Terrorist attacks in France and Tunisia

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Today, June 26, around 10:00AM local time, an islamic terrorist apparently linked to Daesh tried to blow up a chemical factory south of Lyon, ramming a car loaded with gas canisters through the entrance to the factory.

The news are still developing, so the details may change in the next hours.

The attacker (or attackers, it is not yet clear if somebody else was driving the car), when it became apparent that the car was not going to explode as expected, rushed out and decapitated somebody, hurting two other people before being subdued.

He has been arrested. Apparently he was “known to the security services” since 2006, but that monitoring of this person was halted in 2008. Which, if true, means that somebody dropped the ball, badly.

Links:

In Sousse, Tunisia, at about the same time, a terrorist attack took place in a beach, 19 dead, one terrorist attacker killed. There was a gun battle between the terrorists (apparently linked to Daesh) and security forces.

Link:

It may be that these two events were planned as a synchronized attack, or it may just be coincidence.

The whole thing is awful, but at least we can take solace in the fact that the would-be bombers in France appeared to be rather amateurish.

2

Idiots, they attack France AND Tunisia And Kuwait. Nice way to unite us all in our common humanity.

This ideology is losing badly. These spasms of terrorism are its death throes.

3

This will probably cause a major decline in tourism in Tunisia.

4

It may be enough to convince the UN to do something. Tunisia has no means of securing itself from terrorism. Do not vacation there.

5

The Tunisian economy really relies on tourism.

I was heartened by the response of a friend of mine who only yesterday was asking my advice on whether to go to Tunisia. I asked her today if she was still considering it. Her response? “Hell Yeah! There’s bound to be some good bargains on offer now!”.

That’s what Tunisia needs to bounce back from this.

6

Wishful thinking.
It’s nice of you to state the politically correct fantasy… but the reality is that ISIS is thriving in Syria, and spreading rapidly, attracting thousands of recruits from western Europe. They may not have a seat at the UN, but they are building a surprisingly large and stable state in the lands they capture.

7

Stable state? They wish! I give them 5 years’ existence, tops.

The Kurds are doing exactly the right thing right now: taking land to the north of their territory, which is what borders Turkey and the main road for smuggling materiel, supplies and people to Daesh. The Kurds have already taken one border crossing and have the others in their crosshairs. One of the best ways to deal with those bastards is to stare them, and that is what te Kurdish militias are doing, slowly but surely. They even are within reach of the “capital” of Daesh in Syria. Probably they will not go for it right now, but make no mistake – the Kurds are doing a good job of slowly grinding down the Daesh in the north.

Turkey, of course, is deeply unhappy with the Kurds doing what they are doing right now, and are refusing assistance… But, see… The Kurds have shown that they do not need Turkey’s help to kick Daesh butt. The US is helping the Kurds with targeted drone strikes, and the Kurds provide the boots in the ground.

They have proven themselves to be way better than the Iraqi military, and probably better than the Syrian military. I have a hunch that it is going to be the Kurds who will mostly save the region’s metaphorical bacon, honestly.

And as I said before, I give the Daesh at most 5 years of existence. Yes, they are monstrous and guilty of crimes against humanity that would make the nazis sit up and take notice… But in the great scheme of things they will be only a shameful page in human history, nothing more.

I am not saying that dealing with Daesh will be easy, or that it won’t be bloody, or that there will not be horrendous amounts of people killed in the process. But, in the end, they will not prevail.

Also – bombing Kuwait, one of their erstwhile sources of financing? Bad strategic move. Scare the Gulf monarchies and you are scaring away a big source of your support.

8

(Missed edit window: in my previous post, where I wrote “stare” I meant “starve”… :smack: )

9

We figured that out. :slight_smile:

10

They have to kill people to enforce their ideology, so in time they will disappear.

11

Was the same group responsible for the mosque bombing? 27 muslims died in that-are these “equal opportunity” killers?

12

Yeah…just like the Taliban have disappeared in Afghanistan.

13

Easy crimes to solve:
Beheaded body. Check
Islamic writings left on the scene. Check
Dead bodies everywhere. Check
Perp yelling Allah Akbar as he fires his weapon. Check

A case of work place violence. A case of beach place violence.

Move along folks, move along. Nothing to see here.

14

And yet their influence has waned. Not only that; now it transpires that Daesh-aligned elements are fighting against the Taliban – the two groups are killing each other.

Those idiots cannot even cooperate with groups that might be considered to be ideologically close to them. That is not conducive to long-term existence.

It will take time (for the Daesh and the Taliban), but they will, in due course, disappear. To a certain extent these elements remind me a bit of the anarchist extremists that spent some 50-60 years bombing and killing around Europe and the Americas; roughly between the late 1850s and the 1910s. They were the bugbear of their times. Fanatical, dedicated, with no clear hierarchical structure and only loose communications between their cells, and very murderous (the attack against Napoleon III in Paris, 8 dead and 150 wounded; the bomb in the Liceu theater in Barcelona, 22 dead and 35 wounded; the attack against King Alphonse XIII on his wedding day, 28 dead and more than 100 wounded…). They were very much in the popular consciousness of their time (witness, for instance, Gaudi who put on the façade of the Sagrada Familia a sculpture of a demon giving an Orsini bomb (the archetypical anarchist bomb) to a worker. Title of the sculpture: “The temptation of man”)…

And yet… Now they are nothing but a couple of pages in the history of mankind, with all of their killing having been for basically naught.

Daesh et al remind me of the anarchists of the late 19th-early 20th centuries. And, like them, I have the strong feeling that they will pass, having unfortunately killed a lot of people basically for nothing.

Just my feeling, anyway.

15

Good news.

They wouldn’t be anarchists if they did. :slight_smile:
Good point.

16

Afghanistan has poor communication links, hence it will take longer. But it will go, all these Islamist ideologies are primarily based on violence, and if it takes violence to enforce your message, then it will fail. Look at the former USSR, that was born out of the violence of Communist radicals who overthrew the provisional government, and they were a minority.

I think the same thing, it’s also what I hope it will be remembered as.

17

But Christ, Stalin killed a lot of people.
Communism in Russia generally made people miserable at best.

18

Exactly. There’s no benchmark for how many people die, it’s what happens unfortunately.

19

Are you aware of the difference between Sunnis and Shias?

The Kuwaiti mosque was a Shia mosque.

20

And me thinking you were talking of playing chicken.