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.
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
I don't agree with conservatives on many things, but one area we can all agree: John Kasich really is an asshole.
Fox News’ “The Five” celebrated St. Patrick’s Day by attacking as many other ethnic groups as they could. Greg Gutfeld lamented the fact that you can’t make fun of Mexicans, for instance. “If you throw a Mexican party, like a fiesta and wear a sombrero, you’re in big trouble — a Cinco de Mayo party, for example,” he said. “But you can do whatever you want and actually use stereotypes that are kind of damaging [to Irish people].”
