The French authorities have not confirmed whether the fingerprints of the man who registered as Almohammad in Leros match any of the attackers’ remains.
In the days since the attack multiple copies of that passport have turned up.
A reporter with England’s MailOnline bought a forged Syrian passport with that same name.
Serbian police have also arrested a person carrying the passport in the name of Ahmad Al Mohammad, with all the same identifying details such as age, height, and place of birth.
Authorities believe the passports are all fake, and were forged either in Syria or Turkey. Officials with the European Union agency Frontex, which is responsible for border controls, say the number of people trafficking in fake Syrian passports is rising.
Meanwhile two other bombing suspects have been identified as carrying false Turkish passports.
Actually several groups have voiced protest against the recent events. Unlike in the past, some of them actually got a little coverage.
There are 1.6 BILLION Muslims in the world. People keep throwing out the “number out of their ass” figure of 10% are radicals. Just assuming that is true, those people have to be real shit at terror and killing people, because I am not seeing the violence one expects from that many crazed fundamentalists.
The reality is there are many different flavors of Muslim, just like there are many different flavors of Christianity. Most of them aren’t wanting to hurt others.
Islamic State […] tells refugees they are committing “a major dangerous sin” by attempting to flee the war and entering countries where they will be assimilated or integrated into “Christianity, atheism or liberalism.”
Aside from the Christianity part, that sounds pretty much like some Republicans I know.
I am old enough to remember when this was not the case in the GOP. I mean, I always disagreed with them, but I didn’t always consider them utterly dishonest, shriekingly xenophobic, and completely out where the buses don’t run.
If your opinion of the leadership has fallen so far, why do you maintain membership in the party? Do you think the situation might improve? God knows if there were indications that the current Democratic Party might show signs of reverting to anything like the old Dixiecrat party, I’d abandon ship in a hurry. As it is, I’m just hoping to keep us from reverting to Clintonian triangulation and Wall Street suckupitude.
Liberalism in a global sense, the one likely intended for the quote that you provide, doesn’t mean the same thing as in the local US context. Liberalism as I understand it for the global context means democratic forms of government and free market economics. So although the quote sounds deceptively like standard Republican fare, the similarity is coincidental.
Also, to be fare, lots of political tendencies, many on the left, decry liberalism in both the US and global contexts, with good reason. MLK once said, for example, that the greatest threat to freedom is the white moderate, i.e. many who considered themselves liberal then and now. I think that part of what he meant, and what I would add to clarify, is that liberalism fulfills the role of hindering more sweeping change because it is always seeking a compromise with the right wing and with establishment politics. So, like most political tendencies, it provides no real solutions to our problems and is really just one of many strategies for coping with the class struggles internal to capitalism.
One example is how liberalism generally favors some degree of a welfare state. This ameliorates some of the symptoms of capitalism while in most cases failing to address the causes. But no social safety net at all, or a weak one, yields more crime and weakens the officially sanctioned political process, potentially leading to escalated social struggles and the “specter of communism” (or, these days, maybe some other alternative). With austerity looming on the horizon and Greece functioning as a kind of lab for capitalists to plan the next global stages of economic development and contraction, we may be about to witness the pendulum swing to the right, which is stimulating left-wing politics in many Western countries, in most cases severely watered down by liberalism.
So all of that is to say that comparing ISIS statements against liberalism to the GOP over-simplifies the situation and the vocabulary. If we accept the whole political spectrum–“post”-left / ultra-left, left, center, right, far-right–with anarchists on one end and fascists on the other, then pretty much everybody outside of one small range from center-left to center-right is going to be opposed to liberalism.
Man, I know exactly what you mean. I actually have a friend who was involved in the switcheroo, which was funded by Falwell and CAN. He had a soulcage email address, back in the day.
[quote=“Donald_Petersen, post:47, topic:69440”]If your opinion of the leadership has fallen so far, why do you maintain membership in the party?[/quote]It’s my best chance of effecting useful change, because I live in an overwhelmingly Democratic tiny state. My voice carries further in a smaller crowd, right? I can (and did) call my Republican representative and helped convince him to stand up for gay marriage, and more recently for marijuana decriminalization. Could a Democrat do that? At the local level, I am one of less than five thousand people that he needs to vote for him, and I wasn’t the only one who called him.
People mostly want to join a winning team, and often that prevents them from seeing where they can do the most good. Are you making a difference in the world by joining a club that’s already doing what you want them to do, or would it make more sense to join the organization that needs to change its behavior?
Also, to be honest I believe in a lot of the things the Republicans say (personal responsibility, educational opportunity, individual rights, market-based solutions, &etc.) although when elected they always do the exact opposite of what they said.
Well, you certainly make an excellent point there.
Well, I don’t think the logic holds up here. In an extreme example, I’m not sure my joining the Klan in an effort to change their platform from within would make a whole lot of sense. Also, it’s counterintuitive (though certainly worth thinking about) to deliberately join an association founded on (or at least currently espousing) ideals with which one disagrees. If nothing else, the team one considers to be the “good guys” might need the manpower/help/support to a degree where that might be the stronger investment of one’s time, effort, and resources.
On a smallish scale, where one’s individual voice carries more relative weight, your strategy seems more sound. But I live in big, crowded California, and with my painfully low Charisma score, the most influence I could hope to bring to bear would be on, say, the school board level.
But doesn’t your account, in a nutshell, completely undermine the legitimacy of electoral politics? If we can accept that so-called “representative” government is all but impenetrable and unresponsive, then doesn’t that tell us that we are really living under a dictatorship by other means?
I was just gently pointing out that the “Muslim community as a whole” is about a responsible for these jerks as the Christian community as whole is responsible for their jerks but no one seems to be asking the Christians to take a stand against the problematic portions of their faith.
I also am pretty sure that I’ve heard and seen many Muslim leaders denounce all sorts of terrorism done in the name of their faith… so maybe, just maybe the problem isn’t with what the Muslim community has or hasn’t done as a whole as it is our unwillingness to report on or seek out reporting of Muslim leaders denouncing violence.
