What would be a good response to the Paris attacks?

[Thorgalaeg]

Now France government says all radical mosques are going to be closed and all radical imans expelled. Great, I only wonder why didnt they do it ten years ago. And in all Europe BTW.

 

[JohnRM]

OK, so you don't really care if it works or not. You just want people to die.

Rather, I think it is an indication that anyone who can be turned into a terrorist is someone that I would have no problem killing. Good people, even when abused, will not turn to terrorism.

That is all really beside the point, though. I am really just tired of pussy-footing around the whole thing and worrying about whether or not someone is going to get offended by whatever it is that we do to respond to these attacks. The lives of more than 100 people are more important than that.

 

[uppi]

I don't know if smarter is the right word here. Watch lists tend to be long, and services are probably too understaffed to keep track of everyone on them.

Maybe it is the right word here: Maybe the resources on compiling these watch lists could be better spent elsewhere, if there is nobody there to watch them, anyway.

In other words: Maybe they should stop trying to collect all data and start thinking about finding the really important data instead.

 

[brennan]

Now France government says all radical mosques are going to be closed and all radical imans expelled. Great, I only wonder why didnt they do it ten years ago. And in all Europe BTW.

Expelled how and where? Which neighbour is going to say 'we'll take your troublemakers, thanks!'??? How will they accomplish the legal feat of removing citizenship?

 

[Thorgalaeg]

Obviously to the country they are nationals from. You cant expell your own citizents. Anyway if any imans are french nationals they could leave them on a raft at international waters:

 

[Commodore]

Expelled how and where? Which neighbour is going to say 'we'll take your troublemakers, thanks!'??? How will they accomplish the legal feat of removing citizenship?

By just doing it. If an imam is identified as radical, then he gets black-bagged in the middle of the night and airdropped somewhere in IS territory. Hell, if the French government does it right, they can do this covertly and make it look like these guys just disappeared.

 

[Borachio]

Obviously to the country they are nationals from. You cant expell your own citizents. Anyway if any imans are french nationals they could leave them on a raft at international waters:

As if being a French national isn't punishment enough!

Spoiler :

It's a joke. Though a very fair joke, imo.

 

[Berzerker]

looking back at the last quarter century of making a mess of the Middle East, I dont get the impression our problem is pussy-footing around

 

[Phrossack]

The more I think about it, the more I think hiring more people to track suspects sounds like a good solution. The attackers were known to security as suspects, but there are thousands of people on the watch list, so right now it's too much to track everyone. Hiring more people wouldn't infringe on privacy or other rights; people on the watch list are supposed to be, well, watched, and if security isn't able to keep up with the number of suspects, it isn't able to do its job. Simply expanding the service in size doesn't require any new laws passed or extra surveillance on people not on the list. If attacks can be prevented, it will hurt the terrorists, who will be unable to boast of as many successes to gain recruits and support. It will save lives, and prevented attacks can't be as easily used as excuses to infringe on rights or to stir up resentment against Muslims and immigrants in general. The only downsides are that it will cost money and that extra enforcement of existing laws and capabilities doesn't get as much publicity as passing new laws, so people demanding that the government do something might not notice when it does.

 

[brennan]

By just doing it. If an imam is identified as radical, then he gets black-bagged in the middle of the night and airdropped somewhere in IS territory. Hell, if the French government does it right, they can do this covertly and make it look like these guys just disappeared.

Thank you for posting General Videla.

 

[Commodore]

Thank you for posting General Videla.

"A terrorist is not just someone with a gun or a bomb, but also someone who spreads ideas that are contrary to Western and Christian civilization."

 

[brennan]

Quite a bit of your post history woukd seem to count. Extolling the virtues of 'disappearing' people being just the latest example...

 

[Arwon]

Well, unsurprisingly, a number of Republican governors seek to do exactly this, as they have signed acts to prevent any Syrian refugees from entering their state. So bravo for us giving free propaganda to IS.

Why would people who believe private citizens with guns could have stopped the Paris attacks, be afraid of Syrian refugees? Presumably these are open or concealed carry states.

 

[Commodore]

Quite a bit of your post history woukd seem to count. Extolling the virtues of 'disappearing' people being just the latest example...

You do realize I don't really agree with that quote right?

And exactly what is wrong with expelling dissidents who advocate the violent overthrow of the government or the destruction of the nation in which they currently live? I mean, if Islamic radicals really hate the West so much, why do they insist on living in Western nations? There are over 200 independent nations on this planet, which means there are over 200 different ways in which a society is run. Surely if the society in which one is currently living upsets them, they can find one among the over 200 out there that is a better fit.

So while, you may see expelling Islamic radicals into IS territory as a human rights violation, I see it as the French government assisting them in finding a society in which they will be happier and more productive.

 

[Arwon]

You do realize I don't really agree with that quote right?

And exactly what is wrong with expelling dissidents who advocate the violent overthrow of the government or the destruction of the nation in which they currently live? I mean, if Islamic radicals really hate the West so much, why do they insist on living in Western nations? There are over 200 independent nations on this planet, which means there are over 200 different ways in which a society is run. Surely if the society in which one is currently living upsets them, they can find one among the over 200 out there that is a better fit.

So while, you may see expelling Islamic radicals into IS territory as a human rights violation, I see it as the French government assisting them in finding a society in which they will be happier and more productive.

What about Islamic fundamentalists who seek to change western societies through social change and the ballot box? Isn't trying to change society through politics one of those freedoms we occasionally claim to be defending?

 

[brennan]

You seem pretty keen on making fundamental changes to your society. Have you considered leaving for one where you'll fit in better? If you like perhaps someone can help you disappear with a black bag over your head and no due process.

 

[Commodore]

What about Islamic fundamentalists who seek to change western societies through social change and the ballot box?

Well...

And exactly what is wrong with expelling dissidents who advocate the violent overthrow of the government or the destruction of the nation in which they currently live? I mean, if Islamic radicals really hate the West so much, why do they insist on living in Western nations? There are over 200 independent nations on this planet, which means there are over 200 different ways in which a society is run. Surely if the society in which one is currently living upsets them, they can find one among the over 200 out there that is a better fit.

That should answer your question.

You seem pretty keen on making fundamental changes to your society. Have you considered leaving for one where you'll fit in better? If you like perhaps someone can help you disappear with a black bag over your head and no due process.

Nah, I just express my opinion. I don't ever really take any action or encourage others to take action to make those opinions a reality.

I am curious though as to what extremist opinions you think I advocate? Aside from the black-bagging of Islamic radicals (which, by the way, was not an actual opinion, but more of an answer to your question of how Islamic radicals could be expelled), none are really coming to mind.

 

[Arwon]

Do you imagine the explicit public advocacy of violent revolution is a big problem among even fairly radical religious figures? Inciting people to violence tends to already be a little bit illegal in most jurisdictions. People tend to be pretty circumspect about it.

 

[Birdjaguar]

What's the goal folks?

Destroy ISIS in Syria?
Stop terrorists attacks in Europe/US?
Screen refugees better?
Rebuild Syria/Iraq?

Each goal will have its own best strategies. I think that the first step is to render ISIS in Syria ineffective. They want a medieval society. I suggest we give it to them. Shut off their money supply and communications: Destroy the oil infrastructure they depend upon. Reduce their ability to communicate to paper and pencil: no cell phones, TV, internet, telegraph, radio, or land lines anywhere in the area. I would include power plants if necessary.

To win this someone has to be tough.

 

[Arwon]

An article from Guy Rundle

You couldn’t get a better picture of the current confusion, largely but not wholly on the right, than in Greg Sheridan’s column in The Australian yesterday, where he hymns liberte, egalite, fraternite, and defines Paris as the city of light, and the alternative to terror:

“To attack Paris … is to attack the very project of the Enlightenment, the 18th century precursor to modern liberalism. These terrible … terrorist attacks did more than kill innocent civilians; they attacked the very idea of Paris.”

Boy, oh, boy. I know that Greg approaches every new phase of the post-9/11 era like a teenager falling in love — “nuh, this is real this time, not like all the other times”, and two weeks later it’s all chocolate and Adele on endless repeat — but that one really made me do a spit-take of my Coco Pops. Paris, the antithesis of terrorism? Paris is the birthplace of political terrorism, you hapless clown, as well you know. Paris is the place where Robespierre, Saint-Just and Danton erected the guillotine in the Place de la Concorde and ran it for days on end, the space chosen in part because its octagonal symmetry was a symbol of the Enlightenment.

It’s the place where Mary Wollstonecraft, walking across the cobbles, slipped and realised she walking on a slick of blood. It’s where the US ambassador Thomas Jefferson looked on approvingly and wrote that he would rather see “but an Adam and Eve left in every country, and left free” than see the revolution fail. The form of liberalism that was born there was born as secular fundamentalism. The Jacobins, in their methods, if not the content of their politics, were exact precursors of the Islamic State, people so desperate to change reality they changed the calendar. Paris is the ground zero of Year Zero.

Better still, Paris is the home of strategic non-state terror for political ends, for it was here in 1796 that Gracchus Babeuf and the Conspiracy of Equals group began their violent campaign to force the post-revolutionary government to live up to its liberte/egalite/fraternite ideals. Indeed, that used to be one way in which the right assailed continental culture, by suggesting that its non-Anglo politics served as a crucible for extremism — as in the urban myth that Pol Pot had been a student of Sartre’s in Paris in the ’40s (he wasn’t; he was a radio engineering student, not an area of Sartre’s expertise).

This studied idiocy, repeated everywhere, has the same aim — to represent the Islamic State as entirely other, rather than identifying violent religious fundamentalism as a product of modernity, and coming after the depredations of violent secular modernity had done their work. What could be more modern and of our time, and of Europe, than the attack in the Bataclan concert hall? It had the character of a Nazi reprisal, where the men of an entire village were executed, or similar European Zionist practices on Arabs in the 1948 war, or similar events in ’90s Yugoslavia. The attempt to make such events entirely other has one purpose: to make it look as though such acts are the expression of an ethnos or a religion, rather than of one movement within it. It thus licenses attacks against such that will have a disregard for civilian casualties.

Thus has been the giddy tone of mass media reporting on France’s “strike back” against the Islamic State stronghold of Raqqa. An indiscriminate attack on a city, most of whose inhabitants are simply subjects of IS, it will leave civilian casualties that will remain uncounted — except by the relatives of the dead, who just might have a smartphone and relatives in Europe they can call. It will certainly be useful for the IS, who, as with any terrorist group, welcomes the heightening of tension to a point where everyone feels the need to choose sides now. And it will go largely unremarked by the thousands flocking to paint their wheelie-bins red white and blue or stencil an Eiffel peace sign on their dog. It should by now be obvious that the expressions of solidarity with France are part of the IS script, turning universal human solidarity into a preface for a white European power. What would Lebanese-French, Lebanese-Australian kids feel about all that malarkey, I wonder? Would they feel that the tricolour Sydney Opera House represented them, when there was no similar projection of a cedar tree a few days earlier? Or would they take a different message? It’s a funny way to do “better integration”.

The point of the Raqqa bombings is that they express not power, but powerlessness. They are for domestic consumption only, by a French President who was politically weakened long before the Paris attacks. Indeed he may now see the response to them as a last chance to assert his role as a representative of the nation against the challenge of Marine Le Pen and the Front National. But the Raqqa bombings are simply powerlessness armed, the vanguard of a vast force of futility. The identikit articles in yesterday’s Oz were proof enough of that, with the same themes we’ve heard for the last 15 years: show of strength, assert the Enlightenment, rethink multiculturalism, learn from the fall of Rome(!) etc. The tricolour displays were a similar expression of powerlessness. When Italy was consumed by terror in the ’70s, the left could bring out mass protests against left-group terror done “in its name”. When the Basque separatist group ETA terrorised Spain, an anti-terror civil rights movement formed. But the political and social forms to manifest this are fading now. People feel there is no “social”, so they resort to the world of images. Right-wing op-ed writers are in the same position — they have nothing but shopworn cliches to parade endlessly, the 800-word equivalent of a T-shirt stencil.

The truth? Terror needs no territory. Terror is the weapon of those without territory. The attitude and strategies of the French and Belgian nationals who carried out these attacks are as likely to have come from a fusion of French history and philosophy — it was Merleau-Ponty, the archetypal French intellectual, who wrote In Defense of Terror  — with the Islamist themes of IS, as from violent Islamism itself. People are not animals who react with conditioned behaviour to bombing. They interpret state terror as a meaningful event and reply to it with meaningful acts, which may include political violence. You can do all the assimilating you want — it only takes one person in ten thousand to become a violent actor to unleash a wave of terror. Multi-ethnic societies in the West cannot be “rethought” — they’re here now. Multicultural policy is a detail — 7/7 UK was multicultural, 2015 Paris was assimilationist, there’s no shazam policy solution to this. The right should have the level-headedness to propose real solutions, or the guts to propose what they’d really like to do: the large scale round-up of Muslim citizens, and the indefinite occupation of the Middle East. Then we can at least be clear about where we all stand. People like Sheridan may have forgotten the violence in which the modern West was born. No one outside the West has.