As in Nice, Sousse, Paris and around the world. I suspect the lunatic fringe is no bigger than it ever was but communication has improved and the world has shrunk as a result.

Watching media coverage it is amazing how almost everybody, from professionals to passers by in the street, reaches for cliches and truisms instead of talks sensibly. Phrases and adjectives and words about thoughts being with friends and families and "this will not divide us". I suppose it is natural to use the familiar in times of stress. Am I alone in finding it distressing though?

Any terror attack is distressing on TV, I suppose there is not much to say other than the obvious. Sad thing is that kids were murdered at a gig in Manchester which are normally very safe to visit and no parent was to know what was going to happen.

Despite what happened in Manchester yesterday, we live in a beautiful world where most people are wonderful. Love will always be greater than hate.

That was what I posted on social media.

What we need is strong and stable leadership !

For once we are in full agreement ITK but sadly I can't see much strong or stable leadership available and the moment anybody takes time to consider complex solutions with strength they are shouted down or dismissed in favour of people offering superficial and facile solutions which create more problems than they solve.

PaulB wrote:
Despite what happened in Manchester yesterday, we live in a beautiful world where most people are wonderful. Love will always be greater than hate.

That was what I posted on social media.

Have to agree walked the dog today and bumped in to two neighbours who I get on with, spoke about what we are doing today and we got on like it was another day.

JK2006 wrote:
Watching media coverage it is amazing how almost everybody, from professionals to passers by in the street, reaches for cliches and truisms instead of talks sensibly. Phrases and adjectives and words about thoughts being with friends and families and "this will not divide us". I suppose it is natural to use the familiar in times of stress. Am I alone in finding it distressing though?
Perhaps clichés and truisms in these circumstances are a tried and tested way of conveying the message without causing hurt or offence to the people who have been injured or bereaved.

I find myself in agreement with the editor of spiked-online, Brendan O'Neill, today:

As part of the post-terror narrative, our emotions are closely policed. Some emotions are celebrated, others demonised. Empathy – good. Grief – good. Sharing your sadness online – great. But hatred? Anger? Fury? These are bad. They are inferior forms of feeling, apparently, and must be discouraged. Because if we green-light anger about terrorism, then people will launch pogroms against Muslims, they say, or even attack Sikhs or the local Hindu-owned cornershop, because that’s how stupid and hateful we apparently are. But there is a strong justification for hate right now. Certainly for anger. For rage, in fact. Twenty-two of our fellow citizens were killed at a pop concert. I hate that, I hate the person who did it, I hate those who will apologise for it, and I hate the ideology that underpins such barbarism. I want to destroy that ideology. I don’t feel sad, I feel apoplectic. Others will feel likewise, but if they express this verboten post-terror emotion they risk being branded as architects of hate, contributors to future terrorist acts, racist, and so on. Their fury is shushed. ‘Just weep. That’s your role.’
...
Stop and think about how strange it is, how perverse it is, that more than 20 of our citizens have been butchered and we are basically saying: ‘Everyone calm down. Love is the answer.’ Where’s the rage? If the massacre of children and their parents on a fun night out doesn’t make you feel rage, nothing will. The terrorist has defeated you. You are dead already. [My emphasis]

www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/af...r/19849#.WSRt8LpFycw

I fully expect the Yasmin Alibhai-Browns in our midst to be issuing warnings to us thick lumpen types against facilitating Islamophobia. I wonder why it is that Buddhists, Hindus, the Amish, and so on can adhere to their religious beliefs, sometimes with the most intractable fundamentalism, without wishing to exterminate other people?

I have a problem with the blame culture Pete. I don't allow the murderers under the name of the IRA or the DUP or the Islamics or those who told them God said they should kill hookers. Loonies will always kill, convincing themselves and others it is for some silly reason or other. You're never going to be able to convince Danny Day he destroyed David and Lynn Bryant because he's a loony. He'll say it was for money or he deluded himself he was abused or any of the dozens of reasons but the fact is - they are loonies, suicide bombers and false accusers and trolls. I have no idea why Loony Manchester boy persuaded himself he should kill people. There is always a reason in their head. But they are just loonies.

JK2006 wrote:
I have a problem with the blame culture Pete. I don't allow the murderers under the name of the IRA or the DUP or the Islamics or those who told them God said they should kill hookers. Loonies will always kill, convincing themselves and others it is for some silly reason or other. You're never going to be able to convince Danny Day he destroyed David and Lynn Bryant because he's a loony. He'll say it was for money or he deluded himself he was abused or any of the dozens of reasons but the fact is - they are loonies, suicide bombers and false accusers and trolls. I have no idea why Loony Manchester boy persuaded himself he should kill people. There is always a reason in their head. But they are just loonies.

I agree. The poor sods are mentally ill and I feel very sorry for them.

So do I, JK. But I’ve come to the view that some systems of belief actively encourage forms of malevolent and even frankly murderous loonyism. Beliefs which divide the world up into neat binary opposites like “oppressor” and “victim”, for example.

This isn’t a neutral exercise. Under the influence of post-Marxist ideologies like Herbert Marcuse, those who see themselves as “victims” are granted licence to behave in the most violent and excessive ways, because they are “oppressed” and are therefore entitled to rectify the wrongs they imagine to have been done to them by their “oppressors” in whatever way they see fit - strapping explosives to their guts and butchering children included.

This is a recipe for infantile narcissistic temper tantrums of the most destructive and malignant kind.

I’m certainly not advocating idiotic Trumpfart policies like “ban all Muslims”, because we really need apostate Muslims, gay Muslims, feminist Muslims on our side in our defiance of bloodthirsty religious maniacs (if feminists are needed anywhere, it’s in the Muslim world). I certainly am advocating a passionate refusal of all victim identities, because I think it fosters a spurious and indelibly vindictive self-righteousness as well as an unhinged (and thoroughly wicked) tendency to point the finger of blame at the innocent, simply because they are seen as members of the “oppressor” group (so they must be guilty by virtue of that membership).

An oppressor which has brought freedom of speech, individual liberty under the rule of law, historically unprecedented prosperity for its citizens, the separation of church and state and freedom of religious worship (or none) may be a deeply flawed and corrupt entity; but this form of oppression seems to me infinitely preferable to that practiced by the bloodthirsty psychopathic thugs who run so much of the world beyond the “oppressive” West, for all its all-too-obvious flaws.

JK2006 wrote:
I have a problem with the blame culture Pete. I don't allow the murderers under the name of the IRA or the DUP or the Islamics or those who told them God said they should kill hookers. Loonies will always kill, convincing themselves and others it is for some silly reason or other.

We are in agreement, JK

The media "whip up emotion" (see today's front pages) then tell everyone to "calm down".

Consider this fact - In 2011, 2,412 children aged 0-15 years were killed or seriously injured on Britain's roads – that's an average of 7 children every day. There were 60 child fatalities in road accidents in 2011. Although this figure is 53% lower than the average for 2005-09, it is 9% higher than the 2010 figure.

7 ... each and every day. Not a single headline amongst them. Thousands of "one-offs" don't have the impact, do they?

They like to "lead us" - tell us what emotion we should be feeling, what is good and what is bad.

Simple headlines for simple people.

"�£350 million a week if we quit the EU" (what happened to that?)
"Bucketloads of cash for .... (list everything here ! doctors / police / teachers / OAPs / students - anyone we have left out?)"

No thought about the consequences etc

Simple slogans .... simple people .... quite often devastating results.

And the media, by responsible and intelligent coverage of something like that, might actually assist in lessening the road deaths, stopping people on mobile phones and so on, whereas the hatred and bile against a religion (totally inappropriate) will only cause more hatred and discrimination. Partitioning India and Pakistan? Misery. Thanks UK. Cyprus, Crusades, Ireland... thanks UK. Yes, Pete, some religions have bad sides to balance up the good ones - a reason why I don't adhere to any established religion. Most creeds are for those who need a moral compass and they can bring with them misinterpretation.

pete wrote:
I wonder why it is that Buddhists, Hindus, the Amish, and so on can adhere to their religious beliefs, sometimes with the most intractable fundamentalism, without wishing to exterminate other people?
"Muslim Rohingya face discrimination and violence from the Buddhist majority in the country, also called Myanmar. Their plight generally goes unnoticed by the world at large, even though some rights activists say their persecution amounts to ethnic cleansing."
www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/bu...uu-kyi-a7449126.html
"There have been several instances of religious violence against Muslims since Partition of India in 1947, frequently in the form of violent attacks on Muslims by Hindu mobs that form a pattern of sporadic sectarian violence between the majority Hindu and minority Muslim communities. Over 10,000 people have been killed in Hindu-Muslim communal violence since 1950 in 6,933 instances of communal violence between 1954 and 1982."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_against_Muslims_in_India

Exactly Jo; there will be loonies claiming to adhere to every cult from Vegans to Atheists. Misinterpreting moral codes is a part of being a loony.

Why were people singing Oasis and is that really the best we got to solve matters?

I certainly didn’t mean to imply that there are creeds or individuals who are entirely free of evil and wickedness; as an old Freudian dinosaur, I’m well aware that the potential for good and evil beats in every human heart. It’s the effort to present oneself as entirely virtuous, in fact, which so often leads to the greatest evils, especially if one’s virtue is driven by sense of victimhood (Blaise Pascal put it rather well: “Man is neither angel nor brute, and the unfortunate thing is that he who would act the angel acts the brute”).

While I agree that those who JK refers to as loonies reside in every religion, secular creed and nation, it seems to me that the anti-Muslim violence Jo cited on the part of Hindus and Buddhists was contingent and incidental rather than inherent to their creeds.

Let me immediately say that I abhor anti-Muslim violence: we need, desperately urgently, to build strong bridges with Muslim scholars who are struggling, all too often in conditions of great adversity and danger, to foster the same separation of Church and State that Christianity has achieved (“Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s…”). Law is public under this arrangement, while morality and religion are private. Freedom depends on distinctions like this.

We need the friendship and support of (and we need to extend friendship, support and hospitality to) dissenting Muslim scholars, Muslim apostates, gay Muslims and feminist Muslims, who know all about the terrible consequences of religiously-prescribed intolerance and violence at the sharp end.

But when the open, welcoming, scholarly phase of Islamic culture – Islam’s Golden Age – was shut down on the basis that the Koran could no longer be re-interpreted because it was the literal world of God as revealed to the prophet Mohammed, it seems to me that Islam as the cradle of civilisation gave way to religion as dogma and terror.

Too many radical Muslims see secular law as a form of blasphemy, yet it’s the condition of individual liberty and privacy. The tradition here is that secular law should rarely, if ever, interfere with the private sphere, even if what arises there is deemed immoral; radical Islam recognises no such distinction, which results in the tragic perversity of, for instance, a closeted gay Muslim enthusiastically pushing an outed gay Muslim off the top of very tall building or crushing him to death beneath a very large slab of stone or concrete.

Under secular law, we are citizens; under religious law we are subjects (Islam means “submission” to the power of God). Secular common law, by contrast, seeks to establish justice between individuals in dispute, a ground-up process of human discussion and agreement. It does not, as in shari’ah, seek to impose a deity’s power.

A religion that has sealed itself off from the modern world will feel at odds with the modern era, and murderous resentment thrives off such alienation. Those who seek to reform it toward openness, those who find they cannot live within it without ever-present danger to life and limb, must be welcomed by us.

Back to the deluded, pot-smoking scumbag who perpetrated this villainous act of evil: yes, he may have been a loony, but the “radical” (hate-and-malice-saturated) wing of the predominantly inward- and backward-looking religion he used to support his resentment and paranoia may well have persuaded him to become positively murderous, targeting “decadent” Westerners, even if they were children, engaging in “sins” that its version of Allah considers wicked.

I think pete is thinking along the right lines in his posts above, especially the first.

A large section of the world wants to blow us to smithereens. They are much more numerous than white Europeans. When they succeed, there is wall-to-wall, 24-7 propaganda suppressing any expression of anger or attempts to fight back.

Now there are soldiers on patrol in London. They're not there to protect indigenous Europeans from muslim maniacs. They're there to protect the maniacs from "islamophobia" or "hate speech." They're also there to guard Parliament: the people who brought all these genocidal in-breds here so that we can enjoy the enrichments of multicultural diversity.