Terrorist attack in Brussels.

The Tariff King

The Tariff King

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Confirmed 11 dead from the airport explosion.

Explosions also reported in the subway stations.

Not confirmed if retaliation for ISIS coward captured last week.
 
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Wow. Just wow. Surprised that the crackdown after Paris didn't put a bigger dent in the terrorists, but this is some seriously insidious stuff.
 
50PoundHead said:
Wow. Just wow. Surprised that the crackdown after Paris didn't put a bigger dent in the terrorists, but this is some seriously insidious stuff.
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There's a reason that historically the rules of war let you shoot combatants you capture out of uniform.
 
Hawk said:
I was in Brussels a few weeks ago, including in and out of the airport, and the military presence was unbelievable. Especially surrounding Metro stations in the city. I'm talking entire platoons. Unbelievable that something like this was still perpetrated.
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It's kind of a root and branch thing that I think those of us in the US have a difficult time comprehending. One thing I think that gets lost in this is that with the birth rate in Northern and Western Europe declining, there is a need for workers and those workers are coming from the Middle East. The problem is subsequent generations after the initial immigration are neither fully Middle Eastern or fully European and probably feel adrift. For all of their supposed open-mindedness, the French are notorious racists. Not sure about the Belgians, but I know that many of these terrorists come from ghetto-like communities within their respective countries.

That doesn't provide an excuse for terrorism, but I think it's pretty clear that the era of the melting pot is over in Europe and that the Middle Eastern immigrants are increasingly isolated within the European community and their atrocious behavior is part of that. Again, it's not an excuse for this crap.
 
I spent two years of my life in Belgium and my heart is broken.

It's sad, but many knew that this was a long time coming. There is a fierce divide between the Islamic community and Europeans that goes back two decades.
 
chop2chip said:
I spent two years of my life in Belgium and my heart is broken.

It's sad, but many knew that this was a long time coming. There is a fierce divide between the Islamic community and Europeans that goes back two decades.
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I think instead of decades you should think Centuries. The invasion of the Moors, the Ottoman Empire, etc. have been a thorn in the side of the Western Europeans.
 
zitothebrave said:
I think instead of decades you should think Centuries. The invasion of the Moors, the Ottoman Empire, etc. have been a thorn in the side of the Western Europeans.
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Fair.

About 15 years ago a Dutch film maker Theo van Gogh was murdered after he made a documentary that highlighted how poorly women are treated within Islam. When I lived there the Dutch and Belgians would refer to that all the time as 'evidence' that the massive infusion of immigrants from Turkey and Morocco would cause huge problems because they didn't felt that the immigrants had no interest in acclimating to a Western culture.

Today validated their worst fears.
 
50PoundHead said:
It's kind of a root and branch thing that I think those of us in the US have a difficult time comprehending. One thing I think that gets lost in this is that with the birth rate in Northern and Western Europe declining, there is a need for workers and those workers are coming from the Middle East. The problem is subsequent generations after the initial immigration are neither fully Middle Eastern or fully European and probably feel adrift. For all of their supposed open-mindedness, the French are notorious racists. Not sure about the Belgians, but I know that many of these terrorists come from ghetto-like communities within their respective countries.

That doesn't provide an excuse for terrorism, but I think it's pretty clear that the era of the melting pot is over in Europe and that the Middle Eastern immigrants are increasingly isolated within the European community and their atrocious behavior is part of that. Again, it's not an excuse for this crap.
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But it does point to the existence of a large pool that is much more readily radicalized.
 
My thought for a while now has been that we're fighting radical Islam all wrong. This isn't a military dispute it's a clash of cultures. You have two cultures that are fundamentally incompatible. On one side you have Islamists who want to see society operating as if it were the 9th century in the Middle East. On the other you have modern Western Civilization with all of its freedoms and individualism. These two cultures cannot coexist alongside one another (please note I'm not talking about Islam as a religion, I'm talking about Islamism, the political and cultural movement).

While we have to answer the military threats that radical groups like ISIS present, we've ignored the cultural component. We should be wanting to assimilate as much of the Islamic world into Western culture as we can. When these people are literally citizens of Western countries, there's no excuse for leaving them alienated.
 
striker42 said:
My thought for a while now has been that we're fighting radical Islam all wrong. This isn't a military dispute it's a clash of cultures. You have two cultures that are fundamentally incompatible. On one side you have Islamists who want to see society operating as if it were the 9th century in the Middle East. On the other you have modern Western Civilization with all of its freedoms and individualism. These two cultures cannot coexist alongside one another (please note I'm not talking about Islam as a religion, I'm talking about Islamism, the political and cultural movement).

While we have to answer the military threats that radical groups like ISIS present, we've ignored the cultural component. We should be wanting to assimilate as much of the Islamic world into Western culture as we can. When these people are literally citizens of Western countries, there's no excuse for leaving them alienated.
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Great point. You can't bring people in as basically glorified guest workers and marginalize them without some expectation of pushback. You either bring them fully into your society or you don't bring them in at all. That said, there's enough blame to go around here. Are the hosts unwelcoming or are the guests resisting assimilation?

Like you said, Islam (in most forms) has co-existed with the West (though not always comfortably). Islamism cannot.
 
50PoundHead said:
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Great point. You can't bring people in as basically glorified guest workers and marginalize them without some expectation of pushback. You either bring them fully into your society or you don't bring them in at all. That said, there's enough blame to go around here. Are the hosts unwelcoming or are the guests resisting assimilation?

Like you said, Islam (in most forms) has co-existed with the West (though not always comfortably). Islamism cannot.
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I agree, but isn't what's really lacking in this whole discussion the same thing that causes communism to not work, and the same thing that causes screwed up capitalism to not work? "Incentive". Don't we need to use both the carrot and the stick to keep the otherwise good people who just want to practice a different religion and immediately identify and remove those who are dangerous and want to or plan to commit violence? In short don't we need those people to police themselves way better than they are now? I know this is probably politically incorrect but don't all decent people no matter their religion, their politics, their anything/everything need to step up and take a stand either FOR civilization or AGAINST it, no excuses no exceptions?
 
50PoundHead said:
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Great point. You can't bring people in as basically glorified guest workers and marginalize them without some expectation of pushback. You either bring them fully into your society or you don't bring them in at all.
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You mean to treat people as equals, and with compassion and kindness??? What a novel idea. Too bad something like this never caught on.
 
Oklahomahawk said:
I agree, but isn't what's really lacking in this whole discussion the same thing that causes communism to not work, and the same thing that causes screwed up capitalism to not work? "Incentive". Don't we need to use both the carrot and the stick to keep the otherwise good people who just want to practice a different religion and immediately identify and remove those who are dangerous and want to or plan to commit violence? In short don't we need those people to police themselves way better than they are now? I know this is probably politically incorrect but don't all decent people no matter their religion, their politics, their anything/everything need to step up and take a stand either FOR civilization or AGAINST it, no excuses no exceptions?
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Good points. I think one of the problems--and this isn't confined to just Islam--is that the incentive isn't there for the outsiders to participate completely because advantage of participation is lacking.

Not trying to hijack this, but I think there's a similarity between what is happening with Muslims in Europe and the Black Lives Matter movement. If you play by the rules--get an education, get a job, work hard--but you still can't crack the upper levels of society, some measure of detachment is bound to result. I think a lot of the angst in the Middle East comes from the fact that oil money provided a broad range of people with higher levels of education, but there's nothing really there for people after they complete said education due to the repressive nature of the regimes in many Middle Eastern countries. Look at how much of the terrorist leadership is composed of highly educated individuals.

It's not in the nature of the hegemon to get inside the heads of those down below, but some of that may be in order. But if all that results from that is the hegemon pretending to listen and then tossing out a few rhetorical bouquets as opposed to really trying to solve the issue, we're simply in for more of the same. I've always believed that knowledge lies with the elites, but wisdom lies with the masses and people are not so clueless as to recognize when something is disingenuous.
 
striker42 said:
My thought for a while now has been that we're fighting radical Islam all wrong. This isn't a military dispute it's a clash of cultures. You have two cultures that are fundamentally incompatible. On one side you have Islamists who want to see society operating as if it were the 9th century in the Middle East. On the other you have modern Western Civilization with all of its freedoms and individualism. These two cultures cannot coexist alongside one another (please note I'm not talking about Islam as a religion, I'm talking about Islamism, the political and cultural movement).

While we have to answer the military threats that radical groups like ISIS present, we've ignored the cultural component. We should be wanting to assimilate as much of the Islamic world into Western culture as we can. When these people are literally citizens of Western countries, there's no excuse for leaving them alienated.
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But I am afraid you can't address the cultural component without addressing the religious - it's all of one cloth. And I think on that score, Western secular cultures are pretty weaponless. You'll pick-off a few to secularism but secularism also fuels their rage.
 
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