Terrorist attacks throughout Europe

well smeato is a not very smart working-class protestant from glasgow so he was basically guaranteed to be right into that stuff

taxi driver made the front page of the Daily Record at least

http://elegilegi.org/img/john-smeaton-jokes.jpg

so did they both kick the burning terrorist in the nuts, or what?

one each

No wonder the guy died.

it would have been a different story if he was wearing a fanny-pack rammed with semtex, although not quite 2-0 to his nuts against the incoming kicking feet!

Five victims in Strasbourg, France. Don't know whether they're wounded or dead.

It's a clichéd thing to say, but it always hits harder when you've lived there.

Chances are they were targeting the Christmas market.

Once had a mean viande de cheval in Strassbourg.

Not looking good, this. Xmas market indeed.

1 dead, 6 wounded. Shooter still on the run.

Of course there's already talk on Twitter of how this is a government-devised conspiracy to distract us from the gilets jaunes.

We going to talk about how an alleged Neo-Nazi tried shooting up a synagogue on Yom Kippur or not?

He couldn’t break in because the door was reinforced, but he shot two other people and streamed the whole thing on Twitch, great.

In a chilling echo of the Christchurch mosque shooting, the gunman recorded the attacks on a head-mounted camera and uploaded it online with an antisemitic and rightwing extremist rant. German media identified the killer as Stephan Balliet, a 27-year-old German citizen.
One woman was shot dead outside the synagogue near a Jewish cemetery and one man killed in a nearby kebab shop.

The German interior minister, Horst Seehofer, described it as an antisemitic attack.

meant to bump this for the murdered Paris police officers too, nothing helpful to offer rn tho tbh

I was going to post on this thread earlier but I couldn't remember what it was called.

depressing, and part of a v.worrying trend of rising anti-semitism

How is yesterday's attack in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine being covered in your countries? It is obviously the only subject of discussion here in France today.

mainly just reporting - haven’t seen any commentary. i’ll ignore the very rapidly published editorial position of the spectator which is i’m afraid as you might expect.

actually i should be more careful - the spectator piece is relatively cautious. it’s probing fault lines - it states a failure of the education system in poor areas, and talks about the electoral problems the attack poses macron, and says it compounds issues raised by the toulouse massacre, as well as bataclan and charlie hebdo. the implication is that the state is failing on terrorism, and that this will raise the salience of the issue over the build up to elections in a year and a half’s time.

the area which feels most provocative but i don’t have enough info to judge is where it says the government assertion there are no “no go zones” to be absurd, citing evidence of weekly attacks on police stations and police officers.

I live in one such "no-go zone" in Paris, where my kids have been among the very few non-Muslims in their schools, so I'm sensitive to how these places are perceived from the outside.

I don't know what the electoral consequences will be---Mélenchon gave one of the earliest and loudest condemnations of the attack, and Macron has been working on an anti-separatism law. But it would seem indeed that Le Pen will receive a boost from this.

But the sheer number of emails I've received today from fellow parents indicates that this attack has struck a particular nerve. Liberty of expression in particular against religion is one of the founding values of the Republic, and this is an attack on that value. I think the desire to protect this liberty of expression is strong enough to unite elements of the far right and far left---unite to do what is the question. And where the centrists fall, those who think that this liberty of expression is generally compatible with personal religious beliefs, is another question.

Suffice it to say that this is an enormous event in French history.

the murder of the teacher is grotesque and offensive. do you think it will be socially/politically significant than other recent terrorist events?

it seemed to me one reason it might be more potent is because it’s to do with the secular teaching principles.

this meant one thing i was surprised about reading the description of what took place in the class was that the teacher said that muslim students (13-year olds) could leave before he showed the picture to avoid causing offence. i think my immediate, cautious, reaction was to question whether it could have been approached in a way that didn’t have to mean students might want to leave the room.

Yes, I think it will be more politically/socially significant than other recent terrorist attacks here, because it targets both French secularism (laïcité) and education, and the relation between the two. These are revolutionary topics, they're at the heart of the Republic.

My wife is quite shook. Her father, now retired, taught histoire-géo for many years at the collège level.

Quebec media outlets are strongly focused on the event, and it's worth noting that 'laïcité' is also highly valued here. A quick peek at Canadian newspapers reveals little to no coverage at all.

That approach of telling Muslim children they could leave the room was so ham-fisted and divisive, even if you wouldn't expect the terrible outcome that happened - some kind of shit storm was guaranteed.

so that's an extremely fucked up thing to say in context

I was making a very serious point here, if you want say that is fucked up I don't really care tbh. You are currently the most tedious cunt on here and I've got zero respect for you.

“some kind of shit storm” yep I guess so

good thinking calz, nobody else had considered that aspect of the story

you know very well I didn't mean some kind of deadly violence by "shitstorm" and I meant just controversy or cultural offence. but yeah go fuck yourself as well tbf- you are just as full of shit.

was recently reading a book about The Raj that talked about the differences between French and British colonialilism. The French made more of an effort to asimilate their "subjects" into some sense of extended nationhood than the Brits. The shrunken dying remains of both these empires have problems it seems, yes. I won't take anything back I have posted on this thread, especially at the behest of a military flag fucker, serial apologist of US imperialism.

Keep it up, tough guy, you’ve got us all dead to rights

You’re literally the guy in the “if you run into assholes all day...” trope.

I'm only talking to you here, so less of the "all". And as a mod it is in quite bad taste and poor form to take your personal beefs onto a thread like this.

I have nothing personal against you. The way you consistently call other posters cunts with almost no provocation is not a personal beef.

I should say “my problem with the way you call other posters etc etc”

next some clueless showboating prick want's to call me "fucked up" I won't it as a provocataion, if i haven't had a few drinks. But if I do - well it's all part of the game i'm afraid!

I'm very calm most of the time. But if I feel like I'm being wronged/misrepresented by some other prick I will stick up for myself.

You can stick up for yourself without calling people names and cursing them out all the time. It’s a thing.

I mean I absolutely do the same shit sometimes, I’m not innocent here. But blasting Simon as a “tedious cunt” right out the gate seemed a bit much, he was just taking issue with your phrasing.

the manner in which you have just derailed this thread over personal beefs (and yes I am at fault myself as a mere fucked up poster as well). If I was a mod I would resign in discgrace. You fight fire with gasoline. If someone wants to criticise another poster in a quite arsey + lame fashion and not except some lively pushback on a saturday night, then fuck this board and it's shitty moderators tbh.

this is about France right now, right? Euler, hope things are ok where you are

fwiw folks, if you feel you’re being detoured from the topic at hand when people are actually dying, by all means take it to another thread

as for the issue of allowing children who did not want their religious beliefs denied, allowing them to leave the room — this reminds me of a high school spanish language teacher who was very religious who showed us a movie that implied off-screen sex was going on, who thought it was a good film but decided not to continue it the next day because of a conflict of beliefs

any kids who didn’t want to watch for religious reasons likely already got the point. they’re very aware of what those cartoons entail, because it’s a part of being a muslim in france. I could see where it could be interpreted as “bully these students because they’re the bad muslims” but the articles make clear that was not the framing

I mean, ffs, there were kids whose parents opted out from the simplest sexual education when I was young and I have no idea who wasn’t in those class sessions, because who cares? This is just how parental and social controls in classes flush out, and it’s always awkward and there is no easy way to present material and start conversation without a minority opting out

I can’t remember anyone opting out from sex ed at my high school, including the more evangelical types.

thanks mh. yeah, things are ok where I am. The attack was in a suburb of the city, whereas we live in the city proper. The suburbs are a different story, because while the government officially requires integration, in practice minorities are allowed to form their own subcommunities. Islamic immigrants are numerically the most important of these. In the case of the present murderer, a Chechen of a Muslim family, his mother was rarely seen outside the home, and was veiled when seen. The veil is a key issue in French life today, because it seems to contradict the liberty of women. In the clash between religious liberty and women's liberty, I think the Republic stands and will continue to stand more with women than with religious people. For instance, Macron banned homeschooling last week, in order to prevent Islamic separatists from continuing to have their children avoid French public school "indoctrination", but also to make sure that women are not forced to stay home to attend to their children. It does not surprise me that most of the discussion I've been involved in over the last few days has been with mothers who want to make sure that nothing like this happens again.

There are other fault lines exposed. One of the 10 people who is currently being held by the state in connection with the murder is a man, Abdelhakim Sefrioui, who has run a pro-Palestinian organization for some time (his organization is named after one of the founders of Hamas who was murdered by the Israeli military). Sefrioui is active in anti-Islamophobia and in anti-Semitism. He produced a video this week decrying the teacher who was murdered, a video that was widely distributed. The investigators are trying to determine if the murder was inspired by the video.

Paywall warning, but this is a good summary (in French) of the timeline leading up to the murder:

https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2020/10/18/attentat-de-conflans-comment-un-incident-mineur-est-devenu-hors-de-controle_6056460_3224.html

Yes, that's a terrific article.

Tbh, the way that Islam and its adherents are racialized in the West makes any attempt by the West to curb Islam a racial attack, IMHO, even if it isn't meant to be.

And I write that as someone who both finds religiosity more than a little unpalatable AND has worked at an Islamic burial ground, digging graves and helping with services.

Is the exercise of the right to liberty of expression against a religion, an attempt to curb that religion, in your view?

prevent Islamic separatists from continuing to have their children avoid French public school "indoctrination"

Teaching the equality of women and the political beliefs of the Enlightenment as social norms is a form of indoctrination. Having grown up in a society that accepted these norms, I find them to be beneficial doctrines.

It is a thorny problem to settle the question of how much of a foreign culture and its norms immigrants are able to retain, when those norms contradict the norms of the host society. There is an inherent friction there that cannot be remedied, but only managed to some degree. Ghettoizing immigrant cultures has been one traditional answer to this problem, but it brings a raft of new problems with it. Assimilation is the other obvious path, but not all immigrant communities can accept assimilation, because it entails the loss of their core identity and is as unthinkable as self-mutilation or suicide.

Good luck, France.