So, some goon in Belgium lights up a Christmas celebration with hand grenades and small arms fire, killing at least three people and wounding some 45.
If, like me, your antennae quiver when you hear of such an event, your suspicions are if anything enhanced rather than otherwise when you learn that the attacker’s name was “Nordine Amrani”. Which doesn’t sound terribly Belgique, does it? As best as I can tell from a casual Google search, the surname “Amrani” is of North African provenance. Think Egypt and Morocco, although there are also Israeli references.
Amrani apparently had a long criminal record, to include firearms offenses.
But what followed immediately after the attacker’s naming in the BBC bears scrutiny:
He was named as Nordine Amrani, aged 33. He was known to police for firearms offences. Officials said the attacker acted alone, ruling out terrorism.
Well, the people in the square were certainly terrorized. And since when did an act of terrorism require partnership?
Too soon to say his real motive. Far too soon to start wishing unpleasant ones away.
“Belgium is a country invented by the British to annoy France.”
Yep, mustn’t jump to any conclusions. I mean, there doesn’t seem to be anything to indicate that he is one of those evil, raaaacist, bitter clingers, is there?
I saw stories identifying him as an “extreme right-wing Italian.” I wonder what exactly defines “extreme right-wing” in Italy and Belgium?
I do believe that was referring to a separate attack.
There was a second attack in Florence, Italy. According to a couple of news sources, a known Italian far-right author killed two Senegalese who were selling things in a market, then shot at a few other people before either committing suicide or being shot by police. Sounds as if the Italian and Belgian attackswere unconnected (unless you want to point to the problems of unassimilated migrants in Europe).
I would bet most extreme right wing Italians are to busy trying to get Berlusconi’s address book.
Think Egypt and Morocco, although there are also Israeli references.
So you’re saying it was the Joos!
As Newt would say, he, like Nidal Hassan, was a “non-Rotarian.”
At least it wasn’t “workplace violence.”
The name “Nordine” sounds awfully French. Algerian fella mayhap?
Liberals can’t admit they have terrorists in their midst. It spoils the narrative.
As Jerry Pournelle puts it, “Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation while the west commits suicide.”
Dr. Pournelle is too much of a gentleman to call them straight out what liberals are – idiots.
What the European Parliament member, Glyn Ford said of the attack:
Hey, don’t shoot me. I’m just a messenger! While I don’t agree, it is still important to know what is being said over there.
Link
It’s all good. My point is that we’re in such a hurry not to see what’s in plain sight that we beclown ourselves in our haste to say that a guy throwing grenades into a crowd before spraying them down with an assault rifle can’t possibly be a “terrorist”, well: He just can’t. And after all, the 7/7 bombers in Britain were all UK-born citizens, so citizenship in and of itself doesn’t strike terrorism from the potential motive set.
Finally, since he went ahead and threw the irrefutable charge of racism on the table, I’d ask Glyn Ford to tell me exactly what race is Islam?
The United States has these kinds of rampage attacks happening fairly regularly in schools and elsewhere.
Which is a train load of bovine excrement. The powerful anti-civil rights lobby and its paid shills in the main stream media have nocturnal fantasies about that, and publish them endlessly as if they were the truth, but the reality is far different. The recent shooting at VT brought back all the coverage of the madmans rampage in 2007 as if it were brand new. And some regurgitated Columbine along with it. Kind of like ‘Groundhog Day’ everything keeps being played over and over again as if it is brand new news.
If the honorable gentleman MP bothered to look at the stats, if you take Germany, France, the Benelux countries and look at them as a unit, the murder rate is very close to that of the US. And the rate of violent crime is higher.
Compare the crime rates among whites in this country to that among whites in Europe and they are almost identical, and extremely low. Factor in the “other” and the crime rates skyrocket.
The loon ball left says “diversity is our strength,” but it’s an absolute lie. Successful societies have a very high level of trust, and the introduction of “the other” causes trust to plummet. Our society is failing because trust is evaporating in our institutions and among the people. That the loon ball left refuses to deal in the truth doesn’t help in the least.
Our strength is in taking in ” the other “, and through assimilation, making him one of us. The Left wants them to come, yet remain “the other “, in a large part, because of the contempt of the Left for any human other than themselves, what the Left wants is human zooz, where they can go and experience, “diversity”. What loathesome people they truly are.
“But, their hearts are in the right place.” Only if their real desire is to destroy the country.
QM: “But, their hearts are in the right place.”
Good thing, too; makes the sight picture simpler.
Sarge/
“…makes the sight picture simpler.”
Unless he’s a doppelganger.
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doppelganger_(movie)
Got a point there, Sarge. Likely head shots wouldn’t do much damage.
Virgil – use the proper size hollow point (.338? .416 Barrett?) and it wouldn’t matter.
Qm, that is crimethink, you know. Check out hbdchick’s blog. Here’s an example of her work:
http://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2011/12/07/a-non-result-result/
She’s my latest blogcrush, being sharp and realistic on this subject, as well as admitting to having a touch of the “A.” Sigh, she’s already taken IRL. There really is an insufficient supply of teh Aspichix.
(When an aspie chick asks if she looks fat in that dress, she wants an honest answer, so she can take corrective action if she gets an affirmative.)
Glyn Ford?
I once met a stripper named Toni Curtis – real name, Bernice Schwartz.
True story.
You forgot the format. Lead with Now TINS…
Did he serve? ya gotta wonder if he might ignorant of teh proper gouge for such stories.
Algerian. FWIW, an Amrani just happens to be Secretary General of the Council of the Nation of Algeria.
The death toll is now 5 including the gunman with 122 wounded.
Isn’t Nordine a fine old Norwegian name? Maybe he got food poisoning from some bad lutefisk and just went crazy!
Yes we have whack jobs in the US, and yes we have gun violence. But I don’t recall the last time somebody was throwing grenades into a crowd and then opening fire. In fact the last time I checked, I couldn’t even buy grenades at Walmart, Bass Pro, or even at one of those wicked gun shows.
Apparently Nordine Amrani has no none aliases. He is assumed, therefore, to have been acting alone, either a peaceful Muslim with post-incarceration depression, or possibly a skinhead form Idaho.
The shooting took place on Saint-Lambert square near a busy Christmas market. “Luckily the mayor had postponed the opening of the Christmas market due to bad weather and high winds. Otherwise many more would have died,” the employee added.
Police said tonight that the killer was a convicted sex attacker (warning for 72 virgins) and drug dealer, who had recently been released from prison.
It would be quite illegal and less effective for infidels ever to advertise the errancy of Islam. Fortunately, a few retrograde Muslim martyrs unwittingly accomplished the task with greater fanfare and self-elimination. While infidels seethe, Muslims breed.
Conversions, however, per capita are on the decline outside prison walls.
So, the loony left says that “in diversity is our strength.” Uh-huh. That’s not exactly true, mostly because it’s how you *think* about diversity that’s your strength or your weakness. The liberal left in college admissions feels impelled to do the bean-counter thing, and because they are interventionist busybodies as most academics are, they base their admissions rules on how many of this race or minority is to be allowed in to meet the strange mixed up rules of admissions theory. So, the Caucasians are held to a higher standard than members of other ethnic groups are. After all, the lucky whites are overpriviledged anyway. And much to the admissions committee’s distress, the Asians, who have been studying very hard all their lives, are disproportionately so much smarter than the local layabouts that admissions rules have to hold them to a higher standard or they would flood the possible admissions slots and unbalance things.
This is the kind of foolish behavior that diversity mavens are led into. And it means that some schools miss out on truly extraordinary scholars. I would rather have Thomas Sowell or Richard Feynmann to illuminate my student group, and to be able to select them for excellence of thought and inspiration, no matter what diversity criteria they fitted into. Or didn’t.
Marianne
The phrase is “unearned privilege”. It is accorded to people who are born white, male or both. And ONLY to such people. The rest of the populace is subject to “institutional racism”, which means that our society in and of itself is racist, as opposed to individual action. According to the left, it is the job of government to balance things out so that the effects of both do not disadvantage anyone. It is unacceptable to question whether either exists, BTW. The fact that this country has managed to elect a black President doesn’t mean that we don’t live in a racist society infected with “institutional racism”.
All persons are presumed to act and be acted upon in accordance with their membership in particular groups. People are not held accountable for individual actions and are essentially not viewed as individuals.
White people from Northern Europe are arguably the least-racist people on the planet, at least instinctively. Sure, we’ve done some racist things, but they were more intellectually than emotionally inspired, and we had to work ourselves up to it.
All the human monkeys don’t care for that other troop of baboons next door, but it comes in degrees, and we seem to have less of it than the other groups, who are eating our lunches while we bend over backwards to be fair-minded.
Maybe Comjam could give us some tips on ethnic survival when all the other monkeys are mad at you.
There are racially correlated things whether we like it or not. However, just try to deal with such things factually and you will quickly learn such things don’t matter. Just ask the authors of the Bell Curve. The one surviving author could educate you real quick to what happens when people try do real social science in a PC world.
I think of John Derbyshire, who claims to be a racist, but of a mild and mellow kind. He married a Han gal, and seems quite happy to have done so. When they were in China together, a lot of Chinese folks insulted his wife as a Race Traitor. She, of course, went right back at them and gave as good as she got.
So with the Derb, at least, the racism is more intellectual than emotional.
Because of this theory of group membership and it’s influence, the left seeks to create “diversity” by including people of all manner of different groups, and to increase the number of the members of those groups into schools, government, etc. in reverse proportion to their perceived power.
White males are the only group that are presumed to have power. So a theory of race relations has been developed that defines racism as “discrimination + power”. Discriminating against someone on the basis of race, or ascribing particular characteristics, etc. to someone on the basis of race is not in and of itself sufficient to define racism. The person who does this must also have the power to influence society to act on the basis of these things. Since only white people have power, only white people can be racist. When members of other races discriminate or ascribe negative characteristics to white people solely on the basis of their race, it’s therefore not racism. Usually that’s called “speaking truth to power”.
Seriously. Talk to some of these people and this is what you’ll hear!
The upshot of all this is that when the left wants to create “diversity” at an institution, they use diversity of income, race, ethnicity, etc. to hide the fact that they have eliminated the only really important diversity: diversity of thought.
RonF … That’s a good analysis of the situation, as far as I understand it. I feel that the liberal “diversity” freaks are poisoning our once impressive educational system. And the heavy hand of liberal busybodies is not improving our educational system or our attitudes toward different ethnic minorities. I wish the holier-than-thous would just put their hands in their pockets and just shut up and let real talents and abilities speak for whichever students are applying for further enlightenment and education.
But it won’t happen, I’m afraid.
Marianne
But, but… Allowing diversity of thought would enable others to disagree with what the leftie feels in his innermost heart to be THE TRUTH!
Justguy – “White people from Northern Europe are arguably the least-racist people on the planet, at least instinctively.”
“Wow! How can you say that? How do you support such a personally biased statement?
I think Englishman Kipling’s’ poem, The White Man’s Burden and the Nazi Holocaust are only two examples of a plethora of instances that say otherwise!
IMAGE
Yes, Flit, because Kipling is exactly like a Nazi, or something.
I don’t even want to know where you got that association from.
Given that European & European-descended countries were the richest and most advanced countries in the world at the time in terms of economics, political structure, technology, and medicine, there’s a lot of truth in Kipling’s poem. It’s not his fault he was brought up in a time where the idea of distinct black and white races was taken seriously, but also the idea of an English “race,” French “race,” and so on.
If you take away the politically incorrect point of view, he introduced the idea of the Peace Corps before JFK was even born…
Oh, crap! Didn’t use preview. For once.
Lex, could you help a brotha out, and end the italics tag right after the word “exactly” above?
{/red face}
There are distinctive races, Casey. It was not illegitimate to refer to nations as races either. A race is just an inbred population. Many have distinctive physical characteristics. You can tell a Jap and a Chink, from a Korean, and from each other, for example.
Those characteristics go all the way to DNA. Forensic Anthropologists can tell a person of Negro stock from a Caucasian just from the bones.
It’s true that there is one human race, but there are a lot of local varieties as well. that there are no races is just PC anti-scientific nonsense.
We were the first people to give up slavery. At least we only enslaved funny-looking foreign guys. Everybody else did, and still does, enslave their own folks.
JTG…yes and additionally…”your people”… some time after 1620 initiated and vigorously carried out the systamatic destruction of the ” funny-looking” native North American “guys”/people. Best
Yah, I know, Snake. Ol’ socially-awkward Jtg once proposed to an acquaintance that the reason our people did better here than the Spaniards in Mexico was that instead of enslaving the natives, we just shot most of them (with a lot of help from measles, etc.).
She immediately rounded on me and said “Hey!” She then reminded me that the part of her which was not Prussian was Blackfoot. I then remembered that she is one of those people with the natural ability to touch off the trigger between heartbeats. (She may well be the Last of the Florida Swamp Women.) I apologized profusely and abjectly.
JTG –
How many Indian reservations are there in Mexico today, compared to the US?
While our measles and bullets killed a majority of Native Americans north of the border (and we did enslave a number too), The Spaniards mostly intermingled and assimilated the natives. Interracial marriage was quite common, unlike here, north of the border.
In fact unlike in the US, Mestizos (mixed European and Native heritage) are the majority in Mexico and Latin America!
Um…Flit, you may, just may, want to check your history. The Spaniards killed off the indigenous people in job lots, often by working them to death in conditions that would have made an Arbeitsziehungslager look good.
The reason we have rezes in the US is that, theoretically, the Indian tribes are independent nations in their own right.
Yes, Flit, and those countries are owned and governed by the white(er) elite. They do their racism differently there. There is no binary distinction between white and not, but the whiter one is, the higher one tends to be placed in those societies. There are laudable exceptions like Benito Juarez, one of my favorite people, but that seems to be the general rule.
Yep. Racism is ubiquitous. No doubt about it. Lighter skinned people in Latin America often do hold more respect than darker skinned Latinos, even though they both may be of similar mixed, European and native heritage.
But the original issue here that was broached was that people of “northern European heritage” were less likely to be racists…. Something all evidence says is false.
While the Americas’ indigenous people of the New World were decimated by the Conquistadors and other European settlers/conquerors, how they live and are treated today varies widely from country to country.
The majority of Latinos today have mixed Inca, Mayan, and European Spanish ancestors. The same cannot be said about our American Sioux, Cheyenne, Iroquois, etc. progeny, vis-a-vis our Europeans’ progeny. They are mostly separate, and more massively unequal.
Perhaps a better way to put it would be, that we white guys are just not as enthusiastic about our racism as some other groups are. I think our variety of it is more founded on arrogance and vanity than on visceral dislike for “the other.”