I like how you're disgusted at actual people for a hypothetical that you came up with not empirically, but because it appears to make sense to you.
But to ease your pain: "media" isn't a person, and therefore doesn't like or dislike or fancy or abhor anything.
As to journalists: From nytimes.com getting 10% more visitors on some day because of some terror attack to anyone's actual pay check or job security takes so many steps it's basically meaningless as a conditioning signal.
And companies are just people. Yes, indeed. "If it bleeds, it leads" - the people who choose headlines or what gets airtime select for urgency and impact within what they perceive to be their demographic. They amp up things that they know hook into trigger-points in their audience, because that's what gets the audience emotionally engaged, because engagement means revenue.
Terror attacks can be played in a number of different ways, depending on the audience and what they're afraid of; whether it's immigrants, other religions, or social freedoms and militarization of the public sphere, there's plenty of fear all around to write about and get the audience riled up on. And if you don't think there's a profit motive in a media source engaging with its audience, there's not much hope for you.
Media isn't a person. It's a machine. A series of feedback loops within our economy that occupy a market niche in which optimizing for maximum fear and outrage is optimizing for profit.
As you say, there are so many steps between getting visitors and someone's paycheck that you can't really blame a particular person within the system. That doesn't change the overall system behaviour, though. Everyone there, in aggregate, optimize for maximum fear and outrage.
We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the site guidelines. If you don't want to be banned on HN, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe you'll follow the rules in the future.
In my opinion, much more useful than a terrible caption, a standard "keep calm and carry on" would be much more hurtful to the terrorist's aims than spreading the news and the "terror" (which is what they want...).
What would help is stop making such a giant fuzz about it every time something happens. The media just "likes" these kinds of events because they make emotions run high.
In reality terrorism accounts for less than 0.01% of premature deaths, yet nations spend magnitudes more surveilling their own citizens and fighting stupid wars (to no apparent avail) than they spend on fighting various other things that kill more than a thousand times (> 1000x) more people.
>In reality terrorism accounts for less than 0.01% of premature deaths,
Sure death by terrorism is only a blip. But the amount of money spent on spreading terrorist idealology is insane.
The problem is, our ally, Saudi Arabia, is spending Billions on Wahhabist Terrorism Propaganda aka Petro-Islam. In fact, money trails show KSA funded 90% of Wahhabist Terrorism Propoganda (Petro-Islam) around the world through mosques and literature.
From Wikipedia:
>Wahhabism has been accused of being "a source of global terrorism", inspiring the ideology of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), and for causing disunity in Muslim communities by labelling Muslims who disagreed with the Wahhabi definition of monotheism as apostates (takfir) and justifying their killing. It has also been criticized for the destruction of historic mazaars, mausoleums, and other Muslim and non-Muslim buildings and artifacts.
>Saudi Arabia is called the "cradle of Wahhabist Terrorism". In fact, Saudi Arabia funded an estimated "90% of the expenses of the entire faith [wahhabism]", throughout the Muslim World, according to journalist Dawood al-Shirian.
>It extended to young and old, from children's madrasas to high-level scholarship.
This spending has done much to overwhelm less strict local interpretations of Islam, according to observers like Dawood al-Shirian and Lee Kuan Yew, and has caused the Saudi interpretation (sometimes called "petro-Islam") to be perceived as the correct interpretation – or the "gold standard" of Islam – in many Muslims' minds.
>The Salafi movement is often described as being synonymous with Wahhabism.
Then you change the media from capitalist goals to propaganda.
While everyone agrees that media that cares for views and nothing else can be nasty, it's the inly 'objective' measure of what media should show that we can get. When media editors start using their influence for (in this case, very noble) political goals, we find ourselves at their mercy.
There's a constant theme in modern democracy that when a certain institution tries just to be a projection of it's customers wishes, it can reveal that these wishes aren't that good. Like Airbnb hosts being racists - is it the problem with individual hosts, or should Airbnb be responsible? Same with media and views: if people react better to sensationalizm and terrorist manifestos, should the media filter their disguisting desires, like a big caring brother, that knows what's best for us? Or should it do whatever we want, showing us all the gore and uglyness?
I don't have the answers, and most importantly, I don't think I have a logical framework for these problems. Do you?
> - no longer showing the faces / names / manifestos of the suicide bombers on media
The UK authorities tried that approach through the 1980s regarding the situation in Northern Ireland; PM Mrs Thatcher's infamous "oxygen of publicity" policy was a response to a general feeling that the media were advertising for the terrorists.
However it was worse than ineffective; no-one receiving their primary news of the situation from TV was likely to volunteer for action, and it became symbolic of the Government's seeming powerlessness, that they had to hide the bad news behind censorship.
Aside: I remember being disappointed when hearing Gerry Adams' actual voice for the first time, having heard him dubbed by an actor throughout my childhood. The actor sounded more authorative!
Agree with the article (generally). The comments section below it, however, shows that many don't seem to understand the problem -- that the media is a tool being exploited by terrorists.
No they are symbiotes. The same as with Trump. The media needs terrorists and love the current administration. They were not exploited... they are willing partners.
Every left leaning journalist has perfect job security - something that this profession has nit seen in a decade. And highly improved social status among the crowds.
>Every left leaning journalist has perfect job security
You've crossed over to hyperbole now. While the current administration has been colorul, there's a click fatigue induced when outrage becomes normative.
Or have you come across some data about the decline of syndicated coverage and the resurgence of investigative reporting?
Great article. Although I think it missed out on offering the obvious solution of just not watching 24H news. Large networks themselves are not going to stop making this kind of content until it's no longer profitable.
This seems like a reframing of Charlie Brooker's criticism of news coverage regarding mass shootings[0]. Then, as now, many institutions seemed focussed on providing dramatic and emotional coverage rather than more objective and disconnected reporting.
I think the BBC has somewhat changed its tone in respect to events like this; it's usually slow or last to report casualty numbers and attacker names, but being last doesn't effect social change if lots of competitors are doing it anyway.
Its inspiring that widespread violence and terrorism didn't erupt in South Africa in response to the end of apartheid. It certainly did as Rhodesia became Zimbabwe. The key to the relative peace, I believe, was the widely endorsed notion of reconciliation, or acceptance promulgated throughout all aspects of South African society, particularly by religious and tribal leaders.
I don't think its realistic to expect the media to change how it covers terrorism. I do think much more could be done to celebrate, reward and publicize those preaching against violence and for peace.
What is needed is for nations in Europe to take less unaccompanied adults and have an education system more focused on assimilating the young ones into the local culture, not opening the local culture to the same cultures those people are supposedly escaping from.
What is needed is for Europeans to confront the facts of their own murderous campaigns. We cry about terrorism, but never about the bombs being dropped, every twenty minutes, on far more civilians - in our name.
I think he's saying that governments should be partly blamed by those who blame these attacks on immigration.
If those governments didn't bring war to those places, maybe less people would be prone to follow the message "attack those who attacked us first", lowering the feasibility of mass murders.
Citizens are responsible for their politicians, who derive their power from the society they govern. If we weren't so ignorant about their actions, politicians wouldn't be getting away with murder every single day.
This disconnect between citizen responsibility and political culpability is the problem. We cannot butter our bread on both sides: either we live in a society where our armed forces are governed by our democracies, or we don't.
I'd say it's not that citizens are ignorant, it's that they're powerless. The only way an average citizen can shape the political reality around himself is by voting. What else can one do? Protest on the streets? Organize a riot? Good luck with that.
What in blazes are you talking about? The perpetrator in question was born and raised in UK. This has NOTHING to do with "unaccompanied adults".
Also, "assimilating the young ones into the local culture"... I am not sure what openly racist stuff like your post has deserved being on HN - I'd say /r/The_Donald is a better place.
As the old saying goes "When in Rome, do as the Romans do".
Why should people not assimilate into the local culture of where they are fleeing to? Or at least discard elements of their previous culture which are incompatible with where they are now? Especially if the place they came from was so bad that they had to leave?
If they cannot or do not want to assimilate to the new culture, or discard incompatible practices in their new location, then they are always free to return.
It's not racist to call out faults with cultures and ideologies, no culture is perfect, but some cultures are objectively better than others.
Note that culture is not the same as religion, and it's not the same thing as race.
Why should they change at all? What does it even mean to be 'incompatible'? Who's the arbiter? Why is your culture the 'objectively better' one?
Lets just call it what it is - intolerance. "Why can't those foreigners just behave like I want them to! They make me uncomfortable" is what small-minded folk all over the world say about immigrants. Have said, for centuries.
What I'm talking about is cultural things like slavery, honour killings, child sexual exploitation, blasphemy killings, making homosexual relations illegal. I would hope that we can agree that these are things which are unacceptable or at least unpalatable in the modern world. Therefore cultures where this is acceptable and normal practice are objectively worse than in cultures where it is unacceptable.
So when people move from cultures where these things are practised to where they are not, they should either drop them, or move back.
Yeah some things seem very wrong to us, and probably are.
But I like to keep aware that, much that we do is viewed as appalling by others. Some is objectively worse (like healthcare, prisons, racism). Yet we struggle at the highest levels to preserve these cultural features.
> What the hell is racist about assimilating into the local culture?
Forcing someone to assimilate just because the other person is "not from here" certainly is racist.
> Also, you seem to be very unfamiliar with radical islamic schools in Britain
So what? Radical religious schools are nothing new, in fact they're a price of having religious freedom.
Did you forget the Irish history? Boiled down, religious war. And even today, every major religion has their boneheaded backwards-oriented buffoons which don't shy off from corporeal or capital punishment - the Catholics have Opus Dei (and whatever more is going on in Vatican, but I won't go down that tinfoil hat now), the Jews have the Orthodox movement, Islam the Salafists, and for what it's worth people also kill and maim in the name of Buddhism and Hinduism.
> Forcing someone to assimilate just because the other person is "not from here" certainly is racist.
Certainly they have no need of going to a place where they cannot adapt to the local culture? They crossed many otherwise peaceful countries. There's many other places where they can go to where they can keep 100% of their cultural habits with no friction with anyone else.
Moderate muslims have no freaking problem with playing along with local rules. It's always some radical jackass pretending that every other muslim is getting as offended as he is by the suggestion and some braindead panel show or journalist playing along with it.
> So what? Radical religious schools are nothing new, in fact they're a price of having religious freedom.
Nice bait. Some of these schools are riddled with all sorts of abuse of its students, including physical. Passively letting muslim kids get educated, abused and raised by islamists in your own territory is a far greater betrayal to these kids than it would have been to put them in a school system where they don't hear about islam at all except in the context of "here's a list of the major religions in the world, here's the main ideas about them, I guess nobody can really be sure about what's out there after all, right? So let's all try to get along, and if someone is trying to get you to kill for your religion, you turn them in to the police, because that's very messed up. Also, atheists are okay people tips fedora."
> lel what about christian past or people elsewhere fighting back after decades of terror
Hey, how about you give me a list of present day British Christian suicide bombers, or Hindus or Buddhists causing terror in Europe before you give me this false equivalence garbage. It's so strange that Hindus and Buddhists are turning violent only where they have extensive conflict with radical Islam, colour me very surprised.
> Opus dei
My friend, you need to put those Dan Brown books down. They aren't even good.
I don't understand how media outlets that report on terrorism (by which I mean the 24hr coverage cycle) aren't charged with being accomplices or accessories to these terrorist acts. We know what terrorism is, mass murder + widespread knowledge of aforementioned murder + political motive.
Look I'm not saying we just trash the 1st amendment but there has to be some reasonable compromise that can be made in cases where violent crime is used in order to grab headlines for some political cause. I'm not saying don't do any reporting on terror either but there's gotta be some hard line of what's definitly being irresponsible.
The most reasonable compromise that could be made is to force western media to report on the casualties of the war being waged by western military forces.
We'd all be far less inclined to knee-jerk react to a 'terrorist attack' if we were more aware, daily, of just how many civilians WE have killed recently.
I have to say, I am impressed at how journalists are able to find new ingenious ways to write whole articles about the attacks without mentioning Islam or why it was perpetrated even once.
On a more serious note, we westerners are probably not the target audience of these attacks, so I'm not sure hiding them from our population will do anything to prevent the news from reaching their target audience. I seriously doubt ISIS potential recruits get their news from Buzzfeed.
Because to do so would be rather unfair on the vast majority of followers who do not share the values of these terrorists. Ever wonder why the world hasn't burnt down? Because there isn't a "sleeper switch" in every Muslim you pass in the streets.
There are discussions of Islam and ISIS - the Atlantic's most popular article covers just that (so thorough that it's praised by ISIS even.) And then there's the likes of the Daily Mail, which rather than heal serves to deepen divisions and hatred - that is the aim of terrorists.
Suppressing when attackers are muslim does not equal equating all muslims with terrorists. Wtf. Lets not censor our news for any reason, nor sensationalize it.
It is profitable to report on such things. Outrage sells. The UK (and I assume others) suffer horribly because of the death throws of print media. The dailymail would lead with every big ISIS video, simply because people would visit their site.
Until the link between peddling/stirring outrage and profits is severed, we will continue to have problems like this.
The media, especially in the UK, also hound victims' families for profit. In the past with the infamous phone-hacking scandal, and this week chasing families of the missing (in this sad case later confirmed fatality).
I can avoid reading such journalism but the vast population is attracted to car crashes and will look.
Could the real ISIS stand up please? Anything and everything is blamed on ISIS yet nobody has ever met a genuine ISIS person. It is a contrivance of the military industrial media congressional complex, the moral panic of our age.
Because ISIS get instantly blamed a legitimate struggle against a Washington ally can be blamed on ISIS and not whatever nationalist movement was behind the incident. Things can only be done by people assumed to be ISIS sympathisers, not by anyone else.
Whenever I read a meta article like this I think that part of the reason it is written is so the author can appear or feel superior to the people reading and the other people writing about the same event. Much in the same way I am (in some small part) writing this comment to feel superior to the author of the article. This then feeds into an endless meta-loop from which only few escape.
There's another side to this that I contemplated today. If the goal of terrorism is to spread terror, have they accomplished their goal? So far as the families of the victims and people in surrounding areas go, likely. However, when you look at the planet as a whole you have this sort of response[1]: widespread and global compassion. This defiance must be incredibly demoralizing for murderous scum. Removing awareness of these events, which media provides, takes our defiance (compassion, solidarity, and fearlessness) away.
Limiting the media would only work if we limited all media in this way. The media needs to cover our peaceful defiance and we need to give the media more of that defiance to cover.
I'm reminded of the Vietnam era slogan: "Suppose they gave a war and nobody came" One could just as easily adapt it to our modern day. "Suppose they gave a bomb and nobody talked about it" I can only imagine how frustrated those narcissistic sociopaths would feel if after all that meticulous planning, people simply talked about the weather the next day.
In 1972 there were over 1,900 acts of domestic terrorism bombing, and more than 2,500 such bombings in the US in an 18 month period in the early 1970's[0][1]. The bombings were so common that reporters didn't even bother to cover all of them, and yet the bombings continued until very gradually the number of people who felt setting off a bomb in a building was a productive way to end racism gradually declined towards zero (the 1970's are remembered as the anti-war era but that wasn't actually the cause that drove most of the bombers, as recounted into the linked histories).
Missing in media reports about these things is the connection between action (our foreign military mis-adventures) and reaction (terrorist attacks).
About a month ago we celebrated the mother of all bombs that flattened what amounted to a small village in Afghanistan. We were told that it killed ONLY 90 terrorists, assuming the vast area it affected was inhabited only by the killed terrorists. Not a single civilian was killed, we were told.
The pilot and his crew are our heroes.
Somewhere there's an Afghan from that flattened area. Even if he doesn't subscribe to ISIS/Taliban ideology, he can't be too happy.
Most people in his position would feel that they have a score to settle. And when he has the opportunity, we don't make the connection.
He's a terrorist, but we have our heroes.
Sometimes I feel like crying, not for the dead (that won't help them), but for the rest of us still alive.
> Missing in media reports about these things is the connection between action (our foreign military mis-adventures) and reaction (terrorist attacks).
Ha! That is probably because there's comparatively less correlation between terrorist attacks and foreign politics, than there's between terrorist attacks and attacker's religion. In case you are not aware, various islamic groups perform terrorist attacks in Philippines (look up recent news), India and Russia, the former two being 100% internal affairs.
And in virtually all those cases, there's a link to the target's actions against something the terrorists hold dear.
Terrorist activity in India? Look to Kashmir.
In Russia? The Russians fought their own war on terrorism before we went into Afghanistan. In some ways going into Afghanistan diverted fighters streaming into Chechnya to fight the Russian army to Afghanistan. We gave them a target they hated more than they hated the Russians. From reports, many of the best fighters on the side of ISIS are Chechens.
The Russians, by the way, are still fighting terrorists.
And whether these wars are "internal affairs" or not is immaterial.
> And in virtually all those cases, there's a link to the target's actions against something the terrorists hold dear.
If by 'something the terrorists hold dear' you mean power and prevalence of islam, I absolutely agree! When Chechnya de-facto separated from Russia in 1990s, they run multiple ethnic cleansings: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%AD%D1%82%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%87... (no translation to English unfortunately).
It looks like something similar is happening right now in the Philippines.
What's missing in the reports is the connection between Martyrdom and the Ideology. Paradise is guaranteed for those who kill and are killed in the way of Allah (Surrah 9-111). That Jihad is obligatory not optional. But, yes let's continue to put forward the idea that this is a reactional factor, because you know, feelings.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 136 ms ] threadBut to ease your pain: "media" isn't a person, and therefore doesn't like or dislike or fancy or abhor anything.
As to journalists: From nytimes.com getting 10% more visitors on some day because of some terror attack to anyone's actual pay check or job security takes so many steps it's basically meaningless as a conditioning signal.
Terror attacks can be played in a number of different ways, depending on the audience and what they're afraid of; whether it's immigrants, other religions, or social freedoms and militarization of the public sphere, there's plenty of fear all around to write about and get the audience riled up on. And if you don't think there's a profit motive in a media source engaging with its audience, there's not much hope for you.
As you say, there are so many steps between getting visitors and someone's paycheck that you can't really blame a particular person within the system. That doesn't change the overall system behaviour, though. Everyone there, in aggregate, optimize for maximum fear and outrage.
I'd like BuzzFeed to lead the fight with a good example - by shutting itself down.
Conventional media reporting is much easier to improve than social media.
* Focus on the victims not the witch hunt
* Don't immediately switch into full crisis mode, dropping the program schedule
* Don't speculate on whether it's "terror" (in fact, drop that terminology altogether - it's all crime)
This is not new thinking.
Social media is a much more challenging issue though, with professional irritants like Katie Hopkins in the UK.
Edit: formatting
- no longer showing the faces / names / manifestos of the suicide bombers on media
- showing the people who stand up, who demonstrate, who fight for our values rather than showing the panic, chaos, people running for their lives
would that help?
In reality terrorism accounts for less than 0.01% of premature deaths, yet nations spend magnitudes more surveilling their own citizens and fighting stupid wars (to no apparent avail) than they spend on fighting various other things that kill more than a thousand times (> 1000x) more people.
Here's a nice chart visualizing the disproportional response: https://i1.wp.com/thinkbynumbers.org/wp-content/uploads/2008...
Sure death by terrorism is only a blip. But the amount of money spent on spreading terrorist idealology is insane.
The problem is, our ally, Saudi Arabia, is spending Billions on Wahhabist Terrorism Propaganda aka Petro-Islam. In fact, money trails show KSA funded 90% of Wahhabist Terrorism Propoganda (Petro-Islam) around the world through mosques and literature.
From Wikipedia:
>Wahhabism has been accused of being "a source of global terrorism", inspiring the ideology of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), and for causing disunity in Muslim communities by labelling Muslims who disagreed with the Wahhabi definition of monotheism as apostates (takfir) and justifying their killing. It has also been criticized for the destruction of historic mazaars, mausoleums, and other Muslim and non-Muslim buildings and artifacts.
>Saudi Arabia is called the "cradle of Wahhabist Terrorism". In fact, Saudi Arabia funded an estimated "90% of the expenses of the entire faith [wahhabism]", throughout the Muslim World, according to journalist Dawood al-Shirian.
>It extended to young and old, from children's madrasas to high-level scholarship. This spending has done much to overwhelm less strict local interpretations of Islam, according to observers like Dawood al-Shirian and Lee Kuan Yew, and has caused the Saudi interpretation (sometimes called "petro-Islam") to be perceived as the correct interpretation – or the "gold standard" of Islam – in many Muslims' minds.
>The Salafi movement is often described as being synonymous with Wahhabism.
Keep calm and keep going.. also means keep reporting.
While everyone agrees that media that cares for views and nothing else can be nasty, it's the inly 'objective' measure of what media should show that we can get. When media editors start using their influence for (in this case, very noble) political goals, we find ourselves at their mercy.
There's a constant theme in modern democracy that when a certain institution tries just to be a projection of it's customers wishes, it can reveal that these wishes aren't that good. Like Airbnb hosts being racists - is it the problem with individual hosts, or should Airbnb be responsible? Same with media and views: if people react better to sensationalizm and terrorist manifestos, should the media filter their disguisting desires, like a big caring brother, that knows what's best for us? Or should it do whatever we want, showing us all the gore and uglyness?
I don't have the answers, and most importantly, I don't think I have a logical framework for these problems. Do you?
The UK authorities tried that approach through the 1980s regarding the situation in Northern Ireland; PM Mrs Thatcher's infamous "oxygen of publicity" policy was a response to a general feeling that the media were advertising for the terrorists.
However it was worse than ineffective; no-one receiving their primary news of the situation from TV was likely to volunteer for action, and it became symbolic of the Government's seeming powerlessness, that they had to hide the bad news behind censorship.
Aside: I remember being disappointed when hearing Gerry Adams' actual voice for the first time, having heard him dubbed by an actor throughout my childhood. The actor sounded more authorative!
Every left leaning journalist has perfect job security - something that this profession has nit seen in a decade. And highly improved social status among the crowds.
You've crossed over to hyperbole now. While the current administration has been colorul, there's a click fatigue induced when outrage becomes normative.
Or have you come across some data about the decline of syndicated coverage and the resurgence of investigative reporting?
I think the BBC has somewhat changed its tone in respect to events like this; it's usually slow or last to report casualty numbers and attacker names, but being last doesn't effect social change if lots of competitors are doing it anyway.
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2o1V4lX_g4
I don't think its realistic to expect the media to change how it covers terrorism. I do think much more could be done to celebrate, reward and publicize those preaching against violence and for peace.
http://www.news.com.au/finance/economy/world-economy/bury-th...
The coalition's terrorist media strategy is a bit more subdued.
The statistics are mind-boggling. We are at war, people, FFS.
Stop being so surprised when that war arrives within our borders.
If those governments didn't bring war to those places, maybe less people would be prone to follow the message "attack those who attacked us first", lowering the feasibility of mass murders.
This disconnect between citizen responsibility and political culpability is the problem. We cannot butter our bread on both sides: either we live in a society where our armed forces are governed by our democracies, or we don't.
Also, "assimilating the young ones into the local culture"... I am not sure what openly racist stuff like your post has deserved being on HN - I'd say /r/The_Donald is a better place.
Why should people not assimilate into the local culture of where they are fleeing to? Or at least discard elements of their previous culture which are incompatible with where they are now? Especially if the place they came from was so bad that they had to leave?
If they cannot or do not want to assimilate to the new culture, or discard incompatible practices in their new location, then they are always free to return.
It's not racist to call out faults with cultures and ideologies, no culture is perfect, but some cultures are objectively better than others.
Note that culture is not the same as religion, and it's not the same thing as race.
Lets just call it what it is - intolerance. "Why can't those foreigners just behave like I want them to! They make me uncomfortable" is what small-minded folk all over the world say about immigrants. Have said, for centuries.
So when people move from cultures where these things are practised to where they are not, they should either drop them, or move back.
But I like to keep aware that, much that we do is viewed as appalling by others. Some is objectively worse (like healthcare, prisons, racism). Yet we struggle at the highest levels to preserve these cultural features.
Sigh.
Forcing someone to assimilate just because the other person is "not from here" certainly is racist.
> Also, you seem to be very unfamiliar with radical islamic schools in Britain
So what? Radical religious schools are nothing new, in fact they're a price of having religious freedom.
Did you forget the Irish history? Boiled down, religious war. And even today, every major religion has their boneheaded backwards-oriented buffoons which don't shy off from corporeal or capital punishment - the Catholics have Opus Dei (and whatever more is going on in Vatican, but I won't go down that tinfoil hat now), the Jews have the Orthodox movement, Islam the Salafists, and for what it's worth people also kill and maim in the name of Buddhism and Hinduism.
Certainly they have no need of going to a place where they cannot adapt to the local culture? They crossed many otherwise peaceful countries. There's many other places where they can go to where they can keep 100% of their cultural habits with no friction with anyone else.
Moderate muslims have no freaking problem with playing along with local rules. It's always some radical jackass pretending that every other muslim is getting as offended as he is by the suggestion and some braindead panel show or journalist playing along with it.
> So what? Radical religious schools are nothing new, in fact they're a price of having religious freedom.
Nice bait. Some of these schools are riddled with all sorts of abuse of its students, including physical. Passively letting muslim kids get educated, abused and raised by islamists in your own territory is a far greater betrayal to these kids than it would have been to put them in a school system where they don't hear about islam at all except in the context of "here's a list of the major religions in the world, here's the main ideas about them, I guess nobody can really be sure about what's out there after all, right? So let's all try to get along, and if someone is trying to get you to kill for your religion, you turn them in to the police, because that's very messed up. Also, atheists are okay people tips fedora."
> lel what about christian past or people elsewhere fighting back after decades of terror
Hey, how about you give me a list of present day British Christian suicide bombers, or Hindus or Buddhists causing terror in Europe before you give me this false equivalence garbage. It's so strange that Hindus and Buddhists are turning violent only where they have extensive conflict with radical Islam, colour me very surprised.
> Opus dei
My friend, you need to put those Dan Brown books down. They aren't even good.
Look I'm not saying we just trash the 1st amendment but there has to be some reasonable compromise that can be made in cases where violent crime is used in order to grab headlines for some political cause. I'm not saying don't do any reporting on terror either but there's gotta be some hard line of what's definitly being irresponsible.
We'd all be far less inclined to knee-jerk react to a 'terrorist attack' if we were more aware, daily, of just how many civilians WE have killed recently.
Alas, nobody wants to hear that news.
On a more serious note, we westerners are probably not the target audience of these attacks, so I'm not sure hiding them from our population will do anything to prevent the news from reaching their target audience. I seriously doubt ISIS potential recruits get their news from Buzzfeed.
There are discussions of Islam and ISIS - the Atlantic's most popular article covers just that (so thorough that it's praised by ISIS even.) And then there's the likes of the Daily Mail, which rather than heal serves to deepen divisions and hatred - that is the aim of terrorists.
It is profitable to report on such things. Outrage sells. The UK (and I assume others) suffer horribly because of the death throws of print media. The dailymail would lead with every big ISIS video, simply because people would visit their site.
Until the link between peddling/stirring outrage and profits is severed, we will continue to have problems like this.
I can avoid reading such journalism but the vast population is attracted to car crashes and will look.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_International_phone_hacki...
[2]https://twitter.com/danhett/status/866960257150529536
- Buzzfeed (a couple of years ago) published an exclusive that ISIS wants it's followers to find employees of company X and slit their throats.
- The Times (last week) published that ISIS wants it's followers to (attack pubic in specific manner).
Anyone, worldwide, who sympathises with ISIS would simply read those instructions and follow them.
Because ISIS get instantly blamed a legitimate struggle against a Washington ally can be blamed on ISIS and not whatever nationalist movement was behind the incident. Things can only be done by people assumed to be ISIS sympathisers, not by anyone else.
> Things can only be done by people assumed to be ISIS sympathisers
No, certain things are done by people who identify themselves as ISIS symathisers
> not by anyone else.
Huh? I think we all know far right and far left groups who are responsible for violence and nobody pretends they're ISIS.
Limiting the media would only work if we limited all media in this way. The media needs to cover our peaceful defiance and we need to give the media more of that defiance to cover.
[1]: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/05/23/world-monuments-i...
[0]https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/42038209-days-of-rage
[1]https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/...
About a month ago we celebrated the mother of all bombs that flattened what amounted to a small village in Afghanistan. We were told that it killed ONLY 90 terrorists, assuming the vast area it affected was inhabited only by the killed terrorists. Not a single civilian was killed, we were told.
The pilot and his crew are our heroes.
Somewhere there's an Afghan from that flattened area. Even if he doesn't subscribe to ISIS/Taliban ideology, he can't be too happy.
Most people in his position would feel that they have a score to settle. And when he has the opportunity, we don't make the connection.
He's a terrorist, but we have our heroes.
Sometimes I feel like crying, not for the dead (that won't help them), but for the rest of us still alive.
Ha! That is probably because there's comparatively less correlation between terrorist attacks and foreign politics, than there's between terrorist attacks and attacker's religion. In case you are not aware, various islamic groups perform terrorist attacks in Philippines (look up recent news), India and Russia, the former two being 100% internal affairs.
Terrorist activity in India? Look to Kashmir.
In Russia? The Russians fought their own war on terrorism before we went into Afghanistan. In some ways going into Afghanistan diverted fighters streaming into Chechnya to fight the Russian army to Afghanistan. We gave them a target they hated more than they hated the Russians. From reports, many of the best fighters on the side of ISIS are Chechens.
The Russians, by the way, are still fighting terrorists.
And whether these wars are "internal affairs" or not is immaterial.
If by 'something the terrorists hold dear' you mean power and prevalence of islam, I absolutely agree! When Chechnya de-facto separated from Russia in 1990s, they run multiple ethnic cleansings: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%AD%D1%82%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%87... (no translation to English unfortunately).
It looks like something similar is happening right now in the Philippines.
However, just watching another person destroy your homeland can tick most people off.