The slow revolt of Western electorates

[Wouter]

17 minutes ago, Arakan said:

I think the reason why the U.K. was relatively safe in recent years is because you have a much stricter immigration policy than say Germany. Obviously this is only possible in a practical manner due to the UK being an island. 

All Islamic terror incidents in Germany 2016 have been conducted by asylum seekers/refugees: 

- Suicide bombing in Ansbach: Syrian refugee 

- Axe attack in train (Würzburg): Afghan refugee

- Berlin attack: Tunisian asylum seeker 

So basically no homegrown Islamist terror but in the UK the terrorists were homegrown IIRC. 

My point: the roughly 4 million Muslims living, working and grown up in Germany never did any terror deeds (except the mentioned case). 

What about Köln, last new year? I would count that as a terrorist attack, too. Were the perpetrators there "homegrown" or recent imports?

[Arakan]

Just now, Wouter said:

What about Köln, last new year? I would count that as a terrorist attack, too. Were the perpetrators there "homegrown" or recent imports?

Recent imports, if you want to call it that way. AFAIK none of the prosecuted perpetrators were Muslims who grew up in Germany. 

[The guy from the Vale]

Munich was a home-grown case though, although we can debate if we consider it an act of terrorism (but if we include Köln, why not München?)

[Arakan]

16 minutes ago, theguyfromtheVale said:

Munich was a home-grown case though, although we can debate if we consider it an act of terrorism (but if we include Köln, why not München?)

Munich was amok. Not terrorism. Was very important for many back in July. No Islamic terrorism. I did not include Köln 

[Rippounet]

7 hours ago, Wouter said:

It seems to me that the fear for the Orwellian society is weighing too much now, in your judgment. Sure, privacy is important and abuse of such laws is possible. But this has to be weighed against the consequences of terrorist attacks (and of organised crime) and the means that counterterrorists have to stop attacks from even happening.

As counter-intuitive as it is, mass surveillance is quite inefficient at preventing terrorist attacks. It's easy to understand that it takes huge numbers to shift through a considerable amount of data if it is gathered indiscriminately. Of course, the search algorithms are constantly being improved, but as far as I know they aren't that good just yet.
I think it's hardly a secret that the mass surveillance of peoples is not actually done for the purpose of fighting terrorism.

Individual surveillance is a different story, of course ; as long as there is a competent judicial authority to oversee it and prevent abuses, I guess I'm ok with it.

7 hours ago, Wouter said:

People talk about Orwellian surveillance, but in the case of the Berlin attack there isn't even any camera footage of the perpetrator.

You can hardly prevent anything with CCTV, and if it's about capturing someone after an attack, all they have to do is wear a hood or a mask until they get out of sight/town. I think CCTV may be able to prevent some types of petty crime, but I very much doubt that it does much good against organized terrorism.

7 hours ago, Wouter said:

Seems that the (near)future from shows like "Continuum" and "Person of interest" and the likes is still fiction. Terrorist attacks are very real though, and I wonder how important privacy will still be in the eyes of the public once/if those attacks (or string of attacks) will make 100s of victims instead of 10s, let alone 1000s as happened 9/11.

Oliver Stone's "Snowden" isn't fiction though.

The resistance to the Patriot Act in the US was admirable. It was a massive grassroots movement that eventually put significant pressure on Congress.

Whenever there is a terrorist attack somewhere, one has to be aware that not all measures taken in its wake will be efficient or pertinent.

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

41 minutes ago, theguyfromtheVale said:

Munich was a home-grown case though, although we can debate if we consider it an act of terrorism (but if we include Köln, why not München?)

That's something I've been wrestling with lately in regards to Omar Mateen and the San Bernadino shooter. Whether or not they can truly be classified as acts of Islamic terrorism, or just the acts of violent, mentally unbalanced people. Heard a really good Sam Harris podcast last night that made a pretty strong argument for the former. 

[Arakan]

4 minutes ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

That's something I've been wrestling with lately in regards to Omar Mateen and the San Bernadino shooter. Whether or not they can truly be classified as acts of Islamic terrorism, or just the acts of violent, mentally unbalanced people. Heard a really good Sam Harris podcast last night that made a pretty strong argument for the former. 

Yeah but Munich had no connection to Islam whatsoever. It was amok. The only reason why people initially suspected a connection was because the guy was half-Iranian. 

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

1 minute ago, Arakan said:

Yeah but Munich had no connection to Islam whatsoever. It was amok. The only reason why people initially suspected a connection was because the guy was half-Iranian. 

I'm not familiar with that case. I just was commenting on the methods we use to classify these acts.

[Wouter]

13 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

Whenever there is a terrorist attack somewhere, one has to be aware that not all measures taken in its wake will be efficient or pertinent.

I don't disagree with that. But (potential or active) measures should be looked at fairly with both sides (police/intelligence on the one hand and privacycommissions on the other hand) being involved. If the detectives say that this measure may hamper their efforts, this should not be dismissed out of hand.

I'm not saying the excesses of the NSA and the like should continue in such fashion, though.

 

[Arakan]

Just now, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

I'm not familiar with that case. I just was commenting on the methods we use to classify these acts.

I understand and with the franchising concept of IS it is getting harder to distinguish between terror and amok. The cases you stated are a good example. 

When bombs are used people have no problem to classify sth as terror. But a single person? The boundaries are becoming unclear. 

[Wouter]

Just now, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

I'm not familiar with that case. I just was commenting on the methods we use to classify these acts.

Munich was a form of terrorism too, but as it was not done with islamist motives it's not relevant to a discussion about (islamic) radicalism among people born in Germany vs recent immigrants.

As for Köln, people certainly were terrorised there and it was such a mass event that it looks like it may have been arranged. Not saying IS was involved, but at least in the sense of football hooligans planning to stage an attack somewhere.

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

2 minutes ago, Arakan said:

I understand and with the franchising concept of IS it is getting harder to distinguish between terror and amok. The cases you stated are a good example. 

When bombs are used people have no problem to classify sth as terror. But a single person? The boundaries are becoming unclear. 

 

1 minute ago, Wouter said:

Munich was a form of terrorism too, but as it was not done with islamist motives it's not relevant to a discussion about (islamic) radicalism among people born in Germany vs recent immigrants.

As for Köln, people certainly were terrorised there and it was such a mass event that it looks like it may have been arranged. Not saying IS was involved, but at least in the sense of football hooligans planning to stage an attack somewhere.

Yeah, it's an interesting conundrum. My initial reaction to both Mateen and San Bernadino is that they resembled "jilted lover" and "disgruntled postal worker" type crimes moreso than acts of Islamic Terror, but after hearing the Harris podcast I'm not quite as comfortable with that opinion as I once was. 

[Arakan]

Just now, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

 

Yeah, it's an interesting conundrum. My initial reaction to both Mateen and San Bernadino is that they resembled "jilted lover" and "disgruntled postal worker" type crimes moreso than acts of Islamic Terror, but after hearing the Harris podcast I'm not quite as comfortable with that opinion as I once was. 

Can you say which # of his podcast it was?

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

37 minutes ago, Arakan said:

Can you say which # of his podcast it was?

Sure, let me pull it up...

There were two that I listened to last night, and both centered on Islam. The first was an interview with author Shadi Hamid.

The second was a solo podcast where he mostly read from Isis official magazine Dabiq. The podcast centered on an article in it entitled Why We Hate you, and Why We Fight You. 

I think the major point that Harris seems to continually hammer home is that we should take Radical Islam at face value when it tells us that it wants to destroy and/or subjugate the non-Muslim world. And also that at the center of this religion is an apocalyptic wish that we would be foolish to ignore. I know he has been labeled an Islamaphobe by many, but the arguments I've heard from him seem to be quite measured and based in logic. 

[Arakan]

@Manhole Eunuchsbane

thank you mate   

the second podcast is funny because today I was linking to the article in the Berlin thread :))). Let's see what Sam Harris has to say about what IS really wants . 

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

22 minutes ago, Arakan said:

@Manhole Eunuchsbane

thank you mate   

the second podcast is funny because today I was linking to the article in the Berlin thread :))). Let's see what Sam Harris has to say about what IS really wants . 

No worries. I went on a deep Christopher Hitchens You Tube dive last weekend, and that led me to some panel stuff that Harris and Hitchens did together, and then eventually to his podcast. He is a compelling speaker. I enjoy listening to him. 

[Werthead]

4 hours ago, Chaircat Meow said:

I don't think the UK has integrated its Muslim population very much at all. There are lots of very distinctive Muslim areas dotted around the UK, with their own cultural practices and to varying degrees removed from full participation in the nation. As Happy Ent has pointed out, the presence of so many Muslim immigrants and their descendants has prompted a shift towards authoritarianism in the UK. Blaming Theresa May for this is senseless: it was Labour which took the initial steps in this regard.

All the UK has done is to, so far, avoid having its ethnic/religious divisions manifest themselves in terrorism/fear/disruption in the ways being seen now in France, Belgium and Germany. And to a degree this might just be luck: it will only take one or two attacks slipping through the net to change the perception that Britain is doing better than the continent. After all, the USA does undoubtedly have a better integrated Muslim population and still had the atrocity in Orlando.

Labour did initiate anti-terrorist legislation in 2001/02, but they did not authorise mass-surveillance through the snooper's charter. That is May's pet project.

Yes, Britain has some logistical advantages over the continent. We're an island so can regulate both people and goods coming into the country a lot more vigourously. That's probably why a lot of the more fundamentalist nutjobs in the UK have instead travelled to the Middle-East, where they can take their chances on the battlefield and good luck to them.

However, saying that "the UK has not integrated its Muslim population very much at all" is misleading. There has been an enormous Muslim population in the UK since the 1950s (when we started recruiting them to do jobs British workers stuck their noses up at) and, surprise, there has been vastly fewer attempted terrorist activity in the UK from that quarter than there has been from Irish nationalist extremists. Where there have been attempted attacks from that area, they have been almost entirely defeated with the sole exception of lunatic single-actor attacks and three conspiratorial attacks (two in London, one at Glasgow Airport), one of which succeeded and two of which failed because the people involved were morons.

If there was a hotbed of Islamic extremism motivating large numbers of people to carry out mass attacks on a regular basis in the UK, we would have a lot more serious issue than we do right now.

Quote

See your first paragraph; the intelligence and police services have done well in defusing terrorist plots. Bravo. But in the other paragraph quoted, you also applaud the courts taking away part of the tools that the intelligence and police services have been using in order to defuse those plots.

The problem with this is that Britain suffered vastly more deaths as a result of the IRA campaign from the 1960s onwards and that situation was eventually defused and defeated without resorting to mass surveillance. Of course, superior technology is available today to make this possible, but modern terrorist doctrine is also to avoid organising anything over the internet/IM/text messaging and arrange things wherever possible in face-to-face meets, so many of the same lessons apply.

[TheKitttenGuard]

1 hour ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

Sure, let me pull it up...

There were two that I listened to last night, and both centered on Islam. The first was an interview with author Shadi Hamid.

The second was a solo podcast where he mostly read from Isis official magazine Dabiq. The podcast centered on an article in it entitled Why We Hate you, and Why We Fight You. 

I think the major point that Harris seems to continually hammer home is that we should take Radical Islam at face value when it tells us that it wants to destroy and/or subjugate the non-Muslim world. And also that at the center of this religion is an apocalyptic wish that we would be foolish to ignore. I know he has been labeled an Islamaphobe by many, but the arguments I've heard from him seem to be quite measured and based in logic. 

My issue is never taken the Jihadist at face value it comes with a center of this religion it is apocalyptic.  "This religion" in what?  How the IS followers see Islam or Islam in general?  If it is the latter then on what level is it very different from several other religions that have their apocalyptic tendencies?  For how is it inescapable for Islam and not for the other faiths?

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

41 minutes ago, TheKitttenGuard said:

My issue is never taken the Jihadist at face value it comes with a center of this religion it is apocalyptic.  "This religion" in what?  How the IS followers see Islam or Islam in general?  If it is the latter then on what level is it very different from several other religions that have their apocalyptic tendencies?  For how is it inescapable for Islam and not for the other faiths?

Yeah, these are things I struggle with as well. At the moment I'm probably partial to the Hitchen's argument (seeing as how I've been listening to a fuckton of his speeches/debates). He takes a similar tact as Harris in that he finds it hard to separate the less palatable bits of the Koran from the religion as a whole. He's fairly militant in his atheism, and has as much ire for say Christianity as he does Islam, but he does seem to find the violence inherent in Islam as being somewhat singular, methinks.

  

 

[Arakan]

7 minutes ago, TheKitttenGuard said:

My issue is never taken the Jihadist at face value it comes with a center of this religion it is apocalyptic.  "This religion" in what?  How the IS followers see Islam or Islam in general?  If it is the latter then on what level is it very different from several other religions that have their apocalyptic tendencies?  For how is it inescapable for Islam and not for the other faiths?

To which podcast do you refer? 

When it's the second, well this is what IS themselves are stating as their raison d'etre. It doesn't talk about Islam in total. And yes, it sounds apocalyptic and the deeds of IS are apocalyptic as is this whole wish to meet for the battle at Dabiq...that sounds like something crazy out of a badly written fantasy novel. 

I am not an expert of Christian sects but AFAIK there are some Protestant sects in which the coming of the Judgement day is a central theme. From a pragmatic point of view, the difference between those Christian nutjobs and their Islamic counterparts is that there are not tens of thousands Christian fundamentalists waiting to blow themselves up or executing thousands upon thousands of people for perceived apostasy/heresy/infidelity. Thank god "we" (aka Europeans) left that shit mostly behind with the Enlightenment and French Revolution.