Terrorist attack in Sri Lanka, hundreds dead

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Will the holy wars ever end?

Can't help but juxtapose this with what happened in New Zealand. Extremists on one side shoot up some mosques. Extremists on another side blow up some churches. Cycle of violence continues and escalates.

What will it take for this to end?

Please don't compare death tolls, or whatever. Trying to describe one side as worst than the other does nothing to end violence.

No official info who did it but targetting churches on Easter morning leaves clear motive

Don't forget what happened in the Netherlands a few days after what had happened in New Zealand.

I may be paraphrasing this, but I remember a line from the movie, Angel Heart, by the sinister character, Louis Cypher (Robert DeNiro): 'The say there's enough religion in the world to make men hate one another, but not enough to make them love."

Actually, there's an indirect tie at least between sociopathic western terrorists like Brenton Tarrant and the Saudi-affiliated Wahhabist-Salafist groups that probably carried out the Easter Sri Lanka attacks. Remember where Al Qaeda, Daesh/ISIS, the Taliban and such came from: NATO, Saudi and other Persian Gulf Monarchies, Iranian, Pakistani and a few other places backing the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan against the Soviets back in the 80s. That's where Bin Laden comes from and everything that's happened since then, including the whole post-9/11 War on Terror that didn't target the country behind 9/11 (Saudi Arabia), but has gone after enemies of those countries and the US: Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen and now Iran. To be clear, Iran did back a faction of the Mujahedeen back in the 80s war against the Soviets, but that wasn't Bin Laden's group and they've been arch-enemies of the Taliban and other Wahhabi-Salafist groups since the Taliban came to power in the mid-90s. They almost fought a war with them in the late-90s. And this is partly b/c of the Shia-Sunni split within Islam and also partly b/c the Saudis HATE and are terrified of Iran, as you can see behind so many conflicts in the Middle East too.

The whole War on Terror with its antecedents going back to Afghanistan in the 80s have produced these massive refugee crises that have especially hit the Middle East and Europe, which has directly fueled the rise of the neo-fascist far right in Europe, the US, Australia and the rest of the "western" world, including the likes of Trump, Marine Le Pen, the fascist regimes in Eastern Europe and the sociopaths acting alone or in groups like Dylan Roof, Brevik and Tarrant (to name just a few). Tarrant visited several of these European countries before committing his terrorist massacre in Christ Church, as well as Israel. And Israel comes in here also both b/c of the rise of its own neo-fascist movements that are behind Netanyahu and groups to the right of him and b/c of Israel's direct support for Daesh/ISIS and Al Qaeda in Syria. Israel didn't want Assad gone, but they did want chaos in Syria (and as many of its other neighbors as possible) and it was happy to work w/the Gulf states (including Saudi) to do it.

To finish on Sri Lanka, I'm gonna link 2 articles from today that show the suspected group is a Wahhabi-Salafist group with fighters who have moved on from the Syrian war now that Damascus-Iran-Russia-Hezbollah have won that war. This attack was no accident, it's 40 years in the making and it's a tragedy and outrage that the west continues to export billions in arms and other equipment to these Feudal Petro terrorist states like Saudi and the UAE!

https://www.mintpressnews.com/sri-lanka ... in/257663/

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Sri ... -0013.html

Blaming The West, I see, when the blame is solely on the actions of the bombers themselves.

Sorta like blaming the miners who mined the ore, the smelters who smelted it into iron, the machinists who machined it into guns, and the sellers who sold the guns instead of the people who fired the guns at Columbine.

Not really, more like blaming the states that are historically and today behind the massacre. Do you know the history or the politics I'm talking about? Since you're not getting it: look at Max Blumenthal's new book on the history: "The Management of Savagery: How America’s National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump".

This is what happened, if you wanna blame lone wolves, be my guest. But that's such a simplistic view, that doesn't really capture what's involved here. I should add the outrage of US support for the Saudis (and they're not the only western backer, Israeli's also part of this) is that this is attack is perpetrated against a poor country that's already suffered through nearly 30 years of war that killed something like 60,000 people. But no, I don't think the US military industrial complex gives a f**k about that, as long as they keep making money selling their s**t to government's like Riyadh's, as Trump likes to brag about. If they were ever really concerned about fighting terror, why didn't they invade Saudi back in 2003? And why does the US continue to terrorize so many nations around the world itself? If you want a list I'd be happy to provide one.

Just to be clear the logistical organisation required to plan this state wide bombing in Sri lanka would require months of preparation and supply of explosives and weapons from overseas

This clearly makes Brendan Tarrant's attack in New Zealand as having nothing to do with the reasons for the attack.

The recent announcement by ISIS they attacked churches in retaliation for Tarrant's Mosque shooting in New Zealand is a piece of propaganda aimed to secure sympathy for the act.

The truth is more likely that a completely unkown local islamic group had sent operatives from Sri Lanka to Syria more than two years ago to get training and they returned after the destruction of Mosul (with the full knowledge of the American CIA and British MI5). The Sri lankan authorities were simply incompetent to act on these operatives (despite being told by both the Americans, British and their own military intelligence) who were planning an islamic state terror attack on targets in Sri Lanka on the behest of their IS controllers in Mosul.

I gather I am correct in surmising the lack of knowledge of the geography or history of Sri Lanka warrants little response to this thread

For those interested the latest death toll is now 359, making it one of the worst single act of terrorism in recent history

The government's revised it downwards dramatically to a little over 250 now. https://www.thehindu.com/news/internati ... 946362.ece

Besides saying "gee whiz that's terrible" what can one say?

Precisely because I know somewhat something about the island nation that used to be called "Ceylon" I am at a loss to say much because the incident is actually a bit of a puzzling nonsequitar to recent Sri Lankan history.

The island only recently resolved their 26 year long civil war. A war between their two main (but not only) ethnic groups: the mainly Buddhist Sinhalese, and the mainly Hindu Tamils. The conflict was mainly ethnolinguistic and not religious (its not quite like Ulster).

To capsulize it: Folks in Sri Lanka tend to hate each other for ethnicity and not for religion, and there is no particular history of animus against Christians that I am aware of in the country.

Though a large minority of Sinhalese are Christian the ethnic conflict that Sri Lanka has been notorious for 26 years has no obvious connection that I can see to this terrorist attack (made by some non Chrisitan group upon Christians).

Presumably the perpetrators were Muslim. So the attack has little or nothing to do with the expected main ethnic rift in the nation, and it DOES show a new influence upon the small Muslim population of the island nation by outside terrorists groups (presumably ISIS, and/or Al Queda).

Sri Lanka has always been on a "superhighway" for ocean going trade from ancient Rome/Greece to China and the Arabs trading with the south east ASia and later the Dutch/Portuguese/British gaining a port on the way to the spice island in the south east of Asia and trade with China/Japan.

It complex history has seen so many invasions from nearly every regional power including neighbouring kingdoms in India.

If European nation states can change alliances and have new wars with different adversaries every 25 years why not other parts of the world?

I take issue w/your conclusion. Yes he didn't partake in this terrorist attack, he carried another of his own. You don't think Daesh doesn't feed off s**t like that? They too have motives and a f****d up political agenda, just as Tarrant does. You can argue that it's a spiral of violence in a way where one side hits the other and then the other retaliates, that's true. But you're taking away Daesh's states motive for what they did in Sri Lanka and while I abhor it, imo you can't validly disconnect them. Arguing they the two have nothing to do w/one another ignores motive, causality and agency in this case. It would be the same as dismissing Tarrant's manifesto, or that of the a**hole who shot up a synagogue today outside San Diego. You can condemn both, as you should, but you're ignoring key pieces of why this happened if you ignore motives.

The Christchurch shooting was on the 15th March and the Sri Lankan bombings took place on April 21.

The information on potential terrorist attacks were received by Sri Lankan authorities from India as early as 4 April and it's likely the Americans knew of the bombing in late March,

This gave the terrorists (around 7 suicide bombers) just over 1-2 weeks to organise from scratch which is logistically impossible given the explosives had to be smuggled into the country and the bombers had to plan timing and getting past security etc...

The more plausible explanation is that it was planned probably 6 months in advance with the intention of attacking Buddhist targets give extremist bhikku priests had agitated mobs to attack mosques in Sri Lanka over the last three years. The local NTJ had infact been agitating for at least three years to commit revenge attacks on buddhists.

However Islamic state (who likely provided the intel and weaponry) are more interested in western targets made up of the anti-IS coalition. Sri Lanka was actually nuetral so was never a direct threat to IS.

The change in targets from innocent buddhists to innocent christians and foreigners was simply a change in tack whereby islamic state may have persuaded the NTJ to target churches and western hotels perhaps using Tarrant's shootings of muslims as a pretext to switch to christians. But the point is that the Tarrant shooting was never the causal reason for the implementation of the bombings. This was always on the cards.

Interestingly Tarrant has now inspired copy cat right wing killers
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/powa ... ego-2019-4

I never meant to imply the New Zealand attack directly inspired this one as a reprisal. It will inspire future attacks as evidenced by the Islamic propaganda claiming this attack as a reprisal for the New Zealand attack even though that is almost certainly not the case. Just like this terrorist attack will inspire more alt-right extremists to attack muslims.

People often ask why the increase of frequency and lethality of spree shootings now. One spree shooter or terrorist directly or indirectly inspiring others is a major reason in my opinion. The sad truth is nobody has much of a clue on how to stop it without creating a vicious Orwellian state and that probably won't work.