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Fucking savages.

I've been tuned in since 5pm EST and have sadly watched the death toll rise. Heartbreaking and infuriating.

Crazy stuff… My heart goes out to Paris.

n

Islamic mass immigration is the biggest mistake the West has made in hundreds of years.

x

The finger pointing online to migration is being seen bigoted knee-jerk reactions indicative of social media but it's not entirely far from the truth sadly. Whether or not these bastards are linked to that won't matter in the long run, this'll knock on and convince some here I'm sure to oppose migration even harder.

CJB wrote:

Islamic mass immigration is the biggest mistake the West has made in hundreds of years.

The early indications (the testimony of some witnesses that they were using a car with Belgian plates) seem to suggest that these were not recent immigrants.
Remember that the Charlie Hebdo attack was carried out by long-term residents (who were even born in France IIRC) as well.
Witnesses also reported that they were talking French.

So I would be very surprised if these men were part of the so-called swarm.

Most likely scenario once again is Frenchmen who were radicalized and got their training in Syria/Iraq.

I didn't suggest they were recent "migrants." This disaster-in-the-making has a longer history.

"Scum" is something that develops around the title in my bathroom and is removed with some Soft Scrub.

What attacked and killed all these people in Paris were M-U-S-L-I-M-S.

https://twitter.com/AFP/status/665530187329720322

CJB wrote:

I didn't suggest they were recent "migrants." This disaster-in-the-making has a longer history.

At least back to the 19th century, I would say.

Well there have been muslims in Europe for centuries but that's not really the point. Large scale movement into Europe is a post-war phenomenon and like much of what has been done to us since the war it has been a total disaster for the coherence of our societies.

Depends on what migration wave you are referring to.
If these are radicalized Frenchmen, it is likely their roots lay in the economic migration of the 1950s and 1960s.
That genie has been out of the bottle for a long time, so I can't see what exactly can be done about it today.

Interesting food for thought from Niall Ferguson in *The Australian*

Quote :

I am not going to repeat what you have already read or heard. I am not going to say that what happened in Paris on Friday night was unprecedented horror, for it was not. I am not going to say that the world stands with France, for it is a hollow phrase. Nor am I going to applaud Francois Hollande’s pledge of “pitiless” vengeance, for I do not believe it. I am, instead, going to tell you that this is exactly how civilisations fall.

Here is how Edward Gibbon described the Goths’ sack of Rome in August 410AD: “ ... In the hour of savage licence, when every ­passion was inflamed, and every restraint was removed ... a cruel slaughter was made of the ­Romans; and … the streets of the city were filled with dead bodies ... Whenever the Barbarians were provoked by opposition, they ­extended the promiscuous massacre to the feeble, the innocent, and the helpless …”

Now, does that not describe the scenes we witnessed in Paris on Friday night? True, Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788, represented Rome’s demise as a slow burn. Gibbon covered more than 1400 years of history. The causes he identified ranged from the personality disorders of individual emperors to the power of the Praetorian Guard and the rise of Sassanid Persia. Decline shaded into fall, with monotheism acting as a kind of imperial dry rot.

For many years, more modern historians of “late antiquity” ­tended to agree with Gibbon about the gradual nature of the process. Indeed, some went further, arguing “decline” was an anachronistic term, like the word “barbarian”.

Far from declining and falling, they insisted, the Roman Empire had imperceptibly merged with the Germanic tribes, producing a multicultural post-imperial idyll that deserved a more flattering label than “Dark Ages”.

Recently, however, a new generation of historians has raised the possibility the process of Roman decline was in fact sudden — and bloody — rather than smooth.

For Bryan Ward-Perkins, what happened was “violent seizure ... by barbarian invaders”. The end of the Roman west, he writes in The Fall of Rome (2005), “witnessed horrors and dislocation of a kind I sincerely hope never to have to live through; and it destroyed a complex civilisation, throwing the ­inhabitants of the West back to a standard of living typical of prehistoric times”.

In five decades the population of Rome itself fell by three-quarters. Archaeological evidence from the late 5th century — inferior housing, more primitive pottery, fewer coins, smaller cattle — shows the benign influence of Rome dimin­ished rapidly in the rest of western Europe.

“The end of civilisation”, in Ward-Perkins’s phrase, came within a single ­generation.

Peter Heather’s TheFall of the Roman Empire emphasises the ­disastrous effects not just of mass migration, but also organised vio­lence: first the westward shift of the Huns of central Asia and then the Germanic irruption into Roman territory.

In his reading, the Visigoths who settled in Aquitaine and the Vandals who conquered Carthage were attracted to the Roman ­Empire by its wealth, but were ­enabled to seize that wealth by the arms acquired and skills learnt from the Romans ­themselves.

“For the adventurous,” writes Heather, “the Roman Empire, while being a threat to their existence, also presented an unprecedented opportunity to prosper ... Once the Huns had pushed large numbers of (alien groups) across the frontier, the Roman state became its own worst enemy. Its military power and financial sophistication both hastened the process whereby streams of incomers became coherent forces capable of carving out kingdoms from its own body politic.”

Uncannily similar processes are destroying the European Union today, though few of us want to recognise them for what they are. Like the Roman Empire in the early 5th century, Europe has allowed its defences to crumble. As its wealth has grown, so its military prowess has shrunk, along with its self-belief. It has grown decadent in its malls and stadiums. At the same time, it has opened its gates to outsiders who have coveted its wealth without ren­ouncing their ancestral faith.

The distant shock to this weakened edifice has been the Syrian civil war, though it has been a catalyst as much as a direct cause for the great Volkerwanderung of 2015.

As before, they have come from all over the imperial periphery — North Africa, the Levant, South Asia — but this time they have come in their millions, not in mere tens of thousands. To be sure, most have come hoping only for a better life. Things in their own countries have become just good enough economically for them to afford to leave and just bad enough politically for them to risk leaving.

But they cannot stream northwards and westwards without some of that political malaise coming with them. As Gibbon saw, convinced monotheists pose a grave threat to a secular empire.

It is doubtless true to say that the overwhelming majority of Muslims in Europe are not violent. But it is also true the majority hold views not easily reconciled with the principles of our liberal democracies, including our novel notions about sexual equality and tolerance not merely of religious diversity but of nearly all sexual proclivities. And it is thus remarkably easy for a violent minority to acquire their weapons and prepare their assaults on civilisation within these avowedly peace-loving ­communities.

I do not know enough about the 5th century to be able to quote Romans who described each new act of barbarism as unprece­dented, even when it had happened multiple times before; or who issued pious calls for solidarity after the fall of Rome, even when standing together meant falling together; or who issued empty threats of pitiless revenge, even when all they intended to do was to strike a melodramatic ­posture.

I do know that 21st-century ­Europe has itself to blame for the mess it is now in. Surely, nowhere in the world has devoted more ­resources to the study of history than modern Europe did.

When I went up to Oxford more than 30 years ago, it was taken for granted that in the first term I would study Gibbon. It did no good. We learnt a lot of nonsense to the effect that nationalism was a bad thing, nation states worse and ­empires the worst things of all.

“Romans before the fall,” wrote Ward-Perkins, “were as certain as we are today that their world would continue for ever substantially unchanged. They were wrong. We would be wise not to ­repeat their complacency.”

Poor, poor Paris. Killed by ­complacency.

That's a rather Barbarianophobic piece. Most Barbarians are peaceful/moderate/deep/gritty/Flemingesque. Besides, have you forgotten that this all started with the illegal war in Germania?

Also I wouldn't be surprised if it was all a Zealot conspiracy to make Barbarians look bad (and BTW just because I'm anti-Zealot doesn't mean I'm anti-Judean).

CJB wrote:

That's a rather Barbarianophobic piece. Most Barbarians are peaceful/moderate/deep/gritty/Flemingesque. Besides, have you forgotten that this all started with the illegal war in Germania?

Also I wouldn't be surprised if it was all a Zealot conspiracy to make Barbarians look bad (and BTW just because I'm anti-Zealot doesn't mean I'm anti-Judean).

Anyone who ever bothered to read a bit of Tacitus would know that the exclusively negative connotation associated with the word barbarian is owed almost exclusively to Roman propaganda echoing through the millennia.

The last days of Rome rhetoric is also a bit premature.

It's been over 11 years since they last pulled off something of this scale.

Well, in Europe, that is.

n

n

Erica Ambler wrote:

Salomé wrote:

It's been over 11 years since they last pulled off something of this scale.

Well, in Europe, that is.

Islamic terrorist attacks on European targets in 2015 alone:

• January 7–9  –  five attacks in Paris kill 17 people and leave 22 injured.
• February 14-15  – attack on synagogue and cafe in Copenhagen, killing two civilians and injuring five others.
• April 19  – gunman intending to attack a church murders French woman.
• April 27  terrorist opens fire on police in Bosnia and Herzegovina. One police officer killed, two passers-by injured.
• June 26 - Beheading in Lyon, victim’s head marked with Arabic writing and Islamist flags. Subsequent gas attack injures 11.
• August 21  –Shooting and stabbing in train travelling from Amsterdam to Paris. Five injured.
• September 17  – Islamist stabs police officer in Berlin.
• October 31  – Bomb on board a Russian airliner kills 224 people.
• November 13  –132 people murdered in Paris.

My point stands. Depending on the results of the inquiry into the Russian airliner, that is.

Erica Ambler wrote:

Quote :

The West’s movement towards the truth is remarkably slow. We drag ourselves towards it painfully, inch by inch, after each bloody Islamist assault.

In France, Britain, Germany, America and nearly every other country in the world it remains government policy to say that any and all attacks carried out in the name of Mohammed have ‘nothing to do with Islam’. It was said by George W. Bush after 9/11, Tony Blair after 7/7 and Tony Abbott after the Sydney attack last month. It is what David Cameron said after two British extremists cut off the head of Drummer Lee Rigby in London, when ‘Jihadi John’ cut off the head of aid worker Alan Henning in the ‘Islamic State’ and when Islamic extremists attacked a Kenyan mall, separated the Muslims from the Christians and shot the latter in the head. It was what President François Hollande said after the massacre of journalists and Jews in Paris in January. And it is all that most politicians will be able to come out with again after the latest atrocities in Paris.

All these leaders are wrong. In private, they and their senior advisers often concede that they are telling a lie. The most sympathetic explanation is that they are telling a ‘noble lie’, provoked by a fear that we — the general public — are a lynch mob in waiting. ‘Noble’ or not, this lie is a mistake. First, because the general public do not rely on politicians for their information and can perfectly well read articles and books about Islam for themselves. Secondly, because the lie helps no one understand the threat we face. Thirdly, because it takes any heat off Muslims to deal with the bad traditions in their own religion. And fourthly, because unless mainstream politicians address these matters then one day perhaps the public will overtake their politicians to a truly alarming extent.

http://blogs.new.spectator.co.uk/2015/11/will-politicians-finally-admit-that-the-paris-attacks-had-something-to-do-with-islam/

Lots of wishful thinking in his supposed solutions.