Breaking news: an attack on a cartoonist who had drawn a picture of Mohommed has led to another death.
Gunmen stormed a Copenhagen building Saturday where controversial cartoonist Lars Vilks and his supporters had gathered, killing one man and wounding three police officers before driving away from the scene, police and witnesses said.
People killing people over bad ideas…it’s got to stop.
Blasphemy and misogyny… the two shittiest aspects of religion.
I hope the murderers can be caught before they kill more.
PZ, you said it, this has got to stop.
I just don’t even know what to say anymore. It all seems so bat-shit crazy. How do we even begin to deal with this level of indoctrination?
do the killers really think that their action will stop the “blasphemy”?
looks to me that at lest in the short run it will just call down destruction on themselves.
that their life is so bleak and painful that this is a solution.
the destruction they seek will not solve any thing neither for them nor for those that are left behind. such hopelessness
uncle frogy
Bad ideas in the USA:
One problem with this crap is that Hagee’s followers may be prompted to start some of the destroying themselves, because, as you know, God needs help.
Killer, singular. The police have just amended their earlier statement.
Nothing specific about the victim save for the description of him as a “civilian”. I believe he wasn’t involved in the debate apart from being in the audience.
Meanwhile, hate from the anti-muslim side is rampant as well:
Violence and burning things down. Not good choices.
The event was a debate on Islam and free speech – so it seems likely there were Muslims there. The shooters were prepared to fire on a room containing fellow Muslims, without even knowing what position the latter took in the debate. Presumably they were ok with killing Muslims as long as they got some blasphemers too.
What is the most effective way to stop this? Genuine question, really.
I’m conflicted on the approach to take with Islam.
On one side, it needs to be criticized On the other, you don’t want to further isolate people that already struggle to integrate in our society.
Any hey, the problem to be addressed may not even be Islam (since Xians and atheists seem to do the same).
Is it possible to tackle this as a single problem, as a “attack ideas but protect people” issue?
I’m thinking solutions that work against this are a) contribute to the campaigns against blasphemy laws and b) lose no opportunity to remind religious people (all religions) that their ideas also offend us, in the name of bringing them round to some better notions of reciprocity.
Obviously, this isn’t likely to work on the tiny minority of people who are going to decide to become terrorists, at least not in the short term.
This attack is horrifying, but it’s just as important to ensure that no violence goes the other way, targeting innocent Muslims. We need to stay calm and not surrender our principles in the attempt to defend them.
We can’t allow this to be framed as Islam vs. the West. If that happens, we lose. Instead, this has to be people willing to live in peace vs. people who respond to words with violence.
@f.o. 9
“Islam” isnt the problem to tackle
Violent fundamentalism is. And you treat it like any other violent ethic; with the rule of law.
To paraphrase The West Wing, [the shooter]:islam::kkk:christianity
I will not live in the global muslim theocracy where the rule that applies to every human on the planet is that you cannot depict their prophet.
To me that is what it comes down to.
It’s a caliphate by stealth.
The only way you will be able to detoxify islam is by fundamentally dismantling the way the religion is taught to children – close down the madrassas. I was brought up roman catholic and over the period of 11 years religious education and weekly masses I calculate that I was only actually exposed to 1% of the contents of the bible – and none of it was the morally questionable sections of the bloody thing.
# 8, Moggie
Same as Christians in older times.
From wikipedia:
Arnaud Amaury or Arnaud Amalric (died 1225) was a Cistercian abbot who took a prominent role in the Albigensian Crusade. He is most remembered for allegedly advising a soldier, who was worrying about killing orthodox Catholics along with the heretics during the sack of the Cathar stronghold of Béziers, Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius. (“Kill them. For the Lord knows those that are His own.”)
Update (from a Dane): It appears there was just one gunman, and he never entered the building as far as I’ve been able to gather – he shot at it from outside. The man who was killed seems to have been a random bystander outside the building, not part of the audience.
Educate the next generation.
Hey, I never said there’s a quick & easy way to stop it; I’m telling you the most effective one.
Someone please take away Martin Wilson’s guns before he kills a few “stealth caliphatists” in a “parking dispute”.
Actually there’s much uncertainty about the original source’s reliability, so it may well be he never said that. That didn’t stop the crusaders from killing everyone though.
Something interesting is that the Albigensian crusade never gained much popularity at the time, and while some kings such as Philippe II of France carefully avoided any overt involvement others such as Peter II of Aragon even opposed it militarily; even the upper echelons of the crusade was mostly composed of northern french knights and nobles more interested in sacking Languedoc and amassing land and wealth rather than actually fighting for the Cross.
The bad news: Same as it ever was. Humans have always killed each other for trivialities that get remapped as being important as principles or as threats to identity. Are you going to take that? A real man would …
The good news: For the most part people who have happy, secure and fulfilling lives, careers, and hope for the future don’t kill people over trivialities, even when egged on.
There will always be killers. Psychopathology is unavoidable. It is part of the human condition. The problem can be managed and the number reduced by establishing social and economic structures that increase the numbers of people with secure and fulfilling lives. Having mental health services readily available seems likely to help.
martinwilson:
Might not want to bring up Catholicism whilst trying to justify your rantings about how inherently evil Islam is and how it must be purged. Glass houses, etc. etc.
lorn:
For fuck’s fucking sake: The mentally ill are not to blamed for the existence of fucking murder.
No, don’t armchair diagnosis. No, do not just outright assume that every murderer and killer MUST be mentally ill, in the holy and hallowed name of Common Sense. Just fucking stop.
“People killing people over bad ideas…it’s got to stop.”
QFT.
So. Tired. Of this shit.
The way to stop this kind of (presumably) home-grown jihadism is to establish solid social programs that make sure nobody falls through the cracks and is not given the opportunity at a happy, healthy and productive life feeling as if they are (in this case) Danish first and foremost. If the problem is mental health, make sure it is identified and addressed as quickly as possible. If it is the bad influence of a parent, religious leader or extra-societal group, make it so that all individuals have a) a support system that includes trusted people of the non-religious fundamentalist variety, and b) the intellectual tools to be able to spot emotional manipulation designed to persuade them to make bad decisions. People who feel they have nothing to lose are easy to manipulate into committing terrible atrocities. But people who have strong ties to a diverse community, people who have worked hard and seen their effort rewarded by a better life for them and their family are going to be very hard to manipulate into murder for a cause.
The goal of terrorism is to manipulate the targets of the terrorism into actions that end up being self-destructive. If a lone gunman who had no collaborators or “handlers” from ISIS or Al-Qaeda can kill one person in Ottawa and have the Canadian government create laws that make Muslims feel more threatened and less at home in a country many of them moved to to build a life, a safe life free of tyranny, a move that was undertaken with pain at the loss of friends and family, but also profound hope that they could have a good life in a new country, that gunman has scored a terrible blow against Canada. Rather than fear and socially isolate Muslims because a tiny minority of them are trying to wage a war on Western values, we should assist them in growing roots in the countries in which they were either born or moved to as immigrants. There is a strong, negative correlation between overall religiosity and social and economic stability in a country. Denmark is a beacon of hope actually, in that it offers one of the highest qualities of life for its citizens, with a strong social safety net. Not coincidentally, it has some of the lowest rates of religious observance in the world. Danish people need to step up and extend the good life they enjoy to the people who are slipping through the cracks. In the short term this means tolerance and understanding – listening to their Muslim community tell them how people are being radicalized (even if the gunman doesn’t reside in Denmark, there is inevitably a portion of the Muslim community who are not leading stable, productive lives and who may be at risk). In the long term, it means fixing the problems that allowed these failures to occur.
We don’t have to compromise Enlightenment values to become a functioning cultural melting pot; if would-be radical fundamentalists feel Danish first (or whatever country in which they happen to live, first), if they are included in the collective Danish identity, they will let their religion evolve so that it becomes compatible with the values that have allowed them to prosper.
Sadly, there has been another shooting in Copenhagen, this time at a synagogue. Does not appear to be much information available yet: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-31475803
unclefroggy wrote @4:
uncle, that question is to easy to rephrase as, “Does the judicial system really think the death penalty will stop the _____(fill in the blank)____ ?” This then brings to mind the notion, that this incident was modeled on the ‘death penalty’ of the judicial system, that executing one perpetrator will act as a deterrent to prevent others from doing the crime.
Assuming this executioner was a perfectly rational person, the “resultant notion”, above, is the only rationalization I can think of that they would have used to justify his action.
[ whoa, I think I’ve gone too far, Sorry, I’ll try to read for comprehension ]
It’s as if the history of humankind is being encapsulated in micro-bursts (no pun there) and it perhaps will never stop.
I doubt even they think their purpose is to stop blasphemy–like, if only European cartoonists stopped engaging in particular forms of satire/criticism/bigotry, everything would be fine and dandy. What seems more likely is that they see world events as part of a conflict between “Islam” and “the West”, of which islamophobic bigotry and violence, wars waged by the US, Israeli expansion and the oppression of Palestinians, the spread of American and European culture in the Muslim world, and the historical loss of influence of Muslim religious institutions are all different but related parts (this worldview is more or less shared by islamophobes). The point is to “fight enemies of Islam” and to get other Muslims to think in those terms, too.
This notion that people are fighting over ideas, or killing for ideas, is way off the mark.
But they ARE fighting for ideas – they (violent fundamentalists) believe Islam offers everything you need to know to live a perfect life, that it should dictate every aspect of how a society is run. And they are trying to destabilize Western nations, to get reactionary politicians to stoke fear and hatred of, not violent Islamists, but of ALL Muslims, so that Muslims who want no part in violence, who moved to the West originally to be free of the theocracies that persecuted them and who are prospering in the West, suddenly are once again being persecuted.
It is hard to convince a Muslim to give everything up to fight a holy war if they are happily integrated into a Western society, if they are accepted and befriended by people of many different cultures, if they are enjoying the benefits of a comprehensive social safety net like that which Denmark possesses. Like I said above – the chief harm of terrorism is not the body count of the initial attack, it is the harm that the target does unto itself in over-reacting to the threat and marginalizing people in the process.
twas brillig
as you say about as good a capital punishment works. the “best” argument for it I have ever heard was at least the killer will never kill anyone else. though it does not seem to have eradicated murder yet!
uncle frogy
And also, the idea that this has much of anything to do with how more than a tiny percentage of Muslims growing up in Europe are raised/educated to think about their religion seems way off the mark, given that extremely tiny numbers of Muslims commit religious violence in western Europe, out of millions of Muslims there. Islamist terrorist attacks in Europe do not occur with the regularity of, say, school shootings, police murders, or even attacks by serial killers in the US, much less other kinds of crime, where you could say that a certain population engages in this behavior in a regular and predictable way. As attractive as the idea that you can solve this problem by making society more welcoming for European Muslims is, the number of people who commit religious violence within Europe is so tiny that I wonder if trying to address it at the level of social relations isn’t a fool’s errand, and also counter-productive because it misleads people as to how widespread the behavior is, or how connected it is to the lives of any significant number of people.
But they ARE fighting for ideas – they (violent fundamentalists) believe Islam offers everything you need to know to live a perfect life, that it should dictate every aspect of how a society is run.
Sure, but what is the connection between creating a Muslim ‘caliphal’ or other state where everyone lives according to strict Islamic principles (as they see them), and preventing the prophet from being dishonored in Europe? These are two very different things. I mean, I could tell you what I think the actual connection is, but I probably don’t need to, you probably have some idea about that already. I guess I object to the characterization of this as “fighting for ideas” because you could say that about virtually any war whatsoever–the “idea” that certain people should be allowed to live here and others shouldn’t. “Lebensraum” was an idea. “Making the world safe for democracy” was an idea. But how much do we think of WWI and WWII as having been fought over ideas? The people who attacked Charlie Hebdo, and probably these attackers too, are probably less interested in how French people think or what they say than in how the publicity created by the attacks can help them build their movement. What’s at stake here is the misconception that these attacks happen because some large number of European Muslims cares enough about the literal text of the Qur’an that they “react” violently to people who “say the wrong thing”. That seems like a very bad way to understand what’s going on.
#9 F.O. One way is for the media to show a spine. They show the picture or videos of potential victim Lars Vilks, but don’t have the guts to show his cartoon. The correct tactic would have just been for all the media to just show his cartoon and no pictures of him, which only serve to make him an easier target. It is a form of blaming the victim.
lorn @ 19
Fuck. Off. No. Seriously what the fuck? First, psychopathology is the scientific study of mental disorders so yeah, it’s probably not a thing we want to avoid. Secondly, assuming what you actually mean is psychopathy, we don’t know near enough about it to justify random fuckwits on the internet declaring it an unavoidable part of the human condition. Third, there’s no evidence psychopathy has anything at all to do with this incident. Fourth, fucking stop blaming all violence on the mentally ill.
@32 – it might be better if we spoke about murders of various kinds as often being committed in some kind of state of altered consciousness. I’m pretty sure that’s something we know so little about that the contributions of lay people may make just as much sense as those of professionals.
Anne Fenwick @ 33
Words fail. Make sense to whom? Lay people? It doesn’t matter what superficially makes sense to anyone. I’ll keep putting my trust in people with training, if it’s all the same to you. And I’ll keep calling out asshats who run their mouths about shit they clearly aren’t qualified to opine on. Thanks anyway for your undoubtedly expert opinion.
I’ve just seen that Danish police have apparently killed the gunman, and while I’m relieved to know that he will no longer be around to murder more innocent people, it’s frustrating to think his companions will be under the impression that he has now gone to paradise. Of course, he can’t tell them that they are wrong, since he’s dead. Sadly, ‘I told you so’ doesn’t work when you’re dead.
chrisdevries and Fuzzy Dunlop
Well said.
It’s time we recognized that violent islamists aren’t bred in Syria or Iraq, but in our own suburbs.
The problem is that a non-negligible fraction of western societies acknowledge this fact, only to concludes from this premise that “The solution is to crush this rabble into craven submission“
chrisdevries et al, yes. One very important practical issue (in the UK) would be to phase out “faith schools” (all of them, obviously) and encourage (not force, so it would take a while) greater integration. Of course the C of E is dead against this, as they run more faith schools than anybody else …
I also wish that as well as putting some resources into translation and interpreting services, a hell of a lot more resources were being put into giving non-English speakers (in our case) access to opportunities to learn English; it’s not just relatively recent arrivals, it’s British women – for the most part – who are effectively prevented from accessing media and information and people outside their communities by lack of proficiency in English.
But phasing out faith schools is so politically unthinkable that nobody outside the Humanists is really talking about it, and equally nobody dares open themselves to accusations of “throwing even more money at (bigoted slur of choice)” by offering more language lessons.
France has a different problem: most of its “faith schools” are catholic schools…. whose core customers are wealthy atheists who put their kids here because they’re the only ones which can still get away with blatant class-based discrimination. Many kids sent to these schools eventually become adults who, while being (being closed doors) contemptuous of religious people defend religious privilege since they perceive it as an efficient tool to keep the plebs compliant.
@Fuzzy Dunlop
So violent religious extremism by immigrants is to be endured by, and blamed on, a population because as long as even one particular immigrant doesn’t feel sufficiently at home in their new surroundings, they can be manipulated into barbarism, which is then to be blamed on those who didn’t sufficiently welcome all immigrants. Which we know they didn’t, because violent religious extremism occurred.
Now that you mention it Fuzzy, that does sound like the intellectual level of last two decades of politics here.
It will never stop. The control freaks who commit the murders are usually religious fanatics who believe that god is on their side – and with god on their side they feel can do no wrong. If they kill someone for making a joke about Mohammad then they must be right to do so, because god wouldn’t let it happen if it was wrong. And if the victim dies for something as trivial as a cartoon then that just proves how carefully people must obey god’s rules – because god will not be mocked. “Firm but fair” say the control freaks as they search about for another victim (and the more trivial the reason for the victim’s death, the more emphatically god’s point is made). It will never stop.
(crossposted with the Lounge)
A situation report from Sweden (and Copenhagen). This week, three neo-nazis got arrested outside the office of the Expressen newspaper, suspected of planning an attack.
During Saturday a crowd of 600 muslims and non-muslim Swedes created a “human chain” between a mosque and a church in Gothenburg to demonstrate solidarity.
Later in the afternoon the culture center in Copenhagen was hit by what appears to have been a “lone gunman”. Guards prevented him from entering but he fired a lot of rounds from the entrance. One visitor died, three policemen were wounded.
The perpetrator fled in a stolen car, dumped it and called for a cab using a cell phone (this may be what made it easy for the police to identify him).
A huge manhunt started in Copenhagen, extending to nearby Sweden.
Late in the evening, he made an apparently poorly planned /improvised attack on a jewish synagogue where a Bar Mitzva was underway. The place was guarded, and he was unable to enter. He fired his gun again and killed a man. Later police managed to track him down. During the confrontation he was shot to death.
Since the initial target seems to have been Lars Vilks, and since the murders took place so near Sweden this has caused a very big reaction over here..
Giliell It’s time we recognized that violent islamists aren’t bred in Syria or Iraq, but in our own suburbs.
Actually I meant the opposite: al-Qaeda in Yemen took credit for the Charlie Hebdo attacks so there is at least some kind of organizational link to the Middle East. IIRC a lot of Muslims who commit religious violence in Europe were raised there, but the total number of these people is so small that I don’t think it tells us much of anything about the population they come from (what do school shooters tell you about the American white male teenagers? something, maybe, but not much…). It may be better (though still not getting us very far) to think of these violent movements as “viral”–they reproduce themselves, rather than spontaneously generating from a population under the right conditions. Not that the social conditions in France or wherever don’t matter, I can’t imagine them not mattering, but what kind of conclusions can you draw with such small numbers? So the idea that you could solve this by getting rid of religious education is probably way off–obviously this violence has a real connection to Islam, but as I understand it a lot of the young men who participate in these things actually don’t have that much knowledge of or participation in their religion/religious community, so unless you could make Islam just vanish altogether, closing religious schools isn’t going to solve this problem. It might even solve other problems, but I don’t think it would solve this one.
dutchdelight So violent religious extremism by immigrants is to be endured by, and blamed on, a population because as long as even one particular immigrant doesn’t feel sufficiently at home in their new surroundings, they can be manipulated into barbarism, which is then to be blamed on those who didn’t sufficiently welcome all immigrants. Which we know they didn’t, because violent religious extremism occurred.
Yeah, again, that is like the opposite of what I said, maybe go back and reread?
Fuzzy Dunlop
In that case, you’re simply wrong. The huge majority of islamistic terrorists has been born and educated in the very countries in which they commit their crimes. Many went to places like Yemen, Syria, etc. to get training after they were radicalised in their own countries.
“IIRC a lot of Muslims who commit religious violence in Europe were raised there
In that case, you’re simply wrong. The huge majority of islamistic terrorists has been born and educated in the very countries in which they commit their crimes.”
By “there” I meant Europe. (I’d have thought that would have been clear from the rest of my comment, but I can see how the previous sentence could have confused things.)
Ok, to simplify this: the number of Muslims who commit religious violence in Europe is tiny, especially relative to the population (19 million in the EU). There might be enough of people who join violent movements to generalize about people who join violent movements, but not enough to generalize to the rest of the European Muslim population, many or most of whom are highly secular (especially young people, so the trend is probably in favor of laicité). So while policies that fight racism in Europe are a good thing in their own right, there may not be any measurable results from them from levels of success they are likely to achieve at eliminating racism/xenophobia/islamophobia.
@crisdevries #22 (and many others)
Thanks.
Laurentweppe @39, that’s really n’importe quoi.
French bash if you will, but at least get it right. Yes, most confessional schools here are Catholic but their core constituency is neither atheist nor wealthy. I live in a working class & petit bourgeois neighborhood full of HLM (government housing projects) in Paris right next to a Catholic grade school. I see these parents and kids twice a day from my window in front of which they stand around talking and I recognize them and know of them. They are not people who wonder how they’re going to put food on the table at the end of the month but they are not by any means wealthy. The least fortunate in my neighborhood don’t send their kids to Catholic school, that’s true, but the least fortunate are the ones who have trouble keeping food on the table. There’s another Catholic grade school a block down and a lycée. I also see these folks coming out of church on Sunday morning when I go to the tabac to buy my liquid nicotine. Though there may be atheists among them and probably is considering atheists and agnostics are the majority in France, many of them actually are practicing Catholics.
Tuition in Catholic schools is 100 to 300 euros a month which a lot of people can afford to pay without being “wealthy”.
You are correct that many people put their kids in Catholic schools because they believe the public schools are mal fréquentées. If this is about class segregation it’s in my neighborhood part of the general phenomenon of people not wanting to mix with the category directly below them, none of whom represent any sort of elite.
Segregation is not the only motivating factor. Sometimes the local Catholic school is better than the local public school. For instance I do personally know the mother of a boy who goes to the Catholic school next to me. I asked her why she chose that because it didn’t seem consistent with what else I knew about her. She told me that when her son started CP 1st grade in our local public school his teacher was absent for 2 months without a replacement teacher. She realized the director of the public school was having a nervous breakdown and that things were not going to get better. So she pulled her boy out and put him in Catholic school. She is a masseuse and her husband is a construction worker, hardly élite.
Yes Catholic schools are common in France and do serve the purpose of social and racial segregation but it is hardly the case that they are all attended by sneering atheist elites.
28% of french public middle-schoolers and 25% of french public high-schoolers are “boursiers” (public grants’ recipients) numbers which fall to 11% and 13% in private schools.
Add in the fact that private schools cost a lot more than public schools (sending your child in a french public primary school will cost you around 1.500 Euros per year, mostly in the form of school supplies, sending your child to a private religious school will cost you up to 11.000 Euros per year, with tuition never representing more than a small fraction of the overall costs), and you get the picture: sure, some catholic schools do take Christian Charity seriously and try their best to welcome students from modest background while lower middle-class parents spend more cash to send their kids to expensive schools enjoying (not necessarily deserved) better reputations than their public counterparts, but cold, hard data shows that on average private schools’ customer base is a lot wealthier, and more than a few testimonies coming from former students and parents who sent their kids here confirm that social insularity is a powerful attractor to private schools.
Yes, social insularity is a powerful attractor. But all the families are NOT wealthy and most Catholic schools do NOT cost a lot which is in fact one of the reasons why there are so many Catholic schools. What really costs a lot are the schools that, unlike the Catholic schools, are not subsidized by the State: bilingual schools or alternative schools, Montessori, etc.
I don’t agree with your figures for sending kids to school at all unless you count lunch and clothing too, which you have to supply anyway. Public school is free! And the price of school lunches is on a sliding scale depending on family income. You have to buy some school supplies, yes, but that’s at most a couple of hundred euros in the Fall. Low income families receive government money to help them buy school supplies. Sometimes there are school outings which cost something, but schools also fund-raise for those.
@Lynna, OM #5 – Funny thing is: God sends storms, floods, and earthquakes, and He never gets the blame. The blame is always on the liberals. Perhaps Hagee thinks that destroying the US is an effective way to relieve the tension between Obama and Netanyahu.
On second thought, it may be not such a bad idea at all. Next time the neighbor and I have an argument I’ll send the plague over town.
chimera
1. School lunches are usually more expensive than home cooked meals, because the person who cooks at home doesn’t get paid for their work. If your family income is above the cap for subsidies (which is often not very high), you pay a hefty sum. At the start of the month I usually pay around 150 bucks for both kids for lunch and breakfast for the younger one.
2. You’re kidding, right? At most a couple of hundred € in autumn is not a trivial thing. It’s also, of course, a question of being able to afford upfronting that money in order to make use of the back to school offers.
3. Are you actually thinking that once you paid for lunch and cahiers you’re done? There’s a shitload of extras from art projects to class trips. And the “better” the school, the more expensive those trips get. Apart from them expecting you to have a bunch of stuff like smartphones, tablets, internet, cameras at your disposal so the kid can do their homework.
Anna Fenwick (#10):
Thank you for putting into succint words something I have long felt but for some reason been unable to articulate: the ideas of religious people are offensive to those of us with no belief in magical, judgmental beings. Oh, you’re offended those people use a different name for Imaginary Sky Friend? Well, I’m offended you think what someone told you when you were four about what Imaginary Sky Friend thinks about sex should have any bearing on the laws in a secular country!