Two different ways to react to the UK terror attacks

There are two different ways you can respond to terrorism, and both of those ways were on display this week in Britain.
Prime Minister Theresa May reacted in the Conservative way today.

She said: "When I stood on the steps of Downing Street after the London attack I said enough is enough and things have got to change.
Above and beyond that, she said: “We should do even more to restrict the freedom and the movements of terrorist suspects when we have enough evidence to know they present a threat, but not enough evidence to prosecute them in full in court.
"And if human rights laws get in the way of doing these things, we will change those laws to make sure we can do them.
"If I am elected as Prime Minister on Thursday, I can tell you that this vital work begins on Friday."

So the problem is too many human rights.
Gotcha.
Representing the far-right is Niles Farage. His solution is even simpler, an oldy but a goody from British history - internment camps.

Of course, mainstream Republicans are already there with Farage, so I guess we have that to look forward to.
What is not on the agenda for May is publishing an investigation into the foreign funding of extremist Islamist groups. That's not something she has time for.

The other way you can respond to the terror attacks is the way Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn responded.

And speaking in London, he will say the West needs an effective response to ISIS that “fights rather than fuels terrorism”.
He will vow that a Labour government would change the UK’s approach – signalling British troops would be brought back home.
“We must be brave enough to admit the ‘war on terror’ is simply not working,” he will say...
One senior Tory said: “This speech is offensive, insulting to those who have sacrificed their lives abroad defending us at home and totally out of touch with the mood of the country.”
...But an ex-Labour frontbencher told the Sun: “It’s clear he’s making a link between the efforts of our troops and Manchester.
“This weak and warped world view only gives comfort to Britain’s enemies. Patriotic Labour MPs will be appalled .”

Corbyn said this because MI6 funnelled foreign fighters with suspected links to al-Qaeda from the streets of Britain to Libya, including the Manchester suicide bomber. This happened while Theresa May was Home Secretary.
Defence Secretary Michael Fallon who said Corbyn was "wrong to link foreign policy to terror", ignoring the fact that UK's Libyan policy was terror.

The British news media, and the American news media, would never agree that foreign policy had anything to do with terror attacks. It's treason to even suggest it.
That's just the way the world is.

Or is it?

This poll came out today.

An overwhelming majority of people agree with Jeremy Corbyn that British involvement in foreign wars has put the public at greater risk of terrorism, according to a new poll.
The exclusive ORB survey for The Independent found 75 per cent of people believe interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya have made atrocities on UK soil more likely.

Seventy-Five Percent!
That's amazing. The mainstream media meme of terrorists falling out of the sky and doing things randomly for mysterious purposes has nothing to do with what people actually think.
Not only that, the breakdown is even more interesting.

Within that, some 68 per cent of Tory voters agreed foreign wars have enhanced the risks of terrorism at home. So did 80 per cent of Labour supporters and 79 per cent of people that voted for the Liberal Democrats in 2015.

2/3rd of Tory voters agree with Corbyn.

If gamblers are to be believed, Labour will still come up short in Thursday's election.
They are probably right.
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Tories usually outperform polls. I think it will be different this time, but history says otherwise.

But there’s a catch — and a potential saving grace for May. Although the polls haven’t been very accurate in the U.K., the errors have usually run in the same direction: Conservatives tend to beat their polls there. (There’s been no comparable phenomenon in the U.S., where polls have erred toward both Democrats and Republicans about equally often in past elections.) That was the case in 2015, for instance, when Conservatives outperformed their polls by a net of 6 percentage points. There was an even worse error in 1992, when polls showed Labour narrowly ahead but instead Conservatives won in a landslide, making for a 9-point polling miss. That election gave rise to the term “Shy Tory Factor,” the idea that Conservative (Tory) voters were reluctant to declare their true voting intention to pollsters....
And betting market prices imply a Conservative win by 9 or 10 percentage points rather than their 7-point lead in the polling average. Since pundits expect Conservatives to beat their polls, the First Rule of Polling Errors would therefore predict that Labour would beat their polls instead.

Probably the more realistic scenario is for Tories to win the most, but lose a few dozen seats.
However, that means there will be one clear loser on Thursday - the neoliberal Blairites.

They reluctantly admit Corbyn has had a good campaign but maintain their core belief – the same conviction that caused 172 Labour MPs to sign a motion of a no confidence in Corbyn last summer and resulted in Owen Smith’s failed leadership challenge – that he must be removed if the party is ever to win a parliamentary majority again.
The problem for them is that Corbyn’s strong election performance has made this much harder.
One Labour candidate admitted the leader's rising personal ratings meant the anti-Corbyn faction is weaker than before the election, making it even more difficult for him to be forcibly removed post-defeat as members have rallied around the incumbent.
“It will be harder if he’s seen to have had a good campaign,” the candidate said.
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in that potential sources of domestic terrorism should be aggressively monitored and prosecuted -- neoliberal "freedom of religion" ideals be damned. Mullahs who propagate Wahhabi doctrines under the cover of overly-permissive British law need to be stopped in their tracks, their funding sources cut off, and their mosques shut down.

While at the same time British foreign policy must clearly separate itself from its ties to America's clearly imperialist foreign policy, by refusing to participate in whatever idiotic "regime changing" adventures the USA/NATO chooses to initiate. The two policies need to be pursued hand in hand, and not debated as if the one were in opposition to the other. The British people should not be obligated to bravely suffer the consequences of the misguided foreign policies of their current leaders, nor should they be forced to tolerate within their midst, the continued existence of a foreign-sponsored and aggressively hostile value system.

To oppose and forbid the propagation of Wahhabism is not to oppose Islam. It is only to declare as an enemy, a specific and very limited version of Islam, a perverted version that deserves no place within the tolerant pantheon of European civilization.

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native

k9disc's picture

@native

Don't you know that it's the gravy train? I mean, our Allies™, Saudi Arabia, are Wahhabism. They're good.

We're supposed to fear and hate the Shia.

Wahhabi is a benefit for the economy and the Establishment Sponsors (Debt and Profits), and therefore is inherently good.

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“Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” ~ Sun Tzu

lotlizard's picture

@native  
instituting government censorship and regulation of content across the entire Internet.

Whereas what the government of the U.K. should be doing instead is: First, publish its own report about terrorist funding. And second, act on that report by forcing itself and all the U.K.’s allies to halt such funding, now and in the future.

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@native

differ from freedom of religion as articulated by the SCOTUS to date?

Or from liberal ideas about freedom of religion?

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@HenryAWallace
may not impinge on any religion's right to practice and promulgate its teachings and ideology. This is an excellent ideal, that has been, and deserves to be idealized... up to a point. However if and when a particular "religious" ideology is bent upon the destruction of the very State and its liberal laws, that both host and generously protect said religion, well, that is carrying religious tolerance a step too far, IMO.

The dividing line between "Divine" law and secular law has always been a bit hazy, but European civilization has managed, over several centuries, to arrive at a more or less amicable, or at least a workable compromise. This compromise has been remarkably successful, in terms of generatting a trans-national value system that has long and profitably endured.

Allowing Wahhabist Mullahs, often imported by the KSA, to operate freely within the European sphere, severely tests the limits of this hard-won practice of tolerance -- to the point where I don't think the two value-systems are at all compatible. It is not Islam per se that is the problem -- it is Wahhabist teachings that are very much the problem. IMO we ignore the threat posed by this pernicious sect of Islam, very much at our own peril. We need to recognize that this virulent off-shoot of Islam has no place within the community of religions that compose what we know of as "Western Civilization". Whether or not it is tolerable to Muslims in general, is beside the point.

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native

@native
then human rights are something to be discarded whenever we feel like it.

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gendjinn's picture

@native Study some revolutions, read some books on the diverse attempts of the British to implement such policies in Ireland over the centuries right on thru to the 20th. By urging these "solutions" you have literally climbed up to the rooftops to scream at the top of your lungs "I do not have a clue what I'm talking about!" I do not exaggerate in the slightest.

Your approach is guaranteed to create terrorists. Guaranteed. Stop, reflect and educate yourself before advocating these counter-productive approaches.

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Not Henry Kissinger's picture

an oldy but a goody from British history - internment camps.

The Boer War makes a comeback.

The term "concentration camp" was used to describe camps operated by the British in South Africa during this conflict, and the term grew in prominence during this period.

The camps had originally been set up by the British Army as "refugee camps" to provide refuge for civilian families who had been forced to abandon their homes for whatever reason related to the war. However, when Kitchener took over in late 1900, he introduced new tactics in an attempt to break the guerrilla campaign and the influx of civilians grew dramatically as a result. Kitchener initiated plans to flush out guerrillas in a series of systematic drives, organised like a sporting shoot, with success defined in a weekly 'bag' of killed, captured and wounded, and to sweep the country bare of everything that could give sustenance to the guerrillas, including women and children ... It was the clearance of civilians—uprooting a whole nation—that would come to dominate the last phase of the war.[57]

As Boer farms were destroyed by the British under their "Scorched Earth" policy—including the systematic destruction of crops and slaughtering of livestock, the burning down of homesteads and farms, and the poisoning of wells and salting of fields—to prevent the Boers from resupplying from a home base many tens of thousands of women and children were forcibly moved into the concentration camps. This was not the first appearance of internment camps, as the Spanish had used internment in Cuba in the Ten Years' War, but the Boer War concentration camp system was the first time that a whole nation had been systematically targeted, and the first in which some whole regions had been depopulated.

Eventually, there were a total of 45 tented camps built for Boer internees and 64 for black Africans. Of the 28,000 Boer men captured as prisoners of war, 25,630 were sent overseas. The vast majority of Boers remaining in the local camps were women and children. Over 26,000 women and children were to perish in these concentration camps.[58]

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The current working assumption appears to be that our Shroedinger's Cat system is still alive. But what if we all suspect it's not, and the real problem is we just can't bring ourselves to open the box?

k9disc's picture

Seriously? What's the death toll? 8000? Gulf "War", Afghanistan, and Terrorist Attacks? 8-10,000 deaths, max?

How about a numerical valuation of "Going Hard"? Meh.

Gross topic. Fuck Farage and Savage, although I think Farage probably has a bit more nuance to him... making him less of an asshole -- if you can believe that... Biggrin

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“Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” ~ Sun Tzu

snoopydawg's picture

And we are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?

The excuse for keeping the wars going so that the men who had died did not die in vein is a poor excuse for keeping the wars going.
We know that the wars will go on and on as long as there is a profit that can be made from them.
Smedley Butler told us that in 1933.
The only way that wars are going to end is for the people who decide to go to war have to fight them themselves.
John Kerry's speech at the winter soldiers hearing
Great speech.

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Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

lotlizard's picture

@snoopydawg

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@lotlizard

The man based his life on trying to become President, like that other JFK from Massachusetts. JMO

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Outsourcing Is Treason's picture

@lotlizard
In 1995 John Kerry married billionaire condiment heiress Theresa Heinz.

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"Please clap." -- Jeb Bush

lotlizard's picture

@Outsourcing Is Treason  
And where is the Order of the Phoenix? And I don’t mean The Fellowship.

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which is intolerable!

Brits must fight Corbynism with jingoism!

/sarcasm

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Lookout's picture

Theresa May has warned that there has been “far too much tolerance of extremism” in the UK and, promised to step up the fight against Islamist terrorism after the London Bridge attack, saying “enough is enough”.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jun/04/london-attack-theresa-ma...

Anytime I hear someone say there is too much tolerance, I say bullshit. Jeremy has it right, the absurd ME wars promote terrorism at home and abroad. Let's imagine we spend 1/10th of the war money helping the people of the ME get clean water, grow food, rebuild, etc. Do you think they would want to perpetrate terrorist attacks then?

The solution could be simple. Why don't we move in that direction?

bar graph import export arms.jpg

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“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

detroitmechworks's picture

when there is one going on, they will continue to be surprised when the "Enemy" fights back.

Yes, yes, all legal, all according to procedure, but that doesn't make a lick of difference to the corpses that result from our "non-war".

The corpses still have families and friends who find that whole "Legally killed" bullshit to be worth a few dozen retaliatory deaths. Hell the scale of retaliation is so low because being willing to go to another country to randomly kill people isn't something that you can do easily and simply.

Which is honestly why I'm surprised our government is willing to spend so much money to do it all the time.

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I do not pretend I know what I do not know.