Sri Lanka bombs
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It's fair to say the world has a severe problem with radical Islam that isn't going away any time soon. This attack is on a massive scale but there's been a lot of serious attacks on churches recently. Fuck being a Christian if you don't live in the west. I don't know what the answer is, but I do know the reluctance of so many people to even critique Islam is not helping. I don't know how we can effect any meaningful reformation without an open dialogue about the problems with the religion in its current state.
I see so much obfuscation from world leaders when it comes to the attackers motivations, and I don't really understand why. The facts actually help reduce anti-Muslim bigotry as we can narrow in on the branches of Islam (E.G. Wahabbi/Salafi) that produce terrorists like this. It's incredibly frustrating.
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I would be interested to know the exact details of this initiative.
This quote from Adern seems somewhat disingenuous: "The March 15 terrorist attacks saw social media used in an unprecedented way as a tool to promote an act of terrorism and hate"
Islamic terrorists have been using social media like this for years and years, spreading their message across all platforms and sharing countless videos of beheadings etc. Granted this was live streamed, but there have been many live streams like it before even if they didn't specifically utilise Facebooks live streaming service.
One of the Sri Lanka attackers had a YouTube channel where he espoused his medieval views unchecked, while other people like Tommy Robinson have been banned from everything. Does this initiative seek to address that? Will Islamic hate preachers be banned as well? Given the reference to March 15 while ignoring the weekly Islamic terrorist attacks I have my doubts.
This makes me uncomfortable - governments cannot be trusted with too much power, especially when it comes to speech. This could easily be used as a tool to shut down political opponents rather than actually doing anything about terrorism.
As always the devil will be in the details.
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A recent example of Islamic terrorists sharing pictures and videos all over social media. This is par for the course.
A graphic video purportedly showing Ms Jespersen's throat being slit, which was viewed this morning by news.com.au, is still being widely shared on numerous social media platforms despite pleas for the footage to be removed.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=12181174
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Also if you're looking for actual reasons for the attack, not the "it's a retaliation to Christchurch" crap (as if this was just a couple of weeks worth of planning) then you don't need to go any further than Saudi Arabian organisations funding Mosques around the world promoting their medieval 6th century Wahabbi interpretation of the Koran & Haddith. Exactly the kind of organisation the Christchurch Mosque rejected a few years back.
Wahabbi Islam has been growing in Sri Lanka for a while, hence groups like National Thowheed Jamath forming.
We can't allow organisations like that to fund and promote a death cult in our countries and then scratch our heads when an attack happens.
Saudi Arabia is an absolute cancer on the world. The sooner Elon moves us away from oil the better.
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@No-Quarter Interesting on the topic of Saudi and stopping terrorism, they aren't exactly blind to the cause in their country.
Of course its very easy to mix up terrorism and anti-government protest, nothing like a crucifixion at easter
I have less than zero faith in the dream-team of Ardern and Macron in reducing terrorism. Can almost guarantee that they will come up with something that sounds nice and at best has zero effect but at worse strips the liberty of law abiding citizens and increases the risk of terrorism.
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@Rembrandt haha, the Saudi government spying on its own citizens, what a surprise.
The Salafi version of Sunni Islam is the official version of Islam in Saudi Arabia. That's the death cult that leads to by far the most terrorism among a host of other human rights abuses.
So you'll forgive me if I don't believe their government for a second when they talk about stopping the spread of "radical ideas".
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@No-Quarter said in Sri Lanka bombs:
@Rembrandt haha, the Saudi government spying on its own citizens, what a surprise.
The Salafi version of Sunni Islam is the official version of Islam in Saudi Arabia. That's the death cult that leads to by far the most terrorism among a host of other human rights abuses.
So you'll forgive me if I don't believe their government for a second when they talk about stopping the spread of "radical ideas".
You can't trust the Saudis or the Qataris. Odd behaviour for a supposed US ally
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@canefan said in Sri Lanka bombs:
You can't trust the Saudis or the Qataris. Odd behaviour for a supposed US ally
Oil reserves with flags.
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This is a good article, he hits the nail on the head when he talks about people weighing in hard on issues they know the social justice left won't attack them on (another recent example is the Folau stuff), yet are mostly silent when it comes to talking about the serious problem of Islamic terrorism.
Last week, I wrote about the West’s unerring capacity for self-immolation. Forgive me for returning to the subject, but last weekend’s massacre in Sri Lanka has underscored how self-destructive our elites can be.
When 250 people were killed by suicide bombers, many of them as they attended Easter Sunday services, it was a harrowing reminder of the intensifying persecution of Christians around the world. The slaughter followed similar assaults in Nigeria, Egypt, Syria, Indonesia and a dozen other countries in the past year alone. According to a recent Pew Research study, Christians are the most widely harassed faithful on Earth. They were attacked for their religion in 144 countries in 2016, more than Muslims, Jews or any other group.
So you would think that the latest horror might induce the official Christian leadership to speak out in defense of their people. John Sentamu, the archbishop of York—the second-highest-ranking cleric in the Anglican communion—had an opportunity. Interviewed on the BBC on Monday, he was asked if this was now a moment to plant a flag for Christians who find themselves under siege.
The archbishop whiffed. “Violence of any sort, to any community, any group, is totally unacceptable. The flag I want to fly is a flag of peace,” he said. Along with the Catholic cardinal of Colombo, he wanted to “ask Christians to refrain from taking any retributory steps against their Muslim brothers.”
One of the most prominent pastors in the world, faced with the scattering of his flock by a pack of murderous wolves, manages to avoid blaming the perpetrators for the carnage and actually worries aloud that the problem might actually be the Christians. Quite a feat after 300 or so of your coreligionists have been blown to bits by supporters of a fanatical religious ideology. Jesus wept, as the Bible tells us.
Why does this keep happening? To be fair, part of the explanation is that this is the very essence of the Christian message: Turn the other cheek. Find the beam in our own eye before pointing to the mote in others. As a creed for individual living, it is imperfectible. But for an entire community under attack, it’s a recipe for self-extinction.
Christian leaders in the West are afraid to upset the politically correct crowd who control the media.
According to another Anglican bishop, Philip Mountstephen of Truro, who is leading a church inquiry into the rising persecution of Christians, the reason for the widespread reluctance among leaders—religious and secular—to take the continuing war against Christians seriously is a lingering sense of historical responsibility. “There is a lot of postcolonial guilt around a residual sense that the Christian faith is an expression of white Western privilege,” he told the Times of London.
This would be absurd even if the people who were being murdered in their hundreds each year were indeed wealthy white Christians in stately homes and colonial mansions. Yet, as the bishop went on to point out, the vast majority of Christians suffering today aren’t white wealthy Westerners. Most are from the relatively poor global South: Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America. To their already unsupportable lot of grinding poverty, they must add the risk of being assaulted by governments, religious vigilantes, gangs and others.
To compound their plight, it seems many Christian leaders in the West are so afraid to upset the politically correct crowd who control the media and cultural establishment that they won’t even speak out. These clerics often find it more congenial to weigh in forcefully on other issues of pressing concern, where they know they’re in no danger of losing invitations for TV interviews and fancy premieres.
I would respectfully suggest to the bishops of the Anglican persuasion—and quite a few of their Catholic brethren too—that however serious and acute you might think the threat of climate change or workplace discrimination, the larger and more immediate threat to Christians in many parts of the world is that they might not get through their next church service without someone dispatching them to eternity to shouts of “Allahu akbar.”
Addressing the rising threat of persecution will require concerted and complex action, policies enacted by governments to isolate and pursue the murderers and those who abet them, and direct support of threatened communities. None of that will be easy. But surely it must start with a willingness by church leaders to call the threat what it is.
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@Rembrandt I'm all for freedom of expression, but the fact is it is mainly the Salafis that mandate the burqa or niqab so it is a good indicator of fundamental Islam. The ban is really just attacking a symptom rather than the cause though.