Crazies

[fpb]

This is the second time in 24 hours that would-be terrorists try to kill considerable numbers of British civilians. And do not think I am not taking it seriously. It is not nice to know that people who live in our community want us dead. But it is comforting to reflect that, as far as realization goes, and in spite of what seems to have been a careful study of mass murder methods, the actual work in both cases seems to have been strictly Amateur Hour. The IRA managed to make trouble for Britain for decades because they were a group of experienced and trained killers. These gentlemen just seem to decide to go on a murder spree one day when they feel particularly pissed off. As long as they remain so amateurish, they will go on making maximum effort for minimum result.

Comments

[rfachir.livejournal.com]

Be careful. Fools kill people lots smarter than them all the time.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Well, the harder fools try, the worse they become. Believe me, I do not underrate the scum. I know terrorism from way back, and there is nothing much that can be done to stop it except hope that the police and secret services are up to the job.

P.S.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the implicit concern.

[patchworkmind.livejournal.com]

I was startled and concerned when I saw the reports coming in yesterday morning on BBC World News.

Amateur Hour. Ugh. It's the amateurs that the experienced in law enforcement, as brilliant a job as they've done in the past, have a tendency to miss. Thank goodness the "average Joe/Jane" who called in the suspect car called. Otherwise who knows what kind of day it would have been. I pray for more such "average" people.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

It wasn't quite an average Joe/Jane who discovered the first car in Haymarket, central London - it was sharp-eyed ambulance workers coming back from an incident. Not police, true, but trained to use their eyes. And as for the rest - the second car was actually towed away for being illegally parked! I should imagine that when the parking attendants realized what they had towed away, they probably fainted dead away. As for Glasgow, it was the terrorists themselves who simply bungled their attempt to drive a burning van into the airport lobby - it crashed into the entrance, and they had to try and flee in spite of burns and injuries. There, the ordinary public did take a hand: at least one of the two was taken down by angry civilians, and I hope they gave him a good kicking before handing him over to the police.

[patchworkmind.livejournal.com]

I really hate hearing this kind of dreadful news about a place that ties as one of my two favorite island nations on the planet.

The other, of course, is Malta.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

So, perhaps I should not tell you that we have been having the worst floods in decades and that half of Yorkshire and the Midlands are under water?

[patchworkmind.livejournal.com]

I've been hearing about it already. : /

[bufo-viridis.livejournal.com]

I should imagine that when the parking attendants realized what they had towed away, they probably fainted dead away.
Just like the guys in this story :)

[dirigibletrance.livejournal.com]

I worry, though, because Britain *does* have such a large segment of militant-minded Muslims, living right in London. I just watched some video on CNN today of a muslim street-preacher who says that he doesn't believe in democracy, and that he wants Britain to adopt Sharia law.

Why is this guy allowed to continue to walk the streets? Why hasn't he been arrested? He's openly advocating the replacement of the British government with a foreign theocracy, one that would not represent the will or wishes of the British people.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Mostly because nobody takes him seriously. Anyone is free to demand any change to the Constitution they like, but if, by a very generous interpretation, your possible supporters are less than a million out of sixty, and that million so divided that most of them would be just as happy killing each other as killing infidels, you do not stand much of a chance politically. That does not mean that directly criminal activities will not be treated as the threat they are. But the only way to change a government in Britain is by winning a majority in Parliament - and the chances of Muslm hate preachers doing that are two, slim and fat.

[avus.livejournal.com]

So relieved whenever such things fail, though sad they're performed in the first place. Paths away from hate are so hard to find. I see that almost every day in my office. It's hardest & most worrisome to see that in children.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Especially when hatred is a corporate phenomenon with a religious dimension, which members of certain communities work hard at reinforcing. But all hope is not lost. One reason why I value kikei so much - one of many, I underline - is that she is living demonstration that a devout Muslim can be a peaceful, constructive, hard-working and open-minded member of society with no interest whatever in violence.

[avus.livejournal.com]

I would be suprised were any religion, any genuine manifestation of our spiritual dimension, our inborn yearning for God, able to become either only corporate-ized or only hateful. I'd like to think, and in my work, sometimes I can actually find something more than that. Which is not to say that, on finding it, I'm necessarily successful at nurturing it. But finding it is still a step, and an important one. ANd I would never think that somehow I had either sole responsibility or even ability to grow this.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I wish I agreed. Remember, C.S.Lewis pointed out in The Screwtape Letters that it is just the highest features of human life and spirit which can, when corrupted, produce the worst sins.

[avus.livejournal.com]

Ah, dear fpb, I believe that you, and Lewis, are both right & not right. (It's been years since I've read The Screwtape Letters.) That I can find that inborn yearning doesn't mean that I could not also find that to which you refer, its corruption.

(By the way, TS Eliot, in "Murder in the Cathedral", points to this in the last of temptation sequence of St. Thomas. As I recall, St. Thomas then says,

"The last is then the greatest treason,
To do the right thing for the wrong reason."

Or something like that. But even a casual & primitive knowledge of history, or one's local church, can produce that understanding.

And yet without that which, assuredly, can become perverted, something not only divine, but fundamentally human & humane is even farther away.

So perhaps we don't disagree entirely. And I suspect we certainly agree that, as part of our earthly duties, to find and, such as we're able, to nourish that is a fundamental healing we owe others & ourselves.

Wishing you all good things,

avus

[goreism.livejournal.com]

Brendan McFarlane they may not be, but still, stay safe.

I read an article some time ago, I think in the New Yorker, that suggested that a surprising number of would-be terrorists are amazingly incompetent. It mentioned two young European men who attempted to join a local al-Qaida cell, were rebuffed, went to Afghanistan to fight the Americans, and were shot dead in the first two weeks.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

All terrorists start out like that, because they have learned to hate and fight from books and not from real life. Most terrorists - the IRA being an exception - are middle-class kids grown in safe, peaceful homes. The first generation of the Italian Red Brigades were hilariously incompetent: they kitted themselves out with antique and useless Winchester rifles because they had read of them in the Western comics they devoured as children. It was not till the PLO started training them by the hundreds in their own camps - the Soviet mediation in this is not demonstrated, but is certain - that they became fearsome.