Paris Shootings and Explosions Kill Over 100, Police Say | Hacker News Reader

Paris Shootings and Explosions Kill Over 100, Police Say

nytimes.com

623 pointsfranzb624 comments

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I live in Paris and was spending the night in the middle of the hot zone. I was a few hundred meters from the Bataclan but fortunately the area I was in was spared. I tried to get a Uber but they were unavailable, "State of emergency, please stay home", the app said. I took a city bike home, rode about 10kms and barely saw anyone in the streets all the way home. It was really, really weird. I'm awfully sad that people can be proud of having killed a hundred innocents. I'm not afraid, I'm just terribly sad. Please stop this pointless killing.

You are trying to rationalize with people who are irrational. They don't reconcile. It sucks. It's depressing.

Terrorism is usually a rational act. It is terrible, but it has political goals. This, for instance, may be aimed at ending the European involvement in Syria and their taking in refugees.

Well, this one reeks of "revenge killing". The airstrikes must be taking their toll.

> aimed at ending the European involvement in Syria

I would be quite surprised if the EU decided against further intervention by this. If anything, I would expect them to intervene more.

They should do neither and simply carry on with the plans they had to date. Any reaction beyond police action to find out what the chain of command is and then targeting those individuals specifically is playing into their hands.

This presumes that playing into their hands would actually bring forth enough support to rebuff the reaction. If forces overwhelmingly squash the terrorist organization, then it doesn't matter if it plays into said organization's hands.

This isn't a game won by winning a debate. When one side can be essentially removed from the field, that is an option, even if the side being removed wanted that line of strategy to unfold. Controlling the plays doesn't mean you win the game.

Unbeknownst to me, I have a proclivity for alcoholism. I am libertarian during a prohibition and work to remove limitations on what, when, where, and how I imbibe. I am successful in deregulating alcohol... then I become alcoholic and die from liver failure... I WIN!

> This presumes that playing into their hands would actually bring forth enough support to rebuff the reaction. If forces overwhelmingly squash the terrorist organization, then it doesn't matter if it plays into said organization's hands.

That is true as far as it goes, but the fundamental problem is not IS, nor Al-Qaeda, nor any single terrorist group out there, nor even all terrorist groups taken together. It's the extremist ideology that appeals to young, angry men across the Muslim world. Taking out Al-Qaeda in 2001 didn't have any effect in the long term. Going to war with Iraq in 2003 actively made the problem worse. Killing bin Laden in 2011 didn't really do anything one way or the other. If the West goes in now, and (figuratively) nukes Syria, then why would we think that will solve the problem, when it never has before?

If you want to win this like you win a war, by killing your way to victory, then you have to kill not just everyone who's currently carrying a gun, but everyone who may pick up a gun as a reaction to that killing, and everyone who may pick one up as a reaction to killing them, and so forth. That kind of total war is immoral, in my view.

Our approach to defusing this threat should not be focused on killing individuals, but on removing the motivations they have for fighting us in the first place, without judging whether, in our view, they are valid or not. The fact that they have them, right or wrong, is all that matters. I don't know what will achieve that, but after responding to over 30 years of Islamic violence with force and force alone, and failing to really have much impact, we should recognize that a change in strategy is required.

The EU does not have a common defense policy. A conventional union always has a common defense policy, but may have internally divergent economic policies, so the "U" in EU is misleading in that regard. Currently France and Britain are the only EU countries engaged in the conflict, with Turkey being a loose EU affiliate also in the conflict.

NL is involved as well but on a smaller scale.

It is only "rational" within an irrational construct, such as extreme religious devotion.

No. It can be rational in the context of anti-colonialism and sovereignist ideology and historical revanchism, as well as many other not at all irrational ideologies. It might or might not be effective, depending on the specific political goals in question. It is not, in general, about religion per se, except in so much as religion is part of group identity (in a similar vein as say, nationalism).

But that is not the point. Targeting civilians for political purposes is not an act of insanity, but it is an unacceptable means, no matter the ends.

(Not saying that the ends are good in this case, nor the opposite. It just really doesn't matter.)

You really think that the sincere belief that you will spend an eternity in heaven and secure a place in heaven for 70 family members of your choosing and earn the love of God has nothing to do with it? It's hard for people who are not religious fundamentalists to understand that some people really believe this with as much certainty as you and I believe that the sun will rise tomorrow. This belief is precisely why so many of these attacks are suicide attacks. Ask yourself why so many suicide bombers? Why blow yourself up when you can make a bomb and then another and another? Mohamed Merah answers this question: "We love death more than the infidel loves life". To these people death is not death. This life is just a test, a test that you can ace by blowing yourself up, death is not the end but the beginning of the real and infinitely long life.

No doubt there are other factors involved, but to deny this key enabling factor which makes suicide terrorism an eminently rational thing to do is laughable and makes you blind to an important and maybe even the most important strategy against religious terrorism: education that sheds doubt on the literal interpretation of holy books. When you have even 1% of doubt that this is what God wants you to do, you may not be so inclined to blow yourself up.

I'm fully aware that this is a very unpopular observation to make, but ask yourself not whether it would be nice if this were false, but whether it is actually true or false. Wishful thinking does not get us anywhere.

> Why blow yourself up when you can make a bomb and then another and another?

To avoid having to endure the consequences of your own actions. For people with nothing to lose, suicide attacks are actually the most risk-averse choice: regardless of the possible existence of an afterworld, you're certain to escape punishment in this world. Look at Columbine-style attacks - no religion there, just semi-rational choices.

People don't blow themselves up because a book or a preacher tells them so; they do it because they are fed up with living shitty lives (either in material or spiritual terms). That is what education should bring them: the consciousness that there is always something worth living for. At that point, whether god exists or not, it doesn't matter.

This is what many people think, but it is demonstrably false. Most terrorists are highly educated and some are rich. The terrorists involved in 9/11 all had university degrees, for example, and some of them from western universities. These are not people who would be committing suicide anyway out of depression caused by miserable circumstances.

Frankly, I suspect that at least part of this comes from the aversion of highly educated and rich people to the idea that somebody much like them in those respects could do such a thing, and that it must be a poor lowly educated person doing it.

I know very well what you mention, but you're not reading what I wrote: "either in material or spiritual terms". Well-educated people are the first to know that society is full of lies and deceit, and without some spiritual rooting (be it familial love or something else), they are at high risk of being depressed but functional individuals. Alienation is a very powerful force. We used to say that only the rich can worry about being sad.

My second statement is coherent with this view: what education should give people is such a rooting. This is not necessarily what it does currently give them. In fact, a lot of academic tracks do their best to kill off any ounce of sentimentalism in one's heart. If it's really "all about data", killing a few hundreds "for the greater good of billions" doesn't look like such a terrible choice. This is something we really should keep in mind.

I'm not sure what your stance is in that case. I certainly agree with you that these people are spiritually maladjusted. They way I see it there are two competing theories. One is that terrorism is mainly the result of economic and political grievances against the west and already present psychological disorders. The other is that in addition to economic and political grievances, religion and theological grievances play a major role, and that these people aren't crazy people but people who have become convinced of a crazy idea. The former is the mainstream left wing theory, and while I am generally sympathetic to the left, this theory simply does not fit the data.

If true we would expect terrorists to be more lowly educated and poor people who mainly come from countries that have suffered under the west. We would expect these to be people who hate life, not people who love death. We would expect terrorism to be weakly or not at all correlated to religion. We would expect that the terrorists are not explicitly telling us that they're doing it because of religious dogma. We would expect terrorist groups to be fighting against the west, and not mass murdering Yazidi's for example, who have absolutely nothing to do with what happens in the world. Of all western countries, we would not expect these attacks to be against France so many times. Why have previous attacks and outrages focused on cartoonists? I could go on and on. What we actually observe is the opposite.

All of this is explained perfectly well by the second theory.

The two are nonexclusive. If you are a disaffected/disenfranchised third-generation Algerian immigrant, you have a predisposition to pick a fight with the old colonial power, and you just need an excuse. Same if you come from Syria or Egypt and are well-educated; you have no idea of the amount of propaganda and West-blaming people in these countries grew up with for generations, because of things like the never-ending problem with Israel/Palestine, the Iranian coup against Mossadiq, the Iran/Iraq war and all the other conflicts "we" had an active role in. In the '70s, a lot of violent action was justified with marxism or fascism; today they can be justified with wahabism. If a particular religion was so magic, we would have had "islamic" suicide bombers for 5 centuries, and we just hadn't. You can't make chocolate cake with just chocolate.

> Of all western countries, we would not expect these attacks to be against France so many times.

And why not? They have been among the most brutal colonial powers, with shocking behaviour in Northern Africa and ongoing active military engagement across Africa -- in large part because of their ideological bent on absolutist superiority of the French republican model. They actively worked to blow up Lybia and actively support anti-islamic forces there. And of course they have now joined the anti-IS bombing campaign, because they hate to be left behind when there is to engage around the Mediterranean Sea. All the while, they have huge swaths of disenfranchised 2nd and 3rd generation-immigrant youth in their midst that they simply don't know what to do with. They are the easiest target after the UK, but unlike Britain they are not an island, their borders are very porous, and their security services are clearly less effective than the Five Eyes axis. On top of that, this: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/14/france-active-p...

Very much so. My guess is if you decide to look at the angry dispossessed young men demographic, you're going to see a group more prone to violence than you would by looking at any racial or religious demographic.

Then why is it the case that virtually all these terrorist attacks come from 1 religion, which coincidentally happens to be the religion whose scripture makes this kind of behaviour rational when interpreted literally?

Because people with certain biases who want to ignore evidence and blame this all on Islam to define "these terrorist attacks" in a way that excludes many similar attacks? We've been averaging about one mass shooting a day in the U.S. There are so many that I'd forgotten about some major recent ones, like the Umpqua Community College Shooting just a month ago.

These usually get planned well in advance by some very sick people who are trying to kill as many people as they can and go out in a blaze of glory. Sure, the existence of opportunistic terrorists networks that get these people to coordinate their attacks and stamp a ideology on them tends to mean that the one day body count is higher for a particular incident. Still, the body count per attacker is often comparable, it's just that the attacks happen on the same day instead of a few weeks apart.

But yeah, if we ignore the non-Muslims who do things like this we can say it's all the fault of Muslims.

There is a difference between a lone mass shooting and a terrorist attack coordinated by a government. It goes without saying that this is not the fault of Muslims in general. It's the fault of some Muslims, in this case IS.

I suppose, in the same way that Dylan Roof is the fault of some Conservatives, or some Southerners, or some Americans, etc. Yes, the existence of terrorist organizations that make use of these lost angry men means that in a minority of these cases a group can tell them to attack on the same day rather than weeks apart, and means they can stamp an ideology on them, like I said. So yes, there is a difference, just as there is a difference between the shooting that are done by a couple of friends (like Columbine) and the ones done by a lone wolf (VTech).

Still, people don't find it inappropriate to bring up Columbine when they talk about VTech or Aurora. When people try very hard to exclude all the other mass attacks and single out only the ones connected to Islam in situations like this speaks more to their personal biases than anything else.

>You really think that the sincere belief that you will spend an eternity in heaven and secure a place in heaven for 70 family members of your choosing and earn the love of God has nothing to do with it? (...) and makes you blind to an important and maybe even the most important strategy against religious terrorism: education that sheds doubt on the literal interpretation of holy books.

That's a caricature. A lot of the perpetrators, like in 9/11, are highly educated and even westernized people, not some backwater goat herders believing such BS.

They could be attracted to those tactics as a mean of compensating for personal issues etc (same way weirdos shoots up a school or a cinema elsewhere), but the political element is involved too.

The fundamendalist is not someone who believes naively such things (most devout village folks are peaceful and pragmatic and could not care less), but rather someone who "goes back" into believing such things (and even has self-doubt he tries to shake by action etc).

> That's a caricature. A lot of the perpetrators, like in 9/11, are highly educated and even westernized people, not some backwater goat herders believing such BS.

I am fully aware of this, I said so in other comment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10564189 The mistake you are making here is the idea that otherwise intelligent and educated people cannot believe crazy things. Just look at the Christian nutjobs.

Quite a fraction of suicide attackers were blackmailed into the act.

Do you have a reference for this?

It might be not about political goals:

http://www.gwern.net/Terrorism%20is%20not%20Effective

Gwern's analysis looks hopelessly naive in the face of modern ISIS-related acts; and ignores the difference between USA, where poison Tylenol causes a huge response, and China where people expect bad fake drugs with a certain frequency.

And he ignores that over-complicated (in gwern's view) cost over a trillion dollars in US response, from NSA to TSA to Afghan and Iraq war.

I've tried to take that analysis seriously when people have linked it before, but to me it just doesn't seem very relevant to the real world. I'm curious what you mean when you say that it's not about political goals and how that is supported?

Terrorists are by definition extremists. They want to upset the status quo to force people to take sides and create a situation where they feel they, who are righteous, have a better chance of being successful or at least relevant. Whether that is a race war, holy war or revolution. The killing itself isn't particularly relevant until your fighting over land and then normally in form of ethnic cleansing.

The analysis you linked misses a the point of e.g. the terrorist plot in Norway. It's wasn't just about killing people, he deliberately tried to effect politics by killing a generation of people he disagreed with. He also believed that it was part of and going to lead to a larger conflict.

That link gets way too much airtime. As much as I usually like Gwerns analysis this one seems in spite of the mountain of citations to miss the point entirely.

> Which will come first, flying cars and vacations to Mars, or a simple acknowledgment that beliefs guide behavior and that certain religious ideas—jihad, martyrdom, blasphemy, apostasy—reliably lead to oppression and murder? It may be true that no faith teaches people to massacre innocents exactly—but innocence, as the President surely knows, is in the eye of the beholder. Are apostates “innocent”? Blasphemers? Polytheists? Islam has the answer, and the answer is “no.”

http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/sleepwalking-toward-armag...

A lot of the time, terrorism is carried out by irrational people, but orchestrated by slightly more rational people. The people willing to risk their lives are not the same people that are convincing others to risk their lives. After all, if people like Sayyid Qutb actually risked his life, he wouldn't be able to convince other idiots to die.

Egyptian here, actually Qutb risked his life and lost it for his "cause" and there's a lot of controversy surrounding this issue and it's a recurrent hot topic in political discussions here that his unlawful detention by the military authorities and the subsequent execution might have resulted in his radicalization and him espousing more extremist views of jihadism and political violence to effect social change in the nation because he was very aware of the fact at the time that he would be executed at any point so he had maybe a "fuck it" moment and decided to screw the world he would depart involuntarily by leaving his vile and despicable writing behind as a vendetta

thanks for the insight - is there good further reading on this topic? I'm really only familiar with it from Adam Curtis' docs

The data on terrorist attacks does not support this conclusion. Terrorism is rarely effective in its political goals and studies have concluded that it is not a rational or cost effective strategy.

That depends on what the goal is. My personal belief is that terrorist acts like these are a recruiting tool and a way to split society further enhancing opportunities to recruit and as such they can be effective if the counterparty reacts as they are supposed to do.

Agreed, reputation is critical for a terrorist organization, just like how gang members brag about how "hardcore" they are because the shot someone.

Citation needed. The US and Israel are 2 rather successful examples of countries born out of terrorism.

Terrorism (attackif civilians to upset people) or asymmetric warfare against a ruling power apparatus?

An insurrection might include some terrorism but they also include a swell and majority of guerrilla foot soldiers whose purpose is to bring their agenda to a close. They don't just go about rampaging and killing without strategy.

If you're referring to attacks against Britain I don't recall any cases of Americans or Israelis randomly killing civilians in the UK.

I don't see any parallel whatsoever to the events of today.

No one can predict the outcome of today's events so by definition they are irrational. I would bet that no good would come out of this to anyone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_David_Hotel_bombing

Did you even read this before hitting the reply button? No parallels whatsoever.

- The King David hotel is in Jerusalem. Not in the UK.

- Warnings were given before the explosion.

- The hotel was housing the occupying British government, military and police. This isn't blindly targeting civilians in an attempt to terrorize the population.

There are a lot more details that make this very different. This is not to say that the outcome was not terrible in cost of human lives or that the perpetrators aren't responsible. It's just very different.

From the article: "American author Thurston Clarke's analysis of the bombing gave timings for calls and for the explosion, which he said took place at 12:37. He stated that as part of the Irgun plan, a sixteen-year-old recruit, Adina Hay (alias Tehia), was to make three warning calls before the attack. At 12:22 the first call was made, in both Hebrew and English, to a telephone operator on the hotel's switchboard (the Secretariat and the military each had their own, separate, telephone exchanges). It was ignored.[5] At 12:27, the second warning call was made to the French Consulate adjacent to the hotel to the north-east. This second call was taken seriously, and staff went through the building opening windows and closing curtains to lessen the impact of the blast. At 12:31 a third and final warning call to the Palestine Post newspaper was made. The telephone operator called the Palestine Police CID to report the message. She then called the hotel switchboard. The hotel operator reported the threat to one of the hotel managers. This warning resulted in the discovery of the milk cans in the basement, but by then it was too late.[5]"

...

"Security analyst Bruce Hoffman has written that the hotel "housed the nerve centre of British rule in Palestine".[13]"

...

Security analyst Bruce Hoffman wrote of the bombing in his book Inside Terrorism that: "Unlike many terrorist groups today, the Irgun's strategy was not deliberately to target or wantonly harm civilians. At the same time, though, the claim of Begin and other apologists that warnings were issued cannot absolve either the group or its commander for the ninety-one people killed and forty-five others injured ... Indeed, whatever nonlethal intentions the Irgun might or might not have had, the fact remains that a tragedy of almost unparalleled magnitude was inflicted ... so that to this day the bombing remains one of the world's single most lethal terrorist incidents of the twentieth century."[13]

We don't call it terrorism when it's effective, we retroactively apply terms like "revolution" and "war of independence" instead.

It used to be rational, rather. The classic terrorists of the '70s wanted "a lot of people talking but not a lot of people dead" -- and also wanted to survive the experience. The new breed of terrorism in the '80s and '90s was different from those; the IRA, the PLO, and various state-sponsored terrorists in that period had/have more in common with each other, despite their obvious differences, than any have with al-Qaida and ISIS, which aim for suicide missions with high body counts.

This particular operation is either ISIS-conducted or ISIS-oriented vigilanteism; whichever it is, backing down in Syria will only embolden them. (Or rather, embolden those like them; I don't imagine that very many of the specific attackers here are going to have particularly many opportunities to do this again in the future.)

ISIS is specifically out for either world empire or apocalyptic defeat (see http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isi... ); tactical concessions will work about as well as they did with the Nazis and the Communists -- or even less well than that, since neither Naziism nor Communism believed that success was a sign that Divine Providence was smiling on them.

> ISIS is specifically out for either world empire or apocalyptic defeat

Which is why (in my understanding) ISIS does not do attacks on foreign soil. Their idea is to re-establish a caliphate (ei Islamic empire, which existed from around the time of Mohamed for centuries). ISIS would probably be okay with those that cannot join the jihad in Syria conducting a terrorist attack on their home turf, but would not actively plan one.

All I'm saying is I would not be surprised if this isn't specifically ISIS.

They've inspired a lot of lone-wolf and copycat attacks, though, and I think they endorse the idea that if you can't get to Syria, you can at least kill people at home. I doubt that ISIS' actual government had anything to do with this, but the attackers were clearly thinking of ISIS -- "For Syria!" and all that.

Putting pressure on countries being part of the offensive against them is definitely in their interest, which is why it came to no surprise at all when it turned out that they were behind the attack.

> neither Naziism nor Communism believed that success was a sign that Divine Providence was smiling on them.

You didn't study your history, comrade! Communist orthodoxy believed in a historical inevitability that overlapped very closely with a sort of man-made Divine Providence. The Nazis had their own set of religious and spiritual motivations, their racial destiny and so on.

They differed from Abrahamic religions in the sense that they expected "victory" in this world and in their time, as opposed to vague posthumous compensations and end-of-times prophecies; but they did believe in a "greater power" manifesting itself in their successful deeds.

> backing down in Syria will only embolden them.

That's a false dichotomy. The problems in Syria won't go away with bombs, and it was manifestly stupid for Hollande to join the party willy-nilly, especially after having experienced first-hand the inefficiency of his security apparatus. What is needed is a real agreement between the real power brokers (Turkey, Saudi, Russia, Iran) to cut off the crazies for good. We need hard diplomacy, not hard policies.

> You didn't study your history, comrade! Communist orthodoxy believed in a historical inevitability that overlapped very closely with a sort of man-made Divine Providence. The Nazis had their own set of religious and spiritual motivations, their racial destiny and so on.

> They differed from Abrahamic religions in the sense that they expected "victory" in this world and in their time, as opposed to vague posthumous compensations and end-of-times prophecies; but they did believe in a "greater power" manifesting itself in their successful deeds.

Good point; I forgot about the historical-determinist side of Communism. I'm more familiar with the Nazis, who believed in an empty, Providence-less cosmos that was more or less Lovecraftian (and who accordingly made themselves a pretty convincing Cthulhu) -- see _Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning_ for the details.

> That's a false dichotomy. The problems in Syria won't go away with bombs, and it was manifestly stupid for Hollande to join the party willy-nilly, especially after having experienced first-hand the inefficiency of his security apparatus. What is needed is a real agreement between the real power brokers (Turkey, Saudi, Russia, Iran) to cut off the crazies for good. We need hard diplomacy, not hard policies.

Surely both at once wouldn't hurt. We need concerted ground action to defeat ISIS -- and in particular, we need Turkey to decide once and for all which side they're on -- but I don't think it's a bad idea to present a united front; I _do_ think that it's a bad idea to imagine that making concessions will inspire fewer lone wolves and opportunists, rather than more.

Also, I'm pretty sure Hitler attributed his survival in the face of the assassination attempt in 1944 to his "divine protection" (at least in the propaganda afterwards).

I think it is actually the opposite. They are trying to provoke a christian involvement in Syria so that they can claim it is a cruisade and recruit more fighters in the muslim world. It is usually how terrorism work. IRA or ETA were doing exactly the same.

I think you are correct. And any kind of extra reaction is bonus and will help to further split the French society indirectly enabling further recruitment as well.

If they're trying to provoke Christian involvement in Syria, they've succeeded; Pope Francis has called on the community of nations to restore order in Syria and suppress ISIS, and has stopped just this side of explicitly calling a crusade...

I actually think you're probably right as well – my original post was done before I'd had much time to reflect. Terrorism is usually done to provoke some kind of hardening response, and today in practice that seems to mean trying to further embroil western countries in military conflict in the Middle East.

It has had a 0% success rate of achieving political goals

http://www.gwern.net/Terrorism%20is%20not%20about%20Terror

How much of that is because when terrorists achieve their political goals, we call them revolutionaries, resistance, freedom fighters, and sometimes insurgents. Only unsuccessful terrorists keep that label.

Sometimes, sometimes. Insurrections typically have an obvious oppression they are trying to overcome. Some insurrections have a terrorist arm, but purely terrorist organizations don't have a direct aim other than cause instability. They don't have an end game. So, I think purely terrorist groups tend to not win as terrorists, sometimes they transform in the process to garner more support and subsequently win but not as pure terrorist organizations but will have become more mainstream.

Gwern had a very limited view of "political goals".

Having a logic is not the same as being rational.

All madness has its own logic.

I want a raise so I terrorize my boss until he gives me one is a logic, but it is not a rational approach.

Typically the irrationality is in the axioms, not the reasoning abilities.

>You are trying to rationalize with people who are irrational.

In my opinion, this is the most dangerous statement in this thread. Saying the actions of these people is irrational loses any ability to understand why they're doing what they're doing and how we can stop them. It turns them into a faceless enemy who are doing things because of hate, which is easy and makes my ego feel better, but doesn't really explain their actions or the actions of anyone. Nobody thinks they're the bad guy of their own story.

There is nothing more rational than terrorizing civilians to achieve a goal. It is the logical conclusion of rationality.

They are doing what they are doing because they have interpreted their primary religious text as explicitly instructing them to kill people that don't believe as they do. Killing another human being that poses no threat to you, regardless of what books you like to read or what instructions you believe they contain, is absolutely irrational - regardless of your "goal". Rational people have no way of understanding these actions, nor should they.

Last I heard, they were doing this to avenge their countrymen. In fact, we don't really know all the whos and the whys, we just know the whats. And what happened was a horrible thing that needs to be investigated, pored over, and responded to in a measured, rational way that doesn't become a nationstate-enabled revenge plot.

This is ISIS, at least that's the best guess of most of the experts being quoted in the media (and most rational observers of world news).

When you avenge your countrymen, you avenge by killing the people at fault... not innocent folks enjoying a concert.

Unless you want to do actual damage. In terror attacks, deaths are only collateral, the real damage is the overreaction of the attacked nation. It's an effective thing if you blame a country.

To be fair the US et al has killed many innocent civilians in the Middle East.

It's not intentional but I doubt ISIS sympathisers see the distinction.

> It's not intentional but I doubt ISIS sympathisers see the distinction.

I don't see the distinction either. If you drop a bomb and kill some people that you didn't intend to kill, you're still 100% responsible for those kills.

It is the saddest thing that we have found no better response to terrorism than limiting civil liberties and sending 18 year old boys with guns to foreign countries.

What if all you got is an Ak47 and they have ships, tanks, air fighters and drones in the sky?

Please think what would happen if the tables were turned - your country is invaded by a much bigger nation with a technological advantage. Would you organize a peaceful protest for your enemy to ignore?

No, that's again a refusal to understand why they are doing it. Happy religious people (say, devout Hindus during Diwali) don't go around killing others. There is a lot of "otherness" and segregation in Europe, poverty and war in the countries of origin, and many other factors that radicalise people. Saying that they're doing it because of a book (that they probably didn't even read) is just your own way to turn them into a justifiable target.

> There is a lot of "otherness" and segregation in Europe

There are lots of e.g. Indian, Chinese, South-East Asian, immigrants in Europe. And all over the world. If anything, they look less caucasian than people from Middle East / North Africa, so one would assume them to face even more racism. But they have not produced terrorists.

Rational.. irrational.. I hope you can see that it's a pointless argument. The word "rational" is highly subjective so we shouldn't pretend there's some objective measure of rationality.

* Kill an innocent civilian * Have or perform an abortion * Eat meat * Fight in a war * Drop an atomic bomb on a city * Commit suicide

That's all shit that some people call rational and others call irrational. The truth is that "rational" is a word we choose because it sounds objective and authoritative, but it really means: "something that makes sense to me"

It's important because to start to solve these problems you have to be able to see things from their point of view, you can't really do that if you think they are irrational.

Well you can wonder why did these people act irrationaly? Could these behaviour have been detected? Could they have been helped out of this narrowed point of view of thinking that killing innocent is the right thing to do ? I don't think anyone today hasn't in mind those questions.

But all the while you think they acted irrationally I don't think you will really be able to understand why they did it.

I agree that with asymmetrical warfare resorting to terrorism is rational. What seems irrational is our inability to recognize the struggle of our enemy for what it's worth and our refusal to negotiate. I can't think of an example where negotiations (as in granting that your partner in negotiations is your peer) haven't led to a net positive outcome. To take but one example close to home: The Soviet Union was founded by a terrorist group. The ultimate recognition of the state by western powers and their foreign policy of engagement -- aside from the Cold War era -- was instrumental in bringing the enemy to its knees (whatever the wider repercussions of this outcome).

How about chamberlains negotiations with Hitler?

I understand your point is that direct confrontation at times cannot be avoided. In particular, you may be provoked to defend yourself, as in the Soviet Union entering WWII upon Germany violating the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. I'm of the opinion that only this latter case of agression justifies taking up arms. Any violence by way of preventive action lends itself too easily to abuses, as we see with the so-called war on terrorism. In the context of WWII, it's not at all clear that anything other than collective action of the allies and the Soviet Union could have stopped Germany. And for that, the events had to run their course. One can find fault with indecision on refugees, but not with appeasement efforts.

Killing innocent, helpless people IS irrational. Period

It's irrational if you do it for kicks. It's rational if you expect a strategic advantage for your group/nation-state out of it. Whether it is moral to do is an entirely different discussion.

It's not irrational at all.

If your goal is to terrify a nation in order to pressure it to change its foreign policy then it is quite rational. And there are quite a few examples of this approach actually working.

Well obvioysly to someone irrational every of his action seem rational.

The point is that for a phycologicaly healthy and balanced human being these actions can not be called rational by any stretch of logic

I think you'll find that psychological health has little to do with what people can convince themselves of, or convince themselves to do - i.e. you can't explain away Daesh (or WWII nazis, etc.) with mental illness.

Their actions could absolutely be called rational and logical if you were to accept their premise - which is what I'd argue is irrational.

You don't even need a Godwin point for that. Nobody was calling Air Marshall Harris, well-known for his strategy of carpet-bombing civilians with incendiaries during WWII, "insane" or "irrational". Instead, they gave him a bunch of medals and made him a baronet.

Oh lordy, no wonder this thread got partially shut down. Calling a pack of murdering religious extremists irrational now classifies as the most dangerous thing that can be said about the situation - yikes. Did I invade your safe space?

They did not terrorize citizens, they murdered them in the name of their non-existent god. Life will go on in Paris just as it did in New York. There is no goal other than blood lust and grim spectacle. All because of their nonsense and yes, irrational religion.

Even if the religion's interpretation of Daesh is irrational to a scientific mind, does not negates the fact that there is a rational analysis to explain the plans and strategy of the liders of the movement(terrorist group).

It's not irrational. It's terrible, but it's a conscious and thought out attack on French social order, and a purposeful political statement. Which makes it far worse.

If we didn't need to secure their oil by supporting/deposing despots in the region, and didn't want to provide the Israelis with military/political/financial support then we would not be dealing with any of this carnage.

Their attempts to fight back will only escalate the situation, and the carnage will continue.

Edit: I'm not advocating that we not support Israel. I'm simply stating a hard truth regarding "why they hate us".

Maaaaaaaybe wait until the bodies have cooled before you start searching for a way to blame the Jews? :(

This has nothing to do with blaming the Jews. The reason for all this carnage is obvious and we shouldn't delude ourselves into thinking otherwise.

You're right... but its not the reason, its the excuse.

And a weak one.

Killing civilians doesn't work, and it never has... terrorism never wins... unless your a huge nation like the USA, then it wins...

Obvious? I'm still not following. I can't figure out how somebody goes from, "The US is responsible for the death and suffering of my countrymen." to "Let's kill lots of French civilians."

Israel = nation state. Jews = ethno-religious group.

Completely different.

Distinct concepts? Sure. But completely different is an exaggeration.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_and_Democratic_State

Look, I'm sure Israel wants to be a jewish state, just like Pakistan wants to be an Islamic state and some people want the US to be a Christian state. That doesn't mean much except politics. The fact of the matter is that nation states are very different beasts from ethno-religious groups.

Assuming that the majority of the problem will go away with the end of the support of Israel is very wishful thinking. There are many complex causes of events like this and blaming Israel is pure scapegoating.

I don't think it's "pure scapegoating". It's very much a relevant part to understand the mechanics behind thing like this. The French ban on anti-Isreali demonstrations might very well have helped radicalization and recruitment of young people with non-french backgrounds. So might the last years worsening conflict in Palestine. It shouldn't be a particularly controversial statement to say that there are things that Isreal do, like settlements, that is not good for the security of EU/US.

A lot of "may" and "might" in your reply, and absolutely no facts. The facts are that on ISIS' agenda, fighting Palestinian groups such as Hamas has a higher priority than fighting Israel [1][2], yet people in this thread still manage to "lightly" blame the Israelis, the US, basically anyone except those responsible, as if these people are incapable of independent thought.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/25/world/middleeast/isis-abu-...

[2] http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/07/islamic-st...

> lightly" blame the Israelis, the US, basically anyone except those responsible.

This argument is so stupid.

Everyone is blaming the people responsible. That's a given. The reason people are blaming Israel and the US is because they are indirectly responsible since their actions are used as recruitment tools.

They clearly use scapegoats to push forward with their agenda. Didn't Al-Qaeda declare Jihad on India? That's a scapegoat. India has nothing to do with them, but they've declared Jihad. France has nothing to do with them, but they bombed her citizens.

The US, France, and other European countries I can actually understand, since these countries performed military operations in Iraq and/or Syria, but I'll be very surprised if Israel is used as a recruiting tool. If you have some sources implying this I'm interested in reading them!

Why would you be surprised Israel's persecution of the Palestinians would be a recruiting tool ? It's a major issue for almost every Muslim worldwide. ISIS have absolutely been recruiting on the back of this and I've seen recruits from Australia even mention it when interviewed.

There are plenty of examples: http://www.businessinsider.com.au/the-manual-al-qaeda-and-no... http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/king-of-jordan-isis-used-gaza-...

Interesting articles, thanks!

People who have historically done these kinds of act don't care about IS nor are they devote Muslims. They care about support for Israel because it is seen as a further proof of the west mistreating Muslims. It's not about blaming Israel, it's about western governments doing things like the french did and first celebrating free speech after Charlie Hebdo, just to ban anti-Israeli demonstrations. That's a great recruiting tool to use on young person in a suburb already feeling mistreated by the government.

Are you saying that France is a big supporter of Israel?

So far Israel hasn't featured high on Isis' agenda, and there have been no significant isis attacks on Israeli targets. This is despite the fact that they almost share a border. Neither are Palestinians' rights a top priority for isis. What's left of the the residents of Yarmouk refugee camp will testify to that. In short, Isis is not about israel vs palestine, it's about a deeper social/religious clash of ideas. So maybe before you try to ratonalize isis, you actually read up on their core beliefs. You might find out that this is one murderous organization whose actions you can't blame on israel.

Exactly right. The plight of the Palestinians is a significant recruiting tool but that's all it is. ISIS has no plans to liberate them.

The purpose of ISIS is exactly what they say it is. To establish their own state governed by hard-right Islamic ideals. And the reason they have so much support is largely driven from the perceived persecution of Muslims worldwide e.g. xenophobia in Western countries, drone strikes on innocent civilians etc.

I'm not too worried about ISIS running up against Israel, but I'm very worried about the connection between ISIS and Pakistan.

Is ISIS really linked to Pakistan? I understand there are strong suspicions of connections between Turkey and ISIS (at least pre-bombings). But I hadn't heard of a link with Pakistan until now. I thought Pakistani intelligence was happy coddling the "right" talibans and their home-grown anti-Indian terrorist groups. Do you have any evidence this connection?

http://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2015/05/25/national/nato-say...

And a ton of other news articles on the same subject. Pakistan is super dangerous because it is not all that hard to imagine a number of groups within Pakistan switching allegiance. It is also super dangerous because it is a nuclear power and has a long history of factions inside it trying to pull Pakistan into a much more radical direction.

Didn't know about that. Now, that's not reassuring, considering that they make the child-killing Talibans look like moderates...

Yes. It's a huge problem, and it looks like it is getting larger by the day.

One of the attackers was heard saying it was about Syria. This isn't about Israel at all.

What one of them allegedly shouted, may not be a proof that the whole thing was about Syria.

How do you know? Imagine another 700m people even poorer than they are now. That might breed extremism I'm sure western meddling can explain some of the extremist responses, but I'm not sure it can explain all of them.

Looking at those arrested for joining ISIS here in my home country I don't know how you can say that. They were not poor, they were not excluded or treated in a racist manner at all. And there are very little lines between them, men and women, from different parts of the country, from different backgrounds (semi-rural versus rural, native/non-native, dutch, french, english-speaking, rich/middle class (I'd say no poor people so far), ...).

About the only link between the ISIS members from Western Europe is that they're muslims. Even that is "not 100%" true, since there are also Christians and some Kurds traveling to Syria/Iraq. The examples of that I know went there to help, of course (medically in 2 cases, sort of an amateur doctors without borders, mostly because neither doctors without borders, nor the red cross risk sending people there, but they did have family there). Of course we don't know that's all they did. At least they're claiming to provide medical help, none of the muslims who got caught going to Syria ever even bothered to say they were going for any reason other than fighting, and some saying they went off for killing and some shit about allah.

This is a convicted ISIS terrorist that went off to kill people and came back, talking to a reporter of the public service about how and why : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKg2UsfnxHc

Claiming that people like this are poor or treated badly by the country they were born into is moronic.

Meanwhile the tensions between (sunni) muslims and everybody, literally everybody else are rising ever more. Fights and crimes against the "natives", and every other minority, from the Jews of Antwerp to the Turks of Molenbeek (there is a large (sometimes very) atheist contingent amongst Turks).

We had a suicide bomber in Sweden who blew himself up because he was angry that the government didn't arrest Lars Vilks, an artist who had made some drawings of Muhammed which he thought was offensive (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Vilks_Muhammad_drawings_c...).

Swedish Muslim terrorists also tried to create a massacre at Jyllandsposten because of their drawings (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyllands-Posten_Muhammad_carto...).

These terrorists were born and raised in Sweden, had a better standard of living than me, studied engineering in university and had nothing to complain about. Sweden doesn't attack any countries, we love Palestine and dislike Israel (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/30/sweden-official...) and we shelter 80-100,000 Muslim refugees/year. What should we do exactly? Jail all cartoonists and make it a crime to insult Islam?

Hard to know how people will react here in Sweden. It's an awful tragedy. I suspect it will lead to large changes in how Europe works, probably not for the better. Just as happened post September 11.

Sweden hasn't been as affected as other countries. Instability will always spill over from conflicts, there's nothing special about this era. RAF occupied the West German embassy in Stockholm in 1975 and planned to kidnap a Swedish politician. To some extent it's the same for France, they didn't invade Iraq, created Guantanamo or other things to escalate the conflict yet they are targeted. Maybe because they have a lot of dealings in the Middle East or to please IS supporters or it's just convenient. I'm sure people will speculate a lot about this in the coming months.

The case of a 'connection' for France is much easier to establish than for Sweden.

It is amazing how many in this thread who make declarations about the underlying political causes for this tragedy. As far as I know, no group have yet claimed responsibilities and very little is known about the perpetrators at this point. Theories have been put forth that they are either IS or al-Queda, two groups with quite different history and agenda. And it is still not confirmed it is either. So any attempt at political explanation at this point is pure knee-jerk.

"Paris attacks: Islamic State says killings were response to Syria strikes"

http://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2015/nov/14/paris-terr...

Actually, both Israel and Palestines are a bit befuddled that their eternal little conflict has lost a good deal of importance to the rest of the world in view of the bigger events in the Mideast. Which probably is a good thing, since both parties were acting like the spoilt children of global attention.

> Please stop this pointless killing.

I think by definition this anything but pointless.

What do you mean by this?

Not the gp, but "pointless" killing would be more like someone killing people because they were bored and had nothing better to do. Extremism is all about ideals inspiring action. The hate and retorhic IS the point for them, even if flawed. I think "senseless" killing/violence is a better descriptor.

You totally got it.

Because it's very clear that whoever did this had a point, an objective. Therefore it's not pointless.

I wanted to get back to your comment given that this thread has erupted into a political discussion. I just wish you the best, and I hope that I am correct in saying that a lot of us have our thoughts with you and the rest of you in Paris.

I may be in the middle of an argument about Communism (which is the last thing I was expecting here!), but you and everyone in France are in my prayers.

I stand with you Parisians in solidarity. I have lived and worked in Paris. It is my favorite city in the world. To see the city suffering is so very sad and painful.

In Paris right now. We are in shock. At both the scale and the extremely coordinated nature of the attacks on civilians at multiple locations.

I work near rue Bichat and Le Petit Cambodge, a warm little restaurant in the 10e that my colleagues and I frequent, where people were tonight killed. The Bataclan is a well-known concert venue for metal bands, where I've seen several bands play live. Les Halles is at the center of Paris. Everyone who lives here has close connections to these areas; they took place very close to our everyday lives. Even those of us fortunate enough to know that our friends are safe are reeling from what has happened.

This is the first time since the Second World War that France has declared a state of emergency.

It's too early to come to any conclusions. It's too early to talk about immediate and long-term ramifications, about connections to the refugees, how these events will make France more 'communautariste'. That time will come, but it's too early right now.

It's 2am right now, Paris is mostly awake. We mourn those who lost their lives.

I'm glad you are safe.

Actually, this is not the first time that France has declared a state of emergency.

It was declared in 1984 and 2005. And it was declared in Algeria in the 1950s and 1960s.

The OP meant that this is the first time since WWII that France has closed its borders, which is true.

For those curious about 2005 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_French_riots#State_of_eme...

Edit: I was wrong, the President said the borders were closed, but then clarified that they weren't.

The borders are not closed, it's just a restoration of border controls.

Border controls were already restored in preparation for the Paris conference.

I don't think they closed their borders. They invoked the Schengen protocol for re-instituting border controls. Under Schengen driving from France to Italy or Germany is like driving from Texas to Louisiana. But there is a clause allowing re-instituting border controls under certain conditions, including a national security emergency.

[edit: source France24; http://mashable.com/2015/11/13/france-border-airlines-flight... . Hollande did refer to 'fermeture des frontières' which is confusing https://twitter.com/Elysee/status/665314066106159104 ]

"Live updates: At least 100 dead, multiple sites attacked, France's borders closed"

--LA Times Headline

This was corrected by the President's office, clarifying "closing the borders" as "restoring border controls". As a side note, during Shengen, border police still exists but is allowed to place controls wherever they want. It's not clear to my why controls at the borders is more efficient than intense, random in-land controls.

This is being pedantic, but it's the first enforced curfew since WWII...I think we can cut the GP a break, since the all this stuff is part of the state of emergency/emergency measures.

Peace to all.

Nope. There were another one about 10 years ago when giant riots happened in many suburbs of Paris. And both these attacks and the riots have the same root cause: a lack of integration of France's african immigration.

I know this is a piddlingly minor thing, but I'm seeing it propagated everywhere, and in the spirit of having an informative HN thread:

'Eagles of Death Metal' is not a death metal band.

What they do play is eclectic and hard to label as anything more specific than "rock", but doesn't fit even a very inclusive definition of metal. See: https://www.youtube.com/user/EaglesDeathMetalVEVO/videos

You have thoughts and good wishes coming from NYC and from Texas. I'm in New York; my dad is in Texas.

My dad is a WW2 veteran. He fought on the front lines of Normandy Beach, The Battle of France, and Liege, among other places like the Battle of the Bulge.

He was housed in France by people there who welcomed and supported him. He was assisted by the underground resistance. He has an enormous amount of love for the French people that he helped liberate and who helped liberate themselves.

There was a family that took him in somewhere in the French countryside and fed him the first meal he'd had in weeks that wasn't out of a can. They cooked food, washed his clothes, and gave him some wine and a decent bed to sleep on.

My dad is 96 now, and about 10 years ago the granddaughter of that family tracked him down and sent him a letter telling him how she had always heard about this man who came there to help them. He has treasured this person ever since and stayed in touch with her.

When I talked to him on the phone tonight, he was in tears about what has happened in that country he fought so hard to protect so many years ago and the people who are experiencing what you are going through.

Best wishes to you and yours. From Texas and New York, Vive la France.

I'm neither French nor American nor a particularly emotional person, but your post made me tear up. We Europeans all need to be more thankful for people like your father who fought a war on foreign soil to protect a foreign culture.

I spent a day last year tracking down a war grave in France and was very much impressed with the absolutely incredible state of maintenance of the graves. One cemetery after another that looked absolutely impeccable and as if it had been created last week instead of many decades ago.

Sad. Of course. I know the French people will not be intimidated by this.

I find it sometimes asphyxiating to realize humanity has come so far and yet can devolve into baseline animal behavior at the drop of a feather. We are very far away, as a whole, from being an enlightened species.

Clearly there's a huge problem with a small percentage of people in the Islamic world. It seems obvious the "adults on the planet" could and should have the power to truly unite against this ridiculous minority and stop these lunatics cold. Now. Not in ten years. Now.

I don't know what the solution might be but it certainly isn't anywhere near appeasing or accepting them (the minority is what I am talking about). I do know it is sad and ridiculous that in the year 2015 we have to take off our shoes to get on planes and worry about getting shot in a theater or restaurant.

Haven't we all had enough?

Facebook has enabled their safety check feature:

https://www.facebook.com/safetycheck/paris_terror_attacks/

What is this?

A way to let others know you're safe even if you can't get through to them personally.

Does that have any value beyond reinforcing people's irrational fear of mass deaths? What if you let your family know you're not one of the 100 killed in this attack then die as one of the 600 murdered in France each year by common crime?

I saw this happen with the London bombings. A colleague was almost in tears because her son lived in London and she couldn't contact him on the phone. It turned out he was fine, as approximately everybody else in the city was too.

There are more [geographical] disasters besides terrorist attacks. Tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes, etc. where it's much more likely for broad swathes of people to be affected.

A good friend of mine headed up this project when she was at FB. Natural disasters were exactly what they had in mind. We were in touch earlier this afternoon, and she said this was not a use case they had considered.

I found it valuable to know that my friends and family in Paris are safe, so I'm grateful to FB for doing that. OTH It saddens me and make me wonder what kind of world we live in for FB to release such a feature.

You didn't need Facebook to tell you that. You could have just assumed it was true based on the enormous population of Paris (2 million) and the small number of deaths in this incident (100-200).

It's a matter of geometry and not loading up the phone lines with un-necessary calls.

If 1,000,000 people try to figure out whether the 1 person they know in a city of 2,000,000 are ok within a very short time-frame then the phone network will stop functioning.

A place to post a simple 'I'm ok' will cut down tremendously on the number of calls that will then still need to be made. Unfortunately (1) not everybody has facebook and (2) a 'no show' will now certainly lead to a phonecall when before it would be assumed the person was ok so I'm not sure whether it helps or not but the basic idea is probably a good one. It would be even better if this functionality was available outside of having a facebook account.

You would have 0.01% chance of being wrong. How high would it need to be to warrant, in your eyes, checking if your family members are alive, instead of assuming they are? 0.1%? 1%? 10%? And why?

The world is full of a mean average of people who, believe it or not, do not run statistical analysis before deciding if they should care for their loved ones.

The world is full of real people, with real understandable concerns for their families and friends.

Not only that, but it isn't about the number who were killed anyway. It is about the probability of your friend being in that location at the time of the disaster which is much, much higher.

No one thinks 'I wonder if Jack was killed, he was at that park today'. They think 'I wonder if Jack was in the CBD, he works nearby!'

Statistically validated concerns or not, the very real effect of this part of human nature is that the phone infrastructure goes down and that sucks for everyone.

Did you read the post to which my reply was directed? I'm not addressing these questions to you or to one of the "people who do not run statistical analysis before deciding if they should care for their loved ones". I'm addressing these questions to someone who apparently does run statistical analysis.

Yes my apologies, I didn't realise I was commenting on the child comment. I was intending to reply to the comment you had replied to.

Assuming that humans will behave rationally is, in itself, quite irrational

You answered your question without even realizing it. It is always ok to care about your loved one, and it is always ok to reach back out to let them know you're ok, no matter the medium, no matter the circumstance. It is not irrational, it is human.

A college classmate on 9/11 died in the Windows of the World restaurant. Her death may be a statistic to you, but it is not to me.

I remember trying to call friends in NYC that day, all the exchanges were overloaded. I'm grateful that we now have ways to connect without worrying about possibly preventing emergency calls from going through.

But Facebook only activates Safety Check on special occasions.

Which are extremely likely to be the same occasions where calls/emergency calls are not getting through.

It's still hands down the best feature of the entire product. I don't use Facebook for much, nor do I particularly care for it. But this is an amazing use of social graph and the internet. Whomever at FB came up with the concept, much respect.

Several of my friends, neighbors and family members have died. In none of those cases did I hear about it on the news and call to make sure it wasn't them. If I did that, I'd be doing it daily, because there are always car accidents, murders, suicides, organ failures and cancers in any city every day.

So what I mean is that for a small incident like this, it's usually not reasonable to check on your friends. If they worked in the WTC on 9/11 then their risk is higher so it certainly can be reasonable. Similarly for a tsunami or other disaster with a high death toll.

Good that you can stay so rational under emotional stress.

I would say that in that respect you are probably an outlier, and urge you to remember that facebook is designed for the mean.

The repeated attacks, heavy immigration of refugees...I'm hoping for the best, but I feel like there is a powder keg here. Whether or not it is based in any fact, how this is handled and plays out is a serious concern.

Indeed. I'm sure a bunch of dipshits are already claiming that this is what happens when you allow Muslims into your country, somehow. Gonna wind up hurting a lot more innocent people.

Indeed - and calls for more surveillance will follow the next day. 100% sure. Terrible what happened, to say so. RIP.

Can we at least wait until people start saying these things before we complain? I'm getting tired of seeing a bunch of comments complaining about other people supposedly making arguments of which I see no trace.

There are people making that argument literally in this thread. They're not saying "Muslims" but they're using terms like "culture" as signifiers.

Go reply to them, then. Don't add to the clutter by repeating their arguments as a straw man.

Open twitter. Every tweet on this topic has a bunch of replies complaining about muslims and migrants.

Even the first comment on HackerNews contained an anti-islamic sentiment jabbing at the migrant crisis.

The whole point is to avoid all the nonsense like what you're saying is on Twitter.

That wait was over more than an hour ago, unfortunately.

I suppose I could have been clearer. People are already making those arguments in the comments of practically every news story on the subject.

It is the central dynamic that perpetuates all this violence. Someone from Group A kills dozens or hundreds of Group B, which uses the violence as an excuse to oppress thousands of Group A, which uses the oppression as an excuse to kill more of Group B, and this goes on and on for decades long after everyone's forgotten who "started" it or why, because both sides have convinced themselves, against all logic and evidence of history, that if they just hurt the other guys enough they'll give up and be nice.

It is never going to end until we find a way to break the cycle. The only way I can think of to contribute is to be a voice condemning the violent bigots on both sides, and trying to separate them from the millions of innocents that they claim to represent. It's not much. It probably isn't anything at all. But what else can I do?

A large part of the reason I avoid comments on sites like that, and read HN comments, is precisely to avoid nonsense like this.

You're just perpetuating the nonsense. Yes, you're against it, but your comment is little more than the sentiment you're against, plus a statement of opposition.

"Howdy, lefties? Still arguing for disarming the citizens and letting in imigrants without control?" -- a (translation of a) friend's post on Facebook I just saw.

Yes, they will make those comments. They always do, even if nothing is happening.

Yes, and they should be kept to Facebook and news article comment sections where they belong, not brought preemptively here.

Fair enough.

But it doesn't change the fact that general population will say these things, and it's them, not HN crowd, that shapes policy. I am seriously, true to God, afraid of what's going to happen now - afraid of overreaction of people and governments.

I just want to see intelligent discourse, whatever the topic may be. Preemptively stating some nonsense before the people who believe it can get there hurts discourse just as much as when it's stated for real.

> But it doesn't change the fact that general population will say these things, and it's them, not HN crowd

What about thought leadership? I know its a cliche beaten to death perhaps, but still I think people are able to see a raised level of discourse, than theirs, while they may not always leave their hard positions and immediately agree.

But there's also this balancing act, that we need to do, of not wanting to get into an argument of certain kinds.

> But there's also this balancing act, that we need to do, of not wanting to get into an argument of certain kinds.

Well, ok. It took me a while after I posted my responses to (sort-of) understand where 'mikeash was going. I initially thought he was disputing the existence or possibility of those comments, so me and others were providing proofs and arguments that they in fact exist.

I think now that 'mikeash wanted us to not accidentally fall from quoting some arguments to actually using and discussing them, but I also still think the meta-level issue is something worth thinking about. We all know general population will say stupid things, because GenPop always says stupid things in situations like that, and those calls will drown reasonable public discussion and they will shape public policy - so it is worth asking, what to do about it? How to prevent this situation from spiralling out of control?

I'm sure I was deeply unclear, since I was just venting my annoyance through sarcasm.

You raise a good point, though. I would ask, where do you have reasonable public discussions? I want to see reasonable discussions here, but it's purely selfish, and I don't think it matters much in the bigger picture. Popular media is full of idiots, because they're pandering to the loudest idiots in the population. What alternative venues could there be?

What do people think the refugees were running away from? Exactly these people.

I think a major problem is that even they can't know who among them - in the big groups of refugees making the journey - is an isis member or supporter, and even if they're not, there's no telling who is going to radicalise in the future. The attacks earlier this year in paris weren't done by someone that came from that area, iirc.

Refugees carry little more than their shirts in their travels. Those guns and grenades didn't come with refugees. End of story.

Guns and grenades are not that hard to get, even in Europe. The limiting factor is how many people are willing to lay siege to a concert hall and calmly execute a hundred people, and whether some of those people were let in under the guise of "refugees".

Come on. Don't blame refugees. Normal people are refugees. Refugees are normal people.

Their problems are rooted in abuse of power.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2015/nov/11/...

http://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2015/nov/12/...

http://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2015/nov/13/...

I'm not blaming the refugees. If anything I feel sympathetic for them because the refugees are trying to escape entire countries that are effectively ruled by these people. But it's worth asking how ISIS managed to get these people into Paris.

> Guns and grenades are not that hard to get, even in Europe.

Not hard to get, but when you're talking about dozens of assault rifles, someone somewhere will know what is going where. If your intelligence people are worth their salt, of course.

> whether some of those people were let in under the guise of "refugees".

Yeah, because it's extremely effective to drop your people for months in a Turkish refugee camp, hoping that 1) they will survive in shocking conditions, 2) they will be processed and sent to France, or 3) they will jump on a dinghy and make it to the other side (when chances are that they will just sink), or 4) they will walk through half a dozen borders on high alert and across unsympathetic countries. Pure tactical genius.

More likely, these people had good passports and went through friendly airports smelling of roses. Once on-site, they were armed by existing networks that the French security apparatus still doesn't know how to infiltrate effectively. That's so much easier than leaving people to their own devices across two continents and hope they'll somehow manage to make it to la Gare du Nord at 10 o'clock on Friday morning.

Since the end of the war in former Yugoslavia and the fall of the former USSR Europe is awash with arms of all shapes and sizes. Automatic weapons caches are uncovered with scary regularity and it is not hard to imagine at all that groups with sufficient money can gain access to assault weapons in relatively large numbers.

I have never heard of this, which is scary in itself. Or maybe it isn't, I don't really know. Do you know of any further reading for me?

Sure, here are two links to start with:

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/europes-small-arms-plague/ (1998)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/getting-a-gun-le...

And many many others, unfortunately. It's a very nasty thing and it will take an extraordinary effort to put this genie back into the bottle.

Open borders has been a blessing in many ways but at the same time it has caused a whole bunch of un-intended side effects and this one and cross border heavy crime are two of the not so nice ones, to put it very mildly. We now have actual gangs with heavy arms in Amsterdam which was a fairly peaceful city not all that long ago.

With 'good passports' there is a good chance the passports were French, and not so much an infiltration as a return to home. Young people coming from poor segregated communities who are vulnerable to radicalization seem ideal tools for this kind of home-turf attack. In the Netherlands the (Italian) organised crime employs this same group, so there could be your access to smuggled arms.

Not long ago French journalists did a 'weird' documentary about smuggling military weapon from eastern Europe. They managed to pass a whole bag of them, neutralized before their trip home obviously and destroyed as soon as they crossed the border. Still, far too easy for two peaceful, networkless persons.

They also carry their religion, genes and culture. And with that comes a clash of civilisations. With open gates: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=cb0_1447249820

Are you suggesting that migrants are somehow genetically inferior? Because that'd be, frankly, an insane point of view to have.

P.O.E.

A charitable reading would suggest that the parent is making a nod to behavioral genetics, which is substantially less insane.

Inferior is subjective. Different groups have different traits. Not an insane point of view, but definitely one that is politically incorrect, for now: https://jaymans.wordpress.com/hbd-fundamentals/ Of course we are all human beings equally deserving of compassion, no matter what our differences, but the equality myth that we are all born the same and all have the same chances of having equal outcomes in life, is a very dangerous one that is destroying the social pacts modern Europe was built on.

> Multiculturalism has never, at any time in human history, worked anywhere

What a load of complete and utter nonsense. I am embarrassed to even see that link on this site.

Multiculturalism is working just fine in Australia right now. In fact it is largely how this country was built. And just like most Western countries we have a fringe right who are xenophobic and anti immigrant but by and large the population welcomes different cultures and the benefits they bring.

Australia wasn't built on multiculturalism. The native culture was destroyed and Australia was built on its ruins.

You have no idea what you're talking about. Within probably 3 hours, one could arrange the purchase of AK-47s. The "bad guys" aren't coming to France with weapons in their checked luggage. This is supported by networks. The foot soldiers aren't the smugglers. You flood 10,000 people, among those you have your "bad guys," then, once they're in country, they link up with their networks.

This isn't "end of story." These ISIS guys aren't just buying tickets to CDG airport. How are they getting into Europe? What's the easiest way to get into Europe if your from Syria? It isn't going through traditional entry routes, it's blending in with refugees.

Why are so many people attempting to vindicate the refugees? If the bad guys are from Syria and 38% of the hundreds of thousands of refugees are Syrian, then wouldn't it follow that some percentage of those refugees could logically be nefarious actors? To think otherwise is to be incredible naive and perhaps blinding by an ideological desire for these refugees to not be part of the problem.

Sure there's tragedy in Syria, however, I'm unwilling to open my home if that exposes my family to any risk. There's no upside for me. There are plenty of poor people here in France that could use my help -- my capacity to care deeply about every single person in every single war zone is limited.

Let's export 50,000 Syrian refugees and dump them in the Mission District in San Fran and see how opinions change.

The French TV mentions that the terrorists were speaking French. And based on previous attacks it is more likely to be home grown terrorists. Syria is probably just a pretext, like a lot of European leftists in the 70s were using the Palestinian situation to justify their terrorist attacks.

Hm... Interesting parallels:

In the 70s, European communist terrorism was widespread because of support from the Soviet Union. Now, European islamist terrorism is widespread because of support from the middle east. I'm aware that the CIA et al. have been doing exactly the same thing, but it's just a sad pattern.

Unfortunately, if one correlates the money, the particular religious flavour, and some incentives in loss of influence in certain neighbour countries, it would point to certain gulf states that we seem to be reliant on for oil. Regard as allies even.

This is probably french terrorists, but they probably did this because they couldn't go in Syria or were ordered to do it in France from Syria. There is hundreds of young french men and few women who went there. There is every week in France a group of muslim terrorists that are arrested because they were ordered or prepared a strike. One time a group a 10 terrorists was arrested.

The problem is that there is a very significant portion of the French immigration who absolutely hate France and that ISIS can recruit so easily in this population. In many suburbs of Paris, people were cheering during 9/11. And earlier this year you didn't see any immigrant in the Charlie support demonstrations. The French press is trying to spin this as a foreign attack from the middle-east but I think that the real problem is inside France.

The Syrian refugees, sure. A big problem is actually determining who people are and why thy are entering Europe.

Yet if it's determined that this was orchestrated by a dozen Saudi nationals on travel visas, my guess is that the Syrian refugees are still going to take it hardest on the chin.

Not European but travelling in Asia at the moment. Have had a couple of discussions with run-of-the-mill Europeans concerned that the refugees areproportionally made up much more of young men than women/children with the implication that these guys are up to no good. I'd say the subtleties of the humanitarian crisis is going to be lost on the average European Joe in the wake of this

> the refugees areproportionally made up much more of young men than women/children with the implication that these guys are up to no good.

You don't even have to imply that they are intentionally up to no good.

Groups of young men without possibilities of pairing off with young women are far more prone to crime and violence.

The refugees who have travelled to Europe to seek asylum are disproportionately young and male. Because if you have a family group in a refugee camp in Turkey, you don't send your grandmother to take a dangerous boatride across the Med and then traipse around the countryside of the Balkans trying to find a way to get to talk to a German government official about the possibility of making an asylum application for your family.

If I had a wife, grandmother, kids, etc. in a dangerous war zone or refugee camp, there is no way in hell that I would leave them behind. Not gonna happen.

Oh you would, if that was the only way to ensure survival and/or a better future for them. It would be painful, but you would feel you have to do this.

No, I would not. Absolutely not. No way.

I would send the wife and kids first before going myself.

I wanted to argue with you about this but the more I think about it, the more I think I should retract my previous comment. I'm not in your head, I can't tell you what you would do. I apologize for doing that before.

I know that for me it would depend a lot on circumstances. Is the current refugee camp safe? Is the trip overseas that dangerous? Can my family handle it there, maybe caring for our grandparents while being protected by our parents? Then I would probably, with my heart broken, go alone to safeguard a place to live for them. I know I would be the kind who's naive enough to play by the books instead of just showing up in another country. But if my family staying would put them in danger, I'd definitely take them with me.

But I guess my point is that the amount of young males among the refugees can be explained by them going to secure a place for their entire family, and not willing to risk taking kids and grandparents on such a dangerous trip.

Exactly - as a species we get the males to take the risks. There is much to be gained from leaving a warzone, but when you see the footage of the refugee camps, children drowned, the immense cost of doing the journey, dealing with people smugglers etc it makes sense that you would send a young male in the family through this first.

If said young male gets to the country on the other side they are probably the most employable too.

You seem to misunderstand what displaced people want. Why would you send them away and stay in a refugee camp? Refugee camps are precisely the first relatively safe place displaced people find. They are attended by aid agencies, and provide basic needs. They are temporarily a place of shelter and food. Traveling on the road from border crossing to border crossing around Europe is less safe than staying put in the refugee camp. You'll need to find food and shelter in different places each night. You will be hassled by authorities. You might end up living rough on the streets of Ljubljana for the winter. But if you make it to Berlin you might be able to apply for asylum, find a job, and get enough money together to bring your family (if you have papers, they will be able to use trains or planes - they won't have to walk 800 miles). That seems a rational calculation for a young man.

No, I'm not "misunderstanding" anything. If the refugee camp is safe, has food, etc., there's no reason for anyone to leave on a dangerous journey. If it's not safe, there's no excuse for leaving your children there.

I realize that life in Germany is more pleasant than life in a refugee camp in Turkey (or has been, historically... that seems to be changing), but that's an entirely different thing.

No, you set fire to your refugee camp because when seeking help from people to flee violence and oppression the best thing to do is start more violence ... /s

It's like being mugged for your wallet and then when someone comes to help you mug them for their wallet, then you wonder why no one wants to help you.

Exactly. Tried to explain that to people many times, and they didn't listen when it was just about refugees. They sure as hell are not gonna listen now.

I believe that France didn't open its borders to this wave of refugees/migrants but I could be mistaken since I don't follow the news this closely.

France cannot really control the wave of migrants anyway. But it is unlikely that the terrorists are one of these migrants. My guess is that they were French nationals/residents.

>My guess is that they were French nationals/residents.

Based on what? I'm pretty uninformed here, and it seems like a lot of people are bringing up refugees. Curious why you think the opposite.

We do not know yet the identities of the terrorists, so only a guess based on the previous three years of attacks in France.

also the TVs are mentioning terrorists speaking French, which if confirmed strongly support this guess.

What he means is french muslims , which are nationals/residents. Charlie Hebdo attackers were french nationals, though having a north african/african background.

Almost certainly. But it does make a difference. Most French muslims come from Algeria and Marrocco and can't really claim to have been affected by the war in Syria. There are deeper roots to home grown terrorism than the Syrian conflict.

At least they speaks french according to witnesses http://www.mediapart.fr/journal/france/131115/paris-frappe-p...

There were eyewitness reports that the gunmen were talking to each other in French. So, that's something. If they were recently-arrived refugees that probably wouldn't be the case, though it doesn't rule out long-term embedded groups.

What do you mean by that? The border between France and neighboring nations is always open.

It's open but that doesn't mean that everyone who shows up at the gate will be allowed in, right?

there are no gates

Under normal circumstances there is no gate to speak of.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schengen_Area

What gates? You can walk or drive from France into Spain or Belgium or Germany and not even notice.

Have you crossed a French land border lately? There are no controls. There are no gates between France and other Schengen countries.

There are no gates. There is a sign. http://travel.jeffersoncampervan.com/Pictures/PixoriginalSit...

Cross border travel within the EU is like moving between states in the US, easy to miss.

What about airports?

I'm very positive that they check people's passports and papers in airports.

The vast majority of European travellers use trains or roads, not air travel.

Actually, air travel is the most common mode of transport in intra-EU travel.

http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/...

Trains are a tiny 6%.

Only if you're arriving from outside of Schengen. Within Schengen, there are only ID checks if the airline themselves have them there to avoid ticket resales.

Sometimes. About 5 years ago, I walked off a plane from Baltimore to Rome and out of the airport like it was a domestic flight. No stamp or anything.

France is part of the Schengen area so there were no borders to open. The signs read 'Bienvenue en France'...

https://www.flickr.com/photos/redlotusmama/4583584976

How many refugee camps does France have? Let me answer you: 0

Refugees are victims of the war. If they wanted to involve violence, they would not be refugees looking for home. Why to see them as potential terrorists ?

That's not true, France does have refugee camps.

I volunteered two different refugee camp constructions in Syrian border and I know the difference between a refugee camp and a homeless camp clearly.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calais_jungle

That's a queue to get to Britain. It's a weird effect of inter-EU collaboration that Britain's borders effectively start at the coast of France.

I wonder about the etymology behind the term "jungle" here.

Is it derived from the slang term that train hoppers and other people in hobo culture use for the temporary, makeshift residences they hold in the woods near train yards during travel?

I don't know the views and concerns in France, I've only followed the responses to the Charlie Hedbo shooting and other media incidents in France. That said, the views and conversations with in-laws in Germany, it's interesting hearing what are otherwise inclusive people being concerned about things and not supporting the refugees.

The events are most likely unrelated, but there is a habit to generalize. And escalation of that generalization is what is a concern to me.

> heavy immigration of refugees

It's much more likely that the terrorists come from the frustrated youth born and raised in France, than some fresh immigrants.

Honestly, I'm curious what makes you think that the children of the new ones will be different?

When people like, say, Angela Merkel, advocate blindly accepting all those thousands of refuges smuggled to the EU, I just can't really understand - what's the point?

The point is that our pensions system is crashing because people stopped making 2.2 children on average because they no longer needed children to survive in their old age. They payed their taxes so they have a guaranteed pension, right?

Wrong, those taxes were already used to pay the pensions in the same year they were collected. Now the shrinking work force is straining itself to pay for the increasing number of old farts, and the future is bleak.

We need young immigrants in Europe. We need them to work for us and make children for us. At least until they get rich and complacent like us and settle for 1 child per family.

There are ways to integrate them culturally, once their children are in our school system. And there are ways to avoid the chronic poverty and marginalization that plagues french banlieues. What we don't have is a way to keep paying those pensions with more and more pensioners leeching on fewer and fewer workers.

The far right is already the largest party in France. The reasons for its strength have actually less to do with immigration than the continuous state of crisis of the French economy combined with the corruption of the political establishment. But the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January noticeably increased the anti-islam sentiment in France and I am ready to bet that this night's events will be another step up.

> The reasons for its strength have actually less to do with immigration than the continuous state of crisis of the French economy combined with the corruption of the political establishment.

The political establishment in France is in thrall to a radical, globalist agenda that seeks to increase its power by performing 'divide and conquer'.

A multicultural society has many more fault lines that can be exploited for political gain. One has only to look at how miserably the US is faring and how Americans are getting it good and hard from the donor class..

Offtopic, but while multiculturalism makes certain things difficult (like congress in the US now, agreeing on policy) diversity also helps in other ways (like being able to understand and deal with those who aren't like you and don't agree with you). One example of an extremely sucessful, multicultural society is Singapore. And, be honest, for all of America's faults, it's still a world power and one of the largest economies in the world.

One example of an extremely sucessful, multicultural society is Singapore.

So that's one. And one overseen and enforced by an autocrat.

Singapore is a success only if you appreciate 24/7 unrelenting surveillance not to mention brutal oppression of anything even vaguely against the status quo.

It's really important to understand the Muslim community in France, and not evoke false connections.

We don't know if the attackers had anything to with the flux of Syrian migrants moving across Europe now, but my guess would be: they had nothing to do with it.

There are about 5 million Muslims in France, which accounts for about 7 percent of France's total population. France has deep, long-standing and often troubled ties to several Muslim nations, notably Algeria. The French presence in Algeria lasted from 1830-1962.

During the Algerian civil war of the 1990s, France was targeted by terrorist attacks several times. One of those bombings EDIT: injured more than 100 people, which may be the number lost in the attacks today.

There are several basic facts that may help people understand why these attacks happen in France (I'm going to make some crude and unsympathetic generalizations that stem from the years I spent there):

* It's close to Middle Eastern and North African countries torn by conflict, notably Libya and Syria. These are training grounds for would-be attackers, many of whom originate in the west.

* Because of that, and of the fact that France rejoined NATO in 2009 and put itself firmly on the side of the US, it is also a proxy for the US, and will be targeted by those unhappy with American policies.

* It's racist. France has not dealt with the fact that people other than the French live on its soil. If you are the child of immigrants who were invited to France to help its post-War growth, you soon learn that a Muslim name will exclude you from many opportunities.

* Its economy is stagnant. France is no country for young men. They will face limited opportunities regardless of their ethnicity, unless they belong to the elite passing through the grandes écoles. This leads to a lot of frustration. When people cannot build a life in one direction, sometimes they are susceptible to morbid, violent ideologies.

* It's sloppy. I lived in France for 14 years, on either side of the 9/11 attacks on Manhattan. The French were really slow to put respectable security systems in place. CDG airport leaked like a sieve for years and I have no reason to believe that has changed.

Anyone who wants to know more about Islam in France should read Gilles Kepel:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilles_Kepel

He wrote a particularly good book in the 1980s called "The suburbs of Islam".

Correction: 1995 attacks killed 8 and injured 100 (Puts the current attack in perspective, I don't think anything similar ever happened)

I stand corrected. Thank you. A terrorist attack killing more than 100 happened in 1961, during the Algerian war for independence.

And not to detract from your points above, there's been terror attacks on "both" sides: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_massacre_of_1961

That was a pretty nasty time. The French military tortured and assassinated on very large scale in Algeria (thousands of people). On the other side, the FLN was fighting a guerilla war, combined with terrorist actions (mostly bombings) against civilian targets. To compound this, once De Gaulle announced that Algeria would be become independent, hardliners from the military as well as from the Pieds-Noir community (people living in Algeria of French descent) formed a terrorist group known as OAS, targeting both FLN, Algerian civilians and French authorities (including attempts to kill De Gaulle).

You forgot to include the recent intervention in Mali by French troops. This incident definitely upset the Al Qaeda in the Maghreb people and this terrorist attack was probably a retaliatory attack for the intervention.

The attackers mentioned Syria. The most likely candidate is ISIS, and they wouldn't give a damn to what happens to AQ or their affiliates.

It has been confirmed that the attacker is ISIS.

Not that it makes up for it, but France also committed state-sponsored terrorism (by any definition of the word) in New Zealand in the 80's. Though they only killed one person with their bomb.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Rainbow_Warrior

Could you clarify how this would be "terrorism"? Terrorisms is not something targeted like this. Whethor or not it was a war crime or treason or murder or whatever (they plead guilty to manslaughter)...it's not a repeatable or scalable type of situation and was never a threat to the general public.

I suppose not if terrorism has to give fear to the whole country, not just one group. But it was surely meant to intimidate by random-seeming violence. It wasn't part of a war, which distinguishes it from general war killing. Nor was it a personal grudge that distinguishes it from typical murder.

That has nothing to do with the definition of terrorism. Groups who do targeted attacks of sabotage that rarely kill people are also considered terrorists. For example the Earth Liberation Front is regarded as terrorists by the US.

https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/dt https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2009/september/domterror_09...

Terrorism is anti civillian warfare. Planting sabatoge devices that kill and maim innocent people is actually terrorism/ Is it just not as effective because it maims more than it it kills? I don't get it with these pedantic aruments.

eg lets say we load a bunch of shrapnel into a tree so it maims or permanenly injures whoever the next logger is...tha is basically the same thing as lobbing hand grenades into the public square. the attacks are meant to target random people, caught unawares, in a way that conveys a persistant threat of continued, scalable future action.

Now lets take some other shady randome violence like the KGB assinating a civilian in London with radioactive isotopes in his tea. Is that terrorism? No, its a specific threat carried out in a limited capacity against a designated target. It might be criminal or a war crime or wahatever bad thing describes it, but its not "anti civilian warfare", in the same way that not all war casualties are "war crimes" in the normal usage.

Yes, the murder of Litvinenko is considered state terrorism by those who can afford to say so. Its not considered random at all. They very publicly killed someone who was an outspoken opponent of theirs. KGB has a long history of both state terrorism and state-sponsored terrorism.

> THE senior British official was unequivocal. The murder of the former KGB man Alexander Litvinenko was "undeniably state-sponsored terrorism on Moscow's part. That is the view at the highest levels of the British government".

http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/world_news/article6...

You might think that some forms of terrorism are worse than others, but that doesn't mean that those are the only forms of terrorism.

I do appreciate your point and the quote shows its not just yourself arguing the other side of the case. But every act of violence or intimidation is not "an act of terrorism". For god's sake what would you call the USA police vs Black Unarmed people? I mean if that is not worse and more akin instilling intimidation into people I don't know what is.

The problem with declaring the police as terrorist is that they also have legitimate use and the aren't necessarily directly politically motivated. That said, I could see how someone could claim that the crackdown of the civil rights movement in the US in the 60s could be considered a form of state terrorism. A more obvious example would be something like South Africa under apartheid.

This is of course a slightly academic use of the word. Many people have a hard time seeing even traditional domestic terrorism (like the unabomber) as terrorism.

Please stop with the Rainbow Warrior story, it's true but not proportional. US has attacked Irak by producing false proof of WMD at UN, for God's sake! All states rely on secret agents, only its intensity varies, and I would not classify the Rainbow Warrior as FUD.

A correction: France has always been a member of NATO, they withdrew from integrated military command for several decades though.

The population of France is about 7.5% Muslim. France has had a close relationship with the Muslim world since the 19th century when they colonized parts of North Africa and the Middle East. Sadly, the position in French society of colonial immigrants and their descendants is not very high. Also sadly, France has had a lot of experience with this sort of violence, both in the colonies and "at home".

If you know the attacks were carried out by Muslims, there's no reason to assume these attacks were carried out by refugees.

Context: It was French colonization that put an end to the predations of the Barbary pirates and the Arab slave trade.

Context: the French king Charles X was in a difficult political situation and needed money, so attacking the then-Ottoman-dominated Algeria looked like a good idea at the time. The slave trade had stopped years ago, and the pirate activity, while not over, was way down.

The slave trade had stopped years ago, and the pirate activity, while not over, was way down.

Thanks to military defeats at the hands of Americans, English, and Dutch.

I'm not sure where you're going with that.

Yes, people like to blame the outsider, no matter how ridiculous it is. Ever hear a news story about an angry partner killing a spouse? About a person stabbed to death in the street? Pushed in front of a train? Hit by a car? Most of these you'll never hear of because they're such routine daily occurrences. They're done by US! Normal local people who grew up here (wherever that might be).

Nevermind refugees. People everywhere are much more dangerous than any terrorists. Somehow we don't like the idea of banning everyone from everywhere so we feel justified in judging one group as more dangerous than another to give us a sense of safety.

How dare you mention refugees in the same sentence as this tragedy? Shame.

Thats a perfectly reasonable thing to mention.

I am afraid. Seriously. I'm scared about my life and life of my family, and the civilization we enjoy in Europe.

There was a lot of mess already with the current immigration crisis. Now add that attack, and like you said, it's a powder keg, except I'm afraid that this shooting may have just lit the fuse. People will be connecting those two issues. They already are, judging from things that start popping up on my Facebook feed.

I fear the overreaction coming, of both citizens and governments. I fear the Europe will split, or start a war with someone, or draconian security measures will be introduced by the government. Charlie Hebdo was symbolic. This was a real terror strike. I just hope that sanity prevails and we won't amplify the damage further.

You had me for the first line. But then you clarified throughout the rest of your post that the reason you are scared is that you are afraid of the west. Can you bend over any further backwards, in any way at all, would that be possible.

I'm not sure what you mean here. Me and my family are in no immediate danger now. We don't live near France. But between the war in Ukraine (actually quite closer to my home) and immigration crisis, the perceived tension is pretty high. I am afraid because things like this tend to spiral out of control, and society is a fragile thing.

Very probably this:

> I fear the overreaction coming, of both citizens and governments.

This is pretty much the standard official and media reaction to these kind of events. You're supposed to fear the "backlash" more than the terrorism. Yes, dear French people, this was bad, but the real catastrophe would be voting for Le Pen or ending Mid-East and African immigration.

That's what the OP probably meant. If you think about it, don't you think it is a somewhat unnatural reaction to being under attack, to always end up fearing those who didn't initiate the attack?

> If you think about it, don't you think it is a somewhat unnatural reaction to being under attack, to always end up fearing those who didn't initiate the attack?

It is, but natural reaction is wrong. I still have much bigger chance of dying in a car accident than a terrorist attack. In general, the natural reaction to such events was fine 6000 years ago, but in today's hyperconnected, media-driven society, awareness of a danger is usually inversely proportional to the chance of it happening to you.

But I also know that general population has this natural reaction, and - as politicians follow the voice of people, instead of the voice of reason - it leads to very bad outcomes. I am afraid of those bad outcomes.

> I am afraid. Seriously.

This is exactly what the attackers want you to be. Don't let them win.

Thanks.

My stay in Asia was extended 'till the end of this month. One of the things that bounce in my head now is - what Europe will I come back to?

If my 9/11 experience is a guide, then you will have months of overreacting to everything...from the sick feeling in your gut when you see a clear blue sky with no contrails in it like I did that fateful Tuesday, to the moment of doubt when you take your mail out of the mailbox after the Anthrax attack.

It goes away and you realize that the equilibrium in a civil society is normalcy, and to give in to fear is to lose. Recency bias, forgetting your math/probability/statistics--you're smarter than that. Lead the way for others to keep calm and carry on.

> draconian security measures will be introduced by the government

Inevitable. The attack is no joke, it certainly alarms that the current measure is inadequate.

How convenient for the power brokers. God forbid they explain that fear and power are the real goals and you are more likely to die in [nearly endless list].

>I fear the overreaction coming, of both citizens and governments. I fear the Europe will split, or start a war with someone, or draconian security measures will be introduced by the government.

so... As an American who is old enough to very clearly remember America both before and after the 9/11 attacks? to the extent that America is like France, I can speak some to those fears.

We did several of those things. We massively overreacted; I mean, we didn't split, but we did pick a war with a country who's people kind of looked like the people who attacked us (and another war with a country we had some evidence that they had something to do with the attack) - and yes, both wars were pretty costly in terms of money, geopolitical power and credibility, commodity prices and world stability, but it didn't break us, and it didn't spill out into a major war between industrial powers. It didn't turn into Vietnam, or even something as bad as the CCCP's experience in Afghanistan. I'm not saying it was a good experience, just that it's survivable, and not as life changing as you seem to think. This isn't a war of the 19th or 20th century between major powers. This is a 21st century asymmetrical war, and while that's still pretty bad for whoever ends up getting blamed for these attacks, it's not the end for Europe.

Yes, the security measures were very costly. Airplane travel is dramatically less convenient, which means more traffic. Lots of lost productivity. We've lost so many human-years standing in line, waiting to be groped... or driving instead of flying; that has caused who knows how many extra deaths. (re-reading this... while I logically stand by the idea that we've lost more to the security measures than to the original attacks... on an emotional level, I feel shame for saying so out loud.) Personally, my perception is that this is slowly getting better with the pre-groping of the 'tsa pre-check' or the straight up money check of the "CLEAR" program. I mean, air travel is never again going to be as easy as it was when I was 19 during my lifetime, but it's not as bad as it was when I was 22, let me tell you, and it's getting better.

But... even at it's worst? This wasn't world war two. This wasn't even the Crimean war, at least on my side of the conflict. I mean, I don't want to diminish the sacrifices of our soldiers, it's not a job I would want to do, but being deployed in the wars we engaged in after 9/11 was less dangerous than delivering pizzas, if you only count the chance of getting killed or maimed, rather than harder to quantify mental traumas associated with fighting a war (which personally, I find to be a much larger deterrent to becoming a soldier than the danger. I was... just about at prime recruiting age on September 11th, 2001.

And for the rest of us? Yeah, 9/11 was a big deal. A bigger deal than I understood it to be at the time. A much bigger deal. but... it wasn't the end of life as we know it.

That was the weird thing about my 9/11 experience. So I had a dot-com job, and my boss was watching the news on a very early live-streaming website. (I want to say it was CNN or something, but I don't remember) I was mildly annoyed with her for not working and instead subjecting me to, you know, video news.

My thoughts at the time were the opposite of yours. It did not occur to me that this was going to change my country; It took me quite some time to understand that this was hugely impactfull.

Thank you for sharing your experiences.

> I mean, we didn't split, but we did pick a war with a country who's people kind of looked like the people who attacked us

The problem here is that 'people who kind of look like the people who attacked us' are not foreign, they're here, in Europe. The hot topic of past months was the waves of immigration, and before that it was Islam minorities. I fear that people will retaliate on those communities and it will turn into a civil war. Or even if not, the tension between policies of various European countries RE immigration were high, and overreaction here may just be enough to split us apart.

> My thoughts at the time were the opposite of yours. It did not occur to me that this was going to change my country; It took me quite some time to understand that this was hugely impactfull.

My experiences are informed by what happened to your country over the last 14 years. I've learned that such events can be very impactful.

The risk in France is for the battle to happen on its land. There is a lot of racism and there is also a lot of e.g. Algerian people burning the French flag here and a lot of resentment. There are most well-integrated and well-considered Muslim people here, but there is also a minority we've completely lost. Each year the FN (extremist party) has more votes and after 2 terrorist attacks, it is a real possibility that they get elected for President 2017. From there, police arrests (of actually guilty people, but focused on a minority) can become routine, counter protests will be routine too, protest squashing will be routine, and the uproar can be as fast as a few days after the election.

Three Emergency protocols activated tonight to deal with the situation:

Plan multi attentats: Sudden surge of multiple situations

Plan blanc (in Île de France): surge of unpredictable activity of a hospital

Plan rouge: when there are significant casualties in a small area

The prevailing laws and rights in an Emergency Situation are gist'ed here: https://gist.github.com/fasterthanlime/faa2ae629d22f325beb7

One important feature:

Closure of public places

  Minister of the Interior or the prefects may
  "order the temporary closure of theaters, pubs and meeting places" and 
  "meetings of nature to cause or maintain disorder"

Wondering how the above affects the Internet/Mobile networks, even though they weren't any reports of any throttling today.

I'm not entirely sure how I would define my guiding motivation in life, but I swear "do no harm" would be part of it.

I despair at those who believe otherwise.

I'm not sure if I could keep a motivation like that if, for example, my family was killed by a drone strike.

Point taken, though many of those who are inspired to take up arms against innocent people have no such legitimate grievance.

What if your ideology believes that you should treat those killed by drones as your own family because you share the same ideology?

Did the people who they bombed operate drones? AFAIK, france doesn't conduct drone warfare.

It could be, I suppose, that someone could simply hate western culture due to the acts of one nation, but that doesn't make it right. If you hate all Muslims because of the acts of few, you're most likely in the wrong. The same morality should apply to the people on the other side.

I would like to believe that even if my family was killed in a drone strike I would not go to a random country and kill civilians. Furthermore, I would like to see data on how many terrorists had families that were killed in drone strikes. My understanding is that the vast majority have other grievances, many of them theological.

I'd try - seriously.

I don't know who came up with "an eye-for-eye and tooth-for-tooth would lead to a world of the blind and toothless" but I believe it.

I'm sure it's something I'd struggle with when the hard choice arises, but I honestly believe I'd try to keep to it.

Yea but you weren't born with these ideas, you can't know how you'd be if you grew up in a different context.

Nobody is born with these ideas.

I think by "born" he meant "growing up with".

I'm was not born with idea of harming people, but if my family ended up as "collateral" damage during a wedding I'd be in a pretty dark place. Lots of dark ideas would come to me.

Ghandi "came up with it"

What about those who do harm in your name?

That's their choice not mine.

As much as I'm able to claim, I'd never advocate such.

And there stems the entire problem with islam from. A lot of people killing "in its name"; more often than not, where that is just abused as an ideology to rally more marginalized people to the cause.

We'll never be able to stop those that abuse religions and causes for political gain, but we can starve their number of "soldiers" by not giving impressionable people more reasons to hate a country.

I don't believe Islam is fundamentally different than Christianity. Present day interpretations aside, I believe both share a similar DNA.

I believe the solution is to look inward (as I've already, "do no harm"), rather than to condemn outwards.

And yes, I'm willing to concede the naiveté of my viewpoint.

I agree, I hope my comment was not misinterpreted. Most muslims believe in "do no harm", and every single one I've talked to thinks those terrorists are the exact opposite of true muslims.

Those attacks done "in the name of islam" create islamophobic reactions from people. Media spreads this islamophobia further, to people who just trust whatever they see on TV. The climate grows to marginalize muslims further. The ones closest to the edge, who were surrounded by violence in the past (war climates) and are now surrounded by hatred from the country they live in, end up knowing only violence and seeking to be understood by their own violence.

The cycle of terrorism. We enable it. What can you do once you understand it? Tell other people? You'll be silenced. You'd get shit on on facebook. Attacked on twitter. Downvoted on reddit. HN is still a sane place but what % of the population does that really represent? Can it even make a change? And it's not like you wouldn't ever get downvoted here. There's a lot of people who believe in the direct "more immigrants = more terrorists" idiocy.

Today is such a fucking depressing day. Having to worry about my sister, my brother, my guild mates and on top of that seeing the attackers get exactly what they want: more fear. More knee-jerk reactions.

Let it fucking end...

> HN is still a sane place but what % of the population does that really represent?

I think that the level of HN is rare online but offline things are much better (at least, in my experience).

> And it's not like you wouldn't ever get downvoted here. There's a lot of people who believe in the direct "more immigrants = more terrorists" idiocy.

So talk to them and stand your ground. Sure there will always be jerks but don't let that stop you from trying and who cares about the occasional downvote.

> Let it fucking end...

Yes, please. But I fear that won't happen in my lifetime, maybe in yours depending on your age. This took decades to fuck up it will take decades to restore and a completely different approach.

> I think that the level of HN is rare online but offline things are much better (at least, in my experience).

Maybe you choose your surroundings better, but one of the reasons I like hanging out here is because I can experience some semblance of sanity that, from my point of view, GenPop is lacking. I know few people who try to understand what's going on, but rest just repeat whatever they read on the news.

> Yes, please. But I fear that won't happen in my lifetime, maybe in yours depending on your age. This took decades to fuck up it will take decades to restore and a completely different approach.

Yes, please. But let it please not end in the collapse of what we've achieved as humanity. That's what I'm afraid the most - that at some point those tensions will explode and bring down civilization with them. The world is a fucked up place, but we're at the point in history in which we must fix it, not reboot it.

I'm not convinced that people linking immigrants and terrorism are particularly worried about the actual immigrants turning out to be terrorists in disguise. It's more a worry that they will just add to the ghettoisation of Islamic communities, which is precisely where this latest crop of French terrorists seem to have sprung from.

> I'm not convinced that people linking immigrants and terrorism are particularly worried about the actual immigrants turning out to be terrorists in disguise.

You'd be really surprised. Your point is a valid one, but one I seldom see brought up - most people are just worried that for every 100 immigrants there's a couple of actual terrorists in the lot... Mostly because nobody's told them how stupid that notion is.

> Mostly because nobody's told them how stupid that notion is.

Oh some people try. Hell, I told that to many people myself. People don't care about things like actually being reasonable. Instead, they're afraid and are looking to rationalize it.

Well, it is possible that ISIS would try to infiltrate operators this way (in fact, they caught a convicted terrorist in Italy hiding as a refugee a few days ago).

Possible, yes. Efficient, not really. If they don't get in this way they'll get in another way - closing down borders is about just as efficient as the ban on drugs at stoping drug cartels.

I'm not disputing that, but I'm saying it's not an irrational concern.

I agree. Süddeutsche Zeitung had a very good article (in German) on how young people who feel like their life is lacking are recruited into literal Islam, whether violent or nonviolent.[0]

0: http://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/salafismus-als-jugendkult...

That's precisely the point. Bar psychopaths, nearly everyone thinks they are doing the right thing, even as they do horrors. These people are so deeply indoctrinated that they think they are ultimately doing good in the eyes of god.

That's equating "do no harm" with "do the right thing".

I don't believe the comparison stands.

It does if you play devil's advocate and follow the chain of reasoning.

If god is great and non-believers are bad and "god" says it's righteous and just to punish the non-believers, then naturally doing "god's work" is doing no harm?

Actually the truth is even messier... most of these young men committing atrocities are merely indoctrinated pawns who know very little of their own religion and instead defer to their "emir."

This ideological poison is being propagated by those individuals, with power/financial interests back in the middle east. I think the individual committing the act believes they are doing good, and the individual who convinced them to do it is too morally corrupted & detached to care about ideals such as "civilian life."

There are far more atrocities that occur in this world than there are psychopaths in the general population.

If we hope to make any progress toward peace, I think we need to truly understand the reasons why and how weak, impressionable minds with poor cultural integration can be manipulated to commit such atrocities.

It's easy to label these individuals as determined, unreachable psychopaths (particularly out of fear) but the sad truth is, most extremism is borne not of evil but of weakness. A select few manipulate this weakness to convince otherwise insignificant people, often with desires of grandeur to commit unthinkable acts. This power of perspective becomes increasingly obvious as you realize most problems with immigrants in European countries occur in the 2nd and 3rd generations -- those who have seen the true horrors of war first hand are not so easily fooled.

The hard truth is: if society doesn't provide susceptible minds with alternatives first, a small but steady % will be at the mercy of whomever comes along promising "answers."

  Actually the truth is even messier... most of these young men committing 
  atrocities are merely indoctrinated pawns who know very little of 
  their own religion and instead defer to their "emir."

How can you claim that these young men know very little about their own religion? The Koran and Hadiths are full of hateful texts. Muhammed himself beheaded a tribe of jews according to the Hadiths. Most (all?) Muslims think Muhammed is the most perfect human being ever created - akin how Christians think about Jesus.

You may have misunderstood me there.

Yes, Islam is a particularly violent religion -- if you have read the Koran, many of its concepts seem very incompatible with the idea of a free secular society. Then again, the bible has the crusades.

I'm personally an atheist and I honestly don't think the problem is the the text itself but the cultural, ideological conflicts of an impoverished region that allows whoever "shouts the loudest" to assume power. The kids committing these atrocities probably couldn't even tell you what you just told me about Mohammad -- my point is that they are brainwashed and utterly uneducated so whomever comes along and says "this is god's word" is who they will listen to.

Anger + Desperation - Education = Extremism

You won't solve this problem by banning the Koran, but if you can get Muslims everywhere to renounce this "us-or-them" culture in favor of a more moderate interpretation (you know, how all religions seem to evolve if they want to survive) then perhaps we can neuter these kinds of groups before there's a power-vacuum?

It does stand, though. "Harm" is a vague concept.

Good point.

There is immense emphasis on an afterlife and little to no value on "life on earth" in Islam.

So these indoctrinated individuals don't really see it as too horrendous of a crime to kill someone.

Unfortunately, the reality of the world is that many people do not adhere to this. Thus the need for strong leadership to bring those who will not co-operate kicking and screaming to the discussion table (or to eradicate them if no such discussion is possible).

My first thought about Paris is not to pray for it. It is to bring harm to those who brought the attack on the Parisians.

"People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." George Orwell

This is scary. This was a well coordinated attack that usually create a lot of chatter before hand. Unlike lone wolf attacks these are somewhat easier to detect.

The French intelligence and counter terrorism units are either not doing their best or these terrorist are getting much better at covering their tracks.

They probably have more data than what they can process. The best they can do so far, in terms of prevention, is stopping the incredibly dumb: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/11/france-says-tou...

They knew something was up they just didn't know what.

http://sofrep.com/44480/french-and-german-police-knew-paris-...

The weakness of security states is that to "win" the police need a 100% capture rate. The terrorists only have to be successful once.

That depends on how you measure success. Some would say that just avoiding one is a success.

No, it's much simpler: in an open society it is virtually impossible to defend against terrorism. In other words, you can't stop these things, even if you really want to once they are in the planning stage. The chances of foiling the attack or the attack being successful are about even. So the only way to get rid of these attacks is to either go for some kind of root-cause and to fix the problem before it can gain a foothold or to radically chance society.

I'd hope for the former but I fear it will be the latter.

How much "chatter" do you really need to coordinate something like this?

If it is a small group of just half a dozen people you should be pretty much invisible if you act a bit clever. Coordination can be done via throw away sim cards and personal meetings so you don't really need to communicate that much.

Getting guns, grenades, creating bombs: These things take time, effort and "chatter".

Somehow the assumption always seems to be that terrorists are stupid. They're not stupid, they have seen some plots foiled so they adapt until they make it through the next time. Footsoldiers they can afford to lose, just like the drug trade can afford to lose shipments and mules. Getting guns and grenades is relatively easy in Europe, many ordinary criminal gangs much less well funded manage to get these. Making bombs is a bit more difficult but that's one of those things that you only really need one guy for and some basic tradecraft to get them into the hands of the people that will use them.

'Chatter' is a sign of stuff not working as expected, if terrorists are half as intelligent as I give them credit for they'll know to stay off the phone and off the internet. You'd have a bigger chance locating them by the absence of traffic than by traffic assuming they are not as dumb as we'd like them to be.

Incidentally, and violating my own rule, that's why I don't believe in the whole 'snooping makes us safer' rubbish. If anything it just increases the size of the haystack for a constant number of needles.

I don't think you have to assume terrorists are stupid, good OPSEC is hard.

Particularly re. phones / internet, it only takes one mistake to link a phone number used for nefarious activities with your identity.

(I would expect them to use phones, at least - they have to coordinate somehow.)

> Coordination can be done via throw away sim cards and personal meetings so you don't really need to communicate that much.

You forget the fact that the communication channel is always being monitored, but in this sad case, nothing was caught. Someone has already smuggled the weapons in before hand, just like how the bomb was able to made it to the plane early this month. Someone must have been tipped and bought the weapons from possibly local gangs and bam...

> This was a well coordinated attack that should have been picked up.

Should have been picked up?

You think secret services are omnipotent? That they can get a whiff of every conspiracy.

>The French intelligence and counter terrorism units are either dangerously incompetent or these terrorist are getting much better at covering their tracks.

Or, there is way, way more of them. Currently, thousands of migrants are entering Germany each day. No one is checking them, fingerprinting them, taking their photos or running those against databases.

You can find useful idiots decrying such treatment: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/refugee-crisi...

Doing so would require a lot of coercion, so no one is doing that.

My guess is that the Daeshi idiots slipped in a martyr cell or two. These guys got weapons from black market and executed a well-planned attack.

Why do people always mention migrants? There has been well known extremist cells in France, composed of french nationals or resident (1995 terror attack, Toulouse shootings, Charlie Hebdo shootings). Please stop mixing those.

That is always what they say "we detected a of chatter so we know it was group <X>" after something like this. Perhaps the terrorists have learned not to chat/call/write as much before the act?

I don't think that's an effective attitude to take in response to events like this. The job of intelligence agencies is to minimize the risk of attacks like this, not to eliminate it. The more governments think they can actually eliminate the risk, the more we all suffer.

This soils the reputation of islam. I know some good people (muslims) who suffer from prejudice on a daily basis because of attacks like these.

Being a muslim in a foreign country is an increasingly difficult and isolating experience.

Unfortunately in the eyes of many that reputation could not get much lower. What is a bigger problem is that it will further divide nations regardless of reputation of a religion it will affect any and all who are perceived as either Islamic, Arabic, African, dark skinned or any combination of the above in a negative and measurable way.

Islam soils the reputation of islam. It has a massive problem of large percentages of Muslims supporting (or being okay with) violence and terrorism.

42% of young Muslims in France believe suicide bombings are justified (35% overall).

http://www.pewresearch.org/files/old-assets/pdf/muslim-ameri...

> Islam soils the reputation of islam.

No slurs, please. We've already banned one account for turning this thread into a religious flamewar. Comments here need to stay factual.

I did stay factual, I even provided a link.

If you're going to restrict speech, restrict all mentions of religion, not just the ones that contradict your preconceived notion.

Indeed. The moderation in this thread has been supremely disappointing. Your post contained no slurs, only an interpretation of data along with a link.

No. What dang quoted was a slur.

Definition from http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_eng...:

"An insinuation or allegation about someone that is likely to insult them or damage their reputation"

Saying that "Islam soils the reputation of islam" is a slur by any reasonable interpretation. The link provided some information but the first sentence did nothing to that effect and was simply inflammatory.

This wasn't a mere insinuation, this was a claim made along with some study linked in support of the claim. And since the topic at hand is precisely Islam's reputation in the first place, it seems we can't have any conversation about Islam's reputation for violence (deserved or not), and what to do about it, at all.

If your goal is to integrate Muslims living in Western nations into Western society, what is going on here is not helping to achieve it.

The OP began by saying "Islam soils the reputation of islam. It has a massive problem of large percentages of Muslims supporting (or being okay with) violence and terrorism." Without further proof, that statement is an allegation at best and a slur at worst (especially if the following proof doesn't hold up).

He then went on to say "42% of young Muslims in France believe suicide bombings are justified (35% overall)." So why wasn't his original statement "Islam in France among 42% of Muslims less than 30 years of age (that were prompted to answer a survey question in an environment we know nothing about) soils the reputation of Islam?"

So, he began by making a broad generalization about Islam as a whole and then quoted a statistical observation about a small percentage of Muslims. Sorry, but 2 + 2 = 4. Broad generalization + no proof = slur.

I'd be in agreement with you if the OP started and stopped with that first sentence, but he didn't. And OP is not claiming that all Muslims are violent or making a generalization like that - he very specifically referred to reputation for same and cited a document showing a significant minority of Muslims who support or tolerate violence, especially in France.

I also agree that he would have been better served to clarify in his post that the problem is particularly acute in France rather than in general, but even a cursory glance at the document he provided will bear that out. However that is something to bring up in further discussion (as I have actually done in a sibling comment). Then you can have a conversation about what France is doing differently from other countries that are having relative success, even to the point of e.g. the US where Muslims tend to be more peaceful than the wider population.

But when you just shut down the discussion as was done here, none of that can happen. That's why, as I say, if your goal is to integrate Muslims living in the West into Western society (and French Muslims into French society), then what happened here is counterproductive.

> I'd be in agreement with you if the OP started and stopped with that first sentence, but he didn't

No, it's exactly the other way around: if the comment had omitted the first sentence, it would have been fine. That bit could be taken out without any loss of information, and should have been.

Despite how much you've posted about this, there's no serious argument here. A slur followed by a factual statement is obviously still a slur.

As for "shutting down the discussion", that's a bit of a stretch with 650 comments in one thread and 500 in the other.

You keep saying it's a slur. Since we obviously have some kind of basic disagreement on what this word even means, I'll just elaborate why I think it was appropriate speech:

I think you'll agree that giving a charitable reading to what a person says is the best way to have a clear discussion. While that first sentence, taken by itself and without context, could possibly be interpreted as a bigoted or racist statement, in the context of the whole post I took it to mean "Islam has a reputation for violence, but this reputation exists in part because adherents of Islam in the West support violence more than the rest of the population". I don't think I am going particularly out of my way or being overly charitable in reading it this way. Moreover the grammar "X spoils the reputation of X" is not harsh language, nor is it a tautology - it can be proven wrong. Therefore, I don't think this was an inappropriate comment. How am I wrong? If you bother to answer, please be specific.

That said, I don't fully agree with the statement, actually, as I already mentioned. If you look at support for violence and religious law, etc., in places like the US and Germany, it looks like Muslims do not support that stuff any more than the general population, or they support it less. But looking at the data for France OP might have a point. But, I don't know if he meant only France, or Islam in general, or what, because he never clarified. Maybe he didn't clarify because he stopped reading, or because he doesn't care, or because he realizes he's wrong. Maybe after elaboration he would have outed himself as being a simple Islamaphobe who cherry-picks facts to justify his bigotry. We'll never know that now. But, he also may have stopped posting because you inappropriately called him out in this thread before giving what he said due consideration.

Emotions were probably running high at the time as it was shortly after the attacks and so what you did, in that case, is actually quite understandable. Even if I think you were wrong here, I don't hold this one against you at all. But as the moderator of HN I have seen you time and again shutting down discussion because you perceived something that wasn't there. You are making HN into more of a boring echo chamber and that's sad.

And just to address this:

> there's no serious argument here

That's a pretty ridiculous opinion to have considering the voting in this thread. Even if you're right, I'm clearly far from alone in thinking that what you've done here is wrong. So, in fact, there is an argument to be had here, and trying to preempt discussion like that just shows a false and unjustified confidence in your assertion. A little humility goes a long way, you know?

If that's you criterion for a piece of discourse unsuitable for HN, then that applies to pretty much anything negative you say on any topic, does it not? For example, the post about CMU's possible involvement with exploiting a weakness in Tor on unsuspecting users was itself a "slur" by Oxford's definition.

The part I quoted was not factual and was a slur.

It's not a slur against Islam in the slightest, it's a supposition, with a link in support of it. If one-third of a population supports or tolerates a heinous thing, then it is not unreasonable to claim that the reason the population has a reputation for supporting or tolerating the heinous thing, is that one-third of them actually do support or tolerate it. I don't think it would be particularly controversial to say "American whites in the 50s had a reputation for racism" due to widespread support of Jim Crow and segregation, even if those things were not actually supported by the majority, but only a significant minority. So it goes here.

My takeaway from it would be "why does one-third of this population support this heinous thing?" but it's impossible to have that conversation with people like you piping in and asserting that any interpretation of data that could offend anyone's sensibilities, is off limits.

I'm sure that if you did a survey of disenfranchised white youth in the US, you'd find a lot of people volunteering to enlist, and you could probably get some sympathy for the need to "go kill ISIS" or some other media-oriented headline. France has many issues, I doubt any of them are truly deeply connected to Islam. But it is of course easier to point at religion as the source of civil unrest, rather than at a failing economy, systematic discrimination and a growing divide between rich and poor.

ISIS is a jihadist terrorist organization, and that's recognized by most governments, many Islamic ones even. It's dishonest to compare openly fighting ISIS with blowing up and shooting civilians as a primary mean.

What happened today was not "civil unrest".

> It's dishonest to compare openly fighting ISIS with blowing up and shooting civilians as a primary mean.

That's all well and good to say when you know enlisting in the US military in conventional warfare against ISIS has a good chance of succeeding.

But what if the US was the small poor state and ISIS was the world's largest economy whose military targets were too well-defended to attack?

I'm sure you'd find lots of recruits in Texas for "guerilla special units behind enemy lines". Especially if cruise missiles and drone strikes were hitting US soil every other day.

I find this relativism disconcerting. Please explain how targeting innocent civilians for their ethnicity or beliefs is equal to military vs. military operations. Most of the world is shades of grey but one has to recognize when an ideology is clearly a danger to human society and needs to be fought against. Whether and how violent the means need to be is up for discussion, I just can't understand why people would downplay what ISIS, Boko Haram, Taliban and similar groups are doing. Just because the term "Freedom Fighters" has long been intemixed with Terrorism doesn't mean that it applies here. IMO most of these groups don't want to 'liberate' people, instead they want to either bind them to their religious ideology, kill or enslave them.

> Please explain how targeting innocent civilians for their ethnicity or beliefs is equal to military vs. military operations.

It's not. I'm sure the terrorists would actually prefer to be shooting soldiers and high-ranking politicians instead of innocent civilians. But since those targets are too well protected, in their minds the only thing they can do to retaliate against their enemies is to commit terrorist attacks against civilians in their enemies' homeland.

If the roles were reversed and ISIS were the world superpower launching cruise missiles against Houston (some) Americans would surely sign up to do similar things to get back at them. The only reason we don't is because we're rich and powerful and don't have to stoop to that level, not because we're incapable of it or somehow more morally enlightened.

Edit: see the firebombings and nuclear attacks on Japan in WWII for what the US is capable of when they don't have an overwhelming military superiority.

All warfaring nations have committed atrocities, I'm not denying that and I'd be the first to condemn these actions if they'd be discussed now. What I'm unconvinced of is whether Americans would put their own personal survival lower than the prospect of martyrdom, as long as they don't get indoctrinated by religious beliefs of this sort. It's a similar argument of whether the Nazis or the Khmer Rouge were just a product of their circumstances - no, I don't think so. Their ideology was actively warped to a point where it was detrimental to human survival, detrimental to what our biology tells us to do, and something everyone with a clear mind is IMO obligated to stand up against.

There's a difference between terrorism with clear political goals and terrorism that's targeted at our very way of life. One can be attributed to circumstances and can be dealt with in a more or less peaceful matters (e.g. 'give them what they want'), the other cannot.

The question posed was:

"Can Suicide Bombing of Civilian Targets to Defend Islam be Justified?" (p. 53)

Not a lot of wiggle room in that one. Thought perhaps the question might've been a bit more vague or general. However, it states specifically "civilians". Really...? ...42%? That's astonishing.

Would love to hear from the people down-voting. Is this data flawed / limited / not consistent with personal experience? I've heard people like Bill Maher cite this survey before. I'm sure there are different and interesting perspectives in the HN community-- please don't just reflexively downvote or avoid addressing this because it's uncomfortable.

This seems to be mainly a problem in Europe (and France in particular) as opposed to Islam in general. Even the study you've linked indicates that.

Here is an article that explores a bit more the attitudes among American Muslims in particular. I don't have time to find the actual study, sorry:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/08/a-fascin...

For clarity, the categories from the survey are often/sometimes/rarely/never justified, with respective percentages of 6%, 10%, 19%, and 64% for all Muslims.

Being a muslim in a foreign country, I confirm. I don't know why but I feel scared/guilty when something like this happens. It's sad they have to use Islam's name to do this when my interpretation (of Islam) is exactly the opposite.

I, and I hope most others, lay blame at the feet of those who committed the act. I(a nobody) think I've been too quiet about defending our Muslim friends from being lumped in with bad people just because you share a religion.

I don't know many Muslims and it's just too easy to let bigoted remarks go, but this attack feels like it could really bring out the worst in reactionary people. So stay safe and know at least one person has your back.

There's no question that the ideology of islam - or at least the ideology of several of its sects is a critical element in these attacks. Claiming otherwise is leftist PC nonsense.

Sure there are many good muslims, most of whom you will find adhere to a secular ideology and western value system despite labelling themselves "muslim".

I think the focus in Islam itself is misleading. The Ottoman empire was muslim for hundreds of years yet christians and muslims did not fight against each other on religious grounds, and there was definitely no such fringe fanaticism. My grandmother remembered that people were sad when muslims had to leave the balkans due to national population exchanges back in the beginning of the last century.

The terrorists you see today would become terrorists in the name of Christ just as well. Having said that, it's true that certain groups can be identified as "bad" and labeled so, and it seems that the one unifying characteristic is their islamic faith, although there are other national characteristics as well. Saying that we need to defend against "Islam" would be too broad a target, and the terrorists use that to their advantage. In Europe, we need to stop treating muslim populations as minorities, start treating them as european citizens, and demand that their religious leaders contribute to public safety. They need to actively engage in the expulsion of radicalized people from their religious communities and preach against the sentiment that justifies the attacks. Laisez-faire comes at a price to everyone, and muslims are not excluded from it.The terrorists have been bastardizing the meaning of Islam for 4-5 decades now. Maybe Islam should be having it's own velvet revolution.

My grandmother remembered those times differently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide

I'm sorry but I disagree with most of your comment (with the exception that we concur that the muslim population needs to take responsibility for their own communities - through their religious leaders being more vocal about "fanatic" elements).

You seam to have a very rosy picture of the Ottoman empire.Without going into too much detail, most historians would agree that it was an aggressive expansionist empire with intolerance to non-islamic sects.

"The terrorists you see today would become terrorists in the name of Christ just as well." - This is patently absurd, at least in this century, and a horrendously apologist argument.

I would recommend reading several key articles illustrating the Saudi Wahabi link to ISIS and how its clear that this is an intrinsically Islamist problem: eg.

http://www.newstatesman.com/world-affairs/2014/11/wahhabism-...

Also, I'd advise reading Sam Harris's "Sleepwalking Toward Armageddon"

http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/sleepwalking-toward-armag...

And this is exactly what the terrorists aim for.

If the western world starts feeling it is at war with Islam, Muslims will unite under those terrorist's banner and we're in for a very long, shitty haul.

The worse we treat Muslims in our own countries, the easier simple individuals will be to turn to the terrorist course.

If we attack a Muslim country, hordes of Muslims will travel there to fight for the Prophet.

These attacks are all desperate attempts at starting an avalanche. Don't let them play you, talk with your friends, stay calm.

My wife and I were just there for part of our honeymoon and literally flew out hours before, around noon on Friday. Some locals had talked to us about the recent attack some weeks ago and how they didn't want to let such people stop them from living their lives. This day is worse but I feel like the lovely people we talked to were determined, resilient and optimistic. God bless the city with peace.

The war on terror has been going on for 15 years now - are there more terrorists in 2000 or 2015?

Sooner or later, we will have to come to the realization that terrorism cannot be eliminated by force. Stop destabilizing Arab countries, stop imperial interference in Northern Africa, and perhaps we'll see an end to this nonsense.

I agree with you. Unfortunately these attacks tend to strengthen the resolve of the people who want to reshape the middle East.

The other complicating factor is that not-intervening will mean sitting on our hands while civilian populations get badly treated by their governments.

What to do? what to do? I don't know the answer.

I'm curious, under what logic would this stop or get any better if we allow the cancer to grow?

By the same logic that a wound heals when you stop poking the scab.

If there's any lesson from the past 15 years, it is this: state engineering does not work. Period. You cannot control it. You don't "allow" anything. You cannot stop anything. The forces are beyond your control.

Americans and Europeans have to step out of the colonial mindset of trying to control the world. Then we'll have peace.

Then we'll hopefully have peace, perhaps.

> By the same logic that a wound heals when you stop poking the scab.

Except that our governments see themselves as providing first aid to an infected wound. Infected wounds only get worse without treatment.

> If there's any lesson from the past 15 years, it is this: state engineering does not work. Period.

Their intention was (probably) good, execution on the other hand was less then stellar.

> You cannot control it. You don't "allow" anything. You cannot stop anything. The forces are beyond your control.

1940's France would beg to disagree. The Allies in WW2 clearly stopped the Axis powers and controlled their aggression.

> Americans and Europeans have to step out of the colonial mindset of trying to control the world.

Agreed.

War on Terror is causing the cancer.

So just give up and offer your good will???

To be clear, "giving up" here means stop screwing with other countries. Yes, that's an outstanding strategy. While you're at it, also stop supporting terrorist regimes like Saudi Arabia.

> stop supporting terrorist regimes like Saudi Arabia.

In your earlier comment you wrote:

> Stop destabilizing Arab countries

Isn't supporting the dictatorship in Saudi Arabia pretty much supporting stability? How can you stop supporting a dictator without a big risk of causing destabilization (as happened in Libya)?

Seems like you want two logical opposities simultaneously?

Or it means that the US has a double-standard approach where it stabilizes favorable dictatorships (Saudi, Qatar, Kuwait) and destabilizes unfavorable dictatorships (Libya, Iraq) and democracies (Egypt 60s, Iran 50s).

How about getting out of other people's countries?

Yes. Treat terror attacks as any other act of organized crime. It's stupid to do otherwise, given that the very point of terrorism is to make you do anything else.

It's a bit more complex than that. We've reached the point where the Islamic State is a nation-state, which is at war with a number of other states (including France). In this context, how do you differentiate "terrorism" and "act of war"/"black ops action"?

I agree that an overreaction is likely, though considering how crazy the latest security law are, I don't see how much worse it can get in this regard.

> We've reached the point where the Islamic State is a nation-state, which is at war with a number of other states (including France).

Ok. So if it indeed can be attributed to them, or if they go out and admit, then fine, send in the tanks - the Paris attack would be an act of war.

> considering how crazy the latest security law are, I don't see how much worse it can get in this regard.

Oh it can. We have a long way to go from what we have now to what was in USSR or Nazi Germany. I just hope we don't decide to run the distance.

What worries me more is that the overrection will be aimed at immigrants and minorities who live in Europe. There already are reports of this beginning to happen.

> Ok. So if it indeed can be attributed to them, or if they go out and admit, then fine, send in the tanks - the Paris attack would be an act of war.

They claimed responsibility. As for sending in the tanks, I don't see that happening.

> Oh it can. We have a long way to go from what we have now to what was in USSR or Nazi Germany. I just hope we don't decide to run the distance.

Yeah, but neither were democracies. The Red Scare-era US would be a better example. I really hope it doesn't go this way.

> What worries me more is that the overrection will be aimed at immigrants and minorities who live in Europe. There already are reports of this beginning to happen.

Probably not from the government, but who knows what the population will do?

Do you think tonight's actions were solely about economics and politicalstatus? Could they, and the January attacks, have also have been attributed to a specific reading of the Qur'an?

"Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions." - Karl Marx

Interpretations of the Quran can be a channel for rage, but they are not the cause of it. If they were, we'd have Moroccan terrorists and Malaysian terrorists and Turkish terrorists, all of which we don't have. We have Arab/Pashtun terrorists, mainly from countries where the West interferes. Is that a coincidence?

I've started a translation effort of the 'State of emergency' French laws + some relevant press releases from the government: https://gist.github.com/fasterthanlime/faa2ae629d22f325beb7

Feel free to suggest improvements in the comments and/or request other relevant documents to be translated.

"Evil thrives when good men do nothing" gotta put a stop to this

What should be done?

Bomb the hell out of the Syrians? Surely they have suffered enough.

Iraq III? Maybe this time.... maybe....

Send the ground troops into Saudi? Quatar?

Acknowledging that some of ISIS / Al-Qaeda gripes do have some merit, stop interfering in other countries affairs, stop propping up dictators because they are "our" dictator.

Something else?

Unfortunately for the Syrians, my money is on bomb the hell out of them, trying to limit the number of "collataral damage" of dead women and kids, but hey, not our fault.

And so we go round the merry go round again.

Well we can either change foreign policy and start a long road to trying to repair the damage done, bomb more, start another ineffective war, or somehow get the blessing of Russia and bring the full weight of the (actually fully committed and mobilized) western world down on Isis and everyone else who fucks with us.

Now obviously option 1 is probably the best approach, option 2 is the most likely, and option 4 is the one that is appealing in the wake of hundreds of innocent people dying.

We have to concentrate on stabilizing Syria, Iraq, Yemen, etc., assist the Kurds and other moderate groups against the extremists, and be vigilant within our own borders, yet without sacrificing our liberties.

Beyond that, there's not much more we can do.

We tried to stabilize Iraq, now we have ISIL.

Arguably, we gave up on stabilizing Iraq and pulled out too quickly, angering the Sunni tribes who were counting on the U.S. to protect them from the majority Shi'ite government. Once they saw the U.S. military bailing out, they began allying with Sunni extremists and gave ISIS a fertile soil in which to take root.

US has been mostly used as a very expensive bludgeon to deal with internal enemies.

You don't like your local police officer, call him terrorist and see the world's most expensive bludgeon deal with him. Don't want to deal with rebellious village? Tell Americans they are terrorists.

Moderate is a relative term.

Compared to ISIS, Asad is a secular moderate. Hell, Al Quaida is moderate compared to ISIS. Every other sensible actor in Syria left the country long time ago.

What if we were to remove our dependence on foreign oil?

Though fusion is a long way out, hypothetically, if we didn't have any reason to interfere and could just leave the Middle East to figure out its own problems, they wouldn't have a reason to see us as the enemy.

Shifting the mind-blowingly insane amount of money we spend on defense over to fusion could help move things along pretty quickly.

Wouldn't that destabilize the middle east even more?

It would start an avalanche. The problem is that you never know when or where those stop.

In 2014, net imports accounted for 27% of the petroleum consumed in the United States. 37% of that comes from Canada, followed by 13% from Saudi Arabia. [0]

Our dependence on foreign oil is no longer an excuse for our meddling in the Middle East.

[0] http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=727&t=6

I think our significantly decreasing reliance on foreign energy has put the writing on the wall. Middle East countries used to pushing hundreds of billions in oil welfare and running surpluses will be in serious deficit and facing a decimated budget which will tank their economies. Perhaps the thinking is to revolt now before the money is all gone? With such a strikingly oil-centric economy, oil crashed from its high, steady technological progress making their fields increasingly irrelevant over time... Cities built on $140 oil will sink back into the sand. Seems to me massacring innocent French civilians only makes it happen faster.

We meddle a lot less overall in the Middle East the last 8 years than the prior 8, right? If we don't then Russia steps up to do it themselves (for better or worse US has no leadership there anymore so maybe why not Russia give it a shot?)

In the end I personally don't believe the massacre is in any way "caused" by US or other foreign involvement in the Middle East. This is not the first caliphate, nor will it be the last, and it's not about righting wrongs or a struggle for independence, it's literally about inflicting mass casualties on the infidels in as an atrocious and terrifying (i.e beheadings) manor as possible.

Over 100 murdered is a mind boggling atrocity but also a terrible security failure. Not just in failing to catch and prevent it, but failure to take out the shooters at the concert sooner. (I haven't read a detailed account of how the shooters were stopped if there is one)

Whether you believe it personally or not, the US involvement in the Middle East - namely, support for Israel, funding of the Saudi regime since 1945 and the arming of Wahhabis during the first gulf war - is the reason ISIS and similar groups have flourished.

You wouldn't need to provide much evidence to convince someone that the US certainly makes a great excuse or scapegoat. However, to simply state the US involvement in the Middle East is the reason ISIS and similar groups have flourished doesn't merely strain credulity, it ignores practically a millennium of history, extremely complex political, social, cultural and religious dynamics, and not to mention US support for Israel and funding of the Saudi regime is at an all-time low, and at least as much if not more weapons came from USSR/Russia than the USA. So I assume you're just trolling.

The reality, I believe, is much closer to the same reason it always comes down to when men commit acts of brutality in order to subjugate or terrorize a population. They do it because of ego, pride, opportunity, and a desire for establishing their own power, not because someone else made them do it or in seeking justice in face of tyranny.

If anything, I think it's more likely the premature US withdraw from the Middle East and a lack of stronger support for Israel which has contributed to ISIS flourishing. A perceived faltering of support between two allies is the best invitation for increased pressure and targeted attacks (physical, political, clandestine, and otherwise) against the bonds between those allies. It doesn't surprise me at all that countries and religious fanatics with the stated goal of the destruction of Israel would work tirelessly to popularize the notion that if only not for the US "supporting Israel" the Middle East would somehow be more stable.

Mostly I pin the blame for the flourishing of ISIS collectively on the Middle Eastern countries which themselves have epically failed to confront the rising threat of ISIS on their own turf, while doing seemingly everything possible in their own domestic policies to in fact encourage ISIS recruitment. Assad'd deployment of chemical weapons is mirrored in Egypt's own treatment of citizens in Sinai, and over and over again throughout the Middle East, we see effectively a ceaseless and brutal civil war stretching back, what, 1400 years, only interrupted by periods of apparent calm when one tyrant or another manages to temporarily cement themselves so far above reproach that their own raping and plundering goes uncontested for a relatively short while.

The Middle East has been facing endemic war between Islamic sects basically for the entire history of Islam itself. The "holy wars" (call it barbarism or medievalism) being carried out in the name of Islam (by so-called "Islamic terrorists") is evidence enough that this is not actually problem of foreign policy, but a deep seated and historically pervasive domestic problem.

The inescapable "defunding" of the Middle East over the next few decades is unsurprisingly leading to a surge of sound and fury, signifying little, and ultimately will disappear in a whimper. These are countries which by and large by their own actions and circumstances have squandered a most incredible glut of natural resources (as is human nature) and as that era comes to a close in relatively short order, will bring with it a humanitarian crisis throughout the region, which frankly, neither the US or any other World power, is either responsible for, nor has the political will, nor even the available resources, systems, or infrastructure to adequately address.

The massacre in France is abhorrently evil and sensationally shocking. Statistically, it is a drop in the bucket. I can't even comprehend, for example, the scale of horror and violence which is being inflicted daily against disenfranchised Muslim women and girls who are married into bondage, raped, and brutalized, as a token reward / enticement for ISIS recruits, even wrapping this torture in a veil of propriety and calling it Sharia.... A sickness like that, to me, can only be understood, explained, spread, and ultimately eradicated domestically.

>"Mostly I pin the blame for the flourishing of ISIS collectively on the Middle Eastern countries which themselves have epically failed to confront the rising threat of ISIS on their own turf, while doing seemingly everything possible in their own domestic policies to in fact encourage ISIS recruitment"

ISIS formed in the power vacuum created by the United States toppling Saddam Hussein. [0,1] So yes, the country that had its leader and military demolished was unable to combat the rise of ISIS, you're right. But pinning the failure on them is to ignore the reasons they failed to do so.

>The Middle East has been facing endemic war between Islamic sects basically for the entire history of Islam itself. The "holy wars" (call it barbarism or medievalism) being carried out in the name of Islam (by so-called "Islamic terrorists") is evidence enough that this is not actually problem of foreign policy, but a deep seated and historically pervasive domestic problem.

To collapse the rise of ISIS into the same civil wars that have been raging for the past millennia and a half is the same willful ignorance of the complex cultural history that you deride in your first paragraph. The roots of ISIS are in Wahhabism, a faction that existed mainly in Saudi Arabia. It wasn't until Roosevelt met with King Ibn Saud in 1945 (following the discovery of oil there in 1938) that this nation had any serious ambition at exporting their brand of Islam further in the middle east. Then, with the Oil Crisis of 1973, Saudi Arabia proved its political power and was able to leverage it against the United States. When it came time to expel the Soviets from Afghanistan, the United States armed the Mujahadin, a proudly Wahhabist faction.

The US being the reason that ISIS has flourished is not an opinion, it's the conclusion made over and over by analysis of historical facts.

[0]http://www.cfr.org/iraq/islamic-state/p14811 "The group that calls itself the Islamic State can trace its lineage to the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, in 2003. The Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi aligned his Jama’at al-Tawhidw’al-Jihad with al-Qaeda, making it al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI)."

http://www.thenation.com/article/what-i-discovered-from-inte... [1]"More pertinent than Islamic theology is that there are other, much more convincing, explanations as to why they’ve fought for the side they did. At the end of the interview with the first prisoner we ask, “Do you have any questions for us?” For the first time since he came into the room he smiles—in surprise—and finally tells us what really motivated him, without any prompting. He knows there is an American in the room, and can perhaps guess, from his demeanor and his questions, that this American is ex-military, and directs his “question,” in the form of an enraged statement, straight at him. “The Americans came,” he said. “They took away Saddam, but they also took away our security. I didn’t like Saddam, we were starving then, but at least we didn’t have war. When you came here, the civil war started.”

ISIS is the first group since Al Qaeda to offer these young men a way to defend their dignity, family, and tribe."

Dutch proverb: If you sow wind you will reap storm.

We would have to do a Moonshot program on renewable energy sources like wind, solar, geothermal, water turbine and invent better batteries to store electricity when the renewables aren't providing power.

We'd have to make more electric cars and find a way to make them affordable to replace gas powered cars. Have electric car conversion kits to replace the engine and take out the gas tank and replace it with batteries. You got used gas powered cars as low as $500 and owners that can't afford electric cars so you have to do a government program for them to subsidize the conversion.

Getting off fossil fuels will help fight climate change as well. So it is a win-win.

Our bombs and bullets are what led to the creation of ISIS. Surely the solution is not more bombs and bullets.

Bombs, bullets and money.

I think this quote is exactly backwards wrt. terrorism. There are times when the right move is to not do anything, and terror attacks are such a case. We should focus on police work to determine and bring to justice the entire chain of command, just like every other organized crime group. Just this. The whole point of a terror attack is to make the victim do something more.

According to iTele there are now 118 dead.

Edit: Now it's up to 140. What a sad day :(

140 latest report.

The Guardian is reporting at least 140 at this point. Unfortunately, the number will only rise.

Reworded to avoid offence (hopefully): deaths are not irrelevant, but their exact precise number is irrelevant. What matters is the scale of the security failure, compounded by the fact that they suffered a similar one less than a year ago and they were currently on high-alert (because they've only just started bombing Syria).

The knowledge that a network could carry out such a widespread and well-coordinated attack without being preempted, in a situation of maximum alert, will heavy on the minds of any French citizen regardless of whether victims were 118 or 119. Basically, the French security system has been revealed as completely ineffective. That is a huge problem.

No, the number of innocent killed people is never irrelevant. Every single dead person is one dead person too much. Full stop.

Edit: no need to further downvote as parent has changed his statement. Thanks parent poster.

Of course. But by the same reasoning, there is no difference if there were 1 or 118 victims, which is my point. It's not about keeping score.

If you agree that the number is not irrelevant, it would be very kind of you to revoke that statement. It's an insult to the dead and to the families of the dead. Thank you.

Edit: no need to further downvote as parent has changed his statement. Thanks parent poster.

This kind of thinking led to the War on Terror, which led to a rise in extreme Islam which led to...

Not all craziness is preventable by a security system.

You're right, but attacks that require supplies (especially supplies that aren't dual use, like guns) and coordination between many parties, are the types of attacks that the modern security apparatus is optimized for preventing.

That might be the case, but this particular strain of craziness was well-publicised and even experienced less than a year ago in the same place. One would expect some antibodies would have been developed by now, especially considering that French foreign policy is not getting any softer.

The problem is that the 'foreign' policy is irrelevant. The 'foreign' policy is made to appear the state is 'doing something' while MOST of the problem has been in the country for many, many years. Most of the problem is that the youngsters of immigrant stock have not been integrated, and have nothing else to do than turn to crime and/or religion, so are just RIPE for radicalism...

And there's little the state can do about THAT. they can't send war planes to the banlieus -- it's a lot easier to play tough and send warplanes somewhere else, ignoring the local problem of the ghethos.

And I don't have a proposal to make it all better either. It was an unsolvable problem already in france when I grew up there, and there's very little that can be done that hasn't been tried already.

Of course craziness can explode in many ways, but denying that foreign policy is a huge trigger is just disingenuous. How many suicide bombers have you seen in Canada or Sweden? And they have a huge migrant population, larger than France in percentage terms, with various degrees of (non-)integration. But they don't set other countries on fire nor they usually bomb anyone, so they don't get hit by paramilitary networks.

Fair enough; I think I should have said that it's not 'only' foreign policy that matters, it's part fo the factors of course. You can play with thought policies when you are not already crowded with a population of people who feel they are being dealt (rightly, or wrongly, or perceived, or real) the wrong hand.

The real sad thing is that it puts a lot of other people in the wrong sort of focus, all the people who ARE integrated, who made the efforts, who overcame the hurdles of segregation and racism; these are the 'visible' people who'll get in trouble in the next few weeks/months in the daily lives, and perhaps make them wonder if it was such a good idea to identify and 'join' a population that is just angry and looking for a soft target.

It took Israel security services around 3 years, to stop most bombing and rifle attacks. They are better funded and staffed (forced conscription larger in scope than in France) and that didn't help either . Eventually a massive wall was built (ideologically neither party supported, which gave rise to opportunistic and most corrupt politicians) and as enough of the voters didnt approve with the results the army got approval for countless ground and air raids. The end result was a young generation filled with hatered torwards Israel, now finding other ways to attack.

My point is that to expect security forces to stop such attacks is reasonable up to a point. Escelation on one side builds escelation on the other and eventually its becomes an established norm. The problem Europe has is real, and difficult, tragic.

My heart is with those in Paris, France and Europe . I cannot sleep.

It's relevant to the families and friends of those killed.

Yes, I agree. Immense tragedy and I fear the numbers will go up before this is over.

Why? Is the death of a loved one any more, or less, tragic because it is one among a hundred?

You could probably phrase that first sentence a little better.

> Basically, the French security system has been revealed as completely ineffective.

How can a country possibly prevent these things while still maintaining a free society?

> How can a country possibly prevent these things while still maintaining a free society?

You can't even prevent them when not being a free society. Its not like terrorism only occurs in free societies.

By making the secret services work for their money on real problems, instead of fretting about tapping media pirates and suchlike. By having a foreign policy that does not rely on military intervention at the drop of a hat. By not starting fires all over the place. The list is long and well-known.

I don't think any secret service could prevent any isolated individual to make at home, say, Molotov cocktails, and throw them by car in a crowd.

But these weren't isolated individuals. This was an organised network with grenades and assault rifles and the training to handle them.

This is not a Breivik, or a "Shoe Bomber" Reid; this is '70s-style, organised, cross-border terrorism -- the sort of which "we" were supposed to be good at handling by now.

They can't; even the not free societies - think prisons - are not safe. People that want to do Bad Things will do them. Even if they didn't have guns or weapons, they could've - for example - get enough people into a dinner party or restaurant, have everyone grab a fork, and start stabbing people in the eye.

Terrorism doesn't need weaponry. The only deterrent would be to read people's minds, and you've probably watched Minority Report and other such dystopian scenarios. It's something that needs to be solved at the root, and TBF I don't believe it can be fixed.

I'm a bit more optimistic, I think it can be fixed but it will take many years (decades).

  Terrorism doesn't need weaponry.

Indeed. Even if you deem well-coordinated attacks with just edged weapons (like the fictional ones in "The Following") unlikely, note that the Multiple-Victim public homicide with the most fatalities in US history used not a single firearm.

(and I'm not talking about 9/11, although it could count as such as well)

> Basically, the French security system has been revealed as completely ineffective.

As an aside, strong suveillance laws were voted earlier this year.

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...

Exactly. Fat lot of good it did to them. Clearly the whole approach is simply wrong.

If you see and hear everything, you will know nothing.

> Basically, the French security system has been revealed as completely ineffective. That is what matters.

The attacks are horrible and a security system which effectively prevents them would be just as horrible.

This problem won't be fixed without a major shift in paradigm on either side. Perhaps not in our lifetime but oh how nice it would be...

They already failed to prevent 600 common murders each year. You could call that completely ineffective or you could call it diminishing returns on investment in security. You can't prevent all of them without an unacceptable number of false positives or harsh restrictions on freedom.

Anyone who's upset by this and doesn't have a personal connection to the victims is not being rational. They should be upset by all other killings - the vast majority which don't get into the international news, let along HN. Those are far more prevalent, and perhaps easier to prevent because they're done by amatures.

118 inside the theater and 40 in other locations in and around Paris

itele says 118 total with around 80 in the bataclan

Watching iTele now too, numbers 40 or 80 aren't confirmed yet.

EDIT: 40 confirmed.

158 deaths in total, so terrible

Latest breakdown of fatalities available, from CNN and other sources:

  114 and still rising at the Bataclan theater
  19 at Le Belle Equipe bar
  14 at the Cambodian restaurant
  4 in the area of the Avenue de la Republique
  4 outside the Stade de France (remarkably low death toll here given that there were two suicide bombers there)

It would be interesting to see the number of wounded. There is usually a disproportionate amount of people wounded vs fatalities.

Headline unfortunately is out of date. It's well over 100 deaths, according to major news sources, and unknown wounded. Just tragic and senseless.

Of all the wonderful and dangerous developments that technology has granted our species, I'm saddened to think that we have yet to find a pathway to the human spirit that can help reduce hatred and the impulses that result in such terrible actions. From school shootings in the US to warlords in distant lands, there's so much yet to achieve in the name of progress, for human kind. Surely, we have much to do, and as tragedies continue to befall people of all nationalities, creeds, and colors, reaching for betterment hopefully can be a goal for us all. The sun shall rise tomorrow, and I truly hope each new day is one we can use to its fullest for the pursuit of life.

Don't worry. Driverless cars are coming and the lives they save will quickly outweigh all deaths from terrorism and mass shootings. The US will be such a massively safer place without those 30,000 road deaths each year. It'll be able to sustain another 9/11 incident every year and still be safer than before. So I don't think we need to solve this problem. We're already well on the way to solving the real problems. Terrorism and mass shootings are negligible and don't need to be a priority.

You're missing the point - at the root of all societal discord is an intellectual and emotional disconnect, which is, practically speaking, now easier facilitated by technology. That is, people fueled by hatred are much more driven and capable of mobilizing with technological advances than groups who wish to address the root causes. Driverless cars are simply a "feel good" development, along the lines of bariatric surgery. I'm talking about getting deeper into the human psyche for the benefit of all mankind, which isn't a "negligible" type of pursuit. Also, if society valued lives via driving, people would be subjected to more rigorous testing using technology, not simply cut out of the loop.

Café, croissants, gouter d'anniversaire, et ce soir, j'irais voir Spectre parceque merde (i'm in Paris)

( Café, croissant, birthday party, and tonight, i'll go watch Spectre - as previously planned, because f.. them. )

From reddit

ChickenInASuit8h535: ISIS aren't really trying to "solve" anything in the countries they're attacking, the main motivation behind these attacks is to widen the rift between Islam and the West and bring more moderate Muslims over to their side

alpual7h345: And I'm sure backlash and discrimination resulting from this attack will further alienate Muslims in France. I'm sure that's part of their intention, and I wonder why I don't see that being discussed much. Thanks for pointing that out.

This is a losing game for us. If we don't make ANY backlash, then the terrorists will be encouraged to repeat attacks, as they see there are no consequences for their actions. Additionally, French will be more afraid of Muslims and will surrender whatever they have to them even more willingly, as they would feel helpless. On the other hand if we make backlash, more muslims will radicalize, again, increasing terrorism frequency. The only solution I see is finally admit that multiculturalism is a lost cause when only one culture actually trying for it to work (us), and expel all muslims that don't fit our culture, PLUS invest heavy money into converting current muslims to be more like us. Ban certain practices, etc.

San Francisco seems to be a great example of multiculturalism. I have to admit that I disagree with a good amount of the things you said. I think that we will need multiculturalism to move forward. If we look back into our past, terrible things have come from preventing multiculturalism. What do you think about my statement?

What terrible thing came from preventing multiculturalism? None. On the contrary - terrible things happened BECAUSE of multiculturalism. Several groups of people cannot live as a community when their ideas of a community are different. "Multiculturalism" is only possible when the cultures WANT to live together. In our case here in Europe, whites want to live together with muslims, but muslims don't. Ant that is the problem. We can not fix it, only muslims can. And if they won't fix it, terrible things WILL happen. We are doing our part. It's time for other cultures to do theirs. And if they won't, we will have no choice.

French should be concerned about losing more liberties due to knee-jerk reaction from politicians wanting to "do something". Mass surveillance under the pretext of anti-terrorism.

Be alert.

I hope the people in Paris for the dotGo conference are okay. http://www.dotgo.eu/

We visited France/Paris for our marriage anniversary back in June; and the city left a lasting impression on for over the course of 4 days.

All I can say is; don't change your fundamentals. Then they have won. It's just a larger version of your bitcoin demanding DDOS bandits. Once you give in, humanity will fail.

I am more worried about the innocent people who are going to suffer because of this.

Every Twitter user has jumped aboard and is using the hashtag #PorteOuverte which is intended to help Parisians find a safe place to stay during these attacks. It's even trending in Australia. This shows that Twitter is a successful news aggregation and trend following service, but also proves its failure to be a platform for meaningful communication.

How has it failed as a platform for meaningful communication? Aren't you reporting its success in this area?

People expressing something (sympathy, judgement, whatever) are crowding out the messages of people trying to co-ordinate requests for support and offers of support.

It's cool that the twitter user in Australia has a message of sympathy. But if you urgently need a safe place to stay in Paris, and you can't find the people making that offer, in a place meant for that offer, because the non-parisians are making too much noise, then that's a problem.

Ah. I misread OP's comment.

Yeah, that's bad situation.

The feature isn't easy to find but you can limit a hashtag search to tweets near you. On the results page, click on "More Options" and select "Near You."

100+ is terrifying. While it's still morning here, 80,000 people are estimated to have already died today. (http://www.worldometers.info/)

If these reports are accurate then we have a staggering average above 4,000 violent daily deaths. (http://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/7/2/104.full) (http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/67403/1/a77019.pdf)

Calais Jungle (where refugees stay) is on fire: https://mobile.twitter.com/Harryslaststand/status/6653291703...

Prayers for those who died and their family members.

A reminder than the free societies must remain and and continue to defend themselves despite such terror attacks. It is important that politicians don't cave into the political goals that these terrorists might have.

The US terrorism alert level has not been raised, and there are no US terrorism alerts from Homeland Security following this.[1] PJM and CAISO (the two biggest US power grid operators) aren't showing any emergency actions or warnings. So the US anti-terrorism community isn't seeing an imminent threat.

[1] http://www.dhs.gov/news/2015/11/13/statement-secretary-jeh-c...

And let me tell you, my evening was pivoting on what the terrorism alert level would be today. It was double-plus-orangy-red before, right?

I am as saddened as on Paris shootings and killing of innocents like I'm shooting and killing of thousands of Muslims in Syria, Palestine, Iraq and Kashmir.

I hope Western Society/Media or elsewhere will not bring faith factor in discussion just like they don't bring it up during US shootings or killing in Palestine or elsewhere.

This will only get worse over time, in Europe and in US, more so in Europe as Europe is frankly slowly Muslimized(by 2050 they may become majority). It's the new reality. Western culture is under serious attack and the system is not designed to cope with terrorism like this _at_all_.

Without security, talking about freedom is meaningless.

118 dead reported by AFP (80 inside Bataclan concert hall) and 4 terrorists executed by special forces

executed?

Killed.

Made unalive.

I'm guessing snipers.

That definition made me smile.

But executed has a quite definite meaning, I think. If anything, the terrorists have been executing people tonight.

itele just said that 2 of them might have killed themselves using explosives in their belt

Really sad. It's also depressing to see the response from politics. Border controls and more police presence. How likely is that to solve the underlying problems?

It keeps getting worse.

My heart and thoughts go out to the French people, Parisians and those who were killed and injured and their families.

Je suis français

Condolence for the lost ones' families and Paris people. Such a tragedy for all humanity.

I'm very curious about where the attackers got those firearms. France isn't as heavily disarmed as England, but it isn't exactly the United States for firearms availability; if any of the offenders' weapons can be recovered, I'm sure there will be interesting things to learn from their serial numbers.

There are open borders in most of EU and it's a piece of cake to buy automatic weapons in eastern Europe, gangs in Sweden import theirs from Slovakia for example.

I hadn't known that it was as bad as that! (Other posters here mention old Soviet arms caches, and the general surplus of weapons spread by the fall of Communism.) It sounds like the UK benefits quite a bit from being on an island... (Are they in Schengen or not?)

The UK and Ireland are outside of Schengen. Hence the improvised refugee/homeless camp on the Calais side of the tunnel.

That is only because up until recently you could buy blank fire guns in Slovakia that were easily converted to real guns. Otherwise most of the weapons are from the Balkans as a consequence of the war.

Outlawing guns is a lot like outlawing drugs. If you want them, you can get them.

Drugs I could find. Guns? Wouldn't have a clue where to start.

uh, well, that's probably because you're not a criminal or terrorist.

Technically finding illegal drugs would make you a criminal.

Start selling drugs, then ask your higher-ups. Illegal guns are not hard to find in most US cities and surprisingly cheap too.

Or just go to a gun show in the South.

I'd bet that your drug dealer has suitable connections.

Possibly stolen from the french military... http://www.france24.com/en/20150707-explosives-stolen-france...

see here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10564799

This is saddening to see how others view precious lives as a commodity.

To those in Paris, stay safe.

I don't understand how can you talk about ISIS, Nazis and Communists in the same sentence? Communism has nothing to do with violence compared to ISIS and Nazis...

Edit: Why downvotes? Idea of communism does not propose violence, Nazis and ISIS on the other hand do.

I think he might be talking about Stalinism. Or at the very least, just Stalin.

So you think Stalin was as bad as ISIS and Nazis?

edit: Why downvotes? I've asked a question, I wonder how western people see Stalin in history. I as Russian see him as the one who was involved in defeating Nazis

We can debate on his motives and methods, but in terms of death count he is as good as any. But you are right that ISIS is more evil in this sense: if ISIS had Stalin's power and military apparatus, they would do more damage than Stalin ever did.

As a Russian do you know about the purges he enforced? What is your opinion about the killing of people just for being educated or having having grievances with stalin's governing. Is it OK to kill people for disagreeing with government policies? Like even the post-Stalin soviet government had disowned him.

I am absolutely against that, but I am also against blatant lie and made up figures attributed to people died under Stalin's regime, just look at the comment list here, people saying any kinds of figures from 10 to 100 million deaths, so tomorrow somebody who reads this chat will pick the figure which is more appropriate to his point of view and bring it up in his discussion which will be complete lie and un-official data, which will result in more wrong opinions like that.

Stalin, to use a popular term, topped the charts for quite a while. Compared to him these ISIS clowns are rank amateurs.

I definitely put all three in the same category. Stalin was probably less bad than Hitler (he killed more people than Hitler did historically, but imagine the body count if Hitler had won); but it's not easy to choose among totalitarian regimes -- or aspiring totalitarian regimes, in ISIS' case.

>he killed more people than Hitler did historically

Only when counting famines and a civil war type situation among his casualties. He killed much less than Hitler otherwise (which would still be a lot).

> So you think Stalin was as bad as ISIS and Nazis?

The general consensus is that Germany under Hitler killed around 11 million noncombatants. The USSR under Stalin killed at least 20 million, with some estimates ranging much higher.

Many people in the west still say that Hitler was worse because he tried to exterminate entire ethnic groups, where Stalin mostly killed anyone that he thought might get in his way. I think they were both monsters, and there's no profit in trying to measure which one was worse.

Stalin did help defeat the Nazis. Don't make the mistake of thinking that makes him the good guy. In stories, the villain's enemy is always a hero, but in real life, villains fight other villains all the time.

As far as Stalin and ethnic cleansing goes, he did not do to badly himself (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_transfer_in_the_Sov...).

...or Bolsheviks, try reading wikipedia about the immediate post-revolution violence called the Red Terror as it will turn your stomach it was truly, truly terrible [0]

...or Maoism "struggle sessions" which resulted in 2 million deaths [1]

...or just read about mass killings in communist regimes[2]. Clearly communist governments have mass killed a lot of people.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_...

The period after the French Revolution that threw down monarchy and more or less brought democracy to Europe was called the Terror [1] as well and tens of thousands of people were guillotined or executed (that was quite a lot of people at the time). Unfortunately, when oppressed people overcome the power in place, bad things happen as the results of the change in the balance of powers. IMHO this is similar to what happened when Bolsheviks took over the tsars and Communist Chinese put down the Emperor. I am of course not condoning violence (I am French and still in shock with what just happened) but I think these examples are sometimes more a sign of the people getting rid of hundreds (thousands) years of oppression than a particular political alignment. Unfortunately history is rich of mass killings in the name of politics, religions and other ideologies.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror

I'm talking about Lenin (founder of the VChK/KGB), and Stalin, and Mao, and Pol Pot, and the Shining Path, and the Red Army Faction, and I could go on but the other names escape me. When a political movement kills more people than Hitler, I'm fine with mentioning it in the same breath as Hitler.

There has been plenty of communist-inspired violent terrorism. Germany's RAF, Italy's Red Brigade, Japan's United Red Army, Peru's Shining Path, Columbia's FARC, Sri Lanka's Tamil Tigers, etc. etc. Saying these are not real communists is just a No True Scotsman. As soon as people start believing in utopias there's a danger that they will cross a line.

>As soon as people start believing in utopias there's a danger that they will cross a line.

More people have been killed in pragmatic endeavours, like colonialism, and land grab/turf wars, than from "utopias".

This includes smaller scale utopias -- far less innocent people have been killed by ...hippies than by policemen.

You're not contradicting anything I said, I wouldn't claim utopias are the only reason for people to become violent. I do believe that true believers such as with religions or utopias are particularly dangerous. Did you reply this way because you approve of communism?

>You're not contradicting anything I said, I wouldn't claim utopias are the only reason for people to become violent.

Well, why single them out then if both sides can be dangerous?

If you think they are the "more dangerous", then I think the previous 2 milenia of bloodshed for pragmatic land/power grabbing, including WW I, refute that.

Besides, even so-called utopians are quite pragmatic in their actions. When Mao executed tons of people, it wasn't some "utopianism" guiding him, but a very pragmatic power grab to stay in power and get rid of possible contenders.

(You might say that this was only possible because his subordinates were deluded by some utopian zeal. But lots of other cases, from the Belgian colonies and Pinochet to Indonesian "death squads", prove that you don't need that to have mass killings, just unquestioned power and the upper hand).

>Did you reply this way because you approve of communism?

No, I replied this way because I approve of utopias. The US was one too at some point -- for persecuted from Europe religious nuts.

Also because I like being objective, which needs taking all sides into account. Of any binary (utopia/pragmatism e.g.) I'd never say "the first is dangerous" if the second has been historically proved just as dangerous.

Pan-Americanism and Capitalism are both utopian ideas.

Not sure why the downvotes, I voted you up.

Could someone who downvoted this elaborate? I'd love to hear why you don't consider Pan-americanism and capitalism(!) to be utopian

Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, Kim Il Sung - just to name a couple of famous exponents of communism. Perhaps you are mistaking the ideal of communism with the actual practice of it, which has proven to be just as genocidal as anything else in history.

Sure, be we could name the famous exponents of non-communist states too, and amass a huge blood toll that rivals and surpasses these people.

Heck, there were 2 world wars in which communists countries were only involved in the second, and only on the allies side. How many people were killed there, including civilians?

And let's not get started in the 18th-19th century history, before marxism was even invented...

War, murder and dictatorship are what they are -- they don't just belong to one single side of the political spectrum.

In Indonesia, for one example, nearly a million communist sympathizers were executed by right wingers (as were in Pinochet's Chile and elsewhere). This is an interesting watch:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2375605/

Your comment is irrelevant to the point being discussed, which was specifically about communism. It's akin to saying, "We excuse X for doing something bad because Y (something to which we are ideologically opposed) did the same bad thing". In other words, it's the "side", not the "principle" you are arguing. If you take that position you can be an apologist for practically anything that happens.

>Your comment is irrelevant to the point being discussed, which was specifically about communism.

Only under the naive assumption that we assess things in isolation and not comparatively and in historical perspective.

>It's akin to saying, "We excuse X for doing something bad because Y (something to which we are ideologically opposed) did the same bad thing".

No, it's more akin to saying "You singled out X as the cause of something bad when it's also an attribute of Y".

E.g. something like: "- Python is slow because it's a GC language". "- Nope, Java and Swift also have GC and are very fast".

Also note that I never said anything about "excusing" -- I actually condemn both.

>In other words, it's the "side", not the "principle" you are arguing. If you take that position you can be an apologist for practically anything that happens.

What you can actually be is pragmatic, someone who assesses things in historical and relative perspective, instead of taking sides and singling out.

It's amazing how someone that begins by saying that "this discussion is only about X, anything else is irrelevant", accuses someone adding the stats for Y for comparison as "taking sides".

As horrific and scary as terrorist acts are to civil societies (and impactful to our politics), Stalin's rule was far more devastating. "In February 1989, two years before the fall of the Soviet Union, a research paper by Georgian historian Roy Aleksandrovich Medvedev published in the weekly tabloid Argumenti i Fakti estimated that the death toll directly attributable to Stalin’s rule amounted to some 20 million lives (on top of the estimated 20 million Soviet troops and civilians who perished in the Second World War), for a total tally of 40 million." http://www.ibtimes.com/how-many-people-did-joseph-stalin-kil...

The article you mentioned has no explanation of where he got those figures, as far as I know there is no official data on this and estimates range from 3Mln to 60Mln [1], which as you can see is quite bizarre estimate. According to official documents there were 799,455 people executed in a period from 1921 to 1953 [2] and keep in mind that's a total number of execution, not only those that were executed for political reasons, and that's over a span of 30+ years, so thats around 72 person a day across a whole soviet union territory (around 160+Mln people)

> on top of the estimated 20 million Soviet troops and civilians who perished in the Second World War

What does it have to do with Stalin? It was a war and people perish during a War.

> estimated that the death toll directly attributable to Stalin’s rule amounted to some 20 million lives

Just think about it, Stalin was in power for 30 years, so he had to "directly attribute" to a death of 2000 people every single day? Sounds quite bizarre to me. No official data of the 20Mln of "dead by Stalin's attributing", if you want to down vote me - at least show me official data.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin#Calculating_the_...

[2] - http://www.theguardian.com/education/2002/sep/12/highereduca...

It looks like you're not quite as naive as you'd sounded at first...

Remember, Stalin didn't go in for executions; he preferred slave labor. Deaths in the GULAG -- which could be as high as in the non-death-camp Nazi concentration camps, or higher -- should be counted as well as executions. (Remember how part of Stalin's price for peace with Japan was 300,000 Japanese slaves, none of whom ever returned to Japan after the war.)

Also, some deaths in the war should be attributed to Stalin -- at the very least, deaths in the punishment brigades. If you force someone to march through a minefield, and he hits a mine and dies, it's your fault.

> If you force someone to march through a minefield, and he hits a mine and dies, it's your fault

That's a war, Nazi Germany attacked USSR, people had to fight them, Stalin is not a field officer to force solders to march through a minefield, people die in a war, I don't think you are right here equating people who died fighting for their country with those who were executed for whatever reason.

> Remember how part of Stalin's price for peace with Japan was 300,000 Japanese slaves, none of whom ever returned to Japan after the war.

Most of those Japanese POWs who survived the winter of 1945 / 46 had been repatriated by 1956, with mediation by the Red Cross.

Furthermore:

In 2005, the Russian government provided the Japanese Ministry of Health and Welfare microfilms of personal information of 40,940 Japanese POWs who had died during their detention.

Still horrific but less than 10% of the total number.

There is a fascinating history of those who returned to Japan but couldn't fit-in again due to Soviet indoctrination.

Really! I hadn't known that -- I'm delighted to learn that most came back alive!!! Thank you!

Let’s start with the Holodomor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

Since we are talking about man-made hunger at large scale I thought Churchill deserved a mention - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943

Why downvotes? At a wild guess, 100 million dead.

I said that concessions will work no better with ISIS than they will with Nazis and Communists. Both the Nazis and the Communists were revolutionary movements convinced that the world was going their way. When they got concessions, they became emboldened; the only way to be left alone by them was to challenge and defeat them.

Concessions work with people who have "moderate" (asking for more rights or territorial independence) goals. People who are interested in a global caliphate may leave you in peace for a few years if you withdraw from the war (maybe), but they'll be back eventually.

Because they hate our "freedoms" man! Our enemies, they all a mob of crooks. We're the good guys.

At least, that's what the sorta person who bunches together ISIS, Nazis, and Communists has in mind. He fails to realize that Capitalism is just another utopian philosophy that will fail just like the others. It is also as violent as the others, even if its violence is covert.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10563972 and marked it off-topic.

Clearly more NSA surveillance is needed.

FWIW: The recent book "Day Of Wrath" http://www.dayofwrathbook.com predicts where such attacks are going.

I've seen a lot of HNers suggesting that we must over react and ramp up the war on terrorism. I'm all for cutting off immigration, but how will ramping up the wars do us any good? I don't see how another ten years "fixing" things is going to work.

Obviously it won't. No one who thinks about it for a second can possible think it will.

We terrorise you, you terrorise us. Only difference is we kill you in far greater numbers than you can ever dream of.

The war on terrorism will end when a new enemy can take it's place. The smart money is on China, but don't never count the Red Menace out, good outside bet they come good at the last minute.

It won't; a lot of people are radicalising just because of the 'war on terror'. As I said in another comment, what would you do if your family was bombed in a drone strike?

ISIS has a very fundamentalist view of the end of the world from their reading of the Koran, and are trying to hasten the "final battle". This belief was not "caused" by the war on terror or frustration with the west, though it does align with what they expect to happen.

Wow, you literally side with the terrorists over the victims. Illuminating.

I think the point is that drone strikes that kill innocent victims can be a source of radicalization. Ignoring that aspect of our foreign policy would be idiocy.

Even if I was a homicidal maniac, I doubt I'd mass-murder French civilians.

That's what confuses me the most about these attacks. Many people have legitimate grievances against NATO forces, but how does that lead to shooting random Parisians? It's so wasteful and counterproductive.

How will cutting off immigration do anything? I think it's important to realize that this is something that happens and that you don't necessarily have to do anything. If you get a cold, you don't quarantine your block and divert your life savings to rhinovirus research, you just deal with it and try and take sensible precautions about hygiene.

Equating this with a cold virus is the height of imbecility. Governments have a responsibility to protect their citizens. The scope of this protection is up for debate, but ignoring it is not a choice that most citizens will tolerate.

I thought the metaphor was clear - society, as a whole, is not threatened by this sort of thing, and it is not even particularly dangerous from an expected value perspective. The point is not that nothing should be done - as I mentioned with my reference to hygiene precautions. Washing your hands and encasing yourself in an antiseptic bubble are two very different things, and the fact of the matter is that not all deaths are preventable. I was trying to make the point that the knee-jerk reaction of "something should be done" discounts the possibility that sometimes it's not worth it to do anything, either because additional action would have no effect or because the marginal cost of that action exceeds the benefits.

A fairly large number of people die from influenza every year, but we don't have a mass surveillance dragnet to try and isolate flu vectors, for good reason. We do, however, have a fairly robust vaccination system which is a sensible precaution to take.

I think attacks like this are absolutely threatening to society, besides the obvious direct impact on everyone personally scared by their experience tonight, they likely increase islamaphobia and racism, cement negative prejudices in minds of average citizens, and yes likely lead to many "wrong" reactions by the State.

But it's completely wrong to conclude that the right thing to do is therefore nothing. As we learn more about who, what, why, and how this happened the first goal is to hunt down, arrest, put on trial, and if found guilty imprison for the rest of their lives (or execute) anyone who contributed to this attack. Every angle must be criticized to understand what effective countermeasures could have been in place to detect, disrupt, or kill the attackers sooner. There should be a tremendous outpouring of support for all the people and families impacted.

The most sickening is the celebratory response from various camps, and I wonder if that's happening anywhere inside France.

Particularly if this turns out to be a home brew attack, the Islamic communities bear a tremendous responsibility, not for the attack, but going forward, in significantly strengthening and mobilizing all their resources towards preaching nonviolent protest and leading the efforts to root out radicalized groups in the community. Where are the Islamic MLKs to rally the community against radicalization? The fear-and hate-fueled backlash against French Muslims may only be stemmed by a disproportionate response against the violence from within the communities.

And just a pedantic point, we actually do spend a reasonable sum on detecting flu trends by "surveillance" of hospital visits and even monitoring Google searches to identify and better respond to possible outbreaks.

It wasn't equated. It was mentioned as an example of something that is practically impossible to eradicate. Accepting this is better than for example sacrificing all of our civil liberties in exchange for security theater.

It won't.

The discussion needs to turn to how can people defend themselves. How 10/20/30 people trapped in a theater CAN overwhelm 3 attackers. How these people will not be willing to spare you no matter how cooperative you are or how sympathetic you are.

If you can't flight, fight.

The terrorists were most likely not immigrants, but french citizen/permanent resident.

Those are not mutually exclusive conditions . One does not need to be native-born to be a citizen or legal resident.

Right now we don't know who these people are, where they came from and what their aims were (besides terror). Of course terror is exactly this, you don't know, you imagine the worst, and everyone reacts, often pointlessly. I wonder why France?

We know exactly who they are: islamists. We have video recordings where you can hear them yelling "allahu Akbar" while shooting.

42% of young Muslims in France believe suicide bombings are justified (35% overall).

http://www.pewresearch.org/files/old-assets/pdf/muslim-ameri...

42% is appalling, but so what? What's your conclusion? (Recall that a majority of Americans have no problem with dropping bombs on foreign civilians.)

>a majority of Americans have no problem with dropping bombs on foreign civilian //

What's your reference here? I'd be quite shocked if people "had no problem" with such actions; "felt they were justified" is entirely believable however.

42% in a western non-islamic country is huge. My conclusion is that Islam is not compatible with the western cultures, with things like freedom of speech, freedom of religion, personal freedoms, and it's a huge mistake for Europe to allow so many of them in. You don't have to believe me, listen to the muslims themselves talk about it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bV710c1dgpU&t=138s

Have you noticed that Muslims in e.g. the US and Germany are by and large less radical than the broader population there? Islam doesn't seem to be particularly incompatible with Western culture, rather it seems to be incompatible with France. And I doubt it's something about French culture in particular either - if I was looking for what the difference is the first thing I'd do is look at French domestic policy and whether any of that stuff disproportionately affects immigrants or Muslims.

I agree they most likely were Islamist, although incidentally saying Allahu Akbar is not a very precise way of identifying an Islamist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takbir

To quote from the page: 'In videos released during the course of the Syrian Civil War, Free Syrian Army, Al-Nusra Front, other rebel and Islamist groups and ISIL are heard shouting "Takbir" and "Allahu Akbar"'

Some of those are Islamist groups, some are not.

Also, we don't know if the perpetrators were French or not, so what 42% of young French Muslims believe is not relevant at this point. Even if it was relevant, it would be hard to draw any conclusions from it. In the same link you provide, it seems that over 75% of French Muslims are concerned about the rise of Islamic Extremism.

Not to sound condescending, but if you're remotely interested about mid-east politics it is pretty easy to see what tonight was about. It is about Syria.

Pretty much all the world powers have vested interests in Syria. Russia has started to intervene in Syria very recently. NATO is there from the beginning. There is Iran, Turkey, Saudis, Israel, you name it.

There was supposed to be a G20 event tomorrow (will probably get postponed) and the hot topic was supposed to be Syria. What happened a few hours ago is just diplomacy played with blood.

I have have a few twitter accounts with news on very narrow topics, for example, machine learning news, and other niche technical topics. I just went through them all and anyone who mentions the Paris attacks gets unfollowed. If I ever want news about shocking violence going on on the other side of the planet with my Machine learning news I'll resubscribe. I get inundated every day with too much information. Getting the same shock news through 30 different channels is just ridiculous. Everyone thinks they're the modern day Paul Revere when really, I already know, and they're just being annoying.

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