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  • Pakistani Taliban faction claims Easter park bombing

    ISLAMABAD (AP) — A bombing on Easter Sunday killed 65 people in a park in the eastern city of Lahore that was crowded with Christians, including many children.

    A breakaway Pakistani faction of the militant Taliban group claimed responsibility. Ahsanullah Ahsan, spokesman for Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, told the Associated Press that a suicide bomber with the faction deliberately targeted the Christian community.

    The explosion took place near the children's rides in Gulshan-e-Iqbal park local police chief Haider Ashraf said. He said the explosion appeared to have been a suicide bombing, but investigations were ongoing.



    The attack killed 65 people and wounded over 300, said Deeba Shahnaz, a spokesman for Lahore rescue administration
    .
    Continues
    In the realm of spirit, seek clarity; in the material world, seek utility.

    Leibniz

  • #2
    Will continue till someone grows a pair. Incidentally, we haven't been able to grow our own.
    sigpicAnd on the sixth day, God created the Field Artillery...

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    • #3
      Someone did grow a pair, the bad guys.
      Chimo

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      • #4
        Holy Warriors, striking women and children in pursuit of their 72 virgins.

        God only knows what level of indoctrination can turn humans into such beasts.
        sigpicAnd on the sixth day, God created the Field Artillery...

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        • #5
          I look at them the way I look at a rabid dog to be put down. I don't care to understand them.
          Chimo

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          • #6
            Originally posted by Officer of Engineers View Post
            I look at them the way I look at a rabid dog to be put down. I don't care to understand them.
            Have these people crossed the line too or not?
            Funeral of assassin Qadri: http://www.dawn.com/news/1242863
            What to do about them, if they have not yet?

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            • #7
              If you're asking if I care to understand them? No, I don't. Are they acting the rabid dog that needs to be put down? That remains to be seen.
              Chimo

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              • #8
                Originally posted by Officer of Engineers View Post
                If you're asking if I care to understand them? No, I don't. Are they acting the rabid dog that needs to be put down? That remains to be seen.
                I am not biased towards any side as I have no idea.
                Another Red Mosque incident and they will be rampaging on the streets. What would you do?

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                • #9
                  Not my streets. Their house. Their rules.
                  Chimo

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                  • #10
                    Originally posted by Deltacamelately View Post
                    Will continue till someone grows a pair. Incidentally, we haven't been able to grow our own.
                    Neither have the yanks.

                    Interesting what Christine & Amrullah had to say when they came over recently.



                    JeM is a ghar vapasi (homecoming) program for TTP

                    So what is the deal ? surrender or work for the PA. Cause when they solve their problem ours will intensify.

                    LeT is important for the PA because LeT is against sectarian violence.

                    She says the US & India have to develop the tools to punish these people. And then apply those tools.
                    Last edited by Double Edge; 30 Mar 16,, 02:33.

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                    • #11
                      What the Slaughter of Christians in Lahore Says About the Global Jihad

                      We cannot pretend that the extremism driving jihadist terror around the world has nothing to do with Islam.



                      LONDON — At least 72 people were killed and 300 injured by the suicide blast that shook the crowded Gulshan-i-Iqbal Park in Lahore, Pakistan, on the evening of Easter Sunday. Many of the victims were children. A Taliban splinter group called Jamaat-ul-Ahrar has claimed responsibility for the attack that targeted Pakistani Christians without warning. The group is believed to have carried out previous attacks, including the beheading of 23 paramilitary soldiers in February 2014. A spokesman, Ehsanullah Ehsan, said his group wanted to send a message that it has “entered Lahore.” He then threatened further atrocities.


                      Yesterday’s heartbreaking blasts made this the third time this month alone that Pakistan has been attacked by jihadists. All this just in Pakistan, just in March. And this needs to be understood in the context of the global jihadist insurgency that is upon us: unprecedented in its scale, pluralistic in its leadership, fractured in its strategy, nevertheless inspiring in its central message, and popular enough in its appeal that it is able to move masses.

                      Again, just in the month of March there have been jihadist attacks in eight different countries, and I’m not including the ongoing jihadist civil wars in Afghanistan or Syria, the similar one brewing in Libya, and smaller scale attacks and killings across the world. Turkey, Ivory Coast, Iraq, Mali, Nigeria, and Belgium have all fallen prey to this insurgency.






                      A jihadist guerrilla war is being waged against world order, and the international community is woefully unprepared to address the problem.


                      Many still deny this insurgency exists, and it is true that these countries have locally specific factors that contribute to their respective insurgent conditions. Yes, the groups behind these attacks are not under one central leadership, rather they are either affiliates or offshoots of competing jihadist groups.


                      But they all share one cause.

                      They are all—including ISIS—derived from, or affiliated to just two jihadist groupings: al Qaeda and the Taliban. In turn, jihadists all drink from the same doctrinal well of widespread, rigid Wahhabism. And they share the ideological aims of popular non-terrorist Islamists. They are all unified behind a theocratic desire to enforce a version of Sharia as law over society. Considering that non-violent Wahhabi and Islamist Muslims exist in their millions globally, this drastically increases the potential recruitment pool for jihadists. The insurgency could not succeed were this not so. There is no use in denying it.


                      For many years, liberals—and I speak as one—have refused to acknowledge the ideology of Islamism. All talk of “ideas” was seen to be nothing but a “neocon” line taken directly from the worst excesses of the George W. Bush years.


                      Ironically, due to this very fear of political incorrectness we wound up repeating many of the mistakes of the neocon era. While we feared to engage in a debate on values with Muslim communities, we tried to restrict the problem to the realm of mere criminality, as something to be dealt with by law enforcement or, failing a solution there, by the military—and ultimately by war, even if that word went unspoken. Under this doctrine, President Barack Obama developed a secret kill-list, preferring simply to assassinate his enemies, even if they were American citizens, and he has wound up dispatching more drone strikes abroad than Bush ever did.



                      Anything to avoid discussing ideas.


                      And so, as this global jihadist insurgency became impossible to ignore, we liberals reluctantly, euphemistically began naming the problem “violent extremism.” We used nauseating, limp State Department-coined phrases such as “al-Qaeda-inspired extremism” to refer to what was clearly an ideology. But as the assassination of Osama Bin Laden in his Pakistani hideout proved, we cannot arrest nor shoot our way out of this problem. “Defeating” al Qaeda was only ever going to give rise to a group like ISIS, because it was not al Qaeda that had “inspired extremism”; it was extremism that had inspired al Qaeda.


                      Our failure to recognize this as a civilizational struggle—one centered around values—has allowed the fundamentalist problem of Wahhabism, and the political problem of Islamism, to fester and metastasize. This struggle is an ideological one before it is a military or legal one. Vague platitudes that this has nothing to do with Islam—my own religion—are as unhelpful as saying that this is the essence of Islam. Extremism certainly has something to do with Islam. Not nothing, not everything, but something.


                      The Lahore bombing underscores the very religious character of the jihadists’ fanaticism. This was not about alienation in a European ghetto, or revenge for American and European airstrikes in the Middle East— the secular-sounding explanations offered as the motivations of people like those who carried out the Paris and Brussels attacks. Lahore was about pure, vicious religious intolerance, killing Christians—including Christian children—on Easter Sunday because they were Christians and not the kind of Muslims the murderers claim to be.


                      For years, this kind of brutal intolerance has been cultivated by Pakistan’s mullah mafia. These blasts came in the context of a March 27 deadline set by an alliance of more than 30 hard-line religious groups demanding that the provincial government in Lahore, the capital of Punjab, withdraw a new women’s rights bill that the mullahs oppose. This, after mobs were roused in support of Mumtaz Qadri, an extremist executed last month for killing the man he’d been hired as a bodyguard to protect in 2011, Punjab Governor Salmaan Taseer. The motive for the crime: Taseer had advocated reform of the blasphemy laws. Now several thousand of these blasphemy inquisitors have occupied a high-security zone in Islamabad to demand, among other things, the implementation of Sharia as law.

                      So, let there be no doubt. We are in the middle of a struggle against theocracy, and for secular liberal democratic values. Muslims and non-Muslims respectively must join together in that fight. This is why Trump’s divisive rhetoric is so unhelpful. Everyone must stand together to discredit Islamism, and to support a reform in Islamic discourse. All of us together are responsible for challenging intolerant, theocratic thinking before it spills over to violence. All of us together are responsible for refusing to allow religion to become the primary bond that divides us from “the other.”


                      As Pakistan shows us, this is a difficult, fraught, lifelong struggle that few are yet prepared to face. But face it we must.
                      ......
                      In the realm of spirit, seek clarity; in the material world, seek utility.

                      Leibniz

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                      • #12
                        Christine fair and Amrullah Saleh in the same room!!

                        Fair is a funny character. She started as an islamabad based rabidly anti-india op-ed writer but after the bin laden raid, she re-positioned completely and thats when she actually started getting noticed. Her pre-2011 articles are a gem if you prefer humour. Back in 2011:

                        The opinion in the State Dept. is that she is a "kook". (sic.) Nobody who matters pays any attention to her at all. She is marginalized, frustrated, dismissed and generally worthless... no wonder she sympathizes so much with the pakistanis.
                        Meanwhile, bombing inside crowds of minority gathering(shia, ahmedi etc) is not new in pakistan. Its always open hunting season for the sunni groups.
                        Last edited by anil; 30 Mar 16,, 19:20.

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                        • #13
                          In 2016, i don't find too much sympathy from her about Pakistan. They won't let her into the country any more. PNG status.

                          Her work on LeT has been good.

                          Another person who had something interesting to say was Max Abrahms. particularly on the question of why civvies get attacked by terrorists.

                          It turns out that certain kinds of groups are significantly more likely to attack civilians than others – those suffering from leadership deficits in which lower level members are calling the shots. Leadership deficits promote terrorism by empowering lower level members of the organization, who have stronger incentives to harm civilians.

                          Lower level members may try to rise up within the group by committing atrocities against civilians. Such organizational ladder-climbing is well documented in gangs, but is also quite common in militant groups – just ask Jihadi John. Furthermore, lower level members have less access to organizational resources than the leadership, incentivizing them to strike softer targets. And leaders tend to have more experience in asymmetric conflict, so they are more apt than their subordinates to understand the political risks of indiscriminate violence in the first place.

                          In accordance with this new theory for terrorism, our study reveals that decapitation strikes with drones make militant groups more likely to attack civilians by weakening the leadership. Decentralized groups are also prone to civilian targeting because the leadership must delegate tactical decision-making to lower level members. Similarly, we demonstrate that as operatives travel further away from the leadership, they gain a measure of autonomy and are thus more inclined to attack the population.
                          Could this explain the Lahore attack. The TTP leadership is either incommunicado or unable to control their lower downs who have taken on their own agenda.

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