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Author Topic: Terrorists Attacks in India  (Read 7325 times)

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Geoff

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Re: Terrorists Attacks in India
« Reply #20 on: December 01, 2008, 04:11:16 AM »

Quote from: 59
The recession deepened a bit after 9/11 but it was not as deep as had been predicted in the late 1990s.  


Quite true, I think, but the government was afraid that people were about to dramatically cut back on spending after the Muslim terrorist attacks. Bush didn't quite say "go shopping," either; he said, "We cannot let the terrorists achieve the objective of frightening our nation to the point where we don't conduct business, where people don't shop." As usual, the full substance of what he said was eroded to a one-second sound bite for partisan advantage. (See here.)

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Geoff

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Re: Terrorists Attacks in India
« Reply #21 on: December 01, 2008, 04:19:47 AM »

Quote
I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

...

I cannot conceive of a personal God who would directly influence the actions of individuals, or would directly sit in judgment on creatures of his own creation.

I feel like standing up and applauding both these statements.  :)
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Sondra

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Re: Terrorists Attacks in India
« Reply #22 on: December 01, 2008, 04:51:15 AM »

Read them in context here starting at about page 386. It's interesting stuff. Wonder what he would make of the world today. Not that it's all that different from his time really.

http://books.google.com/books?id=dJMpQagbz_gC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Einstein++his+life+and+universe#PPA386,M1

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Hello Goodbye

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Re: Terrorists Attacks in India
« Reply #23 on: December 01, 2008, 06:16:48 AM »

Quote from: 1161

Quite true, I think, but the government was afraid that people were about to dramatically cut back on spending after the Muslim terrorist attacks. Bush didn't quite say "go shopping," either; he said, "We cannot let the terrorists achieve the objective of frightening our nation to the point where we don't conduct business, where people don't shop." As usual, the full substance of what he said was eroded to a one-second sound bite for partisan advantage. (See here.)


Thank you for linking to that article, Geoff.  I agree with your summation; politics tends to blur past events and distort the meaning of what was said on record.  It's too bad that Senator Clinton chose the events and aftermath of the 9/11 attacks to, in part, base her criticism of the opposing political party for the benefit of her own campaign.  Many of us in the New York area objected to that tactic.  We all needed to feel secure after the attacks.  I feel the government did much to insure our safety.  I certainly don't want to stir up a debate over Homeland Security on this Beatles forum, but I'll simply say that I'm happy there have been no other attacks here since that fateful day.

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DaveRam

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Re: Terrorists Attacks in India
« Reply #24 on: December 01, 2008, 09:30:43 AM »

The problem with fighting this so called War On Terror , is we have been doing it wrong from the begining .
The terrorists are using quite low-tech gorilla tactics against us .
What we need to focus on is good intellegence , each time one of these attacks happen intellegence seems to have failed .
We need Spies everywhere from your career spy to the little old lady walking her dog .
I also think we need to fight this like "The Cold War " in that we never really knew what was happening in that war , i don't care if people are taken out in the dead of night by our security services , play the buggers at their own game go deep undercover and root them out and kill them , before they kill us .
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alexis

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Re: Terrorists Attacks in India
« Reply #25 on: December 01, 2008, 03:22:15 PM »

Quote from: 971
The problem with fighting this so called War On Terror , is we have been doing it wrong from the begining .
The terrorists are using quite low-tech gorilla tactics against us .
What we need to focus on is good intellegence , each time one of these attacks happen intellegence seems to have failed .
We need Spies everywhere from your career spy to the little old lady walking her dog .
I also think we need to fight this like "The Cold War " in that we never really knew what was happening in that war , i don't care if people are taken out in the dead of night by our security services , play the buggers at their own game go deep undercover and root them out and kill them , before they kill us .

I hear what you are saying, DaveRam, but we have to be very careful when we wish for things like this. Yes, in the perfect world, only the bad guys would be taken out in the dead of night. And if YOU were in charge of everything, then no one would come take you or your family by mistake.

But what about me? Mistakes get made, the wrong people get taken away and "disappeared" ... or worse, that process is used as a tool to settle political scores and the like. And before we know it, we are like Argentina, where a whole generation was disappeared, and the country is scarred for another generation more.

If for no reason other than no process is perfect, and because it is not acceptable for innocent people to be made to disappear, it's so important that habeus corpus be part of the legal code of any civilized society.

The argument has been made that if we start doing away with underpinnings of civilization to fight terrorism, then we have already lost that war. I think there is a lot to be said for that.

Just my 2c!
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DaveRam

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Re: Terrorists Attacks in India
« Reply #26 on: December 01, 2008, 04:23:46 PM »

I understand what your saying alexis about the rule of law , and of course such a strategy of bumping people off would need safe guards .
We killed an innocent man in the wake of the London bombings , due in part to a breakdown of intelligence from our security services , so i know you need to be very careful when you act .
But i believe you have to put the fear into these people , they need to feel like they are been watched and followed i want them to be utterly paranoid .
And good intelligence is what is needed , we should have people everywhere spying on them .
these people use appartments and house's in our community , we should be paying neighbours to spy on people .
My mum would do it , she does'nt miss a trick in their street .










(wink1)
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Kevin

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Re: Terrorists Attacks in India
« Reply #27 on: December 03, 2008, 11:03:46 AM »

Quote from: 1161

The familiar chant of Muslim fundamentalists everywhere: you can hear it in Asia, northern Africa, southern Europe and anywhere else a Muslim population has to co-exist with the infidel.

Woh. Don't you find it a bit easy to blame this on religious fundamentalists, as if this was the work of deranged lunatics?
The Mumbai terrorists were fighting to end what they see as India's illegal occupation of Kashmir. UK and US are attacked for our foreign policy (invading, occupying and looting middle eastern counties while providing unflinching, uncriticical support for Israel, regardless of how many dozens of UN resolutions it ignores.)
Surely these issues are political, not religious. In the seventies these people would have gatherred under the banner of communism. Black September and the PLO weren't Muslim fundamentalists.
I of course don't agree with their methods, but would point out that the US and the UK had no problems with slaughtering hundreds of thousands of civilians in WW2 in order to achieve a political/military objective. I don't remember anyone branding the IRA as Christian Fundamentalists.
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alexis

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Re: Terrorists Attacks in India
« Reply #28 on: December 03, 2008, 03:33:29 PM »

Quote from: 185

Woh. Don't you find it a bit easy to blame this on religious fundamentalists, as if this was the work of deranged lunatics?
The Mumbai terrorists were fighting to end what they see as India's illegal occupation of Kashmir. UK and US are attacked for our foreign policy (invading, occupying and looting middle eastern counties while providing unflinching, uncriticical support for Israel, regardless of how many dozens of UN resolutions it ignores.)
Surely these issues are political, not religious. In the seventies these people would have gatherred under the banner of communism. Black September and the PLO weren't Muslim fundamentalists.
I of course don't agree with their methods, but would point out that the US and the UK had no problems with slaughtering hundreds of thousands of civilians in WW2 in order to achieve a political/military objective. I don't remember anyone branding the IRA as Christian Fundamentalists.

This goes back to what I said a bit earlier here, the violence and horror will persist as long as certain NON-religious problems remain. I agree with what I think you are saying Kevin, the religious aspect of all this is just the latest convenient war banner for the decade's violence. for In my mind, these political and territorial "red lines" would disappear with education and economic opportunity. I would wager that if all these terrrorists had an option to make a decent living, support their family, and have a reasonable hope that their kids would have even a better life than they do, they would not only stop bombing, they would gladly work WITH the very people they're trying to kill now.

Just my 2c. Bucking for a position in the Obama administration. But do these ideas make me a flaming liberal, or an Adam Smith capitalist hard core conservative?
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Geoff

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Re: Terrorists Attacks in India
« Reply #29 on: December 04, 2008, 11:12:37 AM »

Quote from: 185

Woh. Don't you find it a bit easy to blame this on religious fundamentalists, as if this was the work of deranged lunatics?

Muslim fundamentalism is a reaction to the whole secular, empirical, rational mode of post-Enlightenment thinking and manner of conceiving the world. A similar phenomenon has occurred among some of our own Christians and interestingly at about the same time. There are  all sorts of political and economic components depending on who you're talking about, but I think the tap root is here.

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Kevin

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Re: Terrorists Attacks in India
« Reply #30 on: December 04, 2008, 11:45:38 AM »

Quote from: 1161

Muslim fundamentalism is a reaction to the whole secular, empirical, rational mode of post-Enlightenment thinking and manner of conceiving the world.

Yeah...well...I was going to say that next. Obviously.   :)
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DaveRam

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Re: Terrorists Attacks in India
« Reply #31 on: December 04, 2008, 02:20:57 PM »

Quote from: 1161

Muslim fundamentalism is a reaction to the whole secular, empirical, rational mode of post-Enlightenment thinking and manner of conceiving the world. A similar phenomenon has occurred among some of our own Christians and interestingly at about the same time. There are  all sorts of political and economic components depending on who you're talking about, but I think the tap root is here.


Geoff do you mean it's a reaction to secularism ?
I read this post and my two brain cells gave up lol , not sure i understand what you have said , but it sounds great
(tongue6)
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Geoff

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Re: Terrorists Attacks in India
« Reply #32 on: December 04, 2008, 04:08:24 PM »

^  ;D

Sorry guys, that was a huge mouthful (and I was trying to stuff a bagel into mine at the time), but I couldn't think of another way of saying it which wouldn't have required about 10,000 words of explanation that I had no intention of typing and which would have been too boring to read anyway.
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alexis

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Re: Terrorists Attacks in India
« Reply #33 on: December 04, 2008, 08:22:48 PM »

Quote from: 1161

Muslim fundamentalism is a reaction to the whole secular, empirical, rational mode of post-Enlightenment thinking and manner of conceiving the world. A similar phenomenon has occurred among some of our own Christians and interestingly at about the same time. There are  all sorts of political and economic components depending on who you're talking about, but I think the tap root is here.


Though undoubtedly true to a degree, I still can't help but feel the religious aspect is just the most convenient way for these frustrated young people to express a deeper rage actually based on the knowledge and feeling that civilization is moving on - and they and their way of life are being left behind to rot. It's no coincidence that these people are being recruited from among the poorest and economically least developed parts of the world. Imagine being a young male in a West Bank camp - turning on the TV or the internet and seeing what incredible opportunity is available to apparently everyone but you and people like you, realizing that your future is likely to be even worse than your father's who cannot get a meaningful job and cannot support his family. The life of a terrorist martyr really doesn't sound so bad compared to the alternatives, one might imagine.

 I'd guess that enrollment in Madrassas and terrorist schools would drop by more than half if, in order to enroll, each of those young men had to leave behind 3 square meals a day, a chance to make a decent living, and a reasonable hope that their kids' lives would be better than their own. It just seems like it would be harder to maintain a high degree of outrage with a full belly and hope for the future.

So though I agree with your description of fundamentalism on the face of it being a reaction of running away from secular/empirical/rational/post-enlightenment thinking, I have a sneaking suspicion that these potential terrorists' embrace of this fundamentalism would loosen up quite a bit if they were actually given a chance to sit at the table with the rest of civilization. Given this, I think there is hope that this horror can end - not by trying to bomb them away, but by using the same money to educate them and help them develop and thrive.

Just my 2c!
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DaveRam

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Re: Terrorists Attacks in India
« Reply #34 on: December 05, 2008, 12:30:05 AM »

The Leeds suicide bombers and the Glasgow airport bombers were not poor they were professional people?
I can see that other's are though , so it's wrong to say it's just about poor life chances .
Lots of people live in poverty and would never dream of killing other's in this way .
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Geoff

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Re: Terrorists Attacks in India
« Reply #35 on: December 06, 2008, 01:13:16 PM »

Quote from: 971
The Leeds suicide bombers and the Glasgow airport bombers were not poor they were professional people?

Many of the Islamist movement's leaders are or were middle class or better. Sayyid Qutb, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and most obviously Osama bin Laden were not poor men leading a class revolt. In fact, they resemble Puritans more than anything else.
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alexis

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Re: Terrorists Attacks in India
« Reply #36 on: December 08, 2008, 04:26:40 PM »

Yes, but I think if the poor foot soldiers had a chance to do other meaningful things in their lives besides signing up for martyr duty, these middle or upper class revolutionaries would not have as much of a movement to lead. As I said above, it's not like all terrorism would disappear, I think the problem would ultimately become more of a low level one, rather than a real threat to our way of life.

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Kevin

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Re: Terrorists Attacks in India
« Reply #37 on: December 09, 2008, 10:34:11 AM »

I too think it's a bit of a myth that we're up against brainwashed, uneducated poor folk. That is definately not the experience here in Britain, but does assist us in convincing ourselves that we hold no blame in all of this.
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alexis

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Re: Terrorists Attacks in India
« Reply #38 on: December 09, 2008, 02:36:13 PM »

Quote from: 185
I too think it's a bit of a myth that we're up against brainwashed, uneducated poor folk. That is definately not the experience here in Britain, but does assist us in convincing ourselves that we hold no blame in all of this.

Well, you may be right in the first part of your post, I suppose we'll learn more as time goes by ...

What are you thinking about with your 2nd part ... where do you think the blame needs to be placed?
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Kevin

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Re: Terrorists Attacks in India
« Reply #39 on: December 29, 2008, 11:04:30 AM »

Quote from: 568

Well, you may be right in the first part of your post, I suppose we'll learn more as time goes by ...

What are you thinking about with your 2nd part ... where do you think the blame needs to be placed?

I just think the world is never that simple that it can be divided into "right" and "wrong." Greater minds than my own debate this still.
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