Terror in Norway: Shootout, bomb explosions kill 11

@Walter Hinteler,

Walter Hinteler wrote:

He'd certainly had said "David, my dear" in that case.

Your meaning is unclear.

1 Reply

@OmSigDAVID,

Then, I have my doubts that he was a "retired English police official".

2 Replies

@Walter Hinteler,

Did he wear a deer-stalker, smoke a pipe, play the violin, snort coke?

0 Replies

@izzythepush,

izzythepush wrote:

Your emotions do not justify making my neighbours less safe.

AGREED.

izzythepush wrote:

My views on gun ownership aren't at all fringe.
Over here they are solidly mainstream.

That is probably true.
U r the same people who threw out Winston Churchill
after he finished finishing off Hitler.

izzythepush wrote:

The 'policeman' you're describing is obviously a right wing nutter,

NO, that is not obvious at all, Pushy.
It coud be possible that he agrees with U
about everything, but he resented having been coerced to lie,
with numbers, in the manner that I described. He respected the truth.

izzythepush wrote:

I'd take everything he said with a pinch of salt.

I believe that u WOUD,
but that has no effect on the actual facts.

I wonder whether he has written a book about it??
If it exists, I 'd be interested to read it.

I called the NRA, in hope that (with luck) we can track him down.
We 'll see.

izzythepush wrote:

Did he say 'Evenin' All?'

Not that I remember, no.
Is that important?

David

2 Replies

@izzythepush,

izzythepush wrote:

I'm sure he would.

Vague, ad hominem remark. Maybe he 's calling me a queer; I dunno.

0 Replies

@Walter Hinteler,

Walter Hinteler wrote:

Then, I have my doubts that he was a "retired English police official".

U make it clear that your "doubts" are motivated by your anti-freedom ideology, not by the actual truth

David

1 Reply

@OmSigDAVID,

OmSigDAVID wrote:

U r the same people who threw out Winston Churchill
after he finished finishing off Hitler.

Yes, because Winston's manifesto was 'I defeated Hitler.' His wartime deputy, who also defeated Hitler, promised to introduce the NHS. There's a lesson there for all politicians, what you are going to do is every bit as important as what you have done.

0 Replies

@OmSigDAVID,

OmSigDAVID wrote:

... motivated by your anti-freedom ideology ...

At least, my "anti-freedom ideology" has been good enough to serve for various governmental services and agencies - even for those, who ... ehem ... who especially look at the protection of our constitution and the guaranteed freedoms we've got.

So, your rambling burps fall on deaf ears.

0 Replies

@OmSigDAVID,

Quote:

U r the same people who threw out Winston Churchill
after he finished finishing off Hitler.

A fairly encyclopedic description of the gun law situation in England resides here:

http://www.guncite.com/journals/okslip.html

The one part of the story which really tells the story is this:

Quote:

E. Genuine Danger

After the fall of France and the Dunkirk evacuation in 1940, Britain found itself short of arms for island defense. The Home Guard was forced to drill with canes, umbrellas, spears, pikes, and clubs. When citizens could find a gun, it was generally a sporting shotgun, which was ill-suited for most types of military use because of its short range and bulky ammunition. British government advertisements in United States newspapers and in magazines such as American Rifleman begged readers to "Send A Gun to Defend a British Home--British civilians, faced with threat of invasion, desperately need arms for the defense of their homes." The ads pleaded for "Pistols, Rifles, Revolvers, Shotguns and Binoculars from American civilians who wish to answer the call and aid in defense of British homes."[77] As a result of these ads, Pro-Allied organizations in the United States collected weapons; the National Rifle Association shipped 7,000 guns to Britain. Britain also purchased surplus World War I Enfield rifles from the United States Department of War.[78] Before the war, British authorities had refused to allow domestic manufacture of the Thompson submachine gun because it was "a gangster gun,"[79] but when the war broke out, large numbers of American-made Thompsons were shipped to Britain, where they were dubbed "tommie guns."[80]

Prime Minister Winston Churchill's book Their Finest Hour details the arrival of the shipments. Churchill personally supervised the deliveries to ensure that they were sent on fast ships, and distributed first to Home Guard members in coastal zones. Churchill thought that the American donations (p.418)were "entirely on a different level from anything we have transported across the Atlantic except for the Canadian division itself." Churchill warned an advisor that "the loss of these rifles and field-guns [if the transport ships were sunk by Nazi submarines] would be a disaster of the first order." He later recalled that "[w]hen the ships from America approached our shores with their priceless arms, special trains were waiting in all the ports to receive their cargoes." "The Home Guard in every county, in every town, in every village, sat up all through the night to receive them .... By the end of July we were an armed nation ... a lot of our men and some women had weapons in their hands."[81]

Of course, the day after the war ended, they went straight back to the same stupid ****.

1 Reply

@gungasnake,

Well the threat of invasion from Mexico is a threat that cannot be underestimated.

1 Reply

@izzythepush,

Gonga is such a docker's omlette, June 1940 was nothing to do with armed civilians it was all to do with being militarily unprepared. Still we're fortunate not to have mighty Mexico breathing down our necks.

0 Replies

@Miller,

Miller wrote:

You've ignored the distribution across the USA of these gun crimes. For instance, gun power is primarily the law of the land on the SouthSide of Chicago, but you rarely see gun fights in the farmlands of Illinois or as a matter of fact anywhere in the MidWest, except thefairly large urban areas.

And yet, I (in New Mexico) can buy a rifle, shotgun, or handgun tomorrow, and take it home the same day. In spite of recent rulings, it is amost impossible for a private citizen in Chicago. I'll have to think about that.

0 Replies

@izzythepush,

Really?

This the best you could come up with?

"Narcisstic Kook" is cuddly?

Going on about "Moslem Hordes?"

I'm disappointed izzy, but at least I now know whose rectum you've planted your head within: Charlie Brooker, that paragon of civility and good taste who in a column he wrote for The Guardian about George Bush asked "John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley, Jr. – where are you now that we need you?"

You haven't read the Brievik manifesto and yet somehow you feel expert enough to identify his influences (which now apparently even include me: "...it helps if you had a hand in putting it together".

You're quite the pip.

Cool

3 Replies

@Finn dAbuzz,

Quote:

You're quite the pip.

Close...

IzzythePOOP:

0 Replies

Quote:

... The ads pleaded for "Pistols, Rifles, Revolvers, Shotguns and Binoculars from American civilians who wish to answer the call and aid in defense of British homes....

Just about everybody in the US whose family has any history of owning firearms remembers this one. They rounded up massive numbers of hunting rifles and every sort of firearm and shipped them all over to England because the English had tried to be PC by ending private ownership of arms and then the British went back to the same stupid **** the day the war ended. Too stupid to experience shame or something like that...

1 Reply

@izzythepush,

Since izzy could not respond in a way more substantive than quoting Charlie Brooker, I'll reply to what Brooker wrote in his column.

The news coverage of the Norway mass-killings was fact-free conjecture Let’s be absolutely clear, it wasn't experts speculating, it was guessers guessing – and they were terrible.

I went to bed in a terrible world and awoke inside a worse one. At the time of writing, details of the Norwegian atrocity are still emerging, although the identity of the perpetrator has now been confirmed and his motivation seems increasingly clear: a far-right anti-Muslim extremist who despised the ruling party.

Presumably he wanted to make a name for himself, which is why I won't identify him. His name deserves to be forgotten. Discarded. Deleted. Labels like "madman", "monster", or "maniac" won't do, either. There's a perverse glorification in terms like that. If the media's going to call him anything, it should call him pathetic; a nothing.

An interesting "turn of phrase," but perfectly understandable coming from a character like Brooker, who has fashioned a career and a following by being outrageously provocative. In the uber-sardonic world in which Brooker operates, waxing nostalgic over deceased assassins and would be assassins of American president is stylishly witty, and so it's not surprising that he would find the terms "madman," "monster," and "maniac" glorifying.

On Friday night's news, they were calling him something else. He was a suspected terror cell with probable links to al-Qaida. Countless security experts queued up to tell me so. This has all the hallmarks of an al-Qaida attack, they said. Watching at home, my gut feeling was that that didn't add up. Why Norway? And why was it aimed so specifically at one political party? But hey, they're the experts. They're sitting there behind a caption with the word "EXPERT" on it. Every few minutes the anchor would ask, "What kind of picture is emerging?" or "What sense are you getting of who might be responsible?" and every few minutes they explained this was "almost certainly" the work of a highly-organised Islamist cell.

That is interesting. I watch FOX for my news and I didn't hear these sorts of speculative assessments, although I did find them at CNN on-line. Way to zero in on those right-wingers Charlie!

In the aftermath of the initial bombing, they proceeded to wrestle with the one key question: why do Muslims hate Norway? Luckily, the experts were on hand to expertly share their expert solutions to plug this apparent plot hole in the ongoing news narrative.

Why do Muslims hate Norway? There had to be a reason.

Norway was targeted because of its role in Afghanistan. Norway was targeted because Norwegian authorities had recently charged an extremist Muslim cleric. Norway was targeted because one of its newspapers had reprinted the controversial Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.

Norway was targeted because, compared to the US and UK, it is a "soft target" – in other words, they targeted it because no one expected them to.

When it became apparent that a shooting was under way on Utoya island, the security experts upgraded their appraisal. This was no longer a Bali-style al-Qaida bombing, but a Mumbai-style al-Qaida massacre. On and on went the conjecture, on television, and in online newspapers, including this one. Meanwhile, on Twitter, word was quickly spreading that, according to eyewitnesses, the shooter on the island was a blond man who spoke Norwegian. At this point I decided my initial gut reservations about al-Qaida had probably been well founded. But who was I to contradict the security experts? A blond Norwegian gunman doesn't fit the traditional profile, they said, so maybe we'll need to reassess . . . but let's not forget that al-Qaida have been making efforts to actively recruit "native" extremists: white folk who don't arouse suspicion. So it's probably still the Muslims.

Although Islamist extremists were not behind the attacks, all of the "reasons" why they might hate Norway that were cited by the speculators for whom Brooker has such raw disgust, were valid. The most valid reason, however, is that Islamists hate everyone in the West and that's reason enough for them to launch an attack. I'm sure Brooker felt his insight here was truly brilliant (obviously izzy did), but is he actually making a cogent point?

Jumping to a conclusion that the Norway attacks were the work of Islamist was shoddy journalism, but that doesn't mean the reasons for supporting such a speculations (i.e. "Why Muslims hate Norway") are fanciful.

The fact is that while folks like Brooker and izzy, for partisan reasons, were quite happy the culprits weren't Muslims, if they had been, would anyone have been amazed? Would anyone have shaken their heads for days because there is just no reason why Islamists might hate Norway?

Soon, the front page of Saturday's Sun was rolling off the presses. "Al-Qaeda" Massacre: NORWAY'S 9/11 – the weasel quotes around the phrase "Al Qaeda" deemed sufficient to protect the paper from charges of jumping to conclusions.

Seems a solid reason to question the journalistic integrity of The Sun, but how this extends worldwide to conservatives of all stripes is far beyond my ken. (I don't know enough about the UK press to be sure, but I'm betting The Sun and The Guardian are bitter rivals. Anyone know what The Guardian’s Sunday headline was?)

By the time I went to bed, it had become clear to anyone within glancing distance of the internet that this had more in common with the 1995 Oklahoma bombing or the 1999 London nail-bombing campaign than the more recent horrors of al-Qaida.

True, and quite a few news outlets, including FOX, reported it this way.

While I slept, the bodycount continued to rise, reaching catastrophic proportions by the morning. The next morning I switched on the news and the al-Qaida talk had been largely dispensed with, and the pundits were now experts on far-right extremism, as though they'd been on a course and qualified for a diploma overnight.

Some remained scarily defiant in the face of the new unfolding reality. On Saturday morning I saw a Fox News anchor tell former US diplomat John Bolton that Norwegian police were saying this appeared to be an Oklahoma-style attack, then ask him how that squared with his earlier assessment that al-Qaida were involved. He was sceptical. It was still too early to leap to conclusions, he said. We should wait for all the facts before rushing to judgment. In other words: assume it's the Muslims until it starts to look like it isn't – at which point, continue to assume it's them anyway.

Actually this speaks rather well of the FOX News anchor don't you think?

If anyone reading this runs a news channel, please, don't clog the airwaves with fact-free conjecture unless you're going to replace the word "expert" with "guesser" and the word "speculate" with "guess", so it'll be absolutely clear that when the anchor asks the expert to speculate, they're actually just asking a guesser to guess. Also, choose better guessers. Your guessers were terrible, like toddlers hypothesising how a helicopter works. I don't know anything about international terrorism, but even I outguessed them.

Somehow I tend to think Brooker always defaults to right-wingers being the culprits behind terrorist attacks, but his preceding comments are essentially on point.

As more information regarding the identity of the terrorist responsible for the massacre comes to light, articles attempting to explain his motives are starting to appear online. And beneath them are comments from readers, largely expressing outrage and horror. But there are a disturbing number that start, "What this lunatic did was awful, but . . ."

Why should this be so disturbing? I seriously doubt that the readers Brooker is citing were saying "What this lunatic did was awful, but . . .the kids at the camp and the people in Oslo deserved to be killed and maimed because Norway coddles Muslims"

More likely they were saying something to the effect of "What this lunatic did was awful, but . . . it wasn't outside the realm of reasonable prediction."

We don't really know because Brooker declined to provide us with much more that the "but..."

These "but" commenters then go on to discuss immigration, often with reference to a shaky Muslim-baiting story they've half-remembered from the press. So despite this being a story about an anti-Muslim extremist killing Norwegians who weren't Muslim, they've managed to find a way to keep the finger of blame pointing at the Muslims, thereby following a narrative lead they've been fed for years, from the overall depiction of terrorism as an almost exclusively Islamic pursuit, outlined by "security experts" quick to see al-Qaida tentacles everywhere, to the fabricated tabloid fairytales about "Muslim-only loos" or local councils "banning Christmas".

Why wouldn't it be relative to discuss immigration when one of the ostensible reasons for Brievik's attacks was...immigration?

For the most part Brooker managed to keep his Leftist rabies in check and his comments about speculating journalists are essentially valid...although he couldn't resist a cheap and off the mark shot at FOX. When he comes to the end of his column, though, he reverts to form.

Again, I haven't seen the comments of the readers Brooker references, but the comments I have seen don't blame Muslims, they blame the multi-cultural policies that have been in place in Europe for years and which now are being recognized, in one European country after another, as a source of larger societal problems than any they might have been intended to address.

Brooker is decrying what he perceives to be a popular narrative manufactured by ideology, only to offer his own as "The Truth."

Given recent history, it comes as no surprise that most people will suspect Islamists when a terrorist attacks occurs. It's only the Left-Wing, of which Brooker and izzy are proud members, that insists that we all ignore recognizable patterns and refrain from even considering the likely possibility that if there is a terrorist attack somewhere in the world, Islamists were behind it.

The Media in its reporting should certainly resist the temptation because of journalistic standards, but the rest of us (including the "readers" for which Brooker has such disdain) are not so regulated. It should be pointed out as well, that the standard that the journalist Brooker criticizes has nothing to do with cultural sensitivity and everything to do with not speculating when the facts are not known.

The sin of the journalists he criticizes has nothing to do with Islamaphobia but with filling space, with reporting anything, with scooping the competition.

It amazed me to see CNN speculating that the attacks were Islamist in nature since, typically, the evidence has to be overwhelming before they will report that a Muslim was involved.

Izzy, and most likely Brooker, would have us believe that deducing that Islamists were, yet again, behind a new terrorist attack is flat out bigotry.

They both were also relieved, if not delighted, that in this case the madman was a right-wing extremist, and they wish to rule all commentary that doesn't amount to "See, those right-wingers are the true danger to the world," out of scope.

At least Brooker, unlike izzy, doesn't seem to be arguing that any such commentary is evidence of immorality and hate-mongering.

3 Replies

@Finn dAbuzz,

I'm in the Brooker camp. Here's Steve Bell's take on the debacle:

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/About/General/2011/7/25/1311628964655/26.07.11-Steve-Bell-carto-004.jpg

1 Reply

@Finn dAbuzz,

Finn dAbuzz wrote:

(I don't know enough about the UK press to be sure, but I'm betting The Sun and The Guardian are bitter rivals. Anyone know what The Guardian’s Sunday headline was?)[/color]

Both papers play in quite a different (very different actually) league: The Sun is a tabloid, The Guardian is considered to be a serious paper.

The Guardian isn't published on Subdays. It's Sunday sister-paper is called The Observer.
This was the Observer's frontpage

this are pages 2 and 3

3 Replies

@Walter Hinteler,

Quote:

[image]: "This was an island paradise..."

In other words, the ruling libtard party had created an island paradise for the libtard party youth movement while simultaneously importing sufficient numbers of muslim immigrants to bring about 86 forcible rapes amongst the peasantry over the past year in a country in which forcible rape would otherwise not exist....

2 Replies

@Finn dAbuzz,

Finn dAbuzz wrote:

: Charlie Brooker, that paragon of civility and good taste who in a column he wrote for The Guardian about George Bush asked "John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley, Jr. – where are you now that we need you?"

It would have saved thousands of lives, Iraqi civilians and countless Western troops. It would have stopped Al Qaida building up a power base in Iraq.

Brooker is a light hearted columnist, which is why he appears in so many comedy shows, but his humour is a bit like concorde from your point of view.

You know very little about British papers if you just think The Sun and Guardian are bitter rivals. One is a newspaper, the other is full of tits, a paper for people too embarrassed to buy a wank mag.

1 Reply

Terror in Norway: Shootout, bomb explosions kill 11

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