Paris under Attack - November 13 2015 (also Munich, July 2016)

http://www.nytimes.com/live/paris-attacks-live-updates/

Shooting underway in Les Halles, apparently...

thanks for making a thread, didn't have the courage, felt strange

man at bataclan has explosives

can nearby ilxors weigh in if they can? US media is getting chaotic updates.

ilx peeps all accounted for/safe?

Hostages taken at Eagles of Death Metal show

I don't know, I'm speaking with my cousin and a bunch of friends and they are as confused as everyone. There is that much information you can handle at the time.

Source for les Halles and Bataclan info above?

Seriously hoping Les Halles' report is a hoax.

Europe 1 radio for les Halles.

Source for les Halles and Bataclan info above?

French 24

For the explosives at the Bataclan, it's reported by Libération (as solid as it gets)

French 24 just reported “more than 50 dead.”

sympathies/best wishes. hoping french ilxors are safe. i'm afraid to turn the news off lest things get worse. it feels like i have control or something if i stay tuned.

Just turned on CNN, “we don’t know if the Eagles of Death (sic) were targeted.” Um, OK.

lemonde.fr is down.

they are reporting as much as they can from their fb page.

Journalist Thibau Lefevre just told radio station France Inter that a policeman talking in his walkie talkie said they were looking for suspects near Parmentier and République.

Both of these areas are between the sites of the two attacks in the city - the former to the west and the latter to the east. That whole part of the city is popular with people out on nights out.
Another witness, who was at the Batalclan with his mother, is currently in tears live on the radio station. He says he heard the assailants were screaming “Allahu Akbar” while shooting inside the crowd.

This is beyond scary

Up to 60 dead being reported now

when will this ever stop

i'm so discouraged

my brother in law is in Paris for work, just got word he's okay, whew

sincerely hope this is bullshit but:

katya adler ‏@BBCkatyaadler 3m3 minutes ago

UNCONFIRMED reports from inside Bataclan concert hall of "young" gunmen "calmly" firing at hostages #parisattacks

Bataclan hostages released supposedly. follow @andrewhistorian for more.
on twitter.

can't help but just feel thankful dad no longer works in paris/france

yeah i smell bullshit on that nickb, there was this weird fb post and no one knows if it's a fake or not.

it's just so hard to parse signal from noise

Not confirmed but seeing this from a number of folks:

Peter Allen ‏@peterallenparis 3m3 minutes ago
Louvre, Pompidou Centre & Les Halles shopping centre now being targeted in coordinated Paris attacks. City streets emptying of civilians..

still my best feed for info at the moment, if you know a bit of french: http://www.liberation.fr/direct/

http://www.brooklynvegan.com/archives/2015/11/eagles_of_death_12.html

that 404s.

http://www.liberation.fr/france/2015/11/13/fusillade-dans-le-10e-arrondissement-de-paris_1413313

xp

text from that link:
"French band Red Lemons posted the following to Facebook:

Pour rassurer les personnes qui nous savaient au concert des Eagles of death metal au bataclan, il y a eu un attentat, nous allons bien.

For our american and english friends, a terrorist attack happened at the Eagles of death metal concert. We are safe. Mikel Ross, Eric McFadden we were with your mates Jesse, Tuesday, the other musicians outside, they're safe too, they took a cab.
Fuck...

"Tuesday" likely refers to Jesse's partner Tuesday Cross. According to Google translate, that first sentence means "To reassure people who knew us in concert Eagles of death metal to [Bataclan], there was an attack , we're fine ."

thanks xp

There were two opening bands -- it's not clear if the Austrian band White Miles has gotten out or not.

Dude on CNN keeps saying ISIS with no evidence.

Borders closed.

borders closed?

yup, the entire French borders are closed. state of emergency.

Hollande declared 'we know where the attacks come from'

O RLY

i doubt they come from the Orly Airport.

sorry, I needed a pun. going to eat and disconnect a bit, t'was a lot.

ugh, this is a nightmare. i'm so sorry for all the ilxors and their friends/family who are nearby. just awful. :(

major update: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2015/11/13/multiple-deaths-reported-after-shootings-explosions-paris/75727746/

france radio saying a total of 5 or 6 places were attacked simultaneously

i can't even imagine being caught in les halles - that place is a giant underground maze

this is the kind of terrorist attack i fear the most, in a mall or a concert venue or a marketplace.

as opposed to the ones that take place in empty fields?

well as opposed to like airplanes i mean, or more symbolic political targets.

this is the kind of terrorist attack i fear the most, in a mall or a concert venue or a marketplace.

― nomar, Friday, November 13, 2015 11:09 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

as opposed to the ones that take place in empty fields?

Yeah, an attack while seeing a show at a place like Bataclan:
http://a397.idata.over-blog.com/600x383/3/71/35/17/album-6/gotye-bataclan-42.jpg

2 suicide attacks confirmed

from the guardian live feed:

At the Bataclan, a popular and renowned concert venue, there hasn’t been any movement outside the building as of 11:45pm local time. Julian Peace, a Europe 1 journalist, who was inside when the attack happened, says two to three people, not wearing face masks, opened fire on the crowd with kalashnivoks. He says it lasted 10 to 15 minutes - so long that the assailants had the time to reload their weapons two or three times. The journalist was wounded.

rumours on what is going on at la bataclan right now are atrocious

Ile de France recommending everyone stay inside wherever they are for the next several hours.

how do you get a kalashnikov into a venue, that is some terrible security

jesus christ

perhaps the gunmen shot their way in?

Witness Ben Grant told the BBC he and his wife were in a bar when he heard gunshots. He was in the back of the bar, didn't see much.
“There are a lot of dead people. It’s pretty horrific to be honest ... The pile of bodies in front was too much for my wife to walk over."

I heard three distinct firing shots that at first I didn't believe were actual shots from a gun. They almost sounded like fireworks cracking off in the middle of the street. And while that happened I saw a guy probably 6' 4" - 6' 5", quite a heavy set man looked Caucasian from about 50 yards away. And he was in the middle of the street shouting "Allez! Allez!" at people. He almost seemed to be a good Samaritan telling people to get out of from the cafes and go inside. As that happened I saw another shot and I saw someone collapse to the floor outside the Bataclan

Don't think we can blame the security here

Just for clarity, he was telling people to 'get inside' the bataclan

France24 is live here: http://www.france24.com/en/livefeed

2m ago23:35

Angelique Chrisafis, our reporter in Paris, has been talking to witnesses.

“It was carnage,” said Marc Coupris, 57, still shaking after being freed from the hostage-taking at the Bataclan concert venue. “It looked like a battlefield, there was blood everywhere, there were bodies everywhere. I was at the far side of the hall when shooting began. There seemed to be at least two gunmen. They shot from the balcony. Everyone scrabbled to the ground. I was on the ground with a man on top of me and another one beside me up against a wall. We just stayed still like that. At first we kept quiet. I don’t know how long we stayed like that, it seemed like an eternity. I saw my last final unfurl before me, I thought this was the end. I thought I’m finished, I’m finished. I was terrified. We must all have thought the same. Eventually, when a few gendarmes came in slowly we began to look up and there was blood absolutely everywhere. The police told us to run.”

Coupris, a legal worker. had come from Brittany with 15 friends to see the US band Eagles of Death Metal .

Jérome Boucer, shivering in the cold night wearing a white shirt splattered with the blood of the victims and wounded said: “The concert had started. I was in the audience and I heard what sounded like a fire-cracker. It was loud but the gig was very loud and I thought it was something that was part of the show. I think lots of people did too. Then they started firing. I saw what I thought was at least two people, then I fled. The exits were clearly marked and I just ran. There were wounded, there was a lot of blood. Blood everywhere.”

“It felt like a film,” said a woman in tears. who was part of his group.

“It was horrible, there were so many corpses, I just can’t talk about it,” said a bearded man in a death metal t-shirt as he ran down the street from the Bataclan in shock.

Agence France-Presse ✔ @AFP
#BREAKING Police storm Paris concert hall where hostages held: security source

sending my prayers, this is really upsetting me

I have friends and co-workers in Paris. Have heard from one who just got home to his apartment in the city after being out in a different neighborhood when the attacks started. Trying to get updates on the rest of my friends. He tells me most of them live outside the city so were probably already home but I'm trying to confirm.

Eagles Of Death Metal
3 mins ·
We are still currently trying to determine the safety and whereabouts of all our band and crew. Our thoughts are with all of the people involved in this tragic situation.

Oh, god, another of my co-workers who lives in Newport Beach is from France, and all her family lives in the city. She's been texting them all and hasn't gotten any responses yet.

msnbc really doesn't need to keep replaying the fucking explosions.

Would hate to be watching cable news now tbh.

putain con

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CTugXWKXAAAh-z3.jpg

he since deleted it

Bataclan siege over, attackers killed... all very rapid?

jesus christ

well it didn't seem like the kind of situation where they were gonna issue demands

Police asked the media to stop reporting on the siege (like for Hyper Casher) to not help the terrorists, so nobody knows as of now?

CSPAN is also broadcasting france24 right now fyi

Fucking Newt Gingrich already dancing on the graves on Twitter. Not even going to link.

White Miles (Austrian duo opening for EoDM) report that they are out but don't know about their small crew or the other bands or crews.

That Gingrich tweet has been RTed into my timeline a couple of times. Political point-scoring of the lowest and most inappropriate order.

xpost

shocking that a man of such high moral caliber would sink so low

ok so the last survivors of the bataclan have been evacuated

casse toi sarkozy. faux cul

i fear the next few days will ressemble what happened in Boston in 2013 and ...well Paris earlier this year

'Carnage' inside the Bataclan. I think I'm going to stop watching this.

Another of my friends just checked in on FB as safe.There's a "safety check" page to check on friends: https://www.facebook.com/safetycheck/paris_terror_attacks/

100 casualties for the Bataclan.

non non non

sarko disant n'importe quoi comme d'hab. crétin

al jazeera america reporting 7 attacks, pointing out that there are still attackers in the wind

"Hundreds killed in attack at Paris concert hall (security source)", says the banner at the bottom of france24

sadly that sounds realistic given how many people must have been in the venue and for how long, and with gunfire and explosions going off inside. Jesus.

Eagles of Death Metal safe: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/nearly-100-hostages-taken-at-eagles-of-death-metal-concert-in-paris-a6734251.html

france info radio is still saying 'dozens' (plusieurs) at bataclan

near the stade de france it sounds like there were at least two suicide bombers with explosives on belts, in fast food places i think - one was in a 'quick' restaurant (that's the name) and one maybe at a mcdonalds if i heard that right

er best translated as "tens', many tens at bataclan and it is hard to get information, the reporters heard four big explosions just before the police went in and then another

Reports of revenge attacks already, refugee camp in Calais on fire (unconfirmed)

France 2 confirmed it's around a hundred for the Bataclan.

they really targeted youth, football stadium, concert venue, bars.

1st Safar in the Islamic calendar: The Day of Grief for Ahl al-Bayt (the household of Muhammad)

In profound sadness. Just trying to make sense of what sort of "message" is intended, here.

Its a really bad day for potential immigrants to the EU, I imagine.

No fires in Calais, just misreporting

https://twitter.com/SimonNRicketts/status/665325028926291969

xpost oh yeah, the syrian refugees are going to be in an even worst situation now.

Has anything been confirmed outside of SdF, Bataclan and rue de la Charonne? i.e. Les Halles?

reporter on france info a few minutes ago was speaking of fog and confusion right now around bataclan, with the evacuation from the venue and emergency services treating victims. they are not saying a specific number and 'le monde' says the toll is probably over 100 in all the attacks

another 'le monde' reporter -- two witnesses at bataclan say the attackers said 'it's holland's fault, it's your president's fault'

Gingrich has got to be drunk

update from brian williams: "deftones were meant to play paris tomorrow night. we assume that's cancelled now. the deftones are reportedly safe".

oh good, moe tucker has an opinion on this:

https://twitter.com/DeStijlRecords/status/665319684460285953

If we could stop acting as if the safety of bands (partic. non-french bands) was more important than others, that would be fucking lovely.

heh who cares about morons

xpost

i was making fun of brian williams' reporting. thought that was obvious. sorry.

more about dumb republicans being dumb republicans as always.

although i agree it's fascinating

is anyone actually placing any more importance on anyone? just posted the link about EoDM because, y'know, it was there. And so were they.

xposts

140+ dead

Kind of forgot and maybe I'm becoming paranoid or something, but this is happening right after the russian plane in Egypt and the attack in Lebanon. If it's all the same organisation, it's kind of scary.

If that is the case then this is very Homeland, a fictional television drama that is primarily about the gross incompetence of our intelligence agencies.
If this really is all ISIS/ISIL groups, then we have a real gap on our hands, cops and spies wise.

xxxpost. good point. my thoughts and wishes are with anyone near the attacks, including dumb bands.

Reports of a big fire at the Calais refugee camp, but it's out now

Reddit's live feed reports: 118 dead at Bataclan Hall, 40 in other locations

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp60GG-AEnc

how do you get a kalashnikov into a venue, that is some terrible security

― Οὖτις, Friday, November 13, 2015 11:23 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah that's where the blame lies. Fucking hell.

idiots in my office giving it the full 'this wouldn't have been happening if they'd been carrying guns' routine

Yes, you should chime in about all the times guns have been proven to stop explosions

So for the people who live in Paris, you can use the #porteouvertes hashtag to find a place to stay in case you are stranded somewhere, since most public transport is closed and many streets as well.

140+ dead

― El Tomboto, Saturday, 14 November 2015 00:59 (9 minutes ago)

where you getting this from, mate?

that's what they were calling it earlier. plea for patience as details emerge

AFP said 140, le Monde is saying 112, it's just hard to tell.

the guardian is saying 158.

BBC news ticker saying French government saying around 100 at Bataclan and 40 at other locations.

news agencies are reporting different numbers

france info still says 118 in total of which 80 were in the bataclan, and 'le monde' has the same number. 'le monde' says their source tells them the three attackers at bataclan blew themselves up

Sorry, Bataclan info from City Hall, other location info from French govt

there is little use in getting the absolute right number anyway

"way too fucking many"

this is so horrible, i spent a lot of time in the Xe and XIe arrondissements when i lived there a decade ago and have been thinking lately about going back to visit next year.. i really love those neighborhoods

<i>If it's all the same organisation, it's kind of scary.</i>

I doubt that's true, any more than the various groups that claimed affiliation with al-Qaeda got their marching orders from Abbottabad. I think IS is simply the current banner that diverse groups claiming to be more militant than al-Qaeda are marching under. Its worth noting that ISIS is at war with the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria.

The (possible) planting of a bomb on the Russian tourist flight makes sense as a ISIS retort to Russia's support for the Syrian Ba'ath regime, but France hasn't been notably active against ISIS. France's interventions have been mostly in initiating air-support for the Libyan rebels in 2011, and sending the Légion against al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb in Mali in 2013.

There are a lot of disgruntled underemployed young Islamic men in France, and perhaps many past Syrian immigrants were francophone, so France represents a target of opportunity.

Yes, I was wondering, but didn't want to seem like a fool, why Paris and not Berlin, London, or elsewhere?

France 24: 5 terrorists neutralized.

xp

Opportunity has as much to with it as anything. There was a terrorist attack in Chattanooga earlier this year, for no reason other than that there was a terrorist there. For a variety of reasons, Paris may have better organized and better armed terrorists than London or Berlin.

I saw the Moe Tucker comment on facebook and was saddened/sickened.

Also saw report on fires in Calais from somebody who knows people there.

And that both Tav Falco who's based in Paris now and a friend of mine who happens to be there right now were safe.

Sad, probably going to mean major backlash

I worry that this stuff is going to lead to renewed calls for stronger domestic intelligence activity in developed / western democracies. and that they might not be 100% wrong, but the side effects / excesses always seem to be unalloyed bad

i seriously doubt domestic intelligence-s could get much stronger! that sounds like a joke, but i'm actually serious. think of the political necks on the line. hollande's gonna get real shit for this (he probably shouldn't).
unless you're talking about things that lead directly from the 'patriot act', or things like that. as if western countries aren't already engaged in racial profiling.
i may have took this a little too far.

What the hell this is crazy

dunno how the world gets out of this highly violent spiral. it's so depressing. isis aren't passive, but if the west acts it just makes things worse.

i mean obv no idea who did this yet - but it's kind of immaterial

idiots in my office giving it the full 'this wouldn't have been happening if they'd been carrying guns' routine

― + +, Friday, November 13, 2015 8:06 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Not nearly as dumb as the dad at my daughter's preschool event who told me "they need to build a wall like they have in Israel, it works there." I have no idea where he imagined said wall would be placed -- the whole coast of Europe?

dunno how the world gets out of this highly violent spiral.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4b/Klee,_paul,_angelus_novus,_1920.jpg

awful stuff.

seems ex-liverpool defender martin kelly was caught up in it. not joking, he actually was in a restaurant that was attacked according to twitter. seen here helping someone.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CTvX1-iWcAIzgv5.jpg

this is truly awful.

Moe Tucker sold separately: http://m.motherjones.com/politics/2015/11/twitter-paris-attacks

anyway.

Yeah can we maybe ignore people saying dumb, reactionary shit on Twitter right now

angel of history otm. so dark, so sad.

I agree with circa, however I recommend perusing the responses to her tweet, which I will not repost

people saying dumb, reactionary shit on Twitter

the day that newt gringrich and michelle malkin stop pandering to vile idiots will be the day they are to weak or senile to do it any more

so upthread there was questions with regards to the security at the Bataclan, and the police confirmed that the four security members of the hall have been shot dead prior to the terrorists entering the place.

thats horrible

Yeah, was gonna say, multiple men with machine guns could probably bypass a few bouncers pretty easily. Weird comment. Nnngh.

thinking of all parisian & french ilxors, holy shit this is awful beyond words

not entirely sure if he still posts here but ilxor Snowballing said he was safe on FB.

so saddened by this. I was in Paris earlier this year, stayed just a block away from where one of the shootings occurred. Love that whole area near the Canal/Republique.

these are neighborhoods where my friends live, where i worked (the 11eme), where i hung out on weekends.

i heard about this just before going in to a movie and had to run to the bathroom before the film and heave.

it is so sad that paris will now have to live with this surfeit of fear. of course, so do many people elsewhere in the world, but that doesn't make it any less horrible.

paris is the greatest city i know.

...and now i'm crying.

what is the endgame for these people? what do they want?

what do they want?

Issue VII of the ISIS English language magazine Dabiq was entitled "The Extinction of the Grayzone", discussed here at anti-Jihadist site Memri. Like past insurgencies and terrorist groups, their goal is to radicalize moderates in the "grey zone", in this case moderate Muslims, via the repressive measures of host countries and alienation of disaffected youth. Those European Muslim youth are ISIS's main cannon fodder *.

On the other hand, I don't recall ISIS having conducted simultaneous terrorist attacks before, which are more al-Qaeda's calling card. al-Qaeda's primary "audience" is also fellow Muslims, but generally within Muslim majority countries. I recall from Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower that the 9/11 attacks were largely motivated by Saudi disinterest in al-Qaeda condemnations of U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia. After Khobar towers, the Nairobi & Dar es Salaam embassy bombings, and the USS Cole, the intended Arab audience was still not radicalized with indignation over infidels in the Land of the Two Holy Mosques.

* Few native Syrians or Iraqis are onboard ISIS's global ambitions, what local support they have was initially for tribal group gains and now maintained through coercion. I suspect if Baghdad guaranteed Sunni province autonomy and a fair share of oil revenue, Iraqi Sunni tribes would rise up against ISIS.

There is some extremely distressing video of the scene behind the Bataclan on le monde's website. Jesus fuck I don't know why I watched it, so fucking heartbreaking

IS claiming responsibility.

have there been trending hashtag hijackings, like there were for the beheadings? i.e. some otherwise innocuous newsy hashtag that suddenly gets violent videos posted against it, with the idea that it shows up in everyone's feeds

prefecture of police is still recommending we all stay inside today. I live outside the city but still in the Ile de France but it's the same here. all public manifestations in the IDF are banned until Thursday. evidently soon we'll hear if there's school on Monday. I don't teach until Tuesday, not sure what to expect by then. my lab & department are shut today, in the center of the centre ville but on the left bank.

this is truly horrific, the attack on the bataclan especially. if, as reported on the guardian site, a syrian passport was found on the body of one of the attackers, then there's going to be a big shift in rhetoric about refugees

Not sure about that one but being reported that a Syrian passport was found near the body of one of the Stade de France bombers.

(xp) sorry misread yr post

Poland has already said it is reneging on its commitment to take any refugees after the attack.

JUst seen that Gatwick airport outside London has been closed because somebody was seen discarding something around the air[port. Hopefully that is just an over-reaction to what's happened in paris and there isn't more widespread activity happening.

The Pope has apparently referred to last night's activity as part of a badly coordinated World War 3.

Wondering what it is like to be part of an ethnic community in France leading up to this. I've heard some dodgy things about sexism in France and how personal parameters are frequently crossed, so wonder if racism is similar. Wonder if people are feeling so generally disenfranchised that linking to Isis becomes attractive.

& yeah do wonder what the story is going to be on clampdowns elsewhere. Stricter airport security, where people can't discard objects in airports without there being great fear and so on.
I did fear in the immediate aftermath of the events of 2001 that internal security might be put on wartime status. The speed with which the CIA were appearing being interviewed on the news had me thinking at the time, but maybe that is standard protocol?

IS statement justifying the attack on the Bataclan on the grounds that it contained "hundreds of idolaters together in a party of perversity".

You despair for the human race sometimes.

That's the sort of line the band would have used about themselves, in that kind of 'upset the parents' way.

Its still nonsense.

French, Egyptian, and Syrian attackers confirmed so far. the French citizen was known to intelligence as having been radicalized.

things are going to be so bad.

today we are all at our worst. i'm giving everybody who hasn't actually killed someone in the past 24 hours a free pass. a week from now, when they're still saying this shit, i'll judge them, and judge them harsh, but not today. today i am just mourning.

I suppose the reason this happened in Paris rather than London comes down to:

-France is actively bombing ISIS targets in Syria, rather than covertly like the UK.

-France is more likely than many European countries to vote for actual fascist parties, which increases the likelihoodlikelihood of widespread alienation among young French Muslims and makes it easier for jihadist organisations to recruit.

Fucking wish that Cameron hadn't decided to get up and tell the world that we'd killed their most famous jihadi in a drone strike though.

you'll have your turn too

Well we already have, and we've been living with this threat for over a decade. It does feel more likely that it has for a long time though. Impossible to feel anything other than fear, horror, anger and despair right now.

right, of course. attacks like last night seem different, though, much easier to pull off than bombings. I've noticed Metro security very high in the last month of so, and of course there are cameras everywhere, but when you're just hopping out of a car and firing, what can be done to protect against that?

after New York and London and Madrid this always seemed like the next step. and when the killers don't care about being killed, they can be so brash. guns are easy to get, despite the laws.

I mean I'm not afraid for myself, I'll ride into the city on the train as usual on Tuesday (unless universities are closed still, an open possibility). but where do things go?

"hundreds of idolaters together in a party of perversity"

logging this for future use

one thing that makes this unique i think is that instead of soldiers and a jewish day school in toulouse and montauban, or hebdo and a koshermart, it hit the young urbanite class. it has seemed to me like france has been dealing w/ attacks tho for years now.

The attack that this one seems most similar to is Mumbai. More than a single bombing or shooting, it's a kind of short-term warfare, where the whole city is a potential battle zone. (Also sickeningly similar to random mass shootings in malls, campuses, etc.)

There is no reason the exact same thing couldn't happen in London but ISIS (in contrast to AQ offshoots) has had a much easier time recruiting from North Africa / the Caucasus than South Asia. Tunisia has six times the number of people fighting in Syria / Iraq than Pakistan despite being 1/18th of the size. I'd imagine that makes it easier to recruit from the diaspora.

Authorities have been talking about "Mumbai style" attacks for a number of years. There is nothing much you can do to stop them and they aren't hugely sophisticated. You just have to trust that there is a very limited number of people who would want to do it.

Mumbai, definitely, and also the Westgate Shopping Mall attack in Kenya. (xp)

U2 cancels concerts at Bercy tonight

afraid of the consequences of this post for the thread

probably pragmatic though am i wrong in feeling like whenever these events happen once they end there tends not to be an immediate follow-up?

Someone was trying to persuade me to go to Paris for New Year too, I suppose they'll have dropped the idea now.

xp Sanapku, So the dabiq article is claiming the point of these attacks is to spur right wing anti-immigrant reactions, spurring more dissatisfaction among muslim youth and allowing ISIS to recruit more terrorists to carry out more attacks? Such circular logic in the worst way. It also shows they have no interest in just maintaining the hellish theocratic state they've established because no one can ignore or tolerate them when they're doing this kind of shit. (I guess we already knew that about them, still)

I would imagine that, even if there were guaranteed zero risk, relatively few people in Paris would be in the mood for an enormous gig tonight.

I doubt it was up to U2
Police probably need more time to set up extra security for large events

Otoh people gathering in a spirit of togetherness and defiance seems like just the sort of thing that u2 concerts might be about. huge practical issues though and would only be a drain on stretched security resources xp

the show was to be nationally televised fwiw

Are the borders not still closed, also?

no, they're opened again, just under heavy checks apparently

and now a TGV has derailed near Strasbourg, 5 dead so far

what is going on

TGV derailment unrelated, it was a test train going too fast.

Wonder if people are feeling so generally disenfranchised that linking to Isis becomes attractive.

it only takes a few dozen to feel this way and we can see something like last night. it doesn’t have to be a very sizable portion of the french/arabic communities in france.

and yes, this most closely resembles mumbai. as several of my indian friends pointed out.

again, what i think of most is my friends in paris and the heightened state of fear they will have to live in. for the muslims of france, that state of fear will be even stronger.

not to mention the effect of this on the economy of france which, while it may seem unimportant in the light of all this death, will still have a strong effect on people’s lives.

radical islam is so odd. they have effectively declared war on most of the world's people's: US, Western Europe, Russia, China, India, sub-Saharan Africa, and of course much of the Middle East. i can't think of another scourge that is (or was) this... global. you'd think that with 99% of the world hating them, we should be able to eradicate this threat, but the nature of asymmetrical warfare militates against that.

so much sadness, all over.

To those more in the know, is an actual ground war against ISIS looking likely?

i don't have any inside information but hollande said: "To all those who have seen these awful things, I want to say we are going to lead a war which will be pitiless." they have already been involved in an air campaign against ISIS. that coupled w/ their recent success in mali suggests to me that we will probably see troops on the ground. but i have no idea really this is only speculation.

the show was to be nationally televised fwiw

Nationally? Globally - it was going to be live on HBO.

You mean w western troops? I dont think that would accomplish much

Btw re: my comment about security upthread was based on the mistaken assumption that the guns had been snuck into the bataclan, as opposed to their being used to blast the way in. Idk why i leapt to this foolish conclusion

Xp

PARIS (AP) - The latest on the deadly shootings and explosions in Paris. (All times local): 5:20 p.m. A Greek official says one of the assailants in Friday's terrorist attacks in Paris whose Syrian passport was found at the scene crossed into the European Union through the Greek island of Leros in October. Citizen Protection Minister Nikos Toskas, in charge of police forces, has released the following statement: "On the case of the Syrian passport found at the scene of the terrorist attack. "We announce that the passport holder had passed from Leros on Oct. 3. where he was identified based on EU rules...

Prospects not looking good for future refugees/asylum seekers in the EU.

prospects already didn't look great before this tbh.

i think the bigger question is whether schengen is at risk

And the U2 show contains some stuff about terrorism I think? A different kind but might be close to the bone.

You mean w western troops? I dont think that would accomplish much

in terms of domestic terrorism? probably not. i do think the west certainly has the manpower to reoccupy ISIS territory. but i am skeptical of the extent to which ISIS has a really significant role in planning these attacks. i think they are as likely to take responsibility for it even if they had nothing to do w it.

I'm frankly amazed these sorts of attacks don't happen more often, especially in western Europe, with several easily accessible high density population centers not that far from one another, and relatively porous borders. Or that it doesn't happen in America more often, too (though maybe they figure we're doing a good enough job regularly killing ourselves). I've always thought that just one grenade in one McDonald's, once a week, would be enough to bring the country to a standstill; consider what the DC/Maryland sniper did in a just a couple of days with sniper precision. What I can't figure out is why this doesn't happen more often. Is it behind the scenes security? The terrorist preference for big coordinated statement acts? A pragmatic strategy of not burning through the handful of radicals truly willing to die for their cause? I can't figure it out.

Anyway, it's all heartbreaking, and the fact that the radical goal is on its face unachievable and practically demand-free makes it all the more senseless and sad.

i think they are as likely to take responsibility for it even if they had nothing to do w it.

I'm not sure they do this (I must have heard this from some terrorism expert sometime).

i like to think it's because the vast majority of humans don't like the idea of murdering other humans

xp

Which is heartening, but these sorts of things demonstrate it doesn't take many people to do a horrible number of horrible things.

The rest of the Foo Fighters tour is cancelled as well, btw (Nov 14 Turin/Nov 16 Paris/Nov 17 Lyon/Nov 19 Barcelona)

FFs:

It is with profound sadness and heartfelt concern for everyone in Paris that we have been forced to announce the cancellation of the rest of our tour. In light of this senseless violence, the closing of borders, and international mourning, we can't continue right now. There is no other way to say it. This is crazy and it sucks. Our thoughts and prayers are with everyone who was hurt or who lost a loved one.

Heavily armed police & bomb squads have been entering houses in Molenbeek (Brussels, Belgium) in the last couple of hours and a couple of people have been arrested there, no official statements yet.

Deftones were in the audience at the eodm show apparently. Not that they're any more important than anyone else obv

I'm not sure they do this (I must have heard this from some terrorism expert sometime).

there was a lot of skepticism about ISIS claims to have bombed the Egypt flight

it's being reported that the killers were part of a single organized cell that had traveled together in Syria, so

1) I'm taking the claim that one guy entered the EU as a migrant with a grain of salt
2) maybe this is why Hollande said already last night that we know where they came from: there were a lot of closures reported as replies to bomb threats in the city yesterday, at the Gare de Lyon, on some train lines, at the hotel of the German national team. so before the attacks yesterday I was wondering if something was going on. I'm guessing intelligence was strong that this cell was known and was up to something bad.

Just officially confirmed by the Belgian minister of justice on the radio news: 5+ arrests in Molenbeek, based on the Belgian rental car's number registration & the guy who rented it etc

xpost Deftones were supposed to be playing there tonight.

What I can't figure out is why this doesn't happen more often

b/c the number of people who want to do such a thing is not really that large, thankfully.

the really sad thing is that i think something like what may have happened here--a migrant from syria instigating or supporting a terrorist attack--was almost inevitable, just because of sheer numbers ... it shouldn't reflect on migrants as a group, who are coming to europe precisely to flee violence ... but inevitably it will, and will lead to hardening of european xenophobia.

And if it does, a win for ISIL

i'm not sure how precisely europe limiting refugees is a win for ISIL

"pitiless" war has been tried for 14 years, M Hollande, doesn't seem especially effective.

xp increased Islamophobia = more recruitment opportunities, at least as I understand the logic here

via dr dr3w

I come from a privileged Francophone community in Lebanon. This has meant that I’ve always seen France as my second home. The streets of Paris are as familiar to me as the streets of Beirut. I was just in Paris a few days ago.

These have been two horrible nights. The first took the lives of over 40 in Beirut, the second took the lives of over 100 in Paris.

It also seems clear to me that to the world, my people’s deaths in Beirut do not matter as much as my other people’s deaths in Paris.

‘We’ don’t get a safe button on Facebook. ‘We’ don’t get late night statements from the most powerful men and women alive and millions of online users.

‘We’ don’t change policies which will affect the lives of countless innocent refugees.

This could not be clearer.

I say this with no resentment whatsoever, just sadness.

It’s a hard thing to realize that for all that was said, for all the rhetoric of progressive thought that we have managed to create as a seemingly united human voice, most of us, most of us members of this curious species, are still excluded from the dominant concerns of the ‘world’.

And I know that by ‘world’, I am myself excluding most of the world. Because that’s how power structures work.

I do not matter.

My ‘body’ does not matter to the ‘world’.

If I die, it won’t make a difference.

Again, I say this with no resentment.

That statement is merely a fact. It is a ‘political’ fact, true, but a fact nonetheless.

Maybe I should have some resentment, but I’m too tired. It’s a heavy thing to realize....

http://hummusforthought.com/2015/11/14/beirut-paris/

i'm not sure how precisely europe limiting refugees is a win for ISIL

MEMRI: The Islamic State's Frantic Response To The Wave Of Refugees Fleeing Syria

http://www.memri.org/image/24931.jpg

Murtaza Hussain @MazMHussain
ISIS promised to destroy the "grayzone" of coexistence between Muslims & the West, this is the goal of such attacks.

I'm pretty much certain whatever is done in response to this attack will end up further exacerbating terrorism. This is the post-9/11 model.

from what i've read from ISIS i think that's a misreading of their intentions + purposes. they do speak of destroying the grayzone but by this they mean forcing muslims to choose a side between ISIS ideology and the West:

The issue's feature article, titled "The Extinction of the Grayzone," states that the world is now clearly divided into two camps – the camp of Islam, represented by ISIS, and the camp of unbelief – and Muslims in the West must therefore choose whether to join ISIS or side with its enemies. The article, which is accompanied by photos of Muslim leaders in the West, exhorts the West's Muslims to renounce "apostate" and "traitor" Muslim leaders and institutions, such as clerics who spoke out against the Paris attacks. It also urges them to attack those who mock Islam’s prophet, and even insinuates that moderate Muslims should be killed. While glorifying various attacks carried out in Europe, such as the Madrid and London bombings, it also stresses that, after the establishment of the Islamic State's caliphate, Muslims in the West no longer have an excuse to stay in the West. Rather, they must leave their countries and come to the territories controlled by ISIS.

The article also denounces rival groups for not recognizing ISIS's caliphate and joining it. It especially bashes Al-Qaeda and Syrian rebel groups that refuse to recognize ISIS as the only legitimate authority. The article accuses them of being partisans for their group and of being lax in their faith and ideology, and claims that, by maintaining a neutral position between ISIS and the West, they are actually accomplices of the latter.

while it might fit their goals to have an angry minority muslim population in france from where to draw future terrorists, the goal of the attacks is explicitly to kill infidels and if it is supposed to have any causal effect i suspect it is more to scare westernized muslims into joining ISIS. i don't see it as this trying to draw out a violent western response as actually the real purpose of these attacks.

Their statement on the Charlie Hebdo attacks explicitly referenced the persecution Muslims would be faced with in their aftermath as a recruitment tool. The belief is that European Muslims will be forced to convert to Christianity or to join ISIS to live in peace.

I can't see how anyone who doesn't believe in their ideology would be "scaredinto joining" by the still fairly remote chance of being killed by them. It's not as though fucking off to Syria is the low-risk option.

hey isis might finally be the thing that unites the world

the #rechercheparis feed on twitter is the most harrowing experience i've been through in front of a computer

yeah that hashtag is too real

also, yeah, completely forgot that Euro 2016 is seven months away. holy christ.

"I'm frankly amazed these sorts of attacks don't happen more often, especially in western Europe, with several easily accessible high density population centers not that far from one another, and relatively porous borders. Or that it doesn't happen in America more often, too (though maybe they figure we're doing a good enough job regularly killing ourselves). I've always thought that just one grenade in one McDonald's, once a week, would be enough to bring the country to a standstill; consider what the DC/Maryland sniper did in a just a couple of days with sniper precision. What I can't figure out is why this doesn't happen more often. Is it behind the scenes security? The terrorist preference for big coordinated statement acts? A pragmatic strategy of not burning through the handful of radicals truly willing to die for their cause? I can't figure it out."

because we'd acclimate to it, of course. america has a mass killing EVERY SINGLE DAY. the entire history of humanity is an object lesson in learning to tolerate the intolerable.

wonder if/how this could affect the climate talks? be extra sordid if ISIS threw off a major (or the last) chance to actually do something about climate change

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CTyh6GXXAAAHUR-.jpg

"why this doesn't happen more often"

I'm sorry this is bs. It happens too often.

mixed feelings upon seeing that tbh xp

Via tcote, a report from Les Inrockuptibles that their writer Guillaume B. Decherf, who had reviewed the EoDM album for them a couple of weeks ago, was one of the victims.

http://www.lesinrocks.com/2015/11/14/actualite/guillaume-b-decherf-a-ete-tue-hier-au-bataclan-11787998/

EoDM's merch guy was also killed at the show, according to my fb feed.

http://news.yahoo.com/france-must-annihilate-islamist-radicals-far-leader-le-160854097.html

The Valls speech is scary in so many ways:
- Claims 5 attacks have been thwarted since the summer
- Says France is in state of war, and he repeated this notion a few times.
- Calls for the expulsion of all radical imams

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CTyh6GXXAAAHUR-.jpg

back to calling them French Fries, then?

^^ Along those same lines:

http://i.imgur.com/hfjgZj4.png

je suis france

my best frend here in A Z works for the ehf.bee.aye on a serveailance team, he says they thwart terrorist attacks quite a lot. He can't give me details but once in a while he'll be like "hey you heard the story about that guy that got caught?" and I'll confirm and he'll say "i followed that guy"

and he'll be gone for weeks at a time in other states that are having bigger threats

because we'd acclimate to it, of course. america has a mass killing EVERY SINGLE DAY. the entire history of humanity is an object lesson in learning to tolerate the intolerable.

just heard that a colleague's died and two injured in the attacks. have sent an email to the office full of lovely people who I've worked with to check they're ok.

We do acclimate. My memory of IRA attacks is amusing stories from my dad about not being able to get home (after the WH Smith's bombing at Victoria for instance) and him sleeping on the roof at work and throwing eggs high up in the air for each othr to catch. it seemed kind of normal. I'm not sure whether that's altogether right, but also feel social media and rolling media amplification doesn't help.

My experience from the French office after the Hebdo attacks and now is one of professionalism and a desire not to let it interrupt either their job and not to let it send France rightwards. one of solidarity with all those who live in france. commentary fairly regularly feels superfluous to the people experiencing it.

So sorry to hear about your colleague Fizzles (I was wondering for a moment whether you were in Paris).

Good thoughts to all.

Todenhofer has opinions: https://www.facebook.com/JuergenTodenhoefer/photos/a.10150173554135838.304529.12084075837/10153335243745838/?type=3&theater

jeez fizzles that's awful

IS's own propaganda suggests that one of their goals may have been to get Europe to close its borders to refugees:

http://jihadology.net/2015/11/14/the-islamic-state-on-refugees-leaving-syria/

'act of war' - nice one hollande they'll hate that :/

"why this doesn't happen more often"

I'm sorry this is bs. It happens too often.

Of course it does. And it's still possible to wonder at, say, why we haven't had something similar in NY in the last 14 years.

There's an argument that calling it an 'act of war' broadens the legal scope of the response - particularly in relation to collective action from NATO. France has already invoked self-defence as a justification for targeting ISIS in Syria but it, again arguably, strengthens the moral case for other member states who aren't formally participating (like the UK) to assist.

xp

well New York is across the Atlantic Ocean for one thing

also French police dont carry guns vs militarized US police

How would a cop with a gun stop a suicide bomber in a shopping mall?

France has a fair amount of armed law enforcements officials (lack of a better word) around sensible areas since at least 2002. I remember the first time I was an assault weapon was a french soldier (i think he was soldier) shoving an east-asian vendor to the ground, using his gun against his neck and the victim to be screaming 'je ne parle pas français, je ne parle pas français'. That stayed with me.

well New York is across the Atlantic Ocean for one thing

― AdamVania (Adam Bruneau), Saturday, November 14, 2015 7:50 PM (26 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this. also america has a /proportionally/ smaller group of potential radicalized young men (and women).

i don't know guys, Charleston is still haunting me. The Boston marathon bombings too.

also French police dont carry guns

lol no

Our 2nd amendment rights keep us safe obvs

Ugh.

Is it to soon to talk about solutions? As others have said, it's such a depressing cycle of reflexively violent action and reaction. Personally I feel like you can draw a straight line from the American invasion of Iraq to the creation of ISIS, but that's kind of beside the point. I just want to know, how do we break out of the cycle? Do we just have to hunker down for a while and let the extremists on both sides fight it out until the moderate middle is just sick to death of it?

I remember Robert Fisk saying that an event like the Twin Towers was inevitable and predictable with the way the West had treated the Middle East.
I think that was in a talk he did at NUIG when The Great War For Civilisation came out.
I think Islam has just been even more vilified since. & the situation in the middle east just worsened.
ISIS is unlikely to form in a vacuum. It's more of a reaction to existing tension and disaffection isn't it?
So yeah do wonder on solutions that aren't going to worsen things. Just hope we're not looking at escalation.

Already had otherwise intelligent people joking about forming walls around ISIS territory and flooding them and that was before Paris. Seems to me that would view everybody inside the area as being behind ISIS policy. Are people from elsewhere than Syria able to flee?

The Wall Street Journal reports that at least one of the Paris gunmen had a ticket to the France-Germany football match at the Stade de France – and tried to enter the stadium before blowing himself up.

The Journal says the attacker was found to be wearing a suicide vest when he was frisked trying to enter the ground 15 minutes into the match.

The attacker then detonated the vest while backing away from security. Three minutes later a second person blew himself up outside the stadium.

"I'm frankly amazed these sorts of attacks don't happen more often, especially in western Europe, with several easily accessible high density population centers not that far from one another, and relatively porous borders. Or that it doesn't happen in America more often, too (though maybe they figure we're doing a good enough job regularly killing ourselves). I've always thought that just one grenade in one McDonald's, once a week, would be enough to bring the country to a standstill; consider what the DC/Maryland sniper did in a just a couple of days with sniper precision. What I can't figure out is why this doesn't happen more often. Is it behind the scenes security? The terrorist preference for big coordinated statement acts? A pragmatic strategy of not burning through the handful of radicals truly willing to die for their cause? I can't figure it out."

it doesn't happen often. people saying it does itt are wrong imo - bad events happen regularly but even with a group like isis present, there aren't even many apprehended terrorists. it is rare. they only have to be successful once for us to fear a repeat. i guess now in france it has become particularly concerning, but london or new york would seem to be targets too, and both have escaped. is this really because the security forces are doing a great job? i doubt it - it's because the will to kill isn't particularly strong. there just aren't that many people who are willing to do this kind of thing. it is incredibly easy to do.

yeah the number of people who can be convinced to kill random civilians at any given time has to be pretty fucking tiny but hey let's call them 'warriors' and mobilize our armies against them, it's worked SO FUCKING WELL for the last 15 years hasn't it

Ahem

There's nothing as unifying as a prescribed THEM is there?
I think the War on terror had the amorphous definition of what equated to Terror as a hinge point. & the fear of further attack being more real than the likelihood.

otm.

Syrian passport might be fake.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/paris-attacks-teams-extremists-france-prosecutor/

When it comes to ISIS/Daesh, at this point I'm more worried with neighborhood states, religious minorities, the kurds and satelites groups like Boko Haram than the occasional terrorist attacks in the western world. For months I haven't been able to wrap my head around a happier scenario in which things run smoothly and we find darn great solutions as human beings. Now, even more so after the attacks, none of the visions I have for the future of this particular region doesn't involve massive amount of innocent deaths. Boots on the ground is exactly what the caliphate wants, rising islamophobia is exactly what the caliphate wants, and right now I think the only thing I can do its to make sure none of those things happen, as a civilian of a country that can vote for these kind of things, kinda.

Between the mourning at home, the loss of civil liberties, and the violent clusterfuck elsewhere, it's just so hard not to feel helpless.

Solutions? Hit the fucking Saudis and their ilk where they live. Since Alfred didn't post the Pierce column:

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a39727/paris-attacks-middle-eastern-oligarchies/

I haven't gotten his check yet.

The Esquire article doesn't really say anything about ISIS. Saudi Arabia and Qatar are actively destabilising the region but much more likely to be funding Al Nusra than ISIS. Both have bombed ISIS and suffered their attacks iirc.

It's going to be much harder to eliminate ISIS now than it was two years ago when they were on an offensive rather than defensive footing. The problem has always been that, apart from the Kurdish militias and maybe Hezbollah, they have never been anyone's priority. Russia believes the US and France let them advance more or less unimpeded because they weakened Assad, the US and France accuse Russia of ignoring them when selecting targets for air strikes. Everyone from Qatar to Canada has a primary goal of getting rid of Assad, Russia, Iraq and Iran a primary goal of keeping a form of the current government in place. ISIS were allowed to grow in the void.

There are no non-military solutions to defeating them, the question is whether the heavy lifting is going to remain with Iran and the Kurds with air support from Russia. What it's required though is a move towards lasting political solutions in Syria and Iraq. This

cut off half way

This recent attack and the apparent bombing of the Russian plane indicate it's probably going to get worse before it gets better for the west though. Their momentum has stalled and without any notable victories in the region, it's going to be harder to convince recruits that they're on course for a grand showdown within a short timeframe.

there just aren't that many people who are willing to do this kind of thing.

Well, clearly there are, because it seems to happen regularly throughout the middle east, Africa and surrounding regions. It just doesn't happen that often (relatively speaking) in Europe, let alone America, but like someone said upthread, it only takes one person, one act, every once in a while, to keep the levels of fear and disruption ratcheted up. By that standard, sure, it happens enough (too often), but it would still be relatively easy to do it more often. I'd like to think it's because, yes, there just aren't that many people who are willing to do this kind of thing, but there are still hundreds, which is enough.

Historically, a lot of terrorism, or violence that targets innocents, has been political, driven by stated political goals, right? But ISIS, like Al Qaeda, as much as they may be a product of western interference, their goals are nihilistic and fantastical. That is, they cannot be placated. Wasn't the idea of that Atlantic article a while back that ISIS has been pretty clear about what it wants and how it operates, and that to not take them at their word is to underestimate them? I'm not even sure a political solution in Syria or Iraq will solve the problem. It's not just that ISIS appeared to fill a vacuum, it's that a lot of these countries have had dictators or authoritarian governments who have actively kept the radicals in check, with money, or violence, or jail. The radicals haven't come out of nowhere, they're currently unchecked. Which unfortunately points to more violence on the horizon.

What it's required though is a move towards lasting political solutions in Syria and Iraq.

Yes, and there are so many conflicting agendas there that it's hard to even envision those solutions, much less move toward them. The Iranian preference is obviously for Shiite-dominated governments in both countries, which mathematically makes sense in Iraq but not in Syria. The creation of some kind of unified Kurdish territory in the region would make sense too, but would alarm pretty much all existing governments, Turkey in particular. Iran definitely does not want a U.S.-Saudi backed Sunni government in Damascus, any more than the Saudis are happy about Iranian affiliates in Baghdad. The Russians obviously prefer more Iranian influence and less American. None of the players, it seems to me, have much of a vested interest in letting ISIS fester and grow -- Pierce is obviously right that a lot of Saudi/UAE money is flowing to ISIS, but presumably at the governmental level those countries aren't enthusiastic about this new caliphate nonsense.

Anyway. It's hard to see a good way forward at the moment. Which probably does mean much worse before (or if) it gets better.

The only thing that makes me slightly more positive with Syria is that it seemed more integrated than Iraq before the war. Take some of the hardliners out of the mix and idk if a more representative government wouldn't be impossible without destroying the whole structure of the state. We'll see how the Vienna talks go.

what does the Daesh statement say about why they targeted Paris:
1) France's participation in attacks in Syria
2) Paris is a center of sexual license
3) France carries the banner of Christianity in Europe

I'm thus expecting a next attack here to be on a church. already earlier this year the police stopped an attack on a church just south of the city.

as in the USA, Catholics in France lean toward both left and right, but the thought could be that a direct attack on the security of Catholics could push Catholics into the FN or more broadly into the identitarian movement (a particularly manifestation of the extreme right)

particularly *French* manifestation of the extreme right

Don't think this article has been linked, seems very informative http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/paris-attack-isis-has-created-a-new-kind-of-warfare-a6734701.html

Feel so bad abt these attacks but cant figure out what to say, how to talk abt it

yeah i am mostly staying very, very quiet because if this thread does turn into a clusterfuck, i don't want to be the one to do it.

thoughts of the potential and/or potential effectiveness of a western populist movement against the house of saud?

maybe if the presidential front runner didn't have a history of dealing arms to SA the tune of $29+ billion

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/05/hillary-clinton-foundation-state-arms-deals

imo we need to stop destabilizing the region and blowing up hospitals which of course creates more terrorists than it kills

In 2011, the State Department cleared an enormous arms deal: Led by Boeing, a consortium of American defense contractors would deliver $29 billion worth of advanced fighter jets to Saudi Arabia, despite concerns over the kingdom's troublesome human rights record. In the years before Hillary Clinton became secretary of state, Saudi Arabia had contributed $10 million to the Clinton Foundation, and just two months before the jet deal was finalized, Boeing donated $900,000 to the Clinton Foundation, according to an International Business Times investigation released Tuesday.

The Saudi transaction is just one example of nations and companies that had donated to the Clinton Foundation seeing an increase in arms deals while Hillary Clinton oversaw the State Department. IBT found that between October 2010 and September 2012, State approved $165 billion in commercial arms sales to 20 nations that had donated to the foundation, plus another $151 billion worth of Pentagon-brokered arms deals to 16 of those countries—a 143 percent increase over the same time frame under the Bush Administration. The sales boosted the military power of authoritarian regimes such as Qatar, Algeria, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman, which, like Saudi Arabia, had been criticized by the department for human rights abuses.

the call is coming from inside the house

well it is actually an open question. what is the better option here, ensuring geopolitical stability, or ending the spread of wahhabist principles? i don't know, but my personal opinion, which could be completely wrong, is that geopolitical stability is generally on the wane due to climate and energy issues, and that there's at least a decent argument to be made about prioritizing the eradication of wahhabism.

I don't know if it's a good idea to bring in discussion about the reactions to the event, or if it would be better just to focus on the event itself. If we are interested in talking about those reactions, here's something:

https://storify.com/JamilesLartey/on-fff

I'm referring to the impulse to say in effect "yes Paris was bad, but why didn't you get outraged about Beirut/Boko Haram/Garissa/etc" (...) This walks dangerously close to the #alllivesmatter attempts to mute real and specific black suffering and grievance (...) People should be permitted to grieve, and seek redress for specific violence and suffer without being redirected or corrected (...)

the "what about beirut?" statuses are useless and annoying, but that's not exactly the parallel i would draw

you know why people are responding differently to the paris attacks than the ones in kenya or beirut? because attacks of this nature in major western cities are much rarer. and unlike when a tragedy happens in the middle east or the horn of africa -- events that at this stage i hope many would agree shouldn't prompt the_west to play world police -- attacks on western soil force their citizens and governments to reckon with the possibility that something concrete (read: military) will have to be done in response. this isn't rocket science

Yeah I've seen a lot of those 'What about' statuses as well, there's something not right about them. Good intentions I think but trying to 'shift the camera' so it pans out and takes in all of this week's victims seems like a mis-step.

Crucially I don't think there's been a full-on, curtain-down cover-up of deaths and suffering in the rest of the world? Syria and Iraq have been all over the news as well?

i think there's been a tremendous outpouring of support for this attack in contrast to a lot of other recent attacks in other parts of the world. some of the reasons for that are understandable - france is a major western country with long historical ties to the US and lots of shared culture. some of the reasons are unfortunate. so yeah i understand why people who feel they've suffered without this kind of reaction might be hurt but i don't think this is an appropriate time for that.

agree world police is bad. every action has a reaction. if the us stopped arming people to the teeth and partaking in a little destabilizing the region there would be less reaction against that. yet the defense budget continues to skyrocket beyond even what the generals consider to be necessary.

maybe some generals but surely most are in favor of larger budgets?

xp and maybe a demand for objectivity should be most rigorously made of politicians and military, less so for civilians?

my thoughts and prayers are w the people of france and people travelling in europe. some of my friends are travelling. my in-laws are from france too but they are ok.

its insane to imagine being at a show and having this happen. terrifying.

xp cardamon

most of the time those people didn't address the horrors of Beirut, or Ankara or Dhaka on social media, but they are sure to jump first on the idea that we only care about the western world. in the end, they really only care about how the western world reacts to different events, which is not really a more enviable moral position.

also, from experience, i think the western world talks more about tragedy than other cultures. my turkish friends were pretty silent after the Ankara bombing, there wasn't this outpour of posts, images coming from them like I've seen for Paris. I don't know why and I don't want to speculate and this is just a personal experience, something I've noticed around me, maybe I'm super wrong.

Also could be argued that when a place becomes violent that is more newsworthy than a place continuing to be violent ... I'm not going to make that argument though and again not sure if people are feeling this would be the thread

Y'know Van, I noticed something along those lines on my Instagram feed. I follow a lot of musicians and there was all this outpouring for France from everyone except Carla Morrison -- the only non English speaking musician I follow.

I don't know. It's just a cultural thing I guess.

*shrug*

nobody complained when alaric sacked piraeus.

yeah, facebook is getting filled with comments describing why the attacks are the west's fault and criticising those who offer their sympathies to the french. i have to add that there are also muslims posting that dyab abou jahjah piece. i don't mean to get into a debate on that right now, though.

i have my theories just like others do, but this weekend should be reserved for mourning and at least letting those who live in france process their natural human reactions (that don't involve violence, obviously)

On the verge of blocking a Spanish acquaintance of mine on Facebook who has been re-posting idiotic truther/false flag shit in the wake of these attacks ... not that I should be surprised as he routinely posts anti-American/anti-Israel garbage, oh well.

It really is a heartbreak on top of a heartbreak when people look immediately past the human aspects of something like this and start politicizing it.

It is for me, anyway.

You can't not politicize it though. Part of the horror is that it was a politically motivated attack.

i think there's been a tremendous outpouring of support for this attack in contrast to a lot of other recent attacks in other parts of the world. some of the reasons for that are understandable - france is a major western country with long historical ties to the US and lots of shared culture. some of the reasons are unfortunate. so yeah i understand why people who feel they've suffered without this kind of reaction might be hurt but i don't think this is an appropriate time for that.

― Mordy, Sunday, November 15, 2015 12:41 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

p much agreed.

did that atlantic article on ISIS from March get posted here? it was rly edifying for me. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isis-really-wants/384980/

xp which political aspects on the attacls are worthy of discussion though? election horse race blather seems beyond the pale to me in the wake of the attacks, but discussing the iraq war invasion or obama's ISIS policy to date seem essential.

Literally, hundreds of tons of people from developed economies have been to Paris.
The same cannot be said for much of MENA. Why ignore Occam's Razor?

should be hundreds of tons of people in the past 48 hours probably

xposts re: Atlantic article: otm, also reactions and a more recent article by the same writer http://www.theatlantic.com/author/graeme-wood/

There's this status being passed around from someone from Lebanon, with a lot of connections to Paris, talking about feeling double shock with two attacks hitting close to home in such a short procession of time. But he also asks why facebook didn't activate a 'safe' button in Lebanon, or why you couldn't overlay your facebook profile photo with a lebanese flag. It's not really that westerners feel more grief about France than about Lebanon, I think everyone understands why that is, and I obviously feel more grief about something happening where I have several friends living at the moment, and want to be allowed to feel that way, that's just how humans are. But at times the outpouring of grief crosses over into expressions of solidarity, of #standwithfrance, not even just from people, but from governments, cities, the empire state building and facebook. And it would probably be smart if we, as westerners, said we'd stand with the most common victims of terrorism from time to time. Otherwise, it only furthers a sense of us and them, and I get why people in MENA feel hurt by that.

agree - definitely the 'mark safe' thing should be extended now

The most egregious thing about the Lebanon coverage was the fact that an attack on civilians in a mixed shopping area was reported as hitting a "Hezbollah area" a "Hezbollah bastion" and a "Hezbollah stronghold" by dozens of news outlets. Lebanese reporters have said they were asked after the fact whether there were any "civilian casualties" by members of the international press. Coupled with the 'hate to say i told you so' responses from some sections to the Russian airline disaster, i'd be more concerned about the way the press / commentariat reports this stuff than people on Facebook.

Yeah I've seen a lot of those 'What about' statuses as well, there's something not right about them. Good intentions I think

there's no good intentions here, it's just typical idiotic "pay attention to me, i'm so astute" social media crap

not including ppl actually affected by other tragedies, obv

glasses-pushing-up "well actually..." of political conflict conversation

Whats worse are the people posting things like "wow, i was going to go to paris this weekend but i changed my mind" which combines the worst elements of cool story, bro and 'how can i make this terrible tragedy be about ME in some way'

The little flag layers everyone's got on their FB profiles are the utmost in making a tragedy about themselves.

And the fact that it's France, a country that prompted the renaming of French fries, has been the butt of so many white flag jokes -- now we're all French? I had the same thought on 9/12/01 --- Oh, so we all like New York City now? Are they going to stop running that Pace Picante Sauce ad?

free kony

or stop kony. can't remember which.

Not gonna criticise the people on my timelines doing French flag overlays, but if anyone finds me layering any flag over my own profile pics, please send me to have my head examined.

coolest part about the flag overlays is that the service now makes it explicitly temporary, to make empty gestures as frictionless as possible

lol i did notice that

someone i know still has a virginia tech ribbon for their profile. they didn't go there or know anyone there as far as i can tell. just shook i guess.

can't bear the outpouring of prescriptive, borderline tyrannical facebooking these last few days. shit like 'cherish your loved ones' and 'hold them close' and 'life is precious.. do something good with yours today'. fuck off pal. if i want to grunt casually in my loved ones direction and do nothing but sit on my arse eating Frazzles all day then i shall.

If you cherish your loved ones that means the terrorists have won.

Yeah I've seen a lot of those 'What about' statuses as well, there's something not right about them

some of those status updates are sincere and well-intended

a lot of them seem like trolling from the sorts of people who always seek a position of moral superiority

i'm especially skeptical of the "what about beirut?" status updates coming from people who have never but never posted anything about lebanon before.

the thing, people are always going to prioritize concern for those they perceive to be "like them," or perhaps more important in this case, people with whom they have direct or indirect social linkages (very direct in my case, FWIW). just look at the way the chinese media addressed the 9/11 attacks. this sort of in-group privileging is not a western phenomenon, it's a human phenomenon. perhaps the political imbalances in the world mean that the western press should be especially sensitive to it, and it's valid to point out the relative volume of coverage, but to use that as a way to feel morally superior, or to castigate people who are grieving, is just, to use a term from ILX's heyday, nagl.

Oh, so we all like New York City now? Are they going to stop running that Pace Picante Sauce ad?

― pplains, Sunday, November 15, 2015 10:20 PM (54 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that's funny, a few weeks ago i had to explain to my japanese girlfriend the significance of that ad from back in the 90s. she was shocked and confused because, as many if not most, japanese people, they think everything in new york is great. we were actually talking about how great she thought new york was, filled with quality stuff and food, and i said, well but do they have good salsa?

I'm really hating Facebook right now

nearly every tragedy seems to provide, via facebook, abundant evidence of people's compassion and dignity as well as their ability to turn almost anything into a chance to scold or settle scores.

Some of the french flag/eiffel tower stuff is surely hollow and sentimental, but we can't look into people's souls and know how sincerely they mean it. Meanwhile saying "Why do you care about France but not Beirut?" seems, ironically, to betray a lack of real humanitarian sentiment in most cases, and more a desire to score points. Because if you really profess to care equally about everyone killed in terrorist attacks, why not start following international news and lettings us know when said attacks happen? Most people saying "Why not Beirut?" would have glossed over the headline about Beirut if it hadn't occurred right before Paris. How many dozens (hundreds?) of suicide bombings have been reported in the news in Iraq since the US invaded? Where were the facebook posts then?

Exactly. The Lebanon posters on my feed are more CNN/Buzzfeed types than ones to follow international news sources.

And the ones posting the university massacre in Kenya as breaking news...

Yeah and I remember the Kenya attacks getting a good deal of media attention (and facebook attention) too, though admittedly not as much as Paris. Also p sure Facebook didn't have the flag-your-profile-pic feature yet when the Kenya attacks happened, as it was debuted with gay marriage equality.

Out of curiosity, I looked at this, but I can't really find anything to say about it, other than FUCK

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents,_2015

And that list even missed the one in Yemen a few days ago.

you know why people are responding differently to the paris attacks than the ones in kenya or beirut?

Morrissey claims this one's different cuz it's us

This is really hard to figure out. Nearly every upper middle class or higher westerner has visited or lived in Paris. No one I know other than me has ever been to Oklahoma City and Beirut is a place we hear about in the news in relation to bombings most of the time.

Notably, the highest death toll terrorist attack of 2015 happened less than a month ago and still no one is posting about it, even self-righteously.

I've got a friend who's ex-Marines and she's reporting on FB that Inactive Ready Reserves are being contacted as we speak.

ha ha D-Day would never have worked in FB age

occurs to me that our responses to tragedies like these are, necessarily, limited to pre-existing responses. nobody responded to 9/11 with anti-wahhabism because too few people in the west had even the faintest notion of what wahhabism was. now anti-wahhabism is a viable response, and is going super-duper viral. god only knows what crucial preventable factor behind these particular attacks we aren't talking about this time.

Story behind Hollande's decision not to evacuate the Stade:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/behind-francois-hollandes-snap-decision-at-stade-de-france-and-the-unfolding-terror-in-paris-1447634427

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2015/11/paris_attacks_may_be_the_end_of_relative_peace_and_libertarianism.html

The premise of this piece is that 18 year olds have never had to think about terrorism. lol. But this is Will Saletan so no real expectations.

so long as 18 year old exists, think pieces will thrive

"You’ve grown up in an era of peace at home: no world wars, no cold war, and little fear of being blown up or gunned down by militants."

As though those of us who were in their 20s on 9/11 (in the US) actually know what it means to live in fear of being blown up or gunned down by militants, you pusillaminous prick

OH MY GOD IT WAS SO SCARY TO BE A TEENAGER DURING THE END OF THE COLD WAR

er sorry, in his 20s during the end of the cold war and 30s on 9/11, but point stands

I mean sure Russia never actually nuked us in the 80s, but there was this tv movie where they did. But these millennial only had to experience 9/11, the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, televised beheadings, London attacks, the Boston Marathon Bombings, Charlie Hebdo, etc. Why would they ever think about terrorism until now?

haha wow - http://gawker.com/candidate-for-minnesota-house-ends-campaign-after-tweet-1742686632

Minnesotapaws.

just some crazy mixed up kids trying to do their best in this wacky world of ours

confirmed that one of the killers was a syrian refugee who passed through Greece

Look for a lot of criticism of the Belgian security forces in the coming weeks.

French news this morning calling Belgium the "carrefour" of Islamism, as a "living room" of salafism funded for the last thirty years by the Saudis.

a colleague just tried to start a discussion about the problem of knowing which refugees are terrorists, took me by surprise did not know what to say

It's been confirmed that he presented a Syrian passport and came into Europe through Greece with a group of refugees -- another Syrian pass, identical but fur the picture, was found in Serbia on Saturday. The man who presented the second passport is not a suspect; it appears the passports are fakes out of Turkey. (Serbian newspaper, weigh accordingly.)

Greece confirmed that his fingerprints match those taken in Greece at his entry in Lesbos. the question of the legitimacy of his Syrian passport affects, I suppose, whether people entering as refugees need to be screened further, or whether Syrian refugees in particular pose a special threat (or both).

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/11997976/Paris-attacks-Terrorists-could-have-used-PlayStation4-to-plot.html

PlayStation 4 could have offered a range of ways to communicate secretly. As well as voice calls between players and online chat messaging, conspirators could discuss plots without speaking or writing a word by exchanging secret messages within specific games.

It has been suggested for example terrorists could spell out an attack plan in Super Mario Maker’s coins and share it privately with a friend, or two Call of Duty players could write messages to each other on a wall in a disappearing spray of bullets.

x-post

You do have to play conspiracy games a little here, because this is a conspiracy -- if the goal of the conspiracy is in part to enflame anti-refugee sentiment, coming in with a group of refugees on a false pass is both a convenient cover for a professional terrorist and one that works well to inspire anti-refugee sentiment.

"a colleague just tried to start a discussion about the problem of knowing which refugees are terrorists, took me by surprise did not know what to say"

wow, this is actually a really sickening question. because on a basic level, you can profile for terrorists beyond "arab". they're also young and male. somewhere herod is shitting himself in glee.

xp yeah I see that. I don't know what Daesh's view on anti-refugee sentiment in Europe is; presumably they're against people fleeing Syria since it's now the caliphate blah blah blah but do they want Europe to stop accepting refugees too? or just to treat refugees badly so that the refugees will choose to go back to Syria willingly (either to settle or to train for revenge attacks in Europe)?

evidently the Belgian police have rearrested the suspect they let loose over the weekend

It's the "destroy the grey zone" theory, right? The Europeans wanna kill the weakest of us -- so sign up and you won't be the weakest of us any more.

German-speakers -- a very well-curated ticker is at derstandard.at.

xxp Super Mario Maker is not of course available for Playstation 4 (the whole article is bananas obviously, but that's the detail someone should be fired for).

now they're pulling back the story that the Belgians have re-arrested the guy

xp it's a sickening question indeed, it followed a suggestion abt "bombing all of it" to which I replied something like "you mean bombing all of France?" then we agreed that terrorists are probably hard to bomb, moved on to the concept of screening refugees and establishing a DNA registry of ISIS-sympathizers and I stopped talking

I do recognize that if you accept that intelligence agencies are useful in preventing attacks then from their perspective it would be necessary to screen refugees (which I reckon is done plenty but have not read much abt)

it was not my colleagues "own" question btw, it was a question raised by a prominent Danish politician with Palestinian/Syrian background who's made a career in being skeptical abt radical islam

xp yeah I see that. I don't know what Daesh's view on anti-refugee sentiment in Europe is; presumably they're against people fleeing Syria since it's now the caliphate blah blah blah but do they want Europe to stop accepting refugees too? or just to treat refugees badly so that the refugees will choose to go back to Syria willingly (either to settle or to train for revenge attacks in Europe)?

― droit au butt (Euler), Monday, November 16, 2015 10:53 AM (42 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Apparently it's a) demolish the grey zone and b) keep potential tax payers in Syria to help finance the Islamic State.
Sounds crazy but also weirdly logical.

Those commentators that seek to distinguish among sorts of Muslim communities and political views are considered to be guilty of pursuing "nuances." Apparently, the enemy has to be comprehensive and singular to be vanquished, and the difference between Muslim and jihadist becomes more difficult to discern in public discourse. It was interesting to me that Hollande announced three days of mourning as he tightened security controls - another way to read "mourning becomes the law." But also, the state must now restrict liberties in order to defend liberty - that seems to be a paradox that does not bother the interlocutors. Yes, the attacks were quite clearly aimed at iconic scenes of daily freedom in France: the cafe, the rock concert venue, the football stadium. In the rock concert hall, there was apparently a diatribe by one of the attackers committing brutal assasinations, blaming France for failing to intervene in Syria (against the regime), and blaming the west for its intervention in Iraq (against the former regime). So, not a position, if we can call it that, against Western intervention per se. Sarkozy is now proposing detention camps, arresting those who are suspected of having ties to jihadists.

http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2337-mourning-becomes-the-law-judith-butler-from-paris

blaming France for failing to intervene in Syria (against the regime)

I find that very surprising, and I haven't read anything about that anywhere else.

me too

a colleague just tried to start a discussion about the problem of knowing which refugees are terrorists, took me by surprise did not know what to say

this seems like an important issue to me, and implicitly very compassionate. a reactionary argument would say fuck the refugees we can't take any of them. a realist compassionate argument asks how can we take as many refugees as we can without allowing terrorists into the country.

that's how I read the sentence, though i'm guessing that's not how the tenor of the conversation went

suggest if terrorist not refugee

Yeah I think it's a little unfair to completely dismiss this concern. The issue is not "muslims are coming, some of them might be terrorists, therefore let's not allow muslims." Although obviously some people see it that way. The issue is such a large number of refugees coming from the very region where ISIS operates at the same time that it's difficult to adequately vet everyone the way you would under normal immigration circumstances, and hence what is to be done. I would like to see Europe take as many refugees as possible. I would like to see America take a lot more refugees. But the refugee situation does present an excellent opportunity for sneaking into the country, and that can't be ignored.

Into various EU countries, I mean.

also if you believe that part of the cause of terrorism in europe is the failure to integrate muslim immigrant populations into european culture, economy, politics, etc, how exactly is that problem helped by bringing in far more immigrants at a time than you're able to integrate? you don't even need to be worried about terrorism to realize that moving a huge quantity of people from a foreign culture into your country is probably a recipe for tensions down the line. which doesn't mean that you shouldn't do it anyway out of humanitarian necessity but i don't understand this fingers-in-your-ears approach to refugees; like if you accidentally acknowledge the risks involved that suddenly makes you a fascist. you can in favor of taking care of the refugees and still concerned about how it's going to play out.

there are all sort of reasons why people would end up with fingers in their ears aren't there

too true

last year and again this year we're living in a French town where there's a big Muslim population, largely first and second generation; and that means my kids are implicated in the relation of that community to more integrated European communities. we've noticed the adolescent students from this population really struggle to do well in school (younger students too but it doesn't really seem to get serious until they're 12-14 or so). the kids speak good French, but their parents don't; and their parents don't have good work. so it seems to me that these communities of students don't really know what the point of taking school seriously is: why work hard now when they're just going to have to scrape by as adults? there's a tendency toward petty crime, low-level violence (against each other), pot smoking, talk of "thug life" (said in an endearing french accent). as an ex-pat american I'd like to see someone do a sociological comparison with some underclass american communities, because there are similarities---not like the americans have any solutions to the problems though. good jobs would help? but when the students of those communities don't work hard in school, what jobs are they supposed to do? I never figured out how this was supposed to resolved in the USA and I don't here either. thug life, I guess?

Holland just now asks for a modification of the constitution: "Nous devons pouvoir déchoir de la nationalité française un individu condamné pour atteinte aux intérêts de la nation ou pour acte terroriste, même s'il est né français, dès lors qu'il a une autre nationalité." That's to say, "We must have the power to strip French nationality of individuals condemned for attacking the interests of the nation or for a terrorist act, even if he is born French, when they have another nationality."

er Hollande

moving right to try and box out le pen?

exactly

Let's make anti-treason laws even stronger, that will surely have an impact.

You can do that in the UK. You can also render people stateless if they were not born UK citizens.

The main reasons it's used are to deny people the right of entry back in to the country or to remove legal protection from people who might later find themselves on the wrong end of a drone strike. It's much harder to deport people who are already in the country.

I'd imagine the reason Hollande is proposing it is that he doesn't want people who have fought in Syria coming back, though idk what the law is around jailing people for simply having gone to fight in the first place.

Texas, Arkansas, Michigan and Alabama announcing today they will not accept Syrian refugees.

Weird. I don't know how that matters - as long as there are states that will accept refugees it's not like these other states can shut down their borders.

Yeah, I can't imagine it accomplishes much other than posturing and catering to the anti-immigrant/anti-Muslim portions of their bases (they're all Republicans). Gov. Abbott in TX accompanied his announcement with a request to Obama that the US refuse all Syrian immigrants.

so Hollande is the reactionary kind of Socialist, is that it?

(i don't know jack about French political parties except for Le Pen)

Is there a particularly significant flow of refugees from Syria to Alabama or is this just a bullshit gesture?

Syrians can't wait to come to Alabama, it's like their favourite place.

The Gospel of Skynyrd travels far

Still no definitive proof that "Syrian refugees" were involved in these attacks, is there?

Yeah, I'm unclear... I read the passport was supposed to be a fake, but has this been confirmed or disproved? I can see why formenting anti-refugee sentiment in the west would be part of ISIS's endgame.

my kids are back from school; the younger two spent their whole days in school talking about the attacks. the youngest's class was taught "Imagine", while the oldest's school bell was changed from "some 90s disco song" (she says) to "Imagine". my oldest, in high school, in french class today worked through the Daesh statement, studying its literary structure, its references to the Koran, etc. a Muslim classmate, one of the kids who's been making trouble in class, argued passionately that those quotations weren't in the Koran, that Daesh doesn't know what they're talking about. so I guess that's was a good exercise?

I think it was george packer's article in the NYer on "the other paris" that noted how France could counter the narrative that Muslims are a persecuted class in France by emphasizing the long history of anti-religious thought and policy in France; laïcité isn't just against Islam in the public sphere, it's against all religion in the public sphere. that seems right to me.

what are the alternatives are for disaffected underclass youth in the west, that's not a specifically French problem. sit around at home, stare at the walls.

Add Bobby Jindal to the "posturing Republican governors" list. (He announced on Twitter, which prompted actor/comedian Michael Ian Black to respond, "Your parents are from Punjab, site of the July 2015 Gurdaspur terrorist attack. Will you be deporting them?"

The 180-degree turn being done by these guys on whether or not immigration policy is a strictly Federal matter or not (cf. "sanctuary cities") is amusing when it's not horrifying.

it's funny how these guys (=GOP governors) are immediately willing to play the role that ISIS has assigned them in this whole mess. or maybe less funny than depressing.

lol @ Michael Ian Black snap

xp

laïcité isn't just against Islam in the public sphere, it's against all religion in the public sphere

"rich and poor alike are forbidden from sleeping under bridges and stealing bread"

An article on the rationale behind referring to them as Daesh (while also rolling its eyes at some of the dumber coverage of that name)

https://www.freewordcentre.com/blog/2015/02/daesh-isis-media-alice-guthrie/

(Reminded because also contains links to two great dissections of the Islamic basis of their claims and activities)

"rich and poor alike are forbidden from sleeping under bridges and stealing bread"

I get this but it's not like people wearing crosses e.g. are allowed in school

unless your point is that people with e.g. Maghrebi names are discriminated against and so laïcité isn't really the main oppressor of Muslims in France. to which: ok. I wasn't trying to say that emphasizing laïcité as a wholesale orientation of society toward religion was the whole solution, just that it's an element that e.g. educators can use. obv anyone who knows France knows that racism is horrible here.

(picking apart racism and anti-Islam-ism is trickier though? maybe that's the trap I'm falling into?)

this is why I'd like to see a sociologist deeply versed in underclass cultures in both France and a non-European country (like the USA) examine these things. or even Ta-Nehesi Coates, if he's still coming to France these days.

http://inthesetimes.com/article/18605/breaking-the-taboos-in-the-wake-of-paris-attacks-the-left-must-embrace-its

Toady 'laicité' is probably seen as being anti-muslim, but originally it was instituted as a way to deal with the catholic church. Secularism in France is rooted in anti-clericalism and hundreds of years of religious sectarian struggles, constant persecutions of protestant huguenots, and of course, jews. Which is what makes it so tough to handle, for it's easy to see how it's used today against muslims, but it's also something that France instituted in a way to keep a religious source of power from persecuting other religious groups.

'Today'. Yikes.

mordy, your link should have come w/ a "zizek" warning

be careful next time

assume any link i post is likely to go to a zizek piece

http://inthesetimes.com/article/18605/breaking-the-taboos-in-the-wake-of-paris-attacks-the-left-must-embrace-its-blah-blah-blah

basically. my reaction to seeing his byline is basically "oh look, zizek has another opinion."

in other news

http://www.nytimes.com/video/world/europe/100000004040409/brother-of-paris-suspects-speaks-out.html

this poor guy -- who looks almost identical to his brother, the subject of a manhunt -- seems terrified. and wouldn't you be?

i should have written, "oh look, zizek has another opinion. and it's the same opinion he always has."

(btw in that guy's video remarks "justice" should really have been translated as "law," not "justice." as in, "our family has never been in trouble with the law.")

i think you're incorrect - i've lately seen a big shift in zizek's take on these issues. this piece has a lot of surprises imo.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/11/16/us-france-shooting-anonymous-idUSKCN0T519Z20151116

can we ship all of these fuckers to the moon and let them battle it out?

haha zizek was fooled by the daily currant

i think you're incorrect - i've lately seen a big shift in zizek's take on these issues. this piece has a lot of surprises imo.

― Mordy, Monday, November 16, 2015 1:18 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you'll have to tell me about them, since i have long since vowed never to read anything by zizek.

don't worry about it ;)

https://twitter.com/ToonArmyMIA/status/666327245347229696

dead

Really looking forward to when Anonymous outs the killers as a Buddhist monk, a retired librarian from Des Moines, and Ralph Nader.

omg xp

XD

goddamn

yeah that wins

Lol holy shit xp

ow my sides

x-post -- started to read that Zizek article and then gave up. Too many false equivalencies and faux attempts to be balanced.

I think I am happy that I have no idea who Zizek is.

Ignorance yay

it always seems like bullshit when it comes up on here and I never encounter the name anywhere else so yeah, ignorance yay

I enjoy him very much on film and psych stuff, not so much on politics

well according to Wikipedia "he has been dubbed the 'Elvis of cultural theory' and 'the most dangerous philosopher in the West'" in case you were wondering what you were missing.

FWIW when he says stuff that's reasonable it's also the kind of thing that any of 20,000 left-leaning intellectuals could have written. but somehow that is always given as proof that he should be taken seriously as a political thinker, even when the other half of the time he's praising stalin's cold-bloodedness or whatever.

you are such a drain on this site

anyway I dunno how it was for any of you with kids in New York or London (or e.g. Mumbai if any one here is from there) after the attacks there, but it's weird to talk about this stuff with my kids. like they understand it completely, and ask reasonable questions, and you can't say anything firm: why are they doing this? but also they form firm but kinda unfounded points of view about what's happening, as defense mechanisms I suppose, and as an adult you recognize this but it feels bad to say "actually..." like my youngest is going on about French patriotism now and how we are to live in liberty because that's what we stand for and the killers hate this, and it's like, I heard all this after 9/11 too, and I don't know...

tomorrow I have to go back into the city for the first time since Friday, also weird

i discussed this w/ my wife. i don't feel any pressure to talk to my girls (4 + 2) about this but i wondered if they had been 4 + 2 during 9/11 would i feel obligated to tell them something? and then what would i tell them? also i was remembering that there were only 3 times in my life that i remember off-hand the media running this story idiom that's like: "how do you explain X to your kids," and X was 9/11, the Clinton BJ scandal, and when elmo turned out to be a molester.

i guess i feel like they are going to have entire lifetimes to fret over how terribly sad + awful the world can be. let them enjoy their youth a little bit longer :/

you are such a drain on this site

― mattresslessness, Monday, November 16, 2015 2:13 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

thanks for your input, we will take your suggestions under consideration and get back to you.

Euler, how old are your kids?

I'm askin, bcz my sister tries to shield he daughter (almost 9) from ALL major violence in the news, esp the school massacre that happened a few miles from their home a couple years ago. I understand the instinct but I watched the Vietnam war on TV a lot when I was 8.

We *don't even own a television* so there's no tv news playing for my kids to see, and the one that's verbal is not even 4 so I feel no particular need to discuss this with her, and honestly I'd probably fly off the handle if her preschool did.

my friend lives in the 10th and she walks her kids to school past the bataclan several days a week. she still hasn't had a big talk about this with them and she isn't sure what to say. they must be really rattled, to say the least.

well, the youngest is probably too young to really 'get' it, but the older is about six.

yeah my kids are a lot older than that (Dr Morbius they're ~15 12 9) and anyway it seems to be all they talked about in school today so the cat'd be out of the bag even if we'd kept quiet about it during the weekend (which we didn't)

it's more the ideologization that I'm thinking about

I understand the instinct but I watched the Vietnam war on TV a lot when I was 8.

8yo weren't eligible for the draft iirc

FYI: http://www.theonion.com/multiblogpost/this-war-will-destabilize-the-entire-mideast-regio-11534

being exposed to a war happening thousands of miles away /= "someday some crazy person might come to your school and murder you and there's nothing anybody is willing to do about it"

xp

I mentioned the terrorist attack to my 11 year old, but didn't really feel like going into details. I'm curious as to what discussion he comes home from school with. I probably should have given him better background, but we were busy this weekend and he doesn't often like sitting down with me for in-depth political discussion on the best days. Last year he had to ask me about 9/11 for a school assignment. I told him my little inconsequential story, but I had to keep it really brief when I tried to squeeze in "now really quickly let me tell you about the early 80s in Afghanistan..."

Have not given my 5-year-old any kind of clue that this kind of darkness exists in the world. Took her to see a concert this weekend by some of her favorite performers from TV. It was a great time, but I spent about 25% of it keeping my eyes on the exits.

yeah I'm figuring my kids are gonna be in double-digits before I go into the unrelenting horrors of humanity

here ya go: http://www.coloringbook.com/9-11-terrorists-coloring-books.aspx

i wonder how much of general teen rebellion is connected to "you didn't tell me the world is a house of horrors"

yeah Shakey i understand the nuances. But we lived in Newark til i was ten and news of the local murders was freely accessible to me.

here ya go: http://www.coloringbook.com/9-11-terrorists-coloring-books.aspx

― wizzz! (amateurist), Monday, November 16, 2015 2:38 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haha o ffs.

http://i.imgur.com/Td9MTYz.jpg

it's not like people wearing crosses e.g. are allowed in school

sure but wearing a cross isn't an essential part of catholic culture and identity. we've been over all this before. in 2015 laicite gets deployed as a specific response to muslim culture.

xp bin laden looks a bit like fozzy in that picture

sure but wearing a cross isn't an essential part of catholic culture and identity. we've been over all this before. in 2015 laicite gets deployed as a specific response to muslim culture.

― illegal economic migration (Tracer Hand), Monday, November 16, 2015 4:08 PM (53 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

depends on whom, i think that for the most part you are right, but there is more nuance to that.

Osama sure got dressed in a hurry when he jumped out of bed in the middle of the night!

I sometimes feel like I learned about the Holocaust too young and that Jewish kids in general do. IDK though, maybe there's no age at which it's not going to seriously fuck with your psyche to learn about that kind of thing.

xp he's just always wearing that

I've talked to my kids about this, to the extent they need to know anything. They're 11 and 8, but more to the point, they're Jewish, and once you learn about the Holocaust you're pretty much set to comprehend the senselessness and sadness of all manner of horrors. Plus, at least in the US these are kids who have literally been raised with the idea of school lockdown drills, their contemporary equivalent of duck and cover. People talk about being desensitized, we're at least a couple of generations down the line already of young Americans who don't know or remember a pre-9/11 "before."

can a jew wear a yarmulke or is that also banned under laicite?

I sometimes feel like I learned about the Holocaust too young and that Jewish kids in general do.

yeah I wrestle with this - I was in the elevator with my mom and daughter over the weekend and my mom was talking about how she's watched this great documentary about Skokie and I was like "we are not getting into this right now". My daughter knows about Nazis but I wasn't about to get into what a Holocaust survivor was...

xp

xpost Man, thinking the same thing as me, re: Holocaust. Kids are so innocent, though, it's really amazing how they understand and assimilate stuff that as an adult practically paralyzes me with fear or depression.

def not all kids...

can a jew wear a yarmulke or is that also banned under laicite?

― Mordy, Monday, November 16, 2015 4:18 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'll be corrected if need be, but most kids who wear yarmulkes will go to specific jewish schools in which they'll also have a kosher cantina and etc. but I have no idea what happens to a kid who wears a yarmulke at a public school, I have the feeling that you are not supposed to, but it's tolerated. The whole thing is pretty debated still, especially with regards to the veil.

Wouldn't be very fair if it wasn't banned.

In July 2003, French President Jacques Chirac set up an investigative committee (commission Stasi) to examine how the principle of laïcité should apply in practice. It consisted of 20 people headed by Bernard Stasi, then ombudsman of France (médiateur de la République). While an obvious focus of the commission was wearing religious attire in public schools, the commission noted in its report that the issues went further.

The Stasi Commission published its report on 11 December 2003, considering that ostentatious displays of religion violated the secular rules of the French school system. The report recommended a law against pupils wearing "conspicuous" signs of belonging to a religion, meaning any visible symbol meant to be easily noticed by others. Prohibited items would include headscarves for Muslim girls, yarmulkes for Jewish boys, and turbans for Sikh boys. The Commission recommended allowing the wearing of discreet symbols of faith such as small crosses, Stars of David or Fatima's hands.

it always seems like bullshit when it comes up on here and I never encounter the name anywhere else so yeah, ignorance yay

I don't care about Zizek but good job opining on someone you've never heard of, the Internet needs more smart people like you.

Wouldn't be very fair if it wasn't banned.

― Caput Johannis in Disco (Tom D.), Monday, November 16, 2015 4:26 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh agreed. the only religious symbol i would ban is the kirpan, the thing is a knife before being anything else, other things are hats, who cares about hats.

cool point in reply to my cool point brimsted, thanks, good work here

anyway : yeah, Van Horn Street is right about Jewish students who want to display overtly their faith.

and Tracer Hand : another way to put it is that the state could redeploy laïcité with more care to make it a part of an integration strategy. this is going on already: my university for instance is introducing a new diploma in knowledge of laïcité, with an aim toward future teachers in particular.

So apparently, Hollande wants to modify some specific things about the article 36 of the constitution.

it's interesting how... aggressive the french policy of laïcité seems compared to the US notion of separation between church and state

(though i realize that if i were in the fundmentalist bubble i probably wouldn't be writing this)

they seem like totally different concepts, driven by different political needs

sure, but they both have roots in the same enlightenment values, i'd say... no?

One is designed specifically to limit the power of the Catholic Church, a problem which didn't really exist in revolutionary America (or America at any time).

ah i see.

whenever i see the word "laïcité" i think of milk.

Euler that's cool and all but even in this theoretical world where laicite falls upon all believers equally it's maybe not so cool if it's important for your sense of, yes, individual human selfhood to express your religious affiliation through your clothing! France's attitude to "freedom" in this instance appears diametrically opposite to, say, America's: in France you are free FROM religion; in America you are free TO BE religious.

And while I'm not religious myself I feel like, if somebody wants to show that in their dress, well, let your freak flag fly, you know?

slavoj žižek and yanis varoufakis in discussion tonight about the future of europe dominated unsurprisingly by paris attacks and refugee crisis

historically laïcité wasn't about separation of church and state so much as subordination of church to state. but yeah it was also in response to i think the realization post-dreyfuss that the army answered more to the catholic hierarchy than to the elected government. but i think it also transformed in lots of ways over the years.

like e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Briand-Ceretti_Agreement

in a sense it doesn't make france less catholic, it makes it more intertwined with the church.

the intertwining of French/Catholic roles and responsibilities is so bizarre. The gov't appoints bishops? Only French citizens are allowed to serve in the Church? I mean wtf

none of that shit is even conceivable in the states

thanks for this historical info, i admit to being pretty ignorant of this stuff.

Good overview:

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2015/nov/16/paris-attacks-isis-strategy-chaos/

A July 2014 poll by ICM Research suggested that more than one in four French youth of all creeds between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four have a favorable or very favorable opinion of ISIS. Even if these estimates are high, in our own interviews with young people in the vast and soulless housing projects of the Paris banlieues we found surprisingly wide tolerance or support for ISIS among young people who want to be rebels with a cause—who want, as they see it, to defend the oppressed.

there's no chance that number is anywhere near correct

all creeds???

It's also a year and a half old and there has been a lot that has happened since then both with ISIS and media coverage thereof

what's a year and a half old -- that article?

oh -- the poll

TBF, those kids thought they were being polled about Archer.

Germany Holland match has just been called off, "suspicious suitcase" found at the stadium.

First ISIS, now FIFA:
https://www.pehub.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/shutterstock_190642220.suitcase.money_.jpg

BREAKING - GERMAN POLICE DISCOVER TRUCK BOMB DISGUISED AS RESCUE VEHICLE NEAR SOCCER STADIUM IN HANNOVER, LOCAL MEDIA SAYS

go germany

honestly waiting for something to happen in the US at this point, it seems inevitable

Yeah, I usually don't let stuff like this get to me but it's kind of a nerveracking time to be working in DC or NYC, especially in fed buildings

aint it grand, KM?

i'm situated smack between the Statue of Liberty and the WTC with a 500-foot perch, so i'll call play by play if nec

Would read tbh

Yeah I felt like a real wimp, but the day of the attacks I had a minor, uncharacteristic panic attack on the subway, felt like I might either pass out or vomit, and had to go all the way back up out of the station to get some air and get my bearings and make sure I wasn't actually physically ill, before going back down again.

BREAKING: 200 POLICE UNIFORMS FOUND IN THE SOUTH OF FRANCE IN A RAID, ALONG WITH ROCKET LAUNCHERS AND RIFLES, according to @DeirdreBolton

The interior minister for Lower Saxony, Boris Pistorius, said that no arrests had been made so far, and said he could not confirm a report in a local newspaper that explosives had been found in an ambulance outside the stadium.

Might be precautionary after all. It's not clear yet.

Hey, Mordy, could you please stop doing that?

sure np

Part of the vividness of the Paris attack was that any of us could picture simultaneous events at a crowded music club, restaurant, and sports arena in our individual cities.

good luck, u ppl who hafta fly for the holidays

Four passengers were taken off a Spirit Airlines Inc flight at Baltimore....

"A passenger alerted a flight attendant of a passenger engaged in suspicious activity on board," it said. The plane returned to the gate, and police removed the four.

The government source said a female passenger who appeared to be Muslim was watching a video on her phone that another passenger thought was from Islamic State....

They were released without charges, the source said.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/11/17/us-spirit-airlines-passengers-idUSKCN0T61VO20151117

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jb_5QlLQQH8

This took me aback a bit but perhaps shouldn't have...

Paris attacks: Hollande upstages opposition
By Hugh Schofield, BBC News, Paris

Several commentators in France have noted the gulf that separates reaction today from reaction to the Charlie Hebdo and HyperCacher killings in January.
Then the country took comfort in its familiar instinct for left-inspired solidarity. A million people turned out in the Place de la Republique, and the language was of healing and cross-community fellowship.
Quite rightly, Mr Hollande has judged that today these mantras will not do.

so fuckin glad Sarkozy isn't the president anymore.

Two suspects dead in raid on St Denis - including a woman who triggered a suicide bomb, according to the police.

yeah a lot's gone on this morning, still waiting to see what's happened

went to work in the city yesterday, things seemed normal except traffic was really slow. I saw cops in the Gare de l'Est going through someone's bag, but that's one of the places where I usually see soldiers with assault rifles, so it didn't seem unusual.

so fuckin glad Sarkozy isn't the president anymore.

― Van Horn Street, Tuesday, 17 November 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

No need with Hollande around with plans to scrap dual nationality.

it's not quite that strong, just for people who are convicted of terrorism-related crimes. so he's not asking for the ability to make people stateless.

(said as someone who is seeking dual French nationality)

I see that's a policy Hollande/his party was against before the attacks..

that's correct

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/recognising-the-terrorist-threat/recognising-the-terrorist-threat

thank me later - this link could save your lives

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/recognising-the-terrorist-threat/recognising-the-terrorist-threat/recognising-the-terrorist-threat/recognising-the-terrorist-threat/recognising-the-terrorist-threat/recognising-the-terrorist-threat/recognising-the-terrorist-threat/recognising-the-terrorist-threat/recognising-the-terrorist-threat/recognising-the-terrorist-threat

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3207363/Prime-Minister-Jeremy-Corbyn/recognising-the-terrorist-threat/recognising-the-terrorist-threat/recognising-the-terrorist-threat/recognising-the-terrorist-threat/recognising-the-terrorist-threat/recognising-the-terrorist-threat/recognising-the-terrorist-threat/recognising-the-terrorist-threat/recognising-the-terrorist-threat.html

4. Suicide attacks
Suicide bombing is a very effective method of delivering an explosive device to a specific location.

I don't like this wording personally - it reads like a recommendation.

I don't think it's intended to, though establishing 'effective' as a higher standard than 'good' may be a welcome side-effect.

OFFICERS MAY
Point guns at you
Treat you firmly
Question you
Be unable to distinguish you from the attacker
Officers will evacuate you when it is safe to do so

I'll probably have managed the last one myself by that point tbh.

Sadness in his eyes

in Marseille yesterday in les quartiers nords some kids held up a bus with knives so that they could spray paint "#prayforparis" on it

by contrast on Monday in Marseille during the moment of silence a guy found it a convenient time to hold up a bar

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CUGJHK3WcAY9JZG.jpg

OFFICERS MAY
Point guns at you
Treat you firmly
Question you
Be unable to distinguish you from the attacker
Officers will evacuate you when it is safe to do so

think this list is missing a key thing that officers might do to you

Officers will evacuate/eliminate you when it is safe to do so

4. Suicide attacks
Suicide bombing is a very effective method of delivering an explosive device to a specific location.

If there's one thing I've learned from this, it's that suicide bombs may have become the least effective method.

http://s3.lprs1.fr/images/2015/11/17/5285121_charlie-hebdo_545x460_autocrop.jpg

"They have the guns / Screw them / We have the Champagne"

Max Blumenthal and James Kleinfeld traveled to Paris to examine the post-Hebdo climate for French Muslims. They interviewed numerous Paris residents whose voices are rarely heard in these debates — French Muslims, immigrants, French Jewish leftists — as well as other French citizens expressing the more conventional anti-Muslim views (including Christian Estrosi, the mayor of Nice (one of France’s largest cities) who warns of national television of a “Fifth Column” composed of French Muslims and calls the battle against it “the Third World War”).

Those interviews form the backbone of a new documentary Blumenthal and Kleinfeld produced, titled Je ne suis pas Charlie, which has been updated to include a discussion of last Friday’s attack. With the permission of its producers, you can watch the full 55-minute film on the video player below.

https://theintercept.com/2015/11/17/film-shows-chilling-climate-for-muslims-in-post-hebdo-france/

lol at quoting a Nice politician, that's a well-known center for the FN

the line about it being the Third World War is going around though, my youngest daughter has been talking about it with us because her teacher (in a regular public elementary school) has been calling it such with them.

Yeah, my son mentioned some kids talking about impending world war at school.

Yeah clearly impending third world war with all these major powers lining up to side with ISIS.

the Assymetrical Great War

the Graeme Wood piece is the best thing I've ever read about ISIS, thank you this thread

Yes, it's very good. I think there's a danger in applying a blanket ideological explanation to the whole group - a lot of the people who have joined up are veterans of other conflicts in the Caucasus, Bosnia, Mali, etc and seem to have pitched in because that's where the fight is now - but it's a well-researched piece on the underlying doctrines and roots.

So was it bullshit then about an ambulance full of explosives outside the Germany v Holland game? Only source I heard that from was the Mirror....

The Mirror is dropping all kinds of spurious shit on Twitter, an alleged explosion at Gare du Nord today etc.

xxp
there was some discussion of the wood piece elsewhere on ilx and I may be repeating myself but some of the most interesting assertions seemed to lack a solid source. it's obviously a nightmare for a journalist but most of his content came from isis sympathisers in the west; obviously they're not the most reliable sources but they may well have no significant relationship with anyone running things in syria/iraq at all. i've read elsewhere that lots of top baathists have taken control of isis' military operations, which seems plausible but it strikes me as unlikely they'd all adopt radical millenarian beliefs on top of what seems like a marriage of convenience

otm, there's a lot going on that's impossible to unpack

it's so weird to turn on the american network news and see and hear all these places i'm so familiar with being discussed in the context of an ongoing crisis of political violence... the 11th arrondissement, montreuil (where i lived and where one of the terrorists apparently abandoned his car), bobigny (wher several of the terrorists rented an apartment), st. denis.... i've been to all of these places, wandered around them....

in any event i found this very moving

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/17/opinion/is-it-normal-to-have-two-terrorist-attacks.html?_r=0

one interesting piece of this puzzle is how many of these terrorists were--before an apparent "conversion" to jihadism--juvenile delinquents, in trouble for petty theft, etc.

i've read a lot of analyses making different sorts of hay of that. some use it to argue that the problem of radicalized european muslim youth is a problem rooted in a lack of economic and social opportunities and resulting alienation from the dominant culture, etc. the kind of social problem that could be "resolved" by the welfare state, in essence.

other folks point to this and say, "well, that's because these kids were violent thugs all along, and now they just have an ideology to hook their nihilism to."

and then there's the fact that some among the terrorists were not necessarily children of the poorest/most disadvantages/most alienated muslim families in europe. some were fairly firmly middle class, with decent schooling and some concrete opportunities that were squandered. reminds me of how some of the terrorists who committed the attacks on 9/11/01 were actually from some of the more affluent or at least UMC families in saudi arabia, egypt, etc.

i don't really have a "point" except to say that the social roots of this stuff are complex and i don't really know how to parse them.

xpost -- i worked in both the 11th and st denis, actually. i only visited bobigny a few times. the parts i saw were really sad... just one ugly brutalist high rise after another.

so what exactly is going on/happened in st denis. were the people apprehended there part of a completely different terrorist cell, or were they connected to last friday's attacks?

this wikipedia image is basically what i remember bobigny looking like btw:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/81/Bobigny_-_Prefecture_01.jpg

I feel like I'd be comfortable answering my children's questions about it, but they don't even know this happened afaik - they aren't exposed to news unless I give it to them, really. so the question for me is "do I sit down and show my children news stories about this" and frankly I don't see the point in doing that. my oldest is only 7, why freak her out? I feel justified in waiting a couple more years before we have the whole Holocaust, 9/11, Hiroshima "the world is an awful place of neverending brutality" conversation. Maybe I'm sheltering her, idk.

xxp

or better yet, this

https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4059/4229076515_823f8f4567_b.jpg

the closest equivalent to that concrete landscape in chicago are the old cabrini green projects. and arguably the two things serve(d) the same purpose.

indulgence of brutalist architecture?

keeping an underprivileged and racial/ethic other population cooped up

csb but was just in paris two weeks ago. stayed two stops away from bobigny and ate at one of the restos that was shot up and drunk in another place 100m from le cambodge. :/

one interesting piece of this puzzle is how many of these terrorists were--before an apparent "conversion" to jihadism--juvenile delinquents, in trouble for petty theft, etc.

and then there's the fact that some among the terrorists were not necessarily children of the poorest/most disadvantages/most alienated muslim families in europe. some were fairly firmly middle class, with decent schooling and some concrete opportunities that were squandered.

All of the recent French/Belgian terrorists of particular note (Mohamed Merah/Charlie Hebdo/Belgian Jewish Museum/guy on the train/this current lot) are the former and none are the latter.

sorry, i'm a bit confused by that -- which is "former" and which is "latter"?

Oh sorry, they're all from similar backgrounds in petty crime/ drug dealing etc

NYT piece about how Abdelhamid Abaaoud's family wanted him dead made him sound p firmly like both

i mean social class is complex, but at least one of the attackers has been routinely described as being from a "middle class" background (his parents were small-business owners). this article is from time magazine, not exactly the pinnacle of journalism, but it's the first thing that came up in a google search; similar observations were made in NYT etc.

http://time.com/4113864/paris-attacks-isis-homegrown-terrorism/

of course "middle class" can mean a whole bunch of things.

xpost

yeah

it's quite possible for a middle-class kid to get involved in petty crime, has rebel without a cause taught us nothing?

I feel like I'd be comfortable answering my children's questions about it, but they don't even know this happened afaik - they aren't exposed to news unless I give it to them, really. so the question for me is "do I sit down and show my children news stories about this" and frankly I don't see the point in doing that. my oldest is only 7, why freak her out? I feel justified in waiting a couple more years before we have the whole Holocaust, 9/11, Hiroshima "the world is an awful place of neverending brutality" conversation. Maybe I'm sheltering her, idk.

I find that this has helped:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51vUaju2xsL._SX319_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

me, i let 'em have it straight from the source, meaning the audiobook version of

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51dYu38PLhL._SX325_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

the cover just draws you in!

Greatness through glowering

(xxxp) Yeah, I don't know for sure the backgrounds of all the attackers but I have noticed a disproportionate number of them seem to directionless, feckless drifters on the fringes of the criminal world... and, never mind the internet, a hell of a lot of radicalization goes on in prisons, in France, for sure.

re: bobigny, housing, architecture: eh... the histories (bobigny vs. cabrini-green) are distinct, surely? the architecture and urban planning are also very different tbh, though admittedly the one shot posted above does indicate the most cabrini-esque features. but cruising around on google maps it's clearly a product of the 60s/70s rather than the late 40s/50s. i had a longer post typed about this, but it's not really the thread for it. and anyway i sincerely don't know enough about the ins and outs of the history of public housing in france. my gut says though that collapsing either or both nations' housing policy down simply to the control of an underprivileged and racial/ethnic other maybe reduces out more than it clarifies. do we have a public housing thread, in general?

dr casino:

right, the comparison was kind of glib. the resemblance is partly aesthetic, and partly just that there are these urban areas (or in the case of france suburban areas) where what seems like a semi-permanent ethnic Other underclass is housed in tightly-packed residential high-rises. but surely the national histories are distinct.

and yes a lot of these projects--in the usa at least--were at one time considered progressive responses to the problem of slum/tenement housing. and their legacy is still contested. so again, i was being a bit glib.

Urgent & key documentary for folks interested in US city public policy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7RwwkNzF68

that doc is so f'n sad

thanks for putting that back on my radar! i had made a mental note to watch that, and like most things in my brain these days it kind of slipped away...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PH_a2OcCmnI

i know the point of these videos is to scare people and i shouldn't "give in", but this is pretty scary. mostly i am worried about my mom worrying about my brother and i

lol sorry wrong link

i was supposed to link to the recent isis video threatening new york.

lol poor terrifying RATATAT

ISIS is obviously incentivized to threaten every major US metropolis at this point. It's all win for them. Fear is the little death. FWIW, Americans, your capital city couldn't give a shit less, so far.

I saw RATATAT live once--my ears were terrorised!!!

Pretty remarkable, the editing et al of that video.

i don't envy you, Shakey and other parents.

is "the world is a terrible place" conversation de rigeuer with kids now? As a child i just gradually realized about adults, "They've been lying to me all along."

(although i have no recollection of being sheltered from the news, i was going through newspapers daily and watching the funeral of MLK on TV when i was in *kindergarten*, etc)

My friend has three boys and when I saw her on Saturday, she hadn't mentioned events to her kids (the oldest is eight or so).

I was allowed to watch the 10pm news when I was about 9 or so, because I'd keep my mother talking while it was on instead of going to bed, so I could watch - and always read newspapers.

Newsround ftw

seriously though! god bless them.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/13865002

<3

i have no recollection of being sheltered from the news

My memory isn't very good but I think this is true for me too, also I can't see my dad passing up the opportunity to pontificate on the state of the world, even to an audience of pre-teens.

Growing up in London, I can't remember a time when terrorist attacks weren't on the news and seeming very close to home, remember my mum and I being turfed of buses due to bomb scares etc. This is on a different level to anything the IRA did but I don't remember feeling fear like over the past week. As an adult its so much easier to imagine yourself in that situation, you don't quite comprehend it as a child, and the world just seems a lot bigger when you're a kid, Paris was unimaginably far away back then, as was Lockerbie.

i wasn't sheltered from the news, hence incidents like when i was 8 or 9 and distressed (mortified, in fact) by my mum saying she would dye her hair green until i eventually blurted that i would have both of my parents reported for sexual abuse

that day i learnt the phrase 'overstepped the mark'

It looks like the attack in Sarajevo yesterday, in which a guy shot two Bosnian soldiers and sprayed a bus with bullets, is being chalked up as Salafi-inspired terrorism.

Abdelhamid Abaaoud confirmed dead.

I don't remember feeling fear like over the past week

do you feel fear? i don't actually. i felt a sense of hopelessness at what actually happened in paris, but i don't feel any heightened sense of fear being in london. i mean i guess an attack is a little more likely, but worrying about it is like worrying about getting hit by a car or diagnosed with a serious illness.

i retract that actually, an attack prob isn't even more likely.

OTM #1 and OTM #2

I don't feel fear, just frustration with the what-the-terrorists-want reactions to these attacks, generally by really dumb people who I don't challenge unless I'm actually related to them.

It's more a kind of abstract unease then fear for personal safety I suppose? Walking around the streets of Central London in (ie the times where I would actually be in danger from any attack) I feel fine, but just sitting at home there have been a couple of moments of creeping dread, even if whatever happens next takes place in a different city altogether. I don't think an attack is more likely than it was a week ago, but then emotional responses to an event like this aren't always rational.

couldn't help laughing at this :/

Aitboulahcen had a brief exchange with police officers, according to one official who said she was asked: “Where is your boyfriend?” and she responded angrily: “He’s not my boyfriend!” before a huge explosion was heard.

Like I am definitely more conscious of this than I was even ten years ago, if only because then there was a sense that the worst had already happened. (xpost)

I don't feel fear and I work in the center of Paris. I feel terribly sad for the victims and their families, and I worry about overreactions by various agents that could make things worse, but attacks like this will remain rare, though always a possibility. If you live/work in a big important city then this is one of the risks you have to live with, like crowded transportation and petty crime.

There's always a risk of copycats, ie, Copenhagen last winter. But bigger attacks probably aren't more likely.

What makes you say that? There were two major ones in the past two weeks. ISIS has a level of reach and influence among Westerners that al Qaeda never did owing to its command of social media.

The best reason to not be afraid is pragmatic - it doesn't keep you safer on a personal level, and on a political level it can lead to rash, disastrous, and xenophobic reactions. That doesn't mean the fear is irrational though. Carrying out these kinds of attacks seems so easy, and there seek to be a good amount of motivated people.

Treeship my impression (and some of this is linked upthread) that ISIS is actually much less interested in attacking Western countries that Al Qaeda was/is - its main concern is expanding the territory of its caliphate.. Paris being (apparently) an exception

What makes you say that?

i'm guessing increased security measures, increased public alertness + depleted terrorist resources?

xp that was the former theory; the current en vogue one that i've been seeing is that since the war at home is going poorly now ISIS is shifting to international terrorism (and that potentially the more we deny them in the middle east the more terrorism we'll see abroad)

From my end of things there is an increased fear of not so much a bomb, but of being caught up in the middle of a racist attack as I look 'foreign'.

:/

That is definitely there as well, violent reprisals in general. Atmosphere in parts of SE London got very ugly for a while after the Lee Rigby murder.

yeah that sucks.

attacks like this will remain rare. whether bigger ones are on the horizon, I don't know; the prime minister today, in arguing (successfully) for the extension of the state of emergency by three months, noted the possibility of chemical and biological attacks in France. and those are scary! but still, rare enough that I don't actively fear it. I was a child in 1980s American, forced to do regular duck and cover drills for nuclear war. you just separate those fears from your ability to live daily.

i was trying to record how i felt last week, like maybe not quite dread, i guess hopelessness as i said, just a feeling of shame at being human maybe.

on a diff note thought this was p interesting - arguing that turkey supports isis.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/18/turkey-cut-islamic-state-supply-lines-erdogan-isis

do you feel fear? i don't actually. i felt a sense of hopelessness at what actually happened in paris, but i don't feel any heightened sense of fear being in london. i mean i guess an attack is a little more likely, but worrying about it is like worrying about getting hit by a car or diagnosed with a serious illness.

I'm on tour and we've gone through several variations of petrified, it is scary to be playing UK / European venues in the wake of something like this

I was at a hotel in another city and immediately called my family as I saw the news of the Rigby murder.

Post-London attacks I didn't go out to a concert I was immensely looking forward to. It wasn't the fear an opera house might be bombed so much as the fear of being on the wrong end of reprisals, although not feeling like enjoying myself post-attacks meant I probably wasn't going anyway. xposts

"the world is a terrible place"

I think once they hit a certain (younger than you think) age, kids pick up on this pretty well, at least to some degree. That is, when a horrible thing happens, they generally get it. There's no way to live in Chicago, say, a not know about all the shootings (or homelessness, or drug addicts, or crime). Likewise, as I said above, all kids/schools practice lockdown drills now, though it is usually couched in terms of a stray dog on the loose (which has happened here!). When something bad happens internationally, they pick up on it, too, even if they're not too sophisticated about it. They might know about the Paris bombing, for example, but you don't need to go far past "some bad people hurt some people," though the inevitable "why?" can be a challenge (even for adults). I'd say the only thing we shield our kids from best we can is news about sexual violence, abduction or molestation. They're taught well (in school and at home) about strangers and being careful, but I'm not sure they realize why they have to be careful. Nor do they really need to know why.

The shock that follows things like Paris always makes me think about previous generation enduring sustained terrorism in the west, like IRA bombings or air raids in WWII. I don't know if we're built for that anymore, though I am not sure why. Perhaps because news travels too fast and we are too well informed about what's going on, where, why and to whom? I personally am torn between education (reading the news) and ignorance (avoiding the news). I feel it's my duty as a citizen to follow things, but sometimes the stress level gets too high and I need to take a long break.

xxp I dunno, I think the answer to any question which contains 'Turkey' and 'the Kurds' is 'Turkey and the Kurds'. They could definitely do more, but it's hard to read it as tacit support for ISIS.

i'm going to *ahem* a gig tonight and it hadn't occurred to me to be scared until now. not that i am really, but it hadn't occurred, as i say

Hah, me too - it only occurred to me yesterday.

the idea that bigger gigs could be a terrorist target has given me v mild unease since 7/7, not sure i'm feeling any greater hesitation or fear wrt whatever undisclosed gig it is i'm going to tonight

Aitboulahcen had a brief exchange with police officers, according to one official who said she was asked: “Where is your boyfriend?” and she responded angrily: “He’s not my boyfriend!” before a huge explosion was heard.

There's throwing a tantrum and then there's this.

to put things in entirely selfish and indefensible terms, i've never been to Paris and kinda feel it has been ruined for me in the future.

i find the media use of terms like "mastermind" re this asshole who was killed yesterday kind of eyerolling, as in "whew we got the mastermind, roll credits."

This guy has truly changed the way we think about driving around in SUVs shooting at random people.

to put things in entirely selfish and indefensible terms, i've never been to Paris and kinda feel it has been ruined for me in the future.

Wait, you live in New York, right?

that's too bad, it's been through much worse than this: the plague, the Nazi occupation, Woody Allen

I am just operating on a heightened sense of awareness. On Saturday, I took my child to an event in a concert hall roughly comparable to the Bataclan. I let myself enjoy the show along with my kid, but also did periodic scans of the entrances and escape routes. It's similar to my state of mind in movie theaters post-Dark Knight Rises, which sucks because I feel like I haven't really fully settled into a movie since then. As if ISIL were going to attack this children's show in Baltimore, but who the fuck even knows anymore?

They made threats against DC, where I work. I've still gone jogging this week on my lunch hour, even though my regular jogging route takes me past high profile tourist destinations and government buildings.

After Newtown, I don't feel 100% comfortable in any public place.

Are you talking about films set in Paris Morbs? I've been thinking about watching Out 1 in a week and what that might be like post-attacks. Its a film that is v imtimate with Paris, its streets and cafes (as is so much French cinema of the Nouvelle Vague)

yep xxxxp

i'm talking about visiting Paris in the future.

to a degree, most of NY who didn't have relatives or friends who died on 9/11 have gotten over it.

(unless the debris cloud caused my cancer, i guess)

also NYC was ruined for me by Giuliani / real-estate piggery, and now it's too late to leave.

Yeah it's been on my mind, in the subway mostly or walking around midtown, but I mean crossing the nightmare that is Queens Blvd with my kids also gives me worrying thoughts every time, shit can happen anywhere and feeling responsible for someone else's life just heightens the awareness of it. I felt about the same degree of heightened concern when I was in NYC post-9/11, it was never really overwhelming but on my mind a lot.

i've never been to Paris and kinda feel it has been ruined for me in the future.

I've never been either but I'm thinking of going in January!

Are you talking about films set in Paris Morbs? I've been thinking about watching Out 1 in a week and what that might be like post-attacks. Its a film that is v imtimate with Paris, its streets and cafes (as is so much French cinema of the Nouvelle Vague)

I'm blaming Eric Rohmer for me wanting to visit Paris.