Brussels Unprepared

 Posted by at 1:28 pm  Politics, Religion
Mar 232016
 

The Daesh, political extremists that are hijacking Islam for their own perverse ends, just committed a horrific act of terrorism, by attacking the the Brussels airport and subway station, killing over 30.  Whenever such attacks happen, their counterparts, political extremists hijacking Christianity for their own perverse ends, call for religious discrimination and a crackdown on civil liberties.  They are wrong about the problem.  In Brussels, the problem was, at least in part, inadequate preparation.

0323Brussels-attack

A week after the attacks early last year in Paris against the magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher grocery, Belgian police officers were fired on as they executed a search warrant in the town of Verviers. Officials learned that the assailants were members of a terrorist cell that had been planning a significant attack on Belgian police officers or civilians.

The incident changed the way counterterrorism officials perceived the Islamic State threat in Europe and made clear that Belgium itself had a greater problem on its hands than it realized.

Before the plot was disrupted, the United States Department of Homeland Security would later explain, nearly all of about a dozen Islamic State plots and attacks in the West had involved lone assailants or small groups. But, the report presciently warned, “the involvement of a large number of operatives and group leaders based in multiple countries in future ISIL-linked plotting could create significant obstacles in the detection and disruption” of new plots.

Indeed, that is now the case, and as the investigation of the even more brutal November attacks in Paris showed, Belgium is a major source of the threat. The attacks on Tuesday in Brussels raised the most serious questions about how prepared the nation was for that threat…

Inserted from <NY Times>

Click through for more detail on how Brussels was unprepared to defend their inhabitants against a terrorist attack.

While Rachel Maddow did not come to a conclusion on preparation, she does provide some excellent background.

Republican responses to the attack have been what we would expect from the pseudo-Christian version of the Daesh.  Fecal Dump Trump would close our borders, infiltrate mosques, and torture suspects.  TRUSed Uranus Cruz blamed Obama for the attack, and called for closing the borders, increasing support for Israel,  and carpet bombing civilian populations where the Daesh has fighters.  KKKsich called for closing the borders.

Those are not the answer.  Whenever we, whichever nation we are, respond to terrorism by making ourselves less fess free, the terrorists win.  Every time we respond to terrorism by discriminating against the religious population that the terrorists are hijacking, the terrorists win.  That guarantees them new recruits.  The best thing we can do is to harden our targets, vet potential immigrants carefully without ethnic profiling, and build a discrimination-free economy where all ethnic groups can thrive.  And as for the people of Brussels…

Je Suis Bruxelles

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  11 Responses to “Brussels Unprepared”

  1. Je Suis BRUXELLES!

  2. The proposed knee-jerk reactions help them win by making us become more like them without any morals or ethical foundations for our actions and choices.

  3. "Whenever we, whichever nation we are, respond to terrorism by making ourselves less free, the terrorists win.  Every time we respond to terrorism by discriminating against the religious population that the terrorists are hijacking, the terrorists win."  That needs to be in huge letters.  But more important, it needs to be indelibly imprinted on every American brain.

    Je suis Bruxelles aussi.

  4. Once Donald Trump becomes the Rethuglican candidate, I, for one, will be waiting with bated breath to see his plans for his "big, beautiful" Taj Ma-Wall.

    He says it'll not only be "beautiful" – it'll be "YUUUGGGEEE!"

  5. What JL said.

    Horrific and so sad.

    Thanks, Tom.

    'Je Suis Bruxelles' !

  6. Ny Times:  Part of the article says that the different departments in Brussels have insufficient communication with each other, that is true in the US, too.

    Rachel Maddow:  Good background info.  Of course, members of the clown car all have a solutioni, too bad none of them have a clue!

  7. In my view, the EU should be tackling the terrorism threat as a whole, writing laws and processes that will facilitate the exchange of information about terrorists, or likely terrorists.  The terrorists have identified a weakness between France and Belgium and are successfully using that weakness to their own ends.

    As to the Republican candidates, their rhetoric, their potential actions only serve the cause of further radicalisation by alienating vulnerable Muslims, especially youth who are often at odds with older generations already.  Drumpf and Cruz particularly are ignorant assholes who are unfit for POTUS.

  8. I'm sorry to be so late in commenting on this, as I feel I need to set some things straight here.

    First of all, Brussels is the administrative center of the European Community, the conglomeration of most but not all European countries. It houses the EU parliament and many organizations connected to the EU in some way. But Brussels is not the capital of Europe, it is the capital of Belgium, a small but divided country, with about half of it French speaking, a tiny part German speaking and the remainder Dutch speaking. Brussels, seat of the Belgian government too, reflects this division in that part of the rapidly expanding city are French speaking while others are Flemish (Dutch) in origin. In the past decades Brussels has encroached many surrounding municipalities who remained rather autonomous in their new settings as departments with their own mayor and resulting in five police departments who do not all speak the same language let alone cooperate together.

    In addition, borders within the EU are open, much like the borders in America. But although people and goods can travel freely through the EU, the EU is still in its early stages of organizing cooperation of police forces and exchanging information across countries.

    So chaotic Brussels, in the heart of the EU with its open borders, with its EU parliament and officials from all over the EU living and working there, but with its deplorable internal security, was an ideal place to settle for this particular Da'esh cell. Because apparently the Paris attackers were directly linked to the bombers in Brussels.

    After the Paris attacks it soon became clear that weapons and even coordination came from Brussels and in the past weeks the Belgian police has raided several sites in the departments around Brussels, arresting people and about 2 weeks ago killing a suspected Da'esh fighter, who was again linked to the Paris attacks. Findings in his appartment lead them to the arrest last week of Saleh Abdeslam, thought to be the brain behind Paris. As it turned out all the Brussels bombers were directly linked to these men – they rented apartments for them – and it is now thought that with they had been preparing for a bombing like this, but put forward their attack because they felt the police were closing in on them.

    So Brussels was not completely unprepared and yet in another way it was. The police found the apartment the two brothers lived in through the tip of the taxi driver who brought them to the airport and called in their weird behavior (they left the largest suitcase behind because it didn't fit in the cab and he wasn't allowed to touch their suitcases). Their apartment turned out to be a bomb factory, something locals had picked up on a little and informed their community policeman off. This message got lost in the chaotic or nonexistent communication between police departments.

    Brussels (or Europe) isn't unprepared, but could be better prepared if communication between police forces within a country and between countries were better matched. However, nobody here wants a total lock down, it isn't feasible and we don't want to live in a police state, in fear of every one who looks a bit different. We will not bow to terrorism.

    • Thanks Lona—the US press provides far less detail on nonUS events than does the European press.

    • "(N)obody here wants a total lock down, it isn't feasible and we don't want to live in a police state, in fear of every one who looks a bit different. We will not bow to terrorism."  I am VERY glad to hear that there are people in the world who have the right attitude – the one most likely to succeed against Da'esh, which is also the one most likely to keep everyone strong.

  9. Thanks to all!!  Major kudos to Lona for the great background.  Any differences we have are semantic.

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