Brutal attack in London heightens terror fears

[Cecil Rhodes]

We sent the Merkin ones home so it doesn't happen any more....

You sent your Pubic Hair wigs home ?

[dc_guy_75]

i'm curious: how is the deity genocidal?

Mass killings of Yahweh =

Noahs Flood
Sodom/Gomorrah
First Born Egyptians
Having Moses ordering the Levites to slaughter the Golden Calf Worshippers
Allowing Satan to kill Job's family, to win a bet
Ordering the Jews to kill the native Caananites
etc etc etc

How many babies were killed?

[robertlouis]

You sent your Pubic Hair wigs home ?

Well, they're your fellow-countrymen.

[Cecil Rhodes]

okay. then prophet should be arrested right. and charged. do you know of his whereabouts?

probably at home with his 2 y/o to 7 y/o wives an the boys the same age he hangs out with .

[Cecil Rhodes]

Well, they're your fellow-countrymen.

No they are not ,

[Prospero]

DC Guy -the deity worshipped by Muslims is the same one worshipped by Christians and jews.

[Prospero]

This is another assumption. There are many African countries with large Muslim populations. All black people in europe and america are immigrants, someone in their family came to the west by one way or another. It could well be that these two were born into families already practicing Islam but became radicalized and then went off and did these things.
This coming from a black male born into a christian family. I would laugh if someone called me a christian "convert". I was raised in it.

It is a guess true... but the guys reportedly spoke with English accents, they appear to be Afro-Caribbean rather than African. I know that many young men from that community have been radicalised in the UK by extremist groups.

As to being part of a larger conspiracy - time will tell. But the weapons of choice and the behaviour - a rusty revolver and a machete - suggest to me radicalised individuals rather than a group acting in concert with a larger organisation. But that is also guesswork.

[GroobySteven]

How do western countries need more people who bring with them misogynistic, bronze-age perspectives?

Sounds like most Christians and Jews to me.

[giovanni_hotel]

Much of Muslim cultural orthodoxy seems to be from from a 1000 years ago which is the heart of the problem.

Currently Islamic culture in a general sense is out of step with modern society. Yes Christianity has its own history of horrific bloodshed, but how many body blows does the West have to absorb while we wait for our Muslim brothers and sisters to 'catch up'??

You would think in the 21st century with the dissemination of technology and global digital communication, it wouldn't take decades if not hundreds of years for a perverse ideology practiced by extremists to be discredited.

The West is under no obligation to tolerate this behavior.

The Islamic world may be forced to be left alone by themselves in a corner until they learn the difference between right and wrong.

It sucks for Muslim moderates who are going to be swept up in a growing resentment against Islam.

[Stavros]

I think the first thing one must say is to acknowledge the bravery of those passers-by who did not run away from the scene, but ran straight to the man on the ground. Even when they realised it was not a car accident, and saw the butchers with their knives, they remained where they were, in the case of two women shielding the body from further attack-the killers then warned men away -one threatened to shoot a man approaching the scene -but the women had no idea if the two men were going to try and kill them, they stayed. A cub scout leader born on the continent (she has a French-German name possibly Swiss) confronted the tall man who had earlier spoken frankly to a man with a camera phone while clutching the knives in blood-stained hands -he said the intention was to start a war, to which she calmly replied that he would lose.
I think many of us would have run a mile rather than confront the killers.

It was alleged on tv last night that one of the killers may be Nigerian by origin, not from the Afro-Caribbean community; and that both men have at one time or another emerged on the radar of the intelligence services, but, perhaps as in Boston, it was not known with any certainty that the people identified would suddenly mount a lethal attack.

The loss of the Communications Data Bill in the last session of Parliament is already leading to calls for Internet surveillance to be re-introduced into English law -the 'internet preaching' that is now being said to be a cause of this extremism is being used as a means to intercept and identify internet traffic -presumably not just the Mafia and drug peddlers and the English Defence League- in order to prevent these attacks from happening again, as if the only way for impressionable young men to choose violent Jihad comes from the internet. This could be the most serious long-term affront to civil liberties.

I am puzzled by the attempt to paint Islam as an archaic religion when the doctrinal disputes that divide Muslims are not so different from those that have divided the Christian church, Judaism, Hinduism and just about any other religion, and are often shaped by Modern life and its attributes and a search for 'Purity' or some accommodation between ancient and contemporary values.

The Muwahhidun of Arabia who practise a form of 'Unitarian' Islam are less than 300 years old, and the religious source of the Saudi Arabian royal family (sometimes also known as Wahabi after the preacher al-Wahabi who married into the family in the 18th century) -but it is interesting that the shock troops (they were known as the Ikhwan or brothers) that Abdul-Aziz ibn Saud used to build his state out of the Najd to cover the western region of Arabia, the Hejaz including the cities of Makka and Madina, were led by a man who split from ibn Saud in the 1920s because the latter had introduced cars and the radio into the new Kingdom -the search for 'purity' in religion, to 'return to the straight path' has been an obsession of believers of all religions for as long as the religions have been going, it does not reflect the broader interest of most the believers who are too busy working and dealing with their families to spend their entire lives consumed by debates on what is or is not 'forbidden' or 'allowed'. And to complete the point, Abdul-Aziz ibn Saud was a moderniser -he razed to the ground most of the exquisite architecture of Jiddah, and the family to this day continue to build over historic sites related to Muhammad, and have built a colossal hotel/shopping mall complex that overlooks the Grand Mosque in Makka, and are currently flattening other parts of the city to extend the Mosque ever further into the city.

And so on, none of this matters when the obsessions of people who have decided they have no future outside violent Jihad remain a threat to all of us, as it is for everyone threatened by people who think violence is an achievement.