As an aside, strong suveillance laws were voted earlier this year.
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...
http://sofrep.com/44480/french-and-german-police-knew-paris-...
Should have been picked up?
You think secret services are omnipotent? That they can get a whiff of every conspiracy.
>The French intelligence and counter terrorism units are either dangerously incompetent or these terrorist are getting much better at covering their tracks.
Or, there is way, way more of them. Currently, thousands of migrants are entering Germany each day. No one is checking them, fingerprinting them, taking their photos or running those against databases.
You can find useful idiots decrying such treatment: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/refugee-crisi...
Doing so would require a lot of coercion, so no one is doing that.
My guess is that the Daeshi idiots slipped in a martyr cell or two. These guys got weapons from black market and executed a well-planned attack.
One important feature:
Closure of public places
Minister of the Interior or the prefects may
"order the temporary closure of theaters, pubs and meeting places" and
"meetings of nature to cause or maintain disorder"
We don't know if the attackers had anything to with the flux of Syrian migrants moving across Europe now, but my guess would be: they had nothing to do with it.
There are about 5 million Muslims in France, which accounts for about 7 percent of France's total population. France has deep, long-standing and often troubled ties to several Muslim nations, notably Algeria. The French presence in Algeria lasted from 1830-1962.
During the Algerian civil war of the 1990s, France was targeted by terrorist attacks several times. One of those bombings EDIT: injured more than 100 people, which may be the number lost in the attacks today.
There are several basic facts that may help people understand why these attacks happen in France (I'm going to make some crude and unsympathetic generalizations that stem from the years I spent there):
* It's close to Middle Eastern and North African countries torn by conflict, notably Libya and Syria. These are training grounds for would-be attackers, many of whom originate in the west.
* Because of that, and of the fact that France rejoined NATO in 2009 and put itself firmly on the side of the US, it is also a proxy for the US, and will be targeted by those unhappy with American policies.
* It's racist. France has not dealt with the fact that people other than the French live on its soil. If you are the child of immigrants who were invited to France to help its post-War growth, you soon learn that a Muslim name will exclude you from many opportunities.
* Its economy is stagnant. France is no country for young men. They will face limited opportunities regardless of their ethnicity, unless they belong to the elite passing through the grandes écoles. This leads to a lot of frustration. When people cannot build a life in one direction, sometimes they are susceptible to morbid, violent ideologies.
* It's sloppy. I lived in France for 14 years, on either side of the 9/11 attacks on Manhattan. The French were really slow to put respectable security systems in place. CDG airport leaked like a sieve for years and I have no reason to believe that has changed.
Anyone who wants to know more about Islam in France should read Gilles Kepel:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilles_Kepel
He wrote a particularly good book in the 1980s called "The suburbs of Islam".
Their problems are rooted in abuse of power.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2015/nov/11/...
http://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2015/nov/12/...
http://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2015/nov/13/...
Cross border travel within the EU is like moving between states in the US, easy to miss.
For those curious about 2005 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_French_riots#State_of_eme...
Edit: I was wrong, the President said the borders were closed, but then clarified that they weren't.
http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/sleepwalking-toward-armag...
This particular operation is either ISIS-conducted or ISIS-oriented vigilanteism; whichever it is, backing down in Syria will only embolden them. (Or rather, embolden those like them; I don't imagine that very many of the specific attackers here are going to have particularly many opportunities to do this again in the future.)
ISIS is specifically out for either world empire or apocalyptic defeat (see http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isi... ); tactical concessions will work about as well as they did with the Nazis and the Communists -- or even less well than that, since neither Naziism nor Communism believed that success was a sign that Divine Providence was smiling on them.
Feel free to suggest improvements in the comments and/or request other relevant documents to be translated.
[edit: source France24; http://mashable.com/2015/11/13/france-border-airlines-flight... . Hollande did refer to 'fermeture des frontières' which is confusing https://twitter.com/Elysee/status/665314066106159104 ]
Our dependence on foreign oil is no longer an excuse for our meddling in the Middle East.
42% of young Muslims in France believe suicide bombings are justified (35% overall).
http://www.pewresearch.org/files/old-assets/pdf/muslim-ameri...
42% of young Muslims in France believe suicide bombings are justified (35% overall).
http://www.pewresearch.org/files/old-assets/pdf/muslim-ameri...
...or Maoism "struggle sessions" which resulted in 2 million deaths [1]
...or just read about mass killings in communist regimes[2]. Clearly communist governments have mass killed a lot of people.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_...
'Eagles of Death Metal' is not a death metal band.
What they do play is eclectic and hard to label as anything more specific than "rock", but doesn't fit even a very inclusive definition of metal. See: https://www.youtube.com/user/EaglesDeathMetalVEVO/videos
0: http://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/salafismus-als-jugendkult...
> on top of the estimated 20 million Soviet troops and civilians who perished in the Second World War
What does it have to do with Stalin? It was a war and people perish during a War.
> estimated that the death toll directly attributable to Stalin’s rule amounted to some 20 million lives
Just think about it, Stalin was in power for 30 years, so he had to "directly attribute" to a death of 2000 people every single day? Sounds quite bizarre to me. No official data of the 20Mln of "dead by Stalin's attributing", if you want to down vote me - at least show me official data.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin#Calculating_the_...
[2] - http://www.theguardian.com/education/2002/sep/12/highereduca...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Rainbow_Warrior
Heck, there were 2 world wars in which communists countries were only involved in the second, and only on the allies side. How many people were killed there, including civilians?
And let's not get started in the 18th-19th century history, before marxism was even invented...
War, murder and dictatorship are what they are -- they don't just belong to one single side of the political spectrum.
In Indonesia, for one example, nearly a million communist sympathizers were executed by right wingers (as were in Pinochet's Chile and elsewhere). This is an interesting watch:
To quote from the page: 'In videos released during the course of the Syrian Civil War, Free Syrian Army, Al-Nusra Front, other rebel and Islamist groups and ISIL are heard shouting "Takbir" and "Allahu Akbar"'
Some of those are Islamist groups, some are not.
Also, we don't know if the perpetrators were French or not, so what 42% of young French Muslims believe is not relevant at this point. Even if it was relevant, it would be hard to draw any conclusions from it. In the same link you provide, it seems that over 75% of French Muslims are concerned about the rise of Islamic Extremism.
Definition from http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_eng...:
"An insinuation or allegation about someone that is likely to insult them or damage their reputation"
Saying that "Islam soils the reputation of islam" is a slur by any reasonable interpretation. The link provided some information but the first sentence did nothing to that effect and was simply inflammatory.
Here is an article that explores a bit more the attitudes among American Muslims in particular. I don't have time to find the actual study, sorry:
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/08/a-fascin...
https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/dt https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2009/september/domterror_09...
[1] http://www.dhs.gov/news/2015/11/13/statement-secretary-jeh-c...
http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/...
Trains are a tiny 6%.
> THE senior British official was unequivocal. The murder of the former KGB man Alexander Litvinenko was "undeniably state-sponsored terrorism on Moscow's part. That is the view at the highest levels of the British government".
http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/world_news/article6...
You might think that some forms of terrorism are worse than others, but that doesn't mean that those are the only forms of terrorism.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/25/world/middleeast/isis-abu-...
[2] http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/07/islamic-st...
There are plenty of examples: http://www.businessinsider.com.au/the-manual-al-qaeda-and-no... http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/king-of-jordan-isis-used-gaza-...
Swedish Muslim terrorists also tried to create a massacre at Jyllandsposten because of their drawings (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyllands-Posten_Muhammad_carto...).
These terrorists were born and raised in Sweden, had a better standard of living than me, studied engineering in university and had nothing to complain about. Sweden doesn't attack any countries, we love Palestine and dislike Israel (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/30/sweden-official...) and we shelter 80-100,000 Muslim refugees/year. What should we do exactly? Jail all cartoonists and make it a crime to insult Islam?
I am fully aware of this, I said so in other comment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10564189 The mistake you are making here is the idea that otherwise intelligent and educated people cannot believe crazy things. Just look at the Christian nutjobs.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/europes-small-arms-plague/ (1998)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/getting-a-gun-le...
And many many others, unfortunately. It's a very nasty thing and it will take an extraordinary effort to put this genie back into the bottle.
Open borders has been a blessing in many ways but at the same time it has caused a whole bunch of un-intended side effects and this one and cross border heavy crime are two of the not so nice ones, to put it very mildly. We now have actual gangs with heavy arms in Amsterdam which was a fairly peaceful city not all that long ago.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2015/nov/14/paris-terr...
> Of all western countries, we would not expect these attacks to be against France so many times.
And why not? They have been among the most brutal colonial powers, with shocking behaviour in Northern Africa and ongoing active military engagement across Africa -- in large part because of their ideological bent on absolutist superiority of the French republican model. They actively worked to blow up Lybia and actively support anti-islamic forces there. And of course they have now joined the anti-IS bombing campaign, because they hate to be left behind when there is to engage around the Mediterranean Sea. All the while, they have huge swaths of disenfranchised 2nd and 3rd generation-immigrant youth in their midst that they simply don't know what to do with. They are the easiest target after the UK, but unlike Britain they are not an island, their borders are very porous, and their security services are clearly less effective than the Five Eyes axis. On top of that, this: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/14/france-active-p...
And a ton of other news articles on the same subject. Pakistan is super dangerous because it is not all that hard to imagine a number of groups within Pakistan switching allegiance. It is also super dangerous because it is a nuclear power and has a long history of factions inside it trying to pull Pakistan into a much more radical direction.
About the only link between the ISIS members from Western Europe is that they're muslims. Even that is "not 100%" true, since there are also Christians and some Kurds traveling to Syria/Iraq. The examples of that I know went there to help, of course (medically in 2 cases, sort of an amateur doctors without borders, mostly because neither doctors without borders, nor the red cross risk sending people there, but they did have family there). Of course we don't know that's all they did. At least they're claiming to provide medical help, none of the muslims who got caught going to Syria ever even bothered to say they were going for any reason other than fighting, and some saying they went off for killing and some shit about allah.
This is a convicted ISIS terrorist that went off to kill people and came back, talking to a reporter of the public service about how and why : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKg2UsfnxHc
Claiming that people like this are poor or treated badly by the country they were born into is moronic.
Meanwhile the tensions between (sunni) muslims and everybody, literally everybody else are rising ever more. Fights and crimes against the "natives", and every other minority, from the Jews of Antwerp to the Turks of Molenbeek (there is a large (sometimes very) atheist contingent amongst Turks).
If these reports are accurate then we have a staggering average above 4,000 violent daily deaths. (http://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/7/2/104.full) (http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/67403/1/a77019.pdf)
ISIS formed in the power vacuum created by the United States toppling Saddam Hussein. [0,1] So yes, the country that had its leader and military demolished was unable to combat the rise of ISIS, you're right. But pinning the failure on them is to ignore the reasons they failed to do so.
>The Middle East has been facing endemic war between Islamic sects basically for the entire history of Islam itself. The "holy wars" (call it barbarism or medievalism) being carried out in the name of Islam (by so-called "Islamic terrorists") is evidence enough that this is not actually problem of foreign policy, but a deep seated and historically pervasive domestic problem.
To collapse the rise of ISIS into the same civil wars that have been raging for the past millennia and a half is the same willful ignorance of the complex cultural history that you deride in your first paragraph. The roots of ISIS are in Wahhabism, a faction that existed mainly in Saudi Arabia. It wasn't until Roosevelt met with King Ibn Saud in 1945 (following the discovery of oil there in 1938) that this nation had any serious ambition at exporting their brand of Islam further in the middle east. Then, with the Oil Crisis of 1973, Saudi Arabia proved its political power and was able to leverage it against the United States. When it came time to expel the Soviets from Afghanistan, the United States armed the Mujahadin, a proudly Wahhabist faction.
The US being the reason that ISIS has flourished is not an opinion, it's the conclusion made over and over by analysis of historical facts.
[0]http://www.cfr.org/iraq/islamic-state/p14811 "The group that calls itself the Islamic State can trace its lineage to the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, in 2003. The Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi aligned his Jama’at al-Tawhidw’al-Jihad with al-Qaeda, making it al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI)."
http://www.thenation.com/article/what-i-discovered-from-inte... [1]"More pertinent than Islamic theology is that there are other, much more convincing, explanations as to why they’ve fought for the side they did. At the end of the interview with the first prisoner we ask, “Do you have any questions for us?” For the first time since he came into the room he smiles—in surprise—and finally tells us what really motivated him, without any prompting. He knows there is an American in the room, and can perhaps guess, from his demeanor and his questions, that this American is ex-military, and directs his “question,” in the form of an enraged statement, straight at him. “The Americans came,” he said. “They took away Saddam, but they also took away our security. I didn’t like Saddam, we were starving then, but at least we didn’t have war. When you came here, the civil war started.”
ISIS is the first group since Al Qaeda to offer these young men a way to defend their dignity, family, and tribe."
You seam to have a very rosy picture of the Ottoman empire.Without going into too much detail, most historians would agree that it was an aggressive expansionist empire with intolerance to non-islamic sects.
"The terrorists you see today would become terrorists in the name of Christ just as well." - This is patently absurd, at least in this century, and a horrendously apologist argument.
I would recommend reading several key articles illustrating the Saudi Wahabi link to ISIS and how its clear that this is an intrinsically Islamist problem: eg.
http://www.newstatesman.com/world-affairs/2014/11/wahhabism-...
Also, I'd advise reading Sam Harris's "Sleepwalking Toward Armageddon"
http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/sleepwalking-toward-armag...
