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Terrible tragedy, for the families of the kids killed, for the survivors and for Norway as a whole.
I don’t know whether the man responsible is simply bad, or mad, or, most likely, both, but wouldn’t it be good if our countries could switch some of the millions or billions we all spend on absurd and OTT airport security on improving our mental health facilities and reach?
And please, please, let’s stop assuming every outrage is bound to be “linked” in some way to al Qaeda and Islamic extremism. Europol has been pointing out for ages that we are threatened most by separatist movements and home-grown fringe groups (of Christian, not Muslim, heritage). Yet all we hear about is Muslims, Muslims, Muslims.
In 2010, seven people died in the EU as a result of terrorist attacks. There were 3 attacks by Islamist terrorists; 160 by separatist groups; 45 by “left-wing and anarchist groups”. I don’t know about other attacks this year, but I reckon 91 (and still counting) killed allegedly by a right-wing extremist will put all the others into deep shade. But still, politicians will insist on ramping up the fear, and spending our money, on Islamist terrorism.
You are wrong since 9/11 islamic terrorists have carried out more than 17506 terror attacks.
It seems to me that you are always defending islam. A true Christian does not kill people.
How many times have you read where Christians have gone mad because someone draw an image of Christ.
When have Buddhists or Hindus or Zoroastrians blown up people.
This man in Oslo was just pure evil.http://www.christianpost.com/news/4-christian-orphanage-workers-beheaded-in-somalia-40249/
http://somalisforjesus.blogspot.com/2008/11/somali-christian-beheaded-for.html
An atheist? Dunno where you get that from.
But you asked the question about when the last time a Christian has gone killing people. Not much of a stretch to answer.
Ain’t too difficult to find examples of Hindus or Buddhists being cunts either (Sri Lanka springs to mind for both sides).
Zoroastrians though? Well you got me there.
Pretending one religion has a monopoly on being cunts is retarded.
@ROB wrote:
Pretending one religion has a monopoly on being cunts is retarded.
What I was going to say, though I wouldn’t have used the c word. ;)
@Orion wrote:
It seems to me that you are always defending islam. A true Christian does not kill people.
No. I’m always challenging islamophobia. Breivik identifies himself as a Christian. He’s thereby put the islamophobes in a tricky position. He cited approvingly people such as Pam Geller, Daniel Pipes, Melanie Phillips, the English Defence League and others, who like to tar all Muslims with the actions of a very few (who also act against the tenets of their religion, just as Breivik did). Now they all rush to say he’s not a true Christian, like them, something they refused to grant the millions of Muslims who aren’t mass murderers or terrorists. Can you not see the parallel?
And though it’s fair for them to say that they don’t condone let alone advocate mass murder (though urging on wars in which thousands of innocent Muslims would inevitably be killed comes close, it has to be said), it is also fair to say that their ravings helped create the climate where a psychopath like him, if that’s what he is, could think it was his duty to kill innocents to defend Europe from a non-existent or insanely overblown threat, to preserve our “cultural purity”. Exactly as the perverters of Islam create the climate where other young fools or nutters think it’s their duty to wage “jihad” against us.
Just a single example of the nonsense these people spout: do you know what percentage of the European population Muslims are likely to make up by 2050, on best projections? 8%. And yet these idiots try to frighten people into reacting against them, into ditching our best values of freedom and tolerance, by saying we’re being swamped, overrun, outbred, going to be minorities in our own countries, subjected to Sharia law, be subsumed into some mythical caliphate. That’s what I take issue with, because it’s dangerously inflammatory crap.
It’s the same hate-mongering on both sides, and just as bad whether so-called Muslims or so-called Christians do it. The only possible tiny glimmer of hope that might conceivably come out of this horrific nightmare visited on poor Norway – Norway, of all places! – is that some of the deluded saps who swallowed all the hate might begin to see that they’ve been had, and refuse to be led so timidly further down that path to mutual destruction.
Well the one religion I have a problem with is islam, Now lets see why, FGM, slavery, genocide(Darfur), forced conversion, sharia law, a women’s word is not worth as much as a man’s, want me to go on, just take a look at Saudi Arabia the birth place of islam. For me killing a human is wrong, does not matter who you are or what you believe.
subjected to Sharia law
Doesn’t Britain already have sharia law, don’t know who Melanie Phillips is or Daniel Pipes. Britain has a problem with that group islam4 UK.
Also that reallly nice fellow called Anjem Choudary. He is one of his quotes.“Look, at the end of the day innocent people—when we say ‘innocent people’ we mean Muslims—as far as non-Muslims are concerned they have not accepted Islam and as far as we are concerned that is a crime against God.”
Anjem Choudary, BBC HARDtalk (8 August 2005)
Lot to comment on there, Orion.
Let’s take genocide. Is that peculiar to Islam? Was the Nazi party in Germany Muslim? What about the colonists who pretty much wiped out whole tribes of native Americans, in North and South America and the Caribbean?
Slavery. I had no idea the British, Spanish and Portuguese who were the principal operators of the triangular trade were Muslim. I did know a lot, but no means all, of the traders in Africa were. And all of the Southern States, including those US founding fathers who kept slaves. They too?
Forced conversion. So what happened in South America, exactly? Did the conquistadores forcibly convert the surviving Indians to Islam? How come they mostly ended up Christian then? I think you’re going to have to acknowledge that these things, vile as they are, aren’t exclusive to Islam.
Maybe you’re thinking that’s all ancient history. Were the Serbs and Croats Muslims? Why were they trying to wipe out Bosnian and Kosovan Muslims then? I don’t think I’d call that genocide, as it happens, but it is officially so categorised. But then I wouldn’t call what happened in Darfur genocide either; and I think that isn’t, officially. And let’s not forget Rwanda. Not Muslims there either.
There was attempted genocide not so long ago in Guatemala too, in which 200,000 indigenous people were killed in the 70s and 80s, by their nominally Christian government. There was forced conversion from the indigenous version of Catholicism to evangelical Protestantism too, under their evangelical dictator, aided and abetted by American missionary groups, who provided food aid to starving people in return for attendance at their churches, and denied it to those who refused.
And so to modern slavery. It’s true that plenty of Arab Muslims keep domestic servants in conditions that amount to slavery. Christian Nigerians too. Not to mention sex slavers, of all religions and none. I guess you didn’t see the UN report on large landowners in Bolivia keeping their workers as slaves, or know that those implicated were among the leaders of the group who attempted a coup against the elected government, with the help of their American backers, only a couple of years ago.
FGM: you’re much closer there. It’s true that it’s mostly practised by Muslims, though not exclusively. It’s a vile cultural tradition in the Horn of Africa and some parts of the Middle East, but it predates Islam. People of other religions who live in the region, including Christians, also practise it, though it is formally forbidden by all the religions that operate there, including Islam. Perhaps you might like to consider male circumcision too. Do you think that’s fine and dandy? My view is that if adult males want to get themselves circumcised, that’s up to them (just as people can have all the piercings or tattoos they like, or sex change operations or whatever, once they’re old enough to decide for themselves). But though the effects are nothing like as dire as female circumcision, and may even have beneficial effects, I think it’s wrong to circumcise baby boys, who have no say in the matter: it’s mutilation of their bodies just the same. Of course there are sometimes serious reasons for it as a medical procedure, which is quite different. But to do it as a matter of course – and this time, yes, it is, I believe, a required religious practice – is not justified.
sharia law, a women’s word is not worth as much as a man’s
Obviously I don’t support that either. But nor is it limited to Sharia. Why do you suppose an Orthodox Jewish man thanks God every day for not making him a woman (or a slave or a Gentile)? I can’t say I like the notion (in all Abrahamic religions) that women are unclean, either. (I was brought up in the Church of England, and our prayerbook still contained the special service to purify women after childbirth before they were allowed to take communion again. They had to be veiled too, just like Muslim women’s hijab. And all women and girls all had to cover our heads when we entered a church. Orthodox Jewish women still do, and not just in synagogue.) Still no women priests allowed in the Catholic or Orthodox churches. And still a lot of fuss about consecrating women bishops in Anglican churches. So none of these treat women as equals yet.
What do you think of the Torah (= the Law), with all its dietary laws, its abomination of homosexuality, the impurity of women and so on? How about Jewish divorce laws, and all those women whose husbands refuse to grant them their “get” so they can’t marry again? That’s OK, I suppose, because it’s not Muslim. Are you American? You do realise you have Jewish religious courts, Beth Din, in the US, don’t you? We do in Britain as well. And they operate in the same way as sharia courts. We also have Anglican ones, consistory courts, but I think they’re only used for the trial of misbehaving clergy now. If people of those religious beliefs want to settle family matters according to their religious custom/laws, they can voluntarily go to those courts. Their laws don’t apply to anyone else and everyone is subject to the laws of the land. The furore about sharia law in the US is just manufactured scare-mongering, like the rest.
And yes, Anjem Choudary is despicable, one of those hate-mongers I was talking about. He’s free to say what he likes, though, within the law (which is a little more restrictive than US law). A lot of the things people like the Phelps family say, and probably Pam Geller et al too, would not be tolerated in the UK. They certainly wouldn’t be allowed to broadcast them on radio or television. Melanie Phillips is a well-known English columnist, who writes for the Daily Mail and the Spectator, often appears on discussion programmes and wrote a book called Londonistan. She is a (necessarily) paler version of the US islamophobic columnists I mentioned.
If you take a slightly longer and broader historical and geographical overview, you can see that your points don’t actually hold up very well.
Here we go. Now the excuses for the inexcusable start.
Italy MEP backs ideas of Norway killer Breivik
The Northern League is a key partner in the governing coalition and is strongly anti-immigration
An Italian MEP has described the ideas of Norway’s self-confessed mass killer, Anders Behring Breivik, as “good” and in some cases “excellent”.
Mario Borghezio, who belongs to the Northern League party, condemned Mr Breivik’s violence, but backed his stance against Islam.
The Northern League is a partner in PM Silvio Berlusconi’s government.
Mr Borghezio’s comments in a radio interview sparked outrage, with opposition calls for the MEP to resign.
Mr Breivik’s justification for killing 76 people was that he wanted to inflict maximum damage on Norway’s governing Labour Party because of its failure to clamp down on immigration.
“Some of the ideas he expressed are good, barring the violence. Some of them are great,” Mario Borghezio told Il Sole-24 Ore radio station.
He agreed with Mr Breivik’s “opposition to Islam and his explicit accusation that Europe has surrendered before putting up a fight against its Islamicisation”.
‘No excuses, no justifications’
The Northern League is an avowedly anti-immigration, regionalist Italian political party, key to the governing coalition, and known for its anti-Islamic rhetoric.The controversy sparked swift reaction from fellow MEPs.
“My heart goes out to the victims of the atrocities that took place in Norway last week, and to their families. There can be no excuses, no justifications. This was nothing but an act of pure and unmitigated evil,” said Nikki Sinclaire, an MEP in the UK Independence Party.
She resigned last year from the European Parliament umbrella group, Europe of Freedom & Democracy (EFD) – which also includes Italy’s Northern League. She cited the racism of Northern League members in making her decision.
“Mr Borghezio’s reported comments are shocking and, if accurately reported, reprehensible. They are in no way reflective of UKIP’s position or that of the EFD Group,” said a UKIP spokesman.
‘Create monsters’
But Mr Borghezio is not the only right-wing politician to express sympathy with the actions of Anders Behring Breivik.A member of France’s far-right National Front party has been suspended after writing a defence of the Norwegian attacker on his blog.
Jacques Coutela described Mr Breivik as “the main defender of the West”, comparing him to Charles Martel, a seventh century leader who halted Islamic expansion in western Europe.
“The reason for the Norway terror attacks: fighting the Muslim invasion, that’s what people don’t want you to know”, read the post.
Mr Coutela stood as a National Front candidate in local elections in March.
“He was suspended today pending a party disciplinary committee,” said Steeve Briois, the Front’s general secretary.
Meanwhile, the leader of the English Defence League (EDL), Stephen Lennon, said the mass killing in Norway was a wake-up call.
“What happened in Oslo shows how desperate some people are becoming in Europe,” said Mr Lennon.
“It’s a ticking time bomb. If they don’t give that frustration and anger a platform as such and a voice – and a way of getting emotion out in a democratic way – it will create monsters like this lunatic.”
The EDL is also known for its strong stance against immigration.
Mr Breivik has posted admiring comments online about the EDL.
The League leadership is checking his claims to have contacts among its members.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-14315108Orion,
I just read through this thread in minute detail and conclude that Penta’s only crime is to politely and reasonably disagree with you.
If you think she should be banned from this forum, I suggest you come up with a far more compelling reason than that.From where I’m sitting I see reasoned discussion from Penta, and hate and annoyance from you…
If you are so aggrieved by people that disagree with you and yet who go to such lengths to explain why their opinion differs from yours, then I suggest you take a long look at yourself.
I enjoy a lively debate and since Penta started regularly posting here we have had plenty of lively debate. Just try not to embarass yourself by bleating for people to be banned for having a different opinion than your own.
For the record, I believe Penta’s views are anti-injustice not pro-islam, as you seem to feel. And she finds islamophobia to be predominantly unjustified and caused mainly by misrepresentation in the media and by people that have strong but misguided views, such as youself.You’re free to continue posting your views and arguments, but if you cannot tolerate being in a discussion with Penta, or if her articulate prose frustrates the hell out of you, then do not engage.
Best,
Lee.
Yeah, i do always use bad language. It’s a personality flaw. I do it in business meetings too and it always raises eyebrows, but very few people are in a position to affect my personal or professional life so I am quite happy to tell them to fuck themselves. :D
As for the religion thing, I ain’t a defender of any religion. I find Islam, on the whole, pretty distasteful. I also have more than my fair share of problems with Christianity. I can certainly see how a westerner might hate Islam and I can see how an Arab might hate Christians to the same degree. Neither are particularly justified in their generalisation. Shinto really shits me to tears. Buddhism can get up my nose. Judaism shits me too. Could probably find plenty of problems with Hinduism too.
@Orion wrote:
Well at least those peoples gave up slavery, islam still practices it.
A quick chat with a Salvo street volunteer should alert you to the fact that there are probably several trafficked prostitutes within 10 miles of where you are sitting. For me it’s closer to 1 mile.
You think those girls want to suck cock to pay off “debt?”
Yeah, i do always use bad language. It’s a personality flaw.
Nah, it shows a bit of fuckin character.
but very few people are in a position to affect my personal or professional life so I am quite happy to tell them to fuck themselves.
This is why I find the thought of ever getting a real job so distasteful.
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