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Comment by rplnt | Hacker News Reader

The comments there are... as expected I guess.

What didn't you expect? Hug-protest and tolerance march? People in Benelux are scared since November, after Paris attacks underground was blocked for a few days and military with full armament was on every corner.

> What didn't you expect?

Anything even remotely rational.

s/Benelux/Brussels/, perhaps Belgium.

My colleague from Luxembourg passed me some news after Paris attacks they had roads blocked and some border controls, so i don't think it's only Belgium.

It seems to be a discussion about whether or not this is Donald Trumps fault, how is that to have been expected?

I guess it's hard to feel in any other way when recent migration policies have translated into a sharp decline of our own security in our own developed countries.

The Paris attackers were French and Belgian, not immigrants. This has been the case with almost all attacks in Europe, where the perpetrators have almost always been local.

>The Paris attackers were French and Belgian, not immigrants.

Two of the nine were not - they were actual, recent immigrants through asylum-seeking process.

"Ahmad al-Mohammad" who came as a refugee through Turkey to Leroa in Greece, and together with him were registered the fingerprints of another immigrant known as "M. al-Mahmodin".

The rest were second-generation immigrants:

Bilal Hadfi was French but he spent time in Syria and came back, not through controlled border crossings, so he might have come with the asylees/immigrants. Others included French citizens Samy Amimour, who fought in Yemen, and Omar Ismail Mostefai and Foued Mohamed-Aggad who fought in Syria, and they were on wanted lists but were not spotted on border, so they appear to have come through people smugglers as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_2015_Paris_attacks#Id...

The fact that Hadfi probably returned with refugees doesn't mean much, when he could have easily jumped on the Easyjet from Istanbul and strolled through the blue channel. Yes, two more of them also probably came that way, one of whom was on a false passport. So yes, maybe they were Syrian refugees, but all that says is that they haven't been identified. The fact that the only one of them who travelled that way who was positively identified turned out to be French means this is by no means a foregone conclusion.

If it turns out that they were in fact refugees, that still doesn't make it a migration problem when most of the attackers were French or Belgian.

>The fact that Hadfi probably returned with refugees doesn't mean much, when he could have easily jumped on the Easyjet from Istanbul

If he'd jumped on Easyjet from Istanbul, he'd have had to provide a passport and visa and risk being arrested at border check in case the authorities were too interested in his involvement with extremists.

I don't get your point about blue channel; flights from Istanbul are not EU/Schengen internal.

Again, that's not something that totally prevents acts of terror, but would work as a bit of deterrent. I believe I should have a voice about this, because I live in the same Schengen area.

"Local", yes, keep telling yourself that

2nd generation immigrants

I'm not against immigration per se, but there's a lot of problems coming from people who fail (because it's mostly their responsibility) to integrate

If they're born in the country and lived there their whole life, they're local by any non-racist definition.

Even if they hate the society they live in, even if they do not accept the laws, even if they do not contribute anything but demand a lot, even if they do not speak the language, even if they raise their kids to become the same religious fags, even if they support people attacking the country where they are "locals"?

Do they think of themselves as local?

Even when they don't speak the local language like it sometimes happens?

Truth is, you can be so enclosed in a foreign culture that you will actually stay a foreigner trough all your life.

P.S.: I'm not saying that was the case here, I'm just answering your broader remark.

That's rather disingenuous. They are second generation immigrants of a particular religion that seems to be coincidentally associated time after time in these incidents.

Second generation immigrants don't mean this a problem with immigration. Lots of people like to link this to the current Syrian refugee crisis, but none of them are refugees. If you want to make it about immigration, make it about immigration from France's former colonies in the 1960s and 70s.

> Second generation immigrants don't mean this a problem with immigration

And that they're not first generation immigrants doesn't prove it isn't a problem with immigration either. We are still left with this recurring coincidence aren't we.

I don't claim to know the absolute truth here, I'm just suggesting we honestly acknowledge reality during discussions.

It's not first generation immigrants or refugees doing this. It's not Syrians doing this. By what possible rationale could you say that recent immigration has anything to do with this, other than that they're Muslim?

> By what possible rationale could you say that recent immigration has anything to do with this

I didn't say it was recent immigration that caused this incident, we both know that (if they are 2nd generation, it couldn't be recent).

> other than that they're Muslim

You think that their religion has absolutely nothing to do with this? I mean, even unjust prejudice within their host country because of their religion could easily cause social isolation and economic disadvantage leading to anger - that seems like a perfectly reasonable explanation to me and largely places the ultimate blame on the host country.

The original comment specified recent immigration. What gave you the impression I thought religion had nothing to do with this? Of course it does. I was talking about immigration though, and the fact they're both Muslim doesn't mean that these incidents have any connection to recent refugees from Syria, aside from the fact that the Syrians are running from these kind of people.

Actually, two of the nine Paris attackers were (probably) from Syria and had come as refugees, as they were registered with fingerprints in Greece.

A few of the others were French and were known to be in Syria, but how they came back to EU is apparently not known (could be with help from people smugglers, avoiding any registration at borders, because some of them were on wanted lists).

So three of them probably came as refugees. One of those has been identified and it turns out he was actually French, but you still assume the two unidentified ones were "real" refugees, rather than other French terrorists who had fought with IS and were trying the same trick?

I can't really say whether they are "real" refugees or not. The point is more that border checks have ceased to exist.

Schengen area doesn't actually even try to verify who comes in, and that enables also movement of jihadists - even if they are only a few among thousands and thousands, but the few can avoid border controls.

Integration is a two-way street. It's a 50/50 responsibility shared between host governments and migrants. From what I see, the Arabs/Muslims in Belgium (btw I'm from the same region so spare me your lectures about tolerance and openness for now) are not doing enough to integrate with the wider community but the Belgian authorities and political elites are not doing enough either to integrate these people and combat marginalization and discrimination that they may experience.

Also, Belgium political system is also not helping given its fractured nature thus limiting its options to effectively tackle those challenges and if we take into account the weak economic reality of Brussels add to that its ineffective fight of organized crime (Funding terrorist attacks and armaments) creating a perfect storm for this type of events to flourish whether in Belgium or spilling into other parts of Europe like what happened in Paris last November.

Sure, there are loads of problems due to ghettoisation or whatever.

That has nothing to do with 'recent migration policies'.

No they haven't. The recent attacks in Europe have not been caused by 'recent migrants'. That's just a bald-faced lie.

In November Paris attacks, two of the nine actually were "recent migrants" as explained in another comment.

So perhaps that "bald-faced lie" needs to be toned down a bit.

Caitlin Moran -

> Always good, on days like this, to remind everyone that the guys blowing up Brussels are THE PEOPLE THE REFUGEES ARE RUNNING AWAY FROM

A throwaway account called “odinduty” is espousing anti-immigration sentiments?

Will wonders never cease. But let’s stick to what HN does best, discuss the wonders of technology. In this case, I’d liek to administer a Turing Test:

The hypothesis is that ”odinduty" is a reasonably sophisticated bot, trained to emulate the kind of comments you find on /r/Europeans. Can we find it making a statement inconsistent with this hypothesis?

It's probably better to flag, downvote, and ignore the obvious trolls.

Maybe yes, maybe not, but you are a troll who created the account about 24 hours before the attacks.

Seems he even bought a clique of downvoters with him.

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