[PREMIUMTIMESNG] Two movie-like incidents occurred in two cities -- Kano in Northern Nigeria and Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A. The two incidents marked the difference between policing in Nigeria and the policing in the U.S.A. This discussion is not about the social media landscape and the role twitter played, turning millions of Americans into police reporters.
For the first time since terrorism reared its ugly head in the mega commercial city that is Kano, the members of the public confronted two bombers who detonated their device in front of the Emir, Alhaji Ado Bayero's palace. One of the bombers died on the spot due to severe beating he got. His body and the tricycle on which they rode were burnt to ashes by the mob. The other bomber captured alive was moved into the palace before the arrival of the security officials. It was a herculean task for palace officials to stop the mob from finishing off the second bomber. This public anger was itself justifiable. The detonation of the explosive indicated that the intention of the perpetrators was not only to create panic but to cause casualties. When the security men came, the first thing they did, a witness told the Hausa Service of the Voice of America, was to shoot the suspect on his thigh. They carried him off, presumably to their detention centre. A few hours later, the JTF announced that this second bomber, taken alive had also died. Knowing how these things are done in the country today, they may actually have executed him the moment they took the suspect away from public view.
Lamentably, this has cost the country an opportunity to determine whether the blast was carried out by angry individuals with grievances against the Emir; against the state or federal government or by an ideologically motivated group or organization of which the Jama'atul-Alil Sunna Wal-Iqamatu Wal-Jihad, better known as Boko Haram says it is one.
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Posted by: Fred ||
04/25/2013 00:00 ||
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-- trailing wife for the moderators
Is it just me, or has there been a spike in murders of groups of people all over the country?
15 Apr: New York Police Veteran Kills Toddler Son, Boyfriend and Herself
18 Apr: 4 killed in Akron incident
22 Apr: 5 killed in Seattle incident
24 Apr: 5 killed in Illinois incident
Perhaps it just seems that way. Following is an excerpt from a December 2012 article "Law and Order in a Fallen World":
It is a natural tendency on the part of most human beings, when confronted with great evil, to want to do something about it. We want to stop the horror of death and violence and disease.
It speaks to what is good within us that we desire this -- it speaks to a recognition on our part, innate and abiding, that there is something terribly broken in this world -- a great mistake which has been made along the way, a gear missed in the works, a gaping hole where something should be. The feeling is all the stronger when we face the destruction of innocent life -- the life of a child.
The Mishnah tells us that the act of murder destroys a whole world -- the world as it would've been with that person in it. When the worlds wiped out are so young, the shock of it all echoes and rebounds throughout the lives of others for generations. And the only part that can be played by those left behind is one of charity.
This is a frustrating limitation...In the real world, there is no law that can make the murderously insane sane, or remove all weapons from their grasp. The tweaks that have been attempted in the past in our nation and others have proven insufficient time and again. And no step which disarms the law-abiding will help.
We are in the midst of an historic and statistically impossible decline in violence in America. The economic downturn, which would be a reasonable reason for a rebound in violent crime, has produced nothing of the sort on a nationwide scale. The experts are flabbergasted as to why, and the assumptions of criminologists are being tested to a great degree.
High imprisonment, high tech tools, more disciplined police forces, and cultural factors are all potential reasons. But it is clear that even as guns are available as ever, this has done nothing to drive up crime rates nationwide. And beyond: Steven Pinker has argued, convincingly, that we are at the most peaceful point in human history. In the midst of such declines, spikes of mass violence and murder are all the more jarring.
So all of the blather you are already hearing about how this can be blamed on the lack of gun control, or on violent movies, or first-person-shooter video games, or on some kind of general cultural malaise is based on a cheap emotional appeal rather than on evidence.
On the basis of the evidence, we can look back over decades in which such killings have occurred at a fairly constant rate and in which the cause has usually been the same. We can conclude that in a nation of 300 million people, there will be a certain number of people who become insane. Of those people, there will always be a small number -- usually young men, because young men have a natural tendency toward aggression and a fascination with violence -- whose insanity drives them to kill, whether to take revenge on society in general, or because of paranoid delusions, or because the voices in their heads tell them to.
This is a basic, predictable fact of life in human society, with no particular political implications and -- this is the part that's hard to accept -- no particular solution.
In the end, the options for what the law can do or society can do are largely limited. They will not prevent this sort of evil from happening again. This is infuriating, of course. All we can do, on an individual level, is prepare ourselves to do whatever it takes if we are put in the position of those who stand between the marauder and the innocent. We can take this time to understand that in that situation, there is always something you can do.
I see jihad-driven terrorism in this light. In the past and at this moment in history, ideology-driven rhetoric drives people insane enough to not only carry out but rejoice in committing acts of violence. It is like an undulant fever, but NOT insanity in a psychological or legal sense. This is an imperfect world without perfect solutions available to us.
[Dawn] MYANMAR is a country that is supposed to be recovering from years of dictatorial rule and moving towards democracy and an opening up to the rest of the world. It is a country with an opposition leader who has won the Nobel Prize for her struggle against dictatorship and for upholding human rights ...not to be confused with individual rights, mind you...
It is also here, however, that Buddhists are killing Moslems with the apparent complicity of government forces, most recently in the town of Meiktila. This blatant violation of human rights, duly documented in a BBC-obtained video has elicited no more of a response from Aung San Suu Kyi, than previous massacres documented and now released by the Human Rights Watch ... dedicated to bitching about human rights violations around the world... office in New York.
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Posted by: Fred ||
04/25/2013 00:00 ||
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#2
It is possible that the muslim world is in decline and has been so since the 1600s. One of the questions I ask is, how much of the world will it take with it?
#4
Buddhists are killing Moslems?? ...because Moslems from neighboring Bangladesh are attacking the Buddhists, trying to take their land and take over their country. Like so many other places in the world.
When the moslems come for your country, you either fight them off or die kneeling.
#6
The Muslim world has been in decline since the first time a Sunni called a Shia an "apostate" or was it a Shia calling a Sunni,
Never mind, it doesn't matter, the important thing is the entire religion is based upon fear, intimidation, violence, death, and hatred. The primary writings of the religion are the ravings of a madman and sexual predator/serial killer/psychopath. What do you expect when you have a religion based on the Qran? Have you ever tried reading that thing? I was sympathetic to the Moslems until I read the thing, it is vile and is strictly a call to violence and hatred.
It is hate speech of a breath taking magnitude, making Mein Kampf look like a Weekly Reader. Never for a second doubt the true face of the religion, it is in the writings, there for all to read.
IF you read it with an open mind, you will be convinced Islam should be eradicated from the planet as soon as possible.
Posted by: Bill Clinton ||
04/25/2013 11:05 Comments ||
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#7
This article *is* quite the pity party, isn't it?
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
