This Brussels incident is indeed horrible and the guys responsible are clearly warped or evil BUT I do feel Western Governments are dealing with the threat in the wrong way. Perhaps they need to study how the Major Government and then Tony Blair's Government managed to defeat the IRA by bringing them in to the mainstream through sitting down at the table and negotiating. I feel Western Governments need to be much more proactive with minority communities living in cities like Brussels, Paris, Marseilles and of course in many a UK city as these terrorists were born and educated here in Europe. Certainly that was the case with the 2007 bombers.
You can't negotiate with ISIS because they have no political aim other than ultimately destroying us. That's a non-starter I'm afraid.
Impossible. They won't negotiate. The only way they can be dealt with is minimising their threat, either through force (i.e. air strikes) or preventing them from radicalising young people and stopping them growing.
If we even went near negotiation (which would be insane), they'd immediately ask for us to withdraw all troops from the ME. Say we do that, all we're doing them is allowing them to grow, effectively unopposed, and continue their systematic genocide of all Christian and Shia groups before expanding their territory and establishing a caliphate (hey, let's call that policy 'Lebensraum' shall we?) Genocide. Lebensraum. Remind you of anyone? Appeasement didn't work terribly well then either. This is nothing at all like the IRA (who had expressed and finite political aims) and to equate the two is a terribly dangerous road to be going down.
Sadly all this isn't new....when I was young it was the IRA and the Baader Meinhof gang doing the bombings....thankfully, younger people have had a brief period of freedom from bombing in Europe. The difference is how many apparently normal people have sympathy for the bombers (here and out in the Middle East)....this is probably down to the access of children to propaganda via the internet, but these things are never simple.
Given events over the past 4/5 months and the high profile arrest last week, where was the security at the airport? A few years ago I arrived back from a holiday at Gatwick Airport and there was a sniffer dog on duty. Surely the authorities in Belgium have trained dogs to sniff out bombs, guns and drugs entering airports plus a plethora of cameras?
It was in the departure area before security where, like in most European airports, there's little overt security.
It'll soon get like Israel - you go through a metal detector before you even go into departures to check-in. These savages are just making life difficult for the ordinary person and must be eradicated. As you've said, negotiation is a non-starter, so we must find a way to stamp them out - perhaps the whole of the Middle East needs to get together and sort something out somehow, but God knows how .............
Agree , hard as it will be for the traveller , security before you even get into the departure areas seems a must to me .
BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner says it is "not a surprise" that this attack has taken place but says it is "shocking it was so successful". He said since the Since Charlie Hebo attacks in Paris in January last year, which killed 12 people, there had been a number of terror cells "on the loose" that had been inspired by so-called Islamic State and had access to weapons and explosives. He said Belgian intelligence services had been playing "catch-up" since then and did not have a "very good system" of sharing information across the various authorities. He said attacks in Britain had been prevented by Muslim communities reporting suspicious behaviour to police but this was not yet happening in Belgium.
Delighted to hear that Muslims in this country are helping. They have the most to lose as suspicion naturally falls on them...people would be lying if they denied giving people of Middle Eastern appearance a second look when in a public place. I do feel for peaceful British Muslims who have come here to get away from religious nutcases then find it has followed them. It is up to them to distance themselves from such people and to look out for radicalisation of their young...though signs seem remarkably hard to notice as radicalisation can be mistaken for excessive religiosity (and vice versa). What is important is that attempts to separate themselves from the general population should be avoided. Their children need to be educated in ordinary schools and not behind closed doors.
I know this is a typo and is extremely serious but it sounds like you ate leaving 26 dead and 196 wounded.
*breathes deeply, picks up bag and heads to the airport security* Hope to be posting later. Shocking news. Wife wondered if I shouldn't fly, but I told her that we can't let the sick bastards win.
