing so); Iran is changing from the inside, and the markets to the immediate east (read: Pakistan & India) need their attention, more so than misguided attempts to de-stabilize their neighbors.

That'd be a pretty good start; we've got enough problems here at home (a useless drug war, a decaying educational system and crumbling infrastructure) that, frankly, do not match our self-perception of the United States as a country that has it together. Rant over.

Hmm, an interesting example of an interventionist policy...

Take a set of small states where Jewish and Christian populations co-exist peacefully until a foreign army invades and forces a new foreign culture on the population at the point of the sword, forcibly dividing the population and expelling one group (join us, leave or die).

...And the dates about which I'm writing are 635 - 639.

There's nothing new under the sun.