Senate Terror attacks in Europe

There's only two reasons to classify something as a terrorist attack. One reason is legal and the other reason is political. The legal reason to classify a crime as a terrorist attack is to add charges against the defendant. The political reason is to justify the Global War on Terror. Terrorist attacks need to keep happening in order for Western governments to justify continuing this war. And they can't be happening elsewhere, they need to be happening in the West. Which is why every crime that's classified as a terrorist attack needs to looked at and examined with a microscope.

It seems to be in the minds of some people in this thread that it's not possible for a Muslim to see a drawing of Muhammad, get upset about the drawing, and kill the person who showed it. This is apparently just not a possible series of events. For those of you who can't fathom this to be a possibility, I ask that you think about why this is the case.

 

You and I both know that's not at all what my post said or implied. I'm going to ask that you try to interact in good faith here, reread what I wrote, and then respond if you want to respond.

 

This is false. The third reason is to recognize the unique nature of the crime, which was specifically to communicate a political message to a broader community. The direct parallel here is hate crimes. In both cases, the crimes are driven by the perpetrator's desire to influence the behavior of others writ large, not whatever the primary outcome of the crime is. These are a different class of crimes, and recognizing this is not inherently bigoted, no moreso than, at the other extreme, recognizing that accidental death/injury is different than pre-meditated ones. Considering the motives of a criminal and the impact of the crime on the broader community has always been a part of jurisprudence.

Again, this is incorrect. Many terrorist cases were prosecuted before the War on Terror, and law enforcement based approaches are broadly supported even by those who have advocated closing the major theaters of operation in this policy. Finally, you're operating under a sort of fantasy logic. The reality is that the US is engaged in a great many places that receive little public debate or acknowledgement (to be clear: not a secret or conspiracy, just it doesn't come up much in public discourse). It has been in many of these places before the formal War in Terror. The overwhelming likelihood is that they would stay there without it.

Even if it was a crime of passion, if he later released public messages to the world about how he'd done it, that demonstrates a clear intent to influence other politically. This is the inescapable fact of this case. Unless you are claiming someone hacked his account or otherwise fabricated his messages, then he wanted everyone to know that he had insured someone who disrespected Mohammad suffered a brutal death. That is a political message. That is the essence of terrorism.

 

What does "recognize the unique nature" even mean here? How is that not falling under the legal reasoning of adding extra charges (which, btw, is what happens in hate crimes as well)?

I'm aware, and once again, I'm not saying there are no terrorist attacks, I'm saying that those prior attacks would fall under the first reasoning, a legal reasoning leading to extra charges against the perpetrator. But now that the War of terror does exist, we can't ignore that it's a factor when the justice department chooses to charge a Muslim with terrorism.

This is where we just flatly disagree. I don't believe that someone wanting to prevent people from disrespecting their religion constitutes the necessary political change you need to find in order to declare something is terrorism.

 

I think I fully disagree with you on this. I think there's a clear third case of relevance, and that's to understand it and ideally avoid those events in the future.

 

@Lord Vivec Well, terrorism is how our Muslims themselves call it - and their religious authorities are now going the extra mile and officially demanding it be specifically labelled Islamism and forbidden by law.

The question you need to ask yourself is: do you know better than the people who are actually directly concerned?

 

Intent is already a part of determinations of criminality in not only sentencing, but defining the nature of the crime. Terrorist crimes and hate crimes have unique elements of motivation that other types of crimes do not. You would never say "Manslaughter is already a crime so trying to change to first degree murder just because the assassin stalked his target across 10 miles, pre-made a map of the entire complex, and lured his target into the spot where he could attack with a sniper rifle is just adding extra charges." Rather, people recognize that the charge is different because the crime is fundamentally different. Your framing seems a pretty clear attempt to ignore that difference, belittle it, or both.

Sure, and I don't object to increased scrutiny. But at some point, there are going to be cases that clearly fit the definition. This is one.

1. It is political, but entirely sympathetic, to wish that the broader society be respectful in certain ways
2. It is criminal, but apolitical, to kill someone out of rage or frustration for being disrespected.
3. It might even be natural that he confesses this crime to one or a few people
4. However, to publicly crow about one's role in the attack is to cross a line. There is now a message to the broader society, backed by the implicit threat in your previous deed. It is both criminal and political.

Do you have some version of him publicizing his attack that isn't meant to be communicating with the broader public?

 

Remember he tagged the head of state when he communicated...

 

oh thanks. Brand regularly impresses me. He's a good guy

Organized action as part of an explicit group or movement with particular goals that it makes clear. So even a member of a terrorist group doing a one off act of violence is debatable if it is terrorism, at least in a society in which terrorism has become a literal opponent in war. It is gonna be a different definition for me if we DIDNT have a 2 decade long war against the concept, but we do and that radically changes things. If we wanna declare war on terror, then terrorists are political prisoners not enemy combatants so no Gitmo. We have made terrorism just a means of justifying war and the removal of civil liberties, often in self-contradictory ways. Like I said, this is when those liberties matter most

 

Is this something you all would consider a terrorist attack then?

https://metro.co.uk/2020/10/21/two-...by-white-women-shouting-dirty-arabs-13455196/

 

Nope, just a hate crime.

on another note, oh god that is horrific and the kind of thing that for the longest time would be buried away and is only pulled out when convenient. we have no panic or mass outrage over this treatment of Arabs, its how you get people unironically saying we all came together and didn't act racist after 9/11. Any haste-crime a Muslim does is terrorism and a national event, but reverse it and it is just an occasional statistic on a hate-crimes graph

 

I would call this terrorism yes.

 

Totally. A hate crime and a terrorist attack aren’t mutually exclusive in my book

 

they are not exclusive, but one designation makes the perp an enemy combatant and cedes their rights. In the old russian or italian terrorist sense I'd totally agree

 

Just a hate crime. Not terrorism.

 

For those of you who consider both crimes 'terrorism,' can y'all explain why the French government is treating the former as terrorism and not this latter crime. Am I maybe right that these governments define Terrorism as stuff Muslims do?

 

Your correct. White terrorism is almost never called that by governments

 

Vivec, vnc - again, I think the fear of calling out terrorism committed by white people is strictly American. It's projection.

A 2010 Europol report on the terrorist risk in the European Union noted that out of 611 arrests of terrorists carried out, 219 (or 35%) were in France. The majority of the 219 people arrested weren't Islamists, but separatists. Islamic terrorism has thus far caused the most casualties by far, so it's most effective and most feared. But that's a recent development. France has had to deal with terrorism for over two hundred years, ever since they actually had a government they now call La Terreur.

Europol is the law enforcement agency of the European Union. Five forms of terrorism are defined in the report, one of which is Islamic terrorism, another is right-wing terrorism, another is left-wing terrorism.

This list mentions all incidents - the past ten years have seen terrorist attacks by Greek anarchists, Corsican freedom fighters, you name it. Your Eiffel Tower cleaver is among them.

It's just strange to have an issue repeatedly brought up that's nearly completely irrelevant to France. I mean, I understand the danger. And I'm not saying France doesn't have its own slew of issues. This just isn't one of them.

In the US, 1% is muslim. In France it's 10%, and they probably got less chances to integrate than in the US. A French muslim's outlook is more like a black American's outlook than like an American muslim's outlook. That's a huge problem France needs to deal with. Equality must be achieved, or there will be more resentment, more radicalization, and more people will vote Front National. If Front National ever really wins and provides a government, yeah, then you'll start to see it happen. They'll both-sides it. Until then, this particular thing is not the issue. Let's hope it will stay that way.

 

Its legal qualification here is attempted murder with aggravating circumstances (racist motivations), and there's a few assorted other crimes. It escapes the qualification of terrorism at this point because there was no effort made by the perpetrators to publicize the attack and exploit it to cause fear. Anybody who does attempt that later on, however, will fall under the terrorism umbrella.

Indeed, the bulk are Corsican, Basque and a few Breton nationalists. Corsican terrorist organizations had disarmed in recent years, by the way - until a few days ago. The main front, FLNC, has announced they were rearming in response to Samuel Paty's murder. So yes, this situation is escalating.

Not by a very wide margin.

There are enormous differences, starting with how far their presence go (before the USA existed for a significant portion of African Americans, after 1962 for French Muslims), and the circumstances in which the majority arrived (slave trade for African Americans, following a 1973 law to regroup families with members already present in France for French Muslims). The conditions in which this occurred are worth a study of their own, and don't quite always put us under a good light, but we did not uproot and force a massive population to come here like American precursors and then Americans did on their own soil.

There's also a huge generational gap here which does not exist in the USA - older French Muslims and those born out of France are far better integrated; it is third and fourth-generation youths who are the least integrated and consider Shari'a should be the law in France.

Ironically, back in the Bled, they call those third and fourth-generation descendants of migrants "the French".

 

There's no attempt to cause fear? So these killings of minorities are not an attempt to cause fear among the minority populations?

 

This feels like a weird statement when the two incidents being discussed both had white assailants

 

1. Unless one of the two victims died of their wounds since, we're not talking about a killing yet, let alone several.
2. From what happened on the scene, there was no attempt to cause fear with an ulterior motive to incite fear in others, which is the part that constitutes the terrorist act under French law. Note, as well, that if anybody, be that the perpetrators somehow or another party, attempts to publicize the stabbings to incite fear, they will be pursued for terrorism.