Tag Archives: terrorism

Timothy Snyder is a Yale historian. I’ve reviewed his books “Bloodlands” and “Black Earth” about the holocaust here and elsewhere. Snyder isn’t Israeli and he isn’t Jewish. But I think the comments he posted today on his Substack blog “Thinking about” deserve reflection. Here are the money grafs:“In evaluating what Hamas has done, it is important to remember that the atrocious crimes are not (or are not only) ends in themselves. They are utterly...

“The Bell: When Economic Distress Becomes Terrorism,” thebell.blogspot.com, “Tom Dinger” What has changed since February 24, 2010? Have things gotten any better since then or 911? Are we still looking at an economic sinkhole for many people? In the last two years, programs were put in place to rescue people in spite of politics. What do you see? Tom’s point, I believe, is people can be driven to do irrational things. The anger coming when they...

Last March, 15 activists chained themselves around an aircraft that was being used by British authorities to deport asylum seekers from Stansted Airport, many of whom had legitimate reasons to fear for their lives if returned to countries like Pakistan and Afghanistan. While at first the Stansted 15 were charged with aggravated trespass, the charges were soon upgraded to terrorism-related offences. This is...

Climate change, terrorism and the backlash against globalization are the three most significant challenges to civilization as we know it, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said at the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting 2018 in Davos, Switzerland. These are all conditions either caused by or strongly influenced by neoliberalism, which entails neo-imperialism and neocolonialism, as well as "colonizing" the vast majority of the populations of the developed countries that heretofore had...

From the World Economic Forum: Kim Kardashian is an unlikely champion of statistics, but a tweet from the reality TV star in January 2017 contained a startling figure that has been named International Statistic of the Year. She shared a table showing a range of violent or unexpected ways people meet their deaths annually in the United States. Kardashian’s aim was to highlight how many more Americans are killed by fellow citizens with guns, than by...

From a story in Daily Mail: Terror suspects including jihadis returning from fighting in Syria are to be offered taxpayer-funded homes, counselling and help finding jobs to stop them carrying out attacks in Britain. The top-secret Government strategy, codenamed Operation Constrain, could even allow fanatics to jump to the top of council house waiting lists. Official documents seen by The Mail on Sunday reveal that up to 20,000 extremists previously...

From a story in The Globe and Mail The 22-year-old Mr. Abedi was identified Tuesday by Manchester police as the suspected bomber. British media reported that he was born in Manchester to parents who fled the violent repression of Moammar Gadhafi’s Libya. Little else is known about Mr. Abedi – British authorities have been tight-lipped about the investigation and only released Mr. Abedi’s name after it was leaked by U.S. officials – but his profile as the...

In this post, Tom issues a timely reminder that there are much worse threats to our freedom than terrorists. Like Tom, I remember as a child disappearing with my friends all day long, only coming home for lunch and tea - a freedom my own children never had. We seem much more fearful of loss (of all kinds) than our forebears. Perhaps that is because we are much less used to it. - Frances Guest post by Tom Streithorst. For the past four days, the city of Brussels has been on lockdown. The...