Terrible, terrible news mate. Most frightening is that this was not the act of a lone madman, but clearly a number of parallel attacks planned and carried out with ruthless precision. How many more like-minded assassins have swarmed into Europe over the summer?
It's a horrible thing to say Oddy, but this probably will not be last horrific attack on Europe soil.
It's early of course, but I read that one witness said the arseholes were railing against France's involvement in Syria. Another gent said he saw one of the shooters get into a car to flee, maybe a planned getaway. This is too big to be just down to those who took a personal hand in these crimes.
Government is saying all 8 are dead, but accounts say that the 2 from La Belle Equipe jumped back into their car and drove toward Charonne station. Did they detonate themselves? Hope so.
Like you Cyc, I don't really know where to begin. Tragic events and I cannot begin to imagine how their families must feel. 2015 and we still have these utter lunatics disrupting the peaceful amongst us. It's hard to pass any other comments without knowing the full story. I just hope there are no more being planned but this could literally be anywhere. Hopefully not.
Best thing we can do oddy is continue as normal and show these people that we are not scared Horrible events, my prayers go out to all those that have lost loved ones
I know what you mean mate, but I couldn't be arsed to go before this happened so I'll be staying home anyway
As an old bastard, I often look for an excuse to get out of stuff the wife has planned for us Oddy. They say we get wiser as we age, personally, I think it's more a case of a better developed sense of rat cunning.
Watching the BBC News at Ten on Friday evening, this was “breaking news”, with their correspondent in Paris only able to offer garbled information as the French were rushing around like headless chickens. I switched over to Newsnight by which point the BBC had managed to drag in three numbskulls to form a panel speculating on what was going on as the patchy information was being scrambled into some sort of news report. I switched to the BBC News channel and they were playing the same pieces of footage over and over in a loop and speaking to two correspondents in Paris. They then had a News special programme on BBC2 for anybody that could not find the News channel. Now that it is the morning after and some of the facts have been established, it seems that the body count is 127 dead, 180 injured (many seriously) and that eight jihadists died, seven of them by suicide bombs. It should be no surprise that this has happened in France. There is quite a large immigrant community in France, mostly from former French colonies in Africa. Social integration is virtually non-existent as the immigrants occupy the banlieue ghettos on the outskirts of Paris and Marseille. Most of the immigrants work at the lower end of the societal scale and have limited prospects. Schengen means that it is easy to smuggle weapons into the country and clearly this group were well armed and trained for what looks like a well planned attack targeting a weekend when there was a large sporting event at Stade de France and selecting some obvious populated targets (Friday night concert at Theatre, restaurants). There will be some uncomfortable meetings going on in Germany as they may now realise that their sudden influx of immigrants are not all refugees and economic migrants, although their lack of involvement in military action in the Middle East does not make them such an obvious ISIS target yet. For the sake of idle speculation, I expect that the French will be bombing ISIS in Syria before the weekend is out.
So very true, Oddy.** Ghastly news from Paris, absolutely terrible. We, and all allies of France, are now at war with these terrorists, as President Hollande rightly stated. If we are not at war, then what goddamn situation are we in then? ** "Syrian passport found on attacker" Posted at12:02 GMT today - Breaking News BBC: A Syrian passport has been found on the body of one of the attackers, AP reports, citing police sources. French TV is carrying the same line, but it has not been independently verified by the BBC. ** "More on Bavaria arrests" Posted at 12:12 GMT today - BBC: Bavaria's state premier Horst Seehofer has said that there is "reason to believe" that a man arrested last week with several weapons in southern Germany is linked to the attacks in Paris. "There is reason to believe that this is possibly linked" to the attacks, Mr Seehofer told a party conference. Police made the arrest on 5 November during a routine check on a motorway and said they found "many machine guns, revolvers and explosives" in the suspect's vehicle
The very notion that western powers think this is a "war" that they can win is ludicrous. For all the rhetoric coming from Mr Hollande, this war is Vietnam multiplied by a 1000. The enemy isn't even visible, except for a few fleeting moments where they are seen and mass carnage ensues. The world needs to look at the root cause of this fundamentalism and eradicate it there. Stability and growing prosperity in countries lie Syria, Iraq, Pakistan would be a great start but seems a million miles away. Not to mention Africa
Could not have put it any better Oddy. The root cause of this fundamentalism is a hybrid between a real lack of education, religious belief instilled from birth, and jealousy, misinterpretation and defamation of the west. All 3 are interlinked as one leads to the other. Educated- and that does not mean university- people who have enough about them to realise right from wrong, the fact that of the 4200 religions in the world, they realise that at best only 1 can be right and even that seems unlikely I the face of pure scientific basis, and therefore have moved on from religious combats of pre-1700. And that's the difference here and what you are up against. Integrating the East with the west is difficult without a time machine because one is so much further forward in its beliefs and understanding than the other. Yet we are afraid to acknowledge it. But you have people here so ingrained in their religious beliefs forced upon them from birth that they can't see the the wood from the trees. Ruled by something we can never prove. Imagine if we replaced the word religion with 'coping strategy'. So that we could all accept and exchange the ideas that make us feel better about life after death, and celebrate the coping with that fear, rather than being divided by it. Imagine if you are a suicide bomber and then the promises in the eternal world are false- how much of a knob are you gonna feel? That's the reality of it. Sounds stupid doesn't it, but it really is that simple a summary. It's easy for people like us to see it that way because we have moved on from having our lives dicated by religion, but we are a million miles away from a common ground.
[Q UOTE="QuarterMoonII, post: 8586775, member: 1009250"]Watching the BBC News at Ten on Friday evening, this was “breaking news”, with their correspondent in Paris only able to offer garbled information as the French were rushing around like headless chickens. I switched over to Newsnight by which point the BBC had managed to drag in three numbskulls to form a panel speculating on what was going on as the patchy information was being scrambled into some sort of news report. I switched to the BBC News channel and they were playing the same pieces of footage over and over in a loop and speaking to two correspondents in Paris. They then had a News special programme on BBC2 for anybody that could not find the News channel. Now that it is the morning after and some of the facts have been established, it seems that the body count is 127 dead, 180 injured (many seriously) and that eight jihadists died, seven of them by suicide bombs. It should be no surprise that this has happened in France. There is quite a large immigrant community in France, mostly from former French colonies in Africa. Social integration is virtually non-existent as the immigrants occupy the banlieue ghettos on the outskirts of Paris and Marseille. Most of the immigrants work at the lower end of the societal scale and have limited prospects. Schengen means that it is easy to smuggle weapons into the country and clearly this group were well armed and trained for what looks like a well planned attack targeting a weekend when there was a large sporting event at Stade de France and selecting some obvious populated targets (Friday night concert at Theatre, restaurants). There will be some uncomfortable meetings going on in Germany as they may now realise that their sudden influx of immigrants are not all refugees and economic migrants, although their lack of involvement in military action in the Middle East does not make them such an obvious ISIS target yet. For the sake of idle speculation, I expect that the French will be bombing ISIS in Syria before the weekend is out.[/QUOTE] Jeb Bush...Move over. Loons abound. Michael Ryan anyone? We (NATO,unsanctioned as it is) need to **** off out of this crap. We have tooled the ghastly Saudi's to the tune of 300 state of the art strike fighters plus all sorts of military hardware..why?...this is their ****ing mess,not ours...****ing joke seeing our young men body bagged for nowt..a group "linked to Al Qaeda" being the mantra. I've not met many Taliban down my street and they ****ing DO NOT pose a threat to national security. Last night was horrible,but was that even a threat to the French national security...NO!!..a tragic incident that lasted for an hour. The soundbite of National Security is a vehicle to intimidate.
Thank you, but yes, as you say, 'loons abound', scores of whom are crossing the Austrian/Bavarian border each day. But it is good to hear your street is free of the Taliban, you are indeed fortunate. You comment "Last night was horrible,but was that even a threat to the French national security...NO!!..a tragic incident that lasted for an hour." Tell that to the bereaved families of this latest IS terrorist atrocity. I might have been rude to you on occasions, but have never stooped to the level of calling you a 'loon', just because I disagree with your analysis of a situation. I should add also that I fundamentally disagree with the views of both OddDog and TopClass on this subject. Firstly, because there is no comparision here between the past Vietnam, and indeed the Korean, conflicts, absolutely none. Secondly, there is no time left to examine the 'root causes' of why religious fanatics deem it necessary to publically cut the throats of innocent, and brave, people, and to terrorise in general. But I do not call either of them 'loons'; they are fully entitled to their opinions.
Swanny just to clarify - my comparison to Vietnam was merely along the lines of both being un-winnable (is that a word?) wars.
Yes, Oddy, I did get your point, but we have to make it 'winnable' as we cannot just sit here and let them blow us up one by one? Easy for me to say this, I am way too old to fight any more, but there is no other solution in my very humble opinion. Far too late to investigate root causes. We have a hell of a fight on our hands. As you know, I am a 'Kriegskind', and have the same feeling now that I had as a young child. I honestly fear for our children and grandchildren. I lived here (well, not all the time as I was often abroad working) during the days of the Cold War and the Red Army Faction, but neither my wife nor I were ever as concerned for our kids as we are now. Maybe we had our heads in the clouds during those days, I really don't know, but this is surely a different and ghastly new ballgame? One could proportion a fair amount of blame for the rise of IS to Bashar Assad and his father, both dictators of the old school. Unfortunately, no one had the guts in NATO et al to 'encourage' Bashar Assad to exile himself to Saudi Arabia, as did former Tunisian president, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. However, even that would not have stopped the emergence of IS; it was simmering all the time?
