#Manchester Muslims Were Queuing Up To Help The Victims

 General, Politics, Religion  No Responses »
May 232017
 

I woke up this morning to the news of the Manchester bombing this morning; learning about what was going on from a forum that had attracted some of the more rancid members of the far right. Who were busy blaming this atrocity on all muslims, but also on Syrian refugees; all this of course before anyone knew any facts because facts are irrelevant to the bigoted far right.

And a particularly nasty piece of work has labelled the victims “sluts” and “whores” (I’ve linked to a site that discusses his comments in order not to give him any extra ad revenue).

Now I am not in the habit of being sympathetic to any religious group – they all believe in imaginary friends. But they’re people and in many cases my fellow countrymen, so when a gang of pathetic little chickenshit cowards labels all muslims as terrorists, it is time to call them out on their bigoted bullshit.

Yes the evil scum who set off the bomb was a muslim; one born in Britain and not a Syrian refugee.

But :-

  1. It is almost certain that some of the 60 ambulances that attended were crewed by a muslim or two.
  2. It is almost certain that some of the police who were there helping people out were muslims.
  3. It is almost certain that some of those who opened their homes to accommodate stranded
  4. Some of the taxi drivers who turned off their meters and offered free lifts to those stranded were muslims.

Of course Mancunians of all faiths and none rallied around and helped out, but as muslims were being painted with the terrorism brush, it seems reasonable to highlight that many of those helping out were muslims.

Westminster Attacker: Cowardly, Pathetic, and Incompetant

 Politics  No Responses »
Mar 232017
 

It may be a bit early to comment in this way with 5 dead, and 40 injured after the attack in Westminster yesterday.

But it could easily have been so much worse.

For those who are not aware, every afternoon Westminster is crawling with hundreds or thousands of pedestrians. Any half-competent attacker armed with a vehicle would have a hard job keeping the casualty figures down to 50-odd.

And then to leap out of a hired car armed with a couple of knives just makes the attacker look pathetic.

Yes this is the worst terrorist attack in London for a decade – which just goes to show just how little terrorism there really is.

Yes there were deaths and terrible injuries, but to me it seems that mocking the attacker is an appropriate reaction.

If you look at recent terrorist attacks in Europe, most of the terrorists turn out to be pathetic petty criminals, and it won’t surprise me if this latest attacker also turns out to be a petty criminal. He’s certainly cowardly, pathetic and incompetent.

The New Defence

The Morality of Drone Killings

 General, Politics  No Responses »
Dec 282016
 

There is an interesting video from 33c3 dealing with drone killings :-

As an aside, one of the thing that makes the Chaos Computer Club congress more interesting than many security conferences is the attention given to more “political” issues.

Drones offer the enticing possibility of tackling terrorist groups without putting people at risk, but the reality is somewhat different.

  1. Drone killings are in effect an act of war against the citizen(s) of a foreign country; very often where war has not been declared. To put it into perspective what if the UK operated drones in the 1970s and targeted US citizens who were helping to fund the IRA? And sometimes these actions resulted in “regrettable collateral damage”?
  2. Why is it not possible to provide information on targets to the law enforcement officials in the country where the target is living? It is possible that the law enforcement officials are compromised in some way of course (for example the US authorities were often against dealing with IRA terrorism), but not in all cases.
  3. Who decides that a target is so evil that they deserve death from the sky? The obvious solution here is a higher court order rather than an arbitrary decision by the military, although secret court orders are almost as bad as arbitrary military decisions. At the very least, such court orders must be made public after the death of the target.
  4. Just how reliable are drone killings anyway? How many times have we heard of “collateral damage” (the sanitised version of “Ooops! We killed the wrong people.”)? And how many times have we not heard of collateral damage? Many videos of drone killings show vehicles being targeted which leads to the most obvious problem – you do not know that the target is within the vehicle and you do not know that he or she is alone in the vehicle.
  5. “Spinning” the effectiveness of drone killings by counting all “military aged males” as militants unless they can be demonstrated to be innocent (i.e. guilty until proven innocent) is about as despicable as it gets. You cannot claim to be in the right if you resort to such claims.

It is all too easy to claim that we’re all under threat from terrorism and that anything that might reduce that threat is justified. But criminal activity by governments is never justified.

The US Terrorist Incident That Wasn’t

 Media, Politics  No Responses »
Nov 282015
 

Waking up this morning, I find news of a terrorist incident in the US; except that it was not called a terrorist incident. It was announced as a mass shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic. For those who are not aware, in the US, Planned Parenthood clinics sometimes perform abortions.

There are those who protest about the abortions using methods up to and including murder. And whilst leaping to conclusions is not something to be encouraged, this incident has all the hallmarks of being a "pro-life" terrorist killing.

(Image from the Casper Star Tribune)

Given that the media is quite happy to label as terrorist incidents other killings, what is special about this incident?

Perhaps it has something to do with who the perpetrators are – they are not wild-eyed revolutionaries, nor are they islamic fanatics; they are christian fanatics. And it seems that christian terrorists get the benefit of the media not labelling their outrages as terrorism. Why?

And look at some of the twitter spew :-

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There’s No Such Thing As Islam

 Religion  No Responses »
Nov 222015
 

There are approximately 1.6 billion muslims in the world today, so there are 1.6 billion different versions of islam; in most cases the differences are trivial (at least to "unbelievers").  In other cases the differences are rather more obvious.

Each muslim supposedly reads the Qur'an differently and consciously or unconsciously gives different conflicting verses a different emphasis: The obvious being :-

…slay the pagans wherever ye find them

And :-

whosoever killeth a human being for other than manslaughter or corruption in the earth, it shall be as if he had killed all mankind, and whoso saveth the life of one, it shall be as if he had saved the life of all mankind.

Any normal person is going to emphasise the second verse whereas murderous psychopaths will emphasise the first.

For those who think that only the qur'an is like this, take a closer look at the bible – in particular deuteronomy 17.

As a wooly minded liberal, I have a problem with certain aspects of certain flavours of islam :-

  • Apostasy. A number of those versions of islam have no place for god in them; if you become an atheist in certain islamic countries it is safest to go through the motions. Because being stoned to death for apostasy would ruin your entire day. And atheists are the lucky ones – it is possible for us to go through the motions and pretend.
  • Women's rights. I'm not happy with anything that believes in second class citizens.
  • Criticism. I'm human and I've got a right to criticise anything which I see has issues. Calling it "blasphemy" and threatening me with stoning isn't a sensible way of facing criticism.

But the main problem is of course that a tiny number (in comparison to the total) of versions of islam support terrorism. Interestingly there are suggestions that many terrorists have an extremely limited understanding of islam.

Mainstream muslims protest that the terrorists aren't real muslims and that islam is a religion of peace. Fair enough.

But perhaps they should go a step further and declare that supporters of terrorism and terrorists are apostates, and need to talk with a qualified iman about rejoining the faith.

For those who think that this is a uniquely islamic problem, you should read up on christian terrorism. 

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