Paris
Oh shit – simultaneous attacks all over Paris. At least 26 dead so far.
USA Today says 46 dead, 100 taken hostage.
At least 18 people have been killed in several shootings in the French capital, Paris, as well as explosions near the Stade de France.
French media say at least 15 people have been killed near the Bataclan arts centre. A hostage taking is under way, with reports of up to 60 held.
At least one man opened fire at a restaurant in the 11th district, causing several several casualties.
Three explosions are also reported outside a bar near the Stade de France.
…
A BBC journalist at the Petit Cambodge restaurant says he can see 10 people on the road either dead or seriously injured.
He says police have now arrived and sealed off the area.
At least 30 people were killed in attacks in Paris and a hostage situation was under way at a concert hall in the French capital, French media reported on Friday.
Several explosions were heard near a stadium where a friendly France-Germany football match was being held, attended by President Francois Hollande.
Police helicopters circled the stadium north of Paris as Hollande rushed back to the interior ministry to deal with the situation.
Police confirmed there had been shootings and explosions at the stadium, but not the number of casualties.
Witnesses said police closed down a neighbourhood in central Paris where media said gunmen had fired in a restaurant, causing multiple casualties.
“I was on my way to my sister’s when I heard shots being fired. Then I saw three people dead on the ground, I know they were dead because they were being wrapped up in plastic bags,” student Fabien Baron told Reuters.
An actual comment I just read, in response to reports that some of the attackers shouted “Allah u Akbar!”:
“this makes me uneasy, if only because yes, that could be possible, but everyone is always SO quick to jump to extremists.”
Isn’t it a shame that extremism gets such a bad rap? Always getting blamed for everything, those poor beleaguered extremists.
Obviously this could be the work of non-extremists.
While awaiting further developments on whether or not this was the work of extremists (ahem), I must say that this from the BBC livefeed touched me deeply:
That’s some pretty brave stuff, considering this is ongoing.
Meanwhile at FTB….. *crickets*. Not a single blogger is covering the attacks.
BBC is now reporting some sort of major police / army operation at the Bataclan concert hall. Not clear what is happening but it sounds major.
One of the news updates I saw – awhile ago now – said an assault was under way.
Patrick @ 3 – yes, that made me choke up a good deal.
How did the Parisians offend the poor widdle dears THIS TIME?
Greenwald? Guardian? Aslan? Obeidallah?
Chirp, chirp chirp.
It was all those cruise missiles they kept throwing around.
@8
Oh, they’ll have an answer. By tomorrow we’ll be reading about the difference between punching down at followers of oppressed religions and punching up at wealthy, privileged Western diners and concert-goers, etc. Greenwald will probably compare the attacks to the killing of Jihadi John, which he seems upset about.
@10
Yes, that’s it, an “oppressed” religion of. 1.6 billion followers and 49 “Islamic” countries.
Naziism and state Communism were the scourges of the 20th century. Islam is the scourge of the 21st.
The international community must spare no effort in finding and punishing the cartoonists responsible.
Helene @11 “Islam is the scourge of the 21st.” More accurate to say fundamentalism, isn’t it? Islamist fundamentalists, Christianist fundamentalists, Hindu fundamentalists, in Burma even some Buddhists (!!), create hell on earth for other people.
(Christianists kill mainly women, mainly by withholding medical care, so it often worries people a lot less. But the women are just as dead. It’s a difference of target, not mentality.)
I think it’s really important to identify fundamentalism as the cause. Not any specific religion, not any specific set of beliefs. It’s that oversimplified, rigid, purist mindset that lets people trash everyone with no pain.
@quixote
Mainstream Islam itself is fundamentalist. There is no other Islam. Unlike its “abrahamic” relatives, Christianity or Judaism, it never underwent any sort of “enlightenment”. Sharia still stones women, hangs gays and beheads blasphemers. I was born (so to speak) Muslim and most of the relatives that I know – even when they won’t speak to me – are gentle people. But their religion is abhorrent. What you see around the world today is no aberration. It is Islam. And it is killing more people – mostly other Muslims, to be sure – than any creed since since the demise of Stalinism/Maoism.
Helene:
Your first sentence belies your second.
The “enlightenment” (the Enlightenment) was a secular intellectual awakening which happened in a Christian milieu, not a religious change in Christianity — though it did cause Christianity to change and adapt.
There is no Jewish equivalent.
Well yes, where Islam retains the social and political power Christendom once had — elsewhere, not-so-much.
For mine, it’s that power that’s the problem, not its particular instantiation.
Consider, for example, that there are plenty of Muslims here in Australia, but no stonings, hangings or beheadings. So, either they are no true Muslims, or your characterisation is not universal.
(I think I know which is the case)
I think the Reform Judaism movement could be pointed to add an example of Jewish Enlightenment.
Much Islamic violence is against other Islamic sects. I don’t see Islam as particularly unified.
Irshad Manji, a lesbian Muslim, has written well on the topic of problems inherent in the practice of Islam. Her writing is controversial, but she is at least an example of someone “inside” who has raised issues.
Religion is a problem; Islam is a problem; fundamentalism is a problem; I don’t see much value in trying to weigh them all to see which is bigger.
For mine, it’s that power that’s the problem, not its particular instantiation.
“Instantiation”
I’m, sure the thousands of friends and relatives of the 250-odd people killed will take great comfort in that.
Consider, for example, that there are plenty of Muslims here in Australia, but no stonings, hangings or beheadings
Well it’s clear you’re neither Chinese in origin nor a café patron.
And you really should add “yet” to that sentence
@John Morales
Ok, would you prefer “literalist”?
Judaism, as Sackbut pointed out, also underwent its own “enlightenment” (note the lower case and the quote marks), and it hasn’t beheaded people since biblical times. And, unlike Islam or Christianity, it isn’t proselytic.
Islam, on the other hand, is mired in medieval attitudes and practices. As Dawkins and others have pointed out, the golden era of Islamic thought died many centuries ago. There is no Islamic science (there never was; just science practiced by Muslims http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/03/150301-aristotle-archimedes-einstein-darwin-ptolemy-razi-ngbooktalk/)… and almost no Muslim Nobelists, as a post right here on Butterflies and Wheels pointed out… (or: https://richarddawkins.net/2013/08/calm-reflections-after-a-storm-in-a-teacup-polish-translation-below/ )
Of course Muslims can’t stone or behead people (legally) in Australia, but they do so – legally, under Sharia – elsewhere. And, as polls have persistently shown, they would like Sharia to be the law everywhere.
Unlike Christianity, which has a Pope, an Archbishiop of Canterbury and an Orthodox Patriarch, i.e. centralized authority, neither Sunni nor Shia Islam have universally recognized corporations, so it is left for individual imams or ayatollahs to decide what is halal and right now the more extreme of them hold sway.
It would be nice for some charismatic Muslim moderate to arise and “reform” contemporary Islam, but I can’t see that happening in the current climate. We are in for some turbulent times, and the “I am not Charlie” useful idiots are making things worse. (Let’s see how they interpret the Paris massacres as “just desserts” – http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/11/paris-attacks-isis/415998/ )
Hellene #14: Blunt, but necessarily so; good work.
The problem with Islam is that it possesses no clear ethical frame work — the ‘Five Pillars’ tell you basically nothing about whether it is right or wrong to commit a particular act. Nearly all Islamic ideology derives from commentary on the Koran from an endless number of scholars, and much of this was made up to suit various cultural and political situations.
@ Helene.
Perhaps the current rise of Islamism IS Islam’s renaissance/enlightenment/reformation. For every Irshad Manji there seems to be a million fired up jihadists
Thanks for that link to The Atlantic
This puts some a few faces (Muslims among them) on the victims.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/islamic-state/11995836/Paris-attacks-who-are-the-victims.html
And the same people who committed that horror are the people who perpetrated this one:
http://www.dw.com/en/mass-grave-of-yazidi-women-killed-by-is-found-in-iraq/a-18850749
But, predictably, the useful idiots (in Salon and other sites) are bleating about “western culpability”. and “blowback”. In reply to which at least some commenters are able to see the religious elephant in the room. Here’s one:
“I’ve been a Liberal Democrat all my life. I campaigned for Bobby Kennedy before he was shot. And frankly this kind of Kumbaya crap is what gives Progressives a bad name. Buddhists, Jews, Sikhs, Wiccans, Christians, Hindus, Parsees, Jains and Confucians do not ban girls from going to school, have an automatic death sentence for leaving their faiths, stone Gays to death, embrace Honor Killings of women who refuse to be sold into slavery, blow up airliners, deny women the right even to drive a car and force them to wear circus tents when they leave home, and carry out mass murder like yesterday’s attacks in Paris. Muslims do these things. It is LONG past time for the Left to stop pretending that a cult of medieval barbarism is a modern faith of tolerance, peace and gender equality.”
Helene:
Not the same people. You should not keep conflating the ideology with the people practicing it.
And no, it is not the only religion* that prescribes a totalitarian social, legal and political system not just for its adherents, but for anyone within its hegemony; rather the only one which currently has sufficient power to enforce its beliefs and is supported by powerful States, where the religious and the political are indistinguishable.
—
To be clear: regarding responsibility, I think that the actual perpetrators and those who abet them are clearly to blame. So, yes, these attacks (whatever their motivation) are clearly to be blamed on Islamism.
—
* note the similarity to the totalitarian Communist states of the twentieth century.
(Theism and religion are not always synonyms)
The same people, John Morales. I will not pretend to be surprised that they’re not Bahai or Jain or Jewish atheists. Not all Muslims slaughter concertgoers (including young Muslim rock fans) in Paris or Yazidi women in Iraq. But all the killers are/were Muslims. Thoroughly halal Muslims.
(Kind of late, but, well, here’s another two cents’ worth anyway :). )
Helene @14: mainstream Islam is fundamentalist.
This is more or less true. More so now than some forty years ago, which is interesting in itself. Shows how quickly these things can mutate. But the thing is, that only confirms my point. It’s *fundamentalism* that’s the problem. Religions with more of it are more of a problem, because fundamentalism is the toxin, not so much the religion itself.
That’s important for two reasons. One, it points the way out of the morass: try to mitigate the fundamentalism, not the other religious beliefs that can coexist with human society. Two, it makes it easier to recognize the problem in non-religious clothing. It’s basically an insistence that the truth is simple and that you’ve got it. Atheists and communists and many kinds of activists can fall into the same simplistic, purist BS. And depending how much capacity they have to kill or humiliate people, cause heaps of harm. It’s not just religion or a religion that’s the problem.
Helene:
Let me rephrase that: Not the same individuals, but rather different people enacting the same ideology.
Wahhabi/Salafi Islamist Muslims, specifically.
(cf. my #15)
quixote, the radicalisation of Islam has certainly been evident in the last few decades.
A form of “Jujitsu politics”.
( http://www.psysr.org/issues/terrorism/mccauley.php )