Bubbles85 said:

I'm sure there will be a shit ton of Liberal media sources that try to discredit the program in the next few days ... Lmfao.

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akira_akuma said:

i'll also be reading this afterwards, as a synopsis of a counter point. http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2016/04/beware-british-muslims-160414102212060.html

that's how this works, point, counter point.

(here is also a US perspective: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/04/12/a-poll-claimed-to-reveal-what-british-muslims-really-think-critics-say-it-failed/ )

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Like i said, it was inevitable that a back lash from Muslim sympathizers and Muslims them selves, as well as certain Liberal media sources would try to discredit the program.

When are people going to wake up and just admit that there is a major problem festering within our community's, with certain members of the Muslim population, that are enough in number to eventually cause some serious upheaval?

It's funny how some people on the left are quick to jump to agree, when similar study's are carried out regarding the "discrimination" of Muslims in the West by the native populace as fact. Yet when study's are conducted to show the other side, its disregarded and slandered as nonsense.

Its hysterical. They've used the best methods that science has to offer to conduct the study, to make sure that it is an accurate representation of general opinion.

Had the same study been conducted regarding the far right, not a word from the left would be said regarding its validity. Yet what they fail to realize, is that the Muslims they defend are wholly conservative That's some retarded shit right there ....

On a side note, I used to despise Phillips and saw him as a major problem, given the fact that he and the government he served in the 90's, were the ones responsible for mass Muslim immigration into the UK. Mass immigration that has completely changed the landscape of Britain in just 20 years.

However, after this program, Phillips "a Liberal i might add" and as i said, one of the sole contributors to Muslim immigration here, has decided to come out and admit that he got it wrong and i fully respect that. Shame the rest on the left can't admit the same.

Its funny how people in the UK never have a bad word to say regarding other ethnic minority's living here, like Sikhs or Hindus, of which there are plenty. Yet the majority of people do feel we have a problem with certain groups of Muslims and the reasons behind that are not unfounded, despite the lefts call to ignore the problems.

Well done Trevor Phillips ... Respect from me, despite the slaying you're now receiving from your left wing peers.

qman said:

https://www.rt.com/news/339737-switzerland-tanks-italian-border/

"To stop migrant onslaught"

At least the Swiss are smart enough to not let their country turn into a third world mess.

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The Ecstatic said:

qman said:

https://www.rt.com/news/339737-switzerland-tanks-italian-border/

"To stop migrant onslaught"

At least the Swiss are smart enough to not let their country turn into a third world mess.

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1. "Could be deployed," contingent on other scenarios taking place.

2. This is one security director of one canton. Lets not try to pretend the Swiss people took a vote and decided to blockade refugees with tanks.

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I don't think it's a far reach to conclude that the Swiss population doesn't want "refugees" invading their precious homeland.

night_shift said:

qman said:

Haven't you heard? The US exploits everyone, that's why everyone should be allowed to come here and we owe them food, shelter, education, and healthcare

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Sure I've heard it. Ahem. So you've got enough food, shelter, education and healthcare for your own population?

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qman said:

The Ecstatic said:

qman said:

https://www.rt.com/news/339737-switzerland-tanks-italian-border/

"To stop migrant onslaught"

At least the Swiss are smart enough to not let their country turn into a third world mess.

---

1. "Could be deployed," contingent on other scenarios taking place.

2. This is one security director of one canton. Lets not try to pretend the Swiss people took a vote and decided to blockade refugees with tanks.

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I don't think it's a far reach to conclude that the Swiss population doesn't want "refugees" invading their precious homeland.

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night_shift said:

qman said:

night_shift said:

qman said:

Haven't you heard? The US exploits everyone, that's why everyone should be allowed to come here and we owe them food, shelter, education, and healthcare

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Sure I've heard it. Ahem. So you've got enough food, shelter, education and healthcare for your own population?

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Nope, there's too many US citizens not getting those above mentioned needs meet on a consistent basis.

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Funny. I would think that if the US exploited everyone else, at least the US citizens would be taken care of. I mean, the US is supposed to be the country where the people determine what happens, democracy at its finest, and it gets enough wealth to provide for all; so how come it doesn't?

Could it be that power is not really in the hands of the people? If so, where is it?

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The Ecstatic said:

qman said:

The Ecstatic said:

qman said:

https://www.rt.com/news/339737-switzerland-tanks-italian-border/

"To stop migrant onslaught"

At least the Swiss are smart enough to not let their country turn into a third world mess.

---

1. "Could be deployed," contingent on other scenarios taking place.

2. This is one security director of one canton. Lets not try to pretend the Swiss people took a vote and decided to blockade refugees with tanks.

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I don't think it's a far reach to conclude that the Swiss population doesn't want "refugees" invading their precious homeland.

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nonsequitur

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qman said:

It's in response to- "Lets not try to pretend the Swiss people took a vote". Again, the Swiss population isn't stupid, they can see what has already happened in Germany, only an idiot would want the same outcome in their homeland.

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airclay said:

qman said:

It's in response to- "Lets not try to pretend the Swiss people took a vote". Again, the Swiss population isn't stupid, they can see what has already happened in Germany, only an idiot would want the same outcome in their homeland.

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the point you're trying to drive in here is your personal opinion on how the entirety of the swedish population feels. not everyone agrees with you on that. that's why it's better to argue in facts rather than the perceived notions of an entire population (because we know confirmation bias exist)

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qman said:

The Ecstatic said:

nonsequitur

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It's in response to- "Lets not try to pretend the Swiss people took a vote". Again, the Swiss population isn't stupid, they can see what has already happened in Germany, only an idiot would want the same outcome in their homeland.

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Quote:

 Despite the existence of a good deal of research about terrorism, there’s a gap between the common understanding of what leads terrorists to kill and what many experts believe to be true.

Terrorist groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda are widely seen as being motivated by their radical theology. But according to Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago and founder of the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism, this view is too simplistic. Pape knows his subject; he and his colleagues have studied every suicide attack in the world since 1980, evaluating over 4,600 in all.

He says that religious fervor is not a motive unto itself. Rather, it serves as a tool for recruitment and a potent means of getting people to overcome their fear of death and natural aversion to killing innocents. “Very often, suicide attackers realize they have instincts for self-preservation that they have to overcome,” and religious beliefs are often part of that process, said Pape in an appearance on my radio show, Politics and Reality Radio, last week. But, Pape adds, there have been “many hundreds of secular suicide attackers,” which suggests that radical theology alone doesn’t explain terrorist attacks. From 1980 until about 2003, the “world leader” in suicide attacks was the Tamil Tigers, a secular Marxist nationalist group in Sri Lanka.

According to Pape’s research, underlying the outward expressions of religious fervor, ISIS’s goals, like those of most terrorist groups, are distinctly earthly:

    What 95 percent of all suicide attacks have in common, since 1980, is not religion, but a specific strategic motivation to respond to a military intervention, often specifically a military occupation, of territory that the terrorists view as their homeland or prize greatly. From Lebanon and the West Bank in the 80s and 90s, to Iraq and Afghanistan, and up through the Paris suicide attacks we’ve just experienced in the last days, military intervention—and specifically when the military intervention is occupying territory—that’s what prompts suicide terrorism more than anything else.

 ISIS emerged from the insurgency against the US occupation of Iraq just as the Al Qaeda network traces its origins to the Afghan resistance to the Soviet occupation in the 1980s.

This view differs from that of Hillary Clinton and others who believe that ISIS “has nothing whatsoever to do” with Islam, as well as the more common belief, articulated by Graeme Wood in The Atlantic, that ISIS can be reduced to “a religious group with carefully considered beliefs.” It’s a group whose outward expressions of religious fervor serve its secular objectives of controlling resources and territory. Virtually all of the group’s leaders were once high-ranking officers in Iraq’s secular military.

 Pape’s analysis is consistent with what Lydia Wilson found when she interviewed captured ISIS fighters in Iraq. “They are woefully ignorant about Islam and have difficulty answering questions about Sharia law, militant jihad, and the caliphate,” she recently wrote in The Nation. “But a detailed, or even superficial, knowledge of Islam isn’t necessarily relevant to the ideal of fighting for an Islamic State, as we have seen from the Amazon order of Islam for Dummies by one British fighter bound for ISIS.”

But how does the notion that terrorists are intent on getting powers to withdraw from their territory square with the view that the group’s shift to terrorist attacks in the West is designed to draw France and its allies into a ground war in Syria? Writing at the Harvard Business Review, Northeastern University political scientist Max Abrahms argues that these analyses are contradictory. But Pape says that it’s important to distinguish between ISIS’s long-term goals and its shorter-term strategies to achieve them:

    It’s about the timing. How are you going to get the United States, France and other major powers to truly abandon and withdraw from the Persian Gulf when they have such a large interest in oil? A single attack isn’t going to do it. Bin Laden did 9/11 hoping that it would suck a large American ground army into Afghanistan, which would help recruit a large number of suicide attackers to punish America for intervening. We didn’t do that – we used very limited military force in Afghanistan. But what Bin Laden didn’t count on was that we would send a large ground army into Iraq to knock Saddam out. And that turned out to be the most potent recruiting ground for anti-American terrorists that ever was, more so than Bin Laden had ever hoped for in his wildest dreams.

    So if your goal is to create military costs on these states and get them to withdraw, you’ve got to figure out a way to really up the ante. And the way that you really up the ante is to get them to overreact. You try to get them to send a large ground army in so that you can truly drive up the costs. That’s what ISIS is trying to sucker us into doing.

Another theory holds that ISIS—and Al Qaeda—set their sights on France in order to polarize mainstream French society against its Muslim community. As University of Michigan historian Juan Cole put it after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, “The problem for a terrorist group like Al Qaeda is that its recruitment pool is Muslims, but most Muslims are not interested in terrorism. Most Muslims are not even interested in politics, much less political Islam.” In Cole’s formulation, if violent Islamic fundamentalists “can get non-Muslim French to be beastly to ethnic Muslims on the grounds that they are Muslims, it can start creating a common political identity around grievance against discrimination.”

Pape says this analysis is also consistent with his research:

    If ISIS is going to end the military intervention by France, one attack is not likely to do it. In the statement that ISIS released, they say that they want a storm of similar attacks against Paris and other French targets because their goal is to knock France out of the military coalition. To do that, to achieve that goal, they’re going to need to recruit many more attackers to do suicide attacks like the ones that occurred in Paris. In the short-term it makes perfect sense to want an environment that stirs up hostility towards Muslims in France, because that will make them much easier to recruit for their longer-term object of kicking France of the coalition.

Pape also argues that ISIS’ shift in strategy to attacks overseas is a sign not of its strength, but of its weakness on the ground in Syria and Iraq. He points out that over the past year, the amount of territory ISIS controls has shrunk by 10 percent:

    The U.S. strategy against ISIS is working and it’s putting enormous pressure on ISIS. It’s a strategy of air and ground power, with the ground power coming from local allies—the Kurds and the Shia in the region, and even some Sunnis who are opposed to ISIS. They’re increasingly working with us on the ground while we’re fighting from the air. The problem here is not that we don’t have enough ground forces.

    It’s because the strategy is working that ISIS is now desperate, and is shifting its pattern of behavior. In October, ISIS launched only eight suicide attacks in Iraq and Syria, when they normally do 30 to 35 per month, and that’s the same month that they shifted to suicide attacks in Ankara, Turkey, on October 10. Then they downed the Russian plane on October 31st, and now the Paris attacks on November 13th. As ISIS’ territory has shrunk in Iraq and Syria, it is now clearly shifting its suicide attack resources out of Iraq and Syria, and into Turkey, into killing Russian civilians, and now also into Paris.

In Pape’s view, most of the conventional wisdom about what terrorists want to achieve is wrong, and that disconnect has limited the effectiveness of the West’s response to terrorism.

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Quote:

Think like the enemy. Let’s suppose I am an Islamic State terrorist. I don’t do bombs or bullets. I leave the dirty work to the crazies in the basement. My job is what happens next. It is to turn carnage into consequences, body parts into politics. I am a consultant terrorist. I wear a suit, not explosives. A blood-stained concourse is a means to an end. The end is power.

This week I had another success. I converted a squalid psychopathological act into a warrior-evoking, population-terrifying, policy-changing event. I sent a continent into shock. Famous politicians dropped everything to shower me with cliches. Crowned heads deluged me with glorious odium.

I measure my success in column inches and television hours, in ballooning security budgets, butchered liberties, amended laws and – my ultimate goal – Muslims persecuted and recruited to our cause. I deal not in actions but in reactions. I am a manipulator of politics. I work through the idiocies of my supposed enemies.

    We should not alter laws, not infringe liberties, not persecute Muslims

Textbooks on terrorism define its effects in four stages: first the horror, then the publicity, then the political grandstanding, and finally the climactic shift in policy. The initial act is banal. The atrocities in Brussels happen almost daily on the streets of Baghdad, Aleppo and Damascus. Western missiles and Isis bombs kill more innocents in a week than die in Europe in a year. The difference is the media response. A dead Muslim is an unlucky mutt in the wrong place at the wrong time. A dead European is front-page news.

So on Tuesday the TV news channels behaved like Isis recruiting sergeants. Their blanket hyperbole showed not the slightest restraint (nor for that matter did that of most newspapers). The BBC flew Huw Edwards to Brussels. It flashed horror across the airwaves continually for 24 hours, incanting the words “panic”, “threat”, “menace” and “terror”. Vox pops wallowed in blood and guts. One reporter rode a London tube escalator to show possible future targets, to scare the wits out of commuters. It was a terrorist’s wildest dream.

With the ground thus prepared, the politicians entered on cue. France’s President Hollande declared “all of Europe has been hit”, megaphoning Isis’s crime. His approval rating immediately jumped.
David Cameron dived into his Cobra bunker and announced the UK “faces a very real terror threat”. An attack is now “highly likely”, according to the security services. Flags fly at half-mast. The Eiffel Tower is decked in Belgian colours. President Obama interrupts his Cuba visit to stand “in solidarity with Belgium”. Donald Trump declares that “Belgium and France are literally disintegrating”. It is hard to imagine what could more effectively promote the Isis cause.

Osama bin Laden set out on 9/11 to depict western nations as feckless and paranoid, their liberalism a surface charade easily punctured. A few explosions and their pretensions would wither and they would turn as repressive as any Muslim state.

By Tuesday evening, such a feeding frenzy was in full flood as the security lobby piled in. Cameron’s snoopers’ charter (or “investigatory powers” bill) was lauded as vital to national security. This is despite continued opposition both in parliament and from intelligence experts. This month in the Times, former NSA technical director Bill Binney ridiculed the bill’s “incredibly intrusive” powers of untargeted interception. Each citizen’s browsing history will soon be in the possession of the government, vulnerable to hacking by every marketer and blackmailer in the land.

Under the government’s Prevent strategy, universities and schools must develop programmes to counter “non-violent extremism, which can create an atmosphere conducive to terrorism”. The bureaucracy will be awesome. Primary schools are reportedly asking children to spy on one another to check “suspicious behaviour”. So must passengers on Virgin trains, as requested after each station. England is becoming old East Germany.

The Brexit camp, in the person of Ukip’s Nigel Farage, claims that Brussels proves the need to leave Europe. The home secretary, Theresa May, says the opposite. Terrorists would roam free, she says, since it would take 143 days to process terrorist DNA samples as against 15 minutes in the EU.

Reacting to terrorist incidents otherwise, in ways that do not play into terrorism’s hands, may seem hard. A free media feels a duty to report events, as politicians feel a duty to show they can protect the public. That it’s hard to show restraint is no excuse for actively promoting terror. Everyone involved in this week’s reaction, from journalists to politicians to security lobbyists, has an interest in terrorism. There is money, big money, to be made – the more terrifying it is presented, the more money.


We can respond to events in Brussels with a quiet and dignified sympathy, with candles and silences. To downplay something is not to ignore it. The terrorists have specific aims, deploying their atrocities for a political cause. There is no sensible defence in a free society against atrocity. But there is a defence against its purpose. It is to avoid hysteria, to show caution and a measure of courage, not Cameron’s lapse into public fear. It is not to alter laws, not to infringe liberties, not to persecute Muslims.

During the more dangerous and consistent IRA bombing campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s, Labour and Conservative governments insisted on treating terrorism as criminal, not political. They relied on the police and security services to guard against a threat that could never be eliminated, only diminished. On the whole it worked, and without undue harm to civil liberties.

Those who live under freedom know it demands a price, which is a degree of risk. We pay the state to protect us – but calmly, without constant boasting or fearmongering. We know that, in reality, life in Britain has never been safer. That it suits some people to pretend otherwise does not alter the fact.

In his admirable manual, Terrorism: How to Respond, the Belfast academic Richard English defines the threat to democracy as not the “limited danger” of death and destruction. It is the danger “of provoking ill-judged, extravagant and counterproductive state responses”.

The menace of Brussels lies not in the terror, but in the reaction to the terror. It is the reaction we should fear. But liberty never emerges from a Cobra bunker.

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Tipote said:

I keep telling myself that I should catch up with this thread but... its just kind of pointless. If you go back 20 pages, the discussions haven't really changed a whole lot. every page qman struggles to understand why anyone should or would mix with any other group, ever. "what is the benefit?!" qman just repeats the same old mantras over and over until he accepts no other perspective. "cultural diversity is a failure""cultural diversity is a failure""cultural diversity is a failure""cultural diversity is a failure".. what? No it isnt!
No one is denying that immigration is deeply flawed and integration is a huge challenge, that doesn't make it worthless. Far from it. If you only watch the youtube videos that qman watches, I'm sure you will have a skewed perspective on reality. This is not reality. There are muslim refugees that have shown more humanity than many Europeans. Some people on this thread ought to be ashamed of themselves by basically being indifferent to thousands of deaths just because they are part of a certain group. Or those apologising for fascist thugs who attack muslim women in defense of "OUR" women..LOL

two points that come to mind that i wanted to add previously were...

regarding Starter, LDS et al.. idiots who think that muslims can't touch bacon don't understand that its that muslims can't EAT pork, so if Trump plans to line his imaginary wall with bacon, it won't do shit. the muslims are coming for you regardless!!!

also, i saw the Trevor Phillips programme about "what muslims really think" at the weekend and it was incredibly embarassing to watch. It was very flawed, the statistics were reframed according to the point that was being made and it was not representative. He looked uniquely at areas where it was predominantly muslim. While many of his findings have a good level of accuracy, his conclusions were weak. If anything, his programme is just about making the case that incompetent mechanisms for integration ultimately cause separate societies. That is an excellent point but he didn't really seem to emphasise that as much as I thought he should have. It would have been far more interesting if the study was more rigorous and used data from all over the country and comparison amongst Abrahamic religions at least. It was framed as only Muslims vs everyone else. If you go to some parts of London, it is sometimes only Orthodox Jewish and i would be certain of some shared views about women and homosexuality to say the least.

Its been said repeatedly by some here that it was the left who is leading us to oblivion/invasion. While it's true that unfettered immigration within our current systems is very problematic, it is the right wing policies of the global war on terror that has fuelled Daesh to have the strength it has now. That is a fact. It is the right wing and increasingly populist parts of society who are now bringing us closer to oblivion - the hatred toward muslims only increases the gulf between groups of people, the hatred means our governments scale up their surveillance and control programmes and this is a significant point that people don't seem to see. Governments and security services are benefitting hugely from qman and Starter's kind of thinking. Are you people so naive to think these control mechanisms will not be used against anyone but Muslims? What about "muslim sympathisers". We live in an era that probably would frighten George Orwell himself and the forces of change hitting Europe are used to meet certain groups interests.

I don't deny the left has much to be blamed for. my point is that Europe is walking into a trap. Why is it that even the older members here (I generally assume qman is about 70) cannot fathom how history repeats itself. I imagine qman doesn't like jews either so he doesnt care, but European history tells us that we are on dangerous ground. The Nazi's didn't just hate the Jews, it was all undesirables - that can be anyone.

Soft power cannot be neglected in favour of hard power. We must take the credibility away from those groups that hate, rather than fuel them. I know some here think that my point is that Western countries (qman reads "WHITE countries") did bad stuff in the past therefore things are bad. NO! The point is that abuses were in the past, present and future. Take away the legitimate grievance and you weaken the rallying call for war and hate. We must move beyond restrictive concepts of nationalism, the reality of society has gone beyond that.

Viktor made a good point about refugees being in the interest of big business. BBW made that point quite a while ago and its a very good one. It reminds us that political situations are always steered and manipulated as much as is possible in reality in order to serve certain interests. The mistake is thinking that this is limited to labour costs etc. Societal upheaval is advantageous to the people at the top. Giving into blind division only serves those interests. It is the rise of the far right that makes that ever more possible, and the failures of the left and right to fuel the disenfranchisement of large swathes of the population. Despite the problems from incompetent immigration systems, our countries (some of the richest in the world) must do it's fair share to stop the fighting, stop the hate and to help the refugees. a reform of those immigration systems would be a start..and the EU is very slowly making some changes but unfortunately they are too little and too slow.

in conclusion.. this thread is one big..

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