ISIS-affiliated suicide bombers attacked the passenger terminal at the Brussels International Airport, prompting calls for increased security not just at access points to flights, but at the entrance of the terminals. Where does this ever end?
The Muscle in Brussels
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication, WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal, a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "The Stringer."
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Warned – over and over again to stay away from people who had a culture that was centuries behind most of the Western world – and are like angry bees when enraged for whatever reason, we still continue to think that we can beat on the beehives with impunity? Now they have migrated from their broken, smoking hives and started new hives all over the world.
The only answers are to completely withdraw from them, hoping that they will swarm amongst themselves more, or what?
Agreed, rikster.
I’ll add that one of the reasons that their culture is centuries behind is because we keep bombing them back to the stone age.
The only way to end this cycle involves genocide. Maybe we should try a new cycle?
The Nobel Peace Prize Prez announced the development of adjustable yield nuclear bombs so their use can be less “unthinkable” than the fixed yield devices. What’s the use of threatening nuclear war when no one believes they would really be used?
And if by some accident the yield is too high the US can always say Whoopsie! and the “civilized” people of the world would agree the accident is no reflection on US civility, but only another example of good intentions gone awry.
Maybe the US oligarchic state should have been buying oil instead of invading and stealing it.
Who could have guessed that those primitive people would figure out who was killing and robbing them and then hold a grudge?
Who would have figured the primitives to be smarter and more aware of how the world works than the average American?
When people are killing and robbing you, Glenn, you either wake up and fight back or cease to exist (often you cease to exist even if you wake up and fight back, if the forces arraigned against you are to great). That, I suggest is why many people in the United States are, in fact, waking up, and why Mr Sanders’ message has received a response that the pundits could never have envisaged in their worst nightmares….
Henri
It ends with a camera in your bathroom. Dorme bene.
«Dorme bene.» In the bathroom, with the camera ? Sounds rather uncomfortable to me !… 😉
Henri
Seems like there was a white guy arrested for bombing people outside the security gate of an Olympics venue.
American Terrorist, 1996
“Mr. Rudolph is thought to be the author of the Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta that killed one woman, an attack at an abortion clinic that claimed the life of a police officer, and two other blasts, one at another abortion center and one at a gay nightclub. He was first named a suspect in 1998.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/01/us/suspect-in-96-olympic-bombing-and-3-other-attacks-is-caught.html
The authorities say Mr. Rudolph first struck July 27, 1996, planting a knapsack bomb that drilled nails and shrapnel into visitors at the Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta. It was midway through the Games. The explosion, which tarred the event, killed Alice Hawthorne, 44, and injured more than 100.
Oh, no, that’s not a terrorist. Terrorists are Muslims. Rudy is a Christian, and that’s an entirely different kind of indiscriminate killer.
So you’re unable to appreciate the difference between an isolated nut and organized terror. Nothing new here.
Or maybe you think someone somewhere claimed that Christians never killed anybody. How you came to such a position is anyone’s guess…
> someone somewhere claimed that Christians never killed anybody.
How you came to such a position is anyone’s guess
> So you’re unable to appreciate the difference between an isolated nut and organized terror.
Sure I can. An isolated nut is a Christian. Organized terror is a Muslim. Isn’t that what I said in the first place?
“So you’re unable to appreciate the difference between an isolated nut and organized terror. Nothing new here.”
Some may not see the Republican Party as an organization.
I can see where that idea could might be convincing to those who wish to be convinced.
Just because the KKK and women’s health clinic closing legislators and sympathizers are pandered to by the Republican Party doesn’t mean they are organized under its auspices.
“Where does this ever end?”
I suppose it will end in a Europe in which native Europeans find themselves strangers in their ancestral lands…
«I suppose it will end in a Europe in which native Europeans find themselves strangers in their ancestral lands…» You mean, «Jack Heart» in the same way that the natives of North America (the descendants of those few that survived the European onslaught) find themselves strangers in their ancestral lands ? I hope you aren’t proposing that people like yourself emigrate from the US to Europe to help keep us from feeling alienated – given your politics, I doubt you’d feel comfortable with our so-called «socialist» economies (which, of course, they are not, but you’d call them such)….
Anyone who talks about «ancestral lands» in Europe would do well to view the following video, which provides a graphic illustration of the transient nature of European borders during the last millennium : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2LgiMMGf6Q ….
Henri
Henri – That’s actually one of Jack most factual posts.
I’m sure he realizes that all Europeans’ ancestral lands are in Africa, where all humanity ultimately originated. And they are indeed, strangers there today.
«I’m sure he realizes that all Europeans’ ancestral lands are in Africa, where all humanity ultimately originated.» Well, CrazyH, as you point out, that’s true – so far as is known – of us all. I am not, however, so sure, that those residing in Africa would be so happy to see their latter-day descendants all return there, nor would I, as a European, be particularly pleased to see «Jack Heart» return to this continent as a way-station on her/his voyage to Africa…. 😉
Henri
Conservatives always have difficulty understanding the basis of civilization, so nicely summed up by the first sentence of the US Constitution.
I often fantasize about freeing them from oppression by sending them back to the African Savanna of 50,000 years ago, naked and alone. They’d be untroubled by regulations and taxes, unburdened by deadbeats, and free to exploit their environment as they see fit. They wouldn’t have to share their profits with people different than themselves.
(unless they run afoul of a group of people who do see a reason to work together for the common good – but hey, that’s just the invisible hand of the free market at work.)
Surely not «naked» CrazyH – that would be too cruel and a denial of their human(oid) rights !… 😉
Henri
Fair enough, they can take anything with them which they have created without the help of other human beings.
A gun, for instance, provided they mined the ore, smelted it, machined the pieces etc. But of course, they would first have to carve a wooden shovel using a flint knife they chipped themselves.
However, they’d be using knowledge that other humans had first discovered and shared . . .
You’re a hard man, CrazyH – but we already knew that !… 😉
Henri
Ask any security expert. They all say the same thing: TSA is theater. It’s designed to make people feel safer but does nothing to improve security. But the media doesn’t cover that. Why? Because the other narratives would have to have analysis (more on that in a paragraph or so).
Another thing the media doesn’t cover? Last night, I was enduring the ABC Evening News with David Muir. They had a campaign update. They mentioned Cruz, Trump and Clinton. Bernie Sanders? Not one word. I mean, literally, nothing. Going by the fivethirtyeight figures, Sanders has gone from 83% of his target to 92% of his target. To put that in perspective, Trump is at 96% of his target–down from 104%–and Cruz is at 53%–politically in a coma with friends and campaign financiers talking in hushed tones about pulling the plug. Clinton is down from 116% to 108%–remember, they don’t give the award to the person who is in first place at the middle of the race; the award’s at the end. If her campaign isn’t having a collective coronary, they must be the reincarnation of the Titanic’s passengers. Sure, Sanders could lose every race from this point on (not likely), and he could still lose the nomination (possible). But to not even cover him? ABC is officially a propaganda organ.
Reality, however, is coming up fast in the rear-view mirror. And the longer you live in the “theater world,” the harder it will be to jump the chasm back to reality.
9/11 was 15 years ago. And except for the occasional, in passing, comment, the demands of the terrorists are never part of the discussion. It isn’t whether you agree that the demands are valid or whether you think the demands are just what the terrorists are saying to justify themselves to themselves, it’s that there was never a substantial analysis of those demands that became part of the 9/11 narrative. It was “theaterized” into “they did it because they hate our freedoms.” And Sanders has been theaterized by the MSM as a pie-in-the-sky lunatic who is completely not grounded in reality.
A long time back, Robert Heinlein pointed out that laws to repeal the tide never work. And they never work because they simply cannot; they are contrary to reality. And the reality is that Sanders is talking about realistic things: universal healthcare, living wages, fixing the infrastructure. And the reality is that the current system, mathematically, can’t go on much longer. We can’t keep making healthcare a “for-specials,” we can’t keep cutting wages and eliminating jobs, we can’t just keep spit-and-baling-wire splicing the electrical grid and the roadways and the schools and hope like hell it all just, magically, holds together.
And electing Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump is electing someone who is not connected to reality.
I think that T-rump is in it just to prove that you don’t have to really want the presidency to get it. I predict that he will eventually pull out. Sanders would never be allowed to win (Superdelegates anyone) mostly because old-time Woodie Guthrie socialism is so last century (and that’s where the bankster-class is going to keep it). Hillary has some serious health issues, which means that her VP will assume command after she kicks the bucket.
In the end, just as it has been for the last two and a half decades or so, it’s the vote-counters who will win the next election.
That is, tired guy, if America doesn’t devolve into a “Friday” universe paradigm without the trans-stellar travel or new world colonization (I’m sure that you can appreciate this Heinlein alternate “Future-History” reference).
DanD
Kudos to anyone who quotes The Grandmaster!
> “they did it because they hate our freedoms.”
… and you can’t solve a problem without first understanding it. But then, that assumes you think terrorism is a “problem.” TPTB see it as a cash cow for the MIC, and an excuse to slap down all those whiners who want their silly, little civil liberties. To them, the problem was to find an enemy after the USSR bit the dust.
«We can’t keep making healthcare a “for-specials,” we can’t keep cutting wages and eliminating jobs, we can’t just keep spit-and-baling-wire splicing the electrical grid and the roadways and the schools and hope like hell it all just, magically, holds together.» But, alex_the_tired, all is not lost : «we» can keep making war all around the world in order to enrich those who profit from such endeavours – which provides them with still greater power to see that the solutions proposed by, among others, Mr Sanders to real problems facing real people are never implemented….
By the way, nine centuries before Mr Heinlein, it was the then king of Denmark, England, and Norway (and earl of Schleswig and Pommern) Canute the Great (Knud II den store) demonstrated for his vassals that no man, however powerful, can command the tide to cease….
Henri