Charlie Hebdo Attacked in Paris

[alanjjohnstone]

I think the Left has the one big advantage…the rank hypocrisy of the Western government, their opportunistic politicians and lick-spittle media with their supposed ranking order of acceptable religious/political beliefs…They offer sitting duck targets for the Left nationalists who can easily expose the double-standards being exercised.  The message is simple …to stop terrorism, stop the terrorism…But Cameron and Obama and Netanyahu etc simply cannot do that, so the other terrorists continue to follow their example using less sophisticated means, in China where gun control is strict, scores can be knived to death. Popular or not we have to maintain a plague on all houses…including that fat Buddha…those cow worshipping Hindutvas…but as Kenny Everett would say, "done in all the best possible taste"

[sarda karaniwan]

It is just an ordinary person who believes that the real world belongs to the ordinary people, the elite belongs to the ideal or mythical world or a world that doesn't exist so they squat on the real world and make a mess of it. I chose to become an Ordinarian because I want to live in the real world and believe me it is much better world than that world where you live among those transcendental beings, like those heroes, martyrs , and saints where there will always be war and poverty. How do you become one? It's easy, just uphold the Five Basic Principles of the ordinary people and they are:1. Don't be a burden!2. Be independent!3. Strive to be equal and be counted!4. Be practical!5. Learn and improve!If you think of yourself as a hero, a martyr, or a saint then you don't need those principles, but if you think of yourself as just only human, you will certainly need them, if you adopt them, welcome to the real world brother, the world where we are only human.sardaan Ordinarian

[Anonymous]

Would be a good idea to 'share' this thread using the # as it is obviously been talked about and may bring interested people to our site  

[alanjjohnstone]

12 dead in Paris France…headlines2,000 dead in Baga, Nigeria in Boko Haram attack …No news for the BBCSays it all really

[Anonymous]

Arab Newspapers react to Charlie Hebdo attacks with cartoons of their own, sending a clear message that violence against free speech should not be tolerated no matter what the culture.http://www.inquisitr.com/1741068/arab-newspapers-react-to-charlie-hebdo-attacks-with-cartoons-of-their-own/

[Socialist Party Head Office]

Contribution from an SP member not on this forum:The newspaper and TV reporters covering the atrocity – carried out apparently to avenge a long dead ‘prophet’ who has become prone to the gags of mickey-takers and critics due to the absurdities of his followers – all emphasise the point that the right to free speech is not negotiable, and is the very essence of democracy.And they are right of course. Ridiculous people and ridiculous ideas inevitably attract ridicule. And the most absurd idea still being bandied about in the 21st century as an answer to modern day capitalism and its problems is religion. Despite the claims from its various apologists of their moral superiority, and the insistence that they should be accepted, unchallenged and unquestioned, as examples of how we are to live our lives, they are, in fact, the socially useless remnants of a long-gone world, a world of ancient social conditions and ideas, mass ignorance and superstition. And far from providing answers to today’s problems they have nothing say, other than to tell us to put our faith in the imaginary gods and their magical powers, of an ancient era.The fact that believers in such gods obviously consider their deities to be so weak and helpless, however, as to need their critics to be silenced by Kalashnikovs says as much about the god’s impotence as does any Charlie Hebdo cartoon.And, while it seems clear that the intention of the attackers was to silence the critics, this has backfired. Already gatherings of outraged people protesting at the barbarity are taking place all over Europe. More moderate Muslims too, this time more than ever before, are expressing their outrage. ‘Everyone should be offended three times a week’ someone once said, ‘and twice on Sundays’. And that seems about right. There’s nothing like a bit straight talking, and a bit of offence to remind us that not everyone shares the same views. And while believers in ancient myths have every right to feel offended that their ideas are sometimes ridiculed, the rest of us reserve the right to be equally offended at religious stupidity and barbarity.

[Anonymous]

Socialist Party Head Office wrote:

Contribution from an SP member not on this forum:‘Everyone should be offended three times a week’ someone once said, ‘and twice on Sundays’. And that seems about right. There’s nothing like a bit straight talking, and a bit of offence to remind us that not everyone shares the same views. 

 This is what I have always said  But you have to be willing to take suspensions, not everyone agrees with 'anonymous'   

[ALB]

Oh dear, the conspiracy theories havealready started. This from another forum I'm on (in the US, naturally):

Quote:

I am very skeptical of the official account as to what happened and who the perpetrators really were, as for one thing the details of this official account seem to change by the day, if not the hour, and some of them strike me as nothing less than a pile of crap, stuff like the precision killer team leaving an ID or two in a getaway car, and the way the explanations for why have changed back and forth a bunch of times in less than 72 hours. Much of this reminds me of 9/11, which i am absolutely convinced was an inside job false flag terror attack, just like the “terrorist” wave of bombings which hit Italy in the late ‘60s and ‘70s, about which Sanguinetti the situations wrote a book, and which was subsequently revealed to be the work of the Italian state and NATO intelligence agencies, including the CIA.

[Anonymous]

If all conpiracy theories were to be proven, so what?   Abolishing capitalism and taking the earth into common ownership  ,  would still be the only solution.   

[Anonymous]

A bomb was placed near the building of the NAACP in the US, and the press has not said too much about it.  In the past, several of their members were killed by fanatics racists peoples. The NAACP contributed to eliminate one of the most racists legal precedent  in the US which was the law of: "Separate but equal" . It looks like some peoples are suffering of historical amnesia

[alanjjohnstone]

Apologies for those who already knew but i think it is symptomatic of the media that it was only today that i read of Ahmed Merabet, one of the policemen killed, was himself a Muslim, surely deserving of emphasis.  But as i previously commentated, the whole media and the politicians stinks of hypocrisy. Who can blame some conspiracist theorists when they see who is jumping on the Charlie band-wagon like Fox TV who campaign to save Christmas from the heathens and support bans on the building of mosques.  Defence of free speech? It was only a few months ago that the French comedian had his rights of free expression curtailed by the French government and was forbidden entry to the UK – his offence was giving offence to Jewish people. The French legally makes holocaust denial a crime, (as does many other countries) yet it decreed that a similar law against those who deny the Armenian holocaust was against the principle of free speech. Granted piss-take and anti-semitism/islamophobia may well be very difficult to differentiate. Deciding intent amounts to mind-reading. Our get-out if it comes to legal action, is that we piss on all religions…organised or not (such as crystal healing fakers). We don't discriminate. Banish all gods from the sky. I can say now that the consequences will be serious for those who are atheists. Won't be long before the Dave Allen's of the comedy world will be silenced…jokes on priests and paedophilia will soon be banned because of religious "hurt". And the law will be selectively applied only against those that the State disapproves of.   

[alanjjohnstone]

Noam Chomsky citing historical parallelshttps://zcomm.org/znetarticle/we-are-all-fill-in-the-blank/

Quote:

terrorism is not terrorism when a much more severe terrorist attack is carried out by those who are Righteous by virtue of their power.  Similarly, there is no assault against freedom of speech when the Righteous destroy a TV channel supportive of a government that they are attacking.

[alanjjohnstone]

And from Robert Fisk providing some much needed historical perspectivehttp://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/charlie-hebdo-paris-attack-brothers-campaign-of-terror-can-be-traced-back-to-algeria-in-1954-9969184.html

Quote:

Long before the identity of the murder suspects was revealed by the French police – even before I heard the names of Cherif and Said Kouachi – I muttered the word “Algeria” to myself. As soon as I heard the names and saw the faces, I said the word “Algeria” again. And then the French police said the two men were of “Algerian origin”.

[ALB]

alanjjohnstone wrote:

And from Robert Fisk providing some much needed historical perspectivehttp://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/charlie-hebdo-paris-attack-brothers-campaign-of-terror-can-be-traced-back-to-algeria-in-1954-9969184.html

Fisk has written some good stuff but he is far too pro-Muslim for my liking, coming near to the position that Darren Redstar has criticised here of condoning what politicized Islamists do as a reaction to imperialism. He ends that article:

Quote:

You can see why some Algerians went to fight for the Iraqi resistance. And found a new cause…

I'm afraid I can't. They can't use history as an excuse. I can see rather why millions of people from Algeria, both there and in France, would just want to get on with their lives under capitalism without the additional complication of violence from fanatical, murderous Islamists.

[ALB]

alanjjohnstone wrote:

I can say now that the consequences will be serious for those who are atheists. Won't be long before the Dave Allen's of the comedy world will be silenced…jokes on priests and paedophilia will soon be banned because of religious "hurt". And the law will be selectively applied only against those that the State disapproves of.

Actually, they did try this but were forced to back down, as Boyd Tonkin recalls in yesterday's i paper:

Quote:

… in 2005 came the lamentable attempt to strangle the critique of religion via the first draft of the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill, with its scattergun provisions against "insulting" belief. It took an energetic and well-organised revolt of artists, writers and comedians to knock sense into that statute.

Agreed, though, that the very fact that they (and the Labour government was in charge of the State at the time) wanted to do this exposes their hypocrisy.Reading the correspondence columns of the Times shows that Christians too do not believe in freedom to criticise religion, with letters from vicars and professors of divinity saying that papers like Charlie Hebdo should not have the right to insult and mock religions in the way they do. They want to stop them doing this, not by shooting them by making it illegal and sending them to jail if they do.

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