Tag Archives: Brussels

New Weapon of Terrorism: Biscuits ‘n Salt???

Posted on by under Global Issues, Random

Terrorism seems to have acquired a new weapon:  salt and biscuits!  Yes, you heard me … armed with nothing more than salt and biscuits in a faux explosive belt, a man identified only as JB managed to trigger a major security alert, shut down a major shopping mall, and cause an emergency meeting among key government ministers in Brussels.  JB claimed that he had been abducted, wired with the ‘suicide belt’, and dropped off at the City2 complex where he would be remotely detonated.  Not many details have been released as of this writing, but it seems likely that this was a hoax, as the man is previously known to police and considered to be somewhat unhinged.  Police did find the car he claimed he was transported in, and are now questioning another person in connection with the event.

Since the above story caught my eye, but it wasn’t enough for a full blog post, I decided to see what other ‘snippets from around the globe’ might be out there.  Sometimes it’s kind of fun just to go with a few short blurbs rather than the more in-depth standard fare.

elephant theme picThey are shooting elephants from helicopters!  But it’s all good.  I recently wrote about the horrors of poachers killing elephants to obtain the ivory from their tusks.  Well good news … some 500 elephants will be relocated to a safe sanctuary in Malawi’s Nkhotakota wildlife reserve.  Eventually the elephants will help increase the elephant population in other parts of Africa where poaching has depleted the species.  Now … how do you think you get 500 elephants from point A to point B?  Well, turns out that you cannot just ask them to form a line and go peacefully. The first step is to shoot them with tranquilizer darts … from a helicopter!  Next, the elephant is hoisted by crane into a crate (can you imagine the size of that crate???), then loaded onto a truck for the 185-mile journey.  The relocation is being done by African Parks, a non-profit group based in Johannesburg, and is expected to be completed sometime next year.  Great work!!!

duckieA rubber-duckie race run amok was raided by police!  A charitable organization in the UK, Midland Freewheelers Blood Bikes, provides free deliveries of blood and medical supplies to hospitals.  They rely solely on donations, so they periodically hold events, such as the rubber-duck race they sponsored in a Cotswolds village last Sunday.  Apparently it was great fun, with over 100 ducks in the water, children gleefully chasing them as they made their way downriver.  Until … the police showed up!  This particular village has been voted one of the most beautiful in Britain, but apparently the residents, while appreciative of beauty, also do not like the sound of people having fun, as they called police saying it was disruptive.  Police broke up the ‘boisterous’ event and there remains doubt whether the group will be able to hold the duck race in that location next year.  My question:  who was there to greet and congratulate the poor duckies at the end of the race?  Sigh.  Do people have nothing better to complain about?

lightning2Indians demand government make treaty with Mother Nature!  It is unclear just what they are asking the government to do, but in a two-day period, at least 93 people died in lightning storms in India, and the farmers are tired of risking their lives.  Lal Babu Usvaha, a farmer from Kanti Butiya village near the city of Muzaffarpur in Bihar, said: “Work is work. We can’t stop because of the weather. We have to keep working in the fields. But we feel scared when we see so many clouds, so much electricity in the sky.  We need help, but what will the government do? What has the government ever done for farmers?”  This is a perilous situation, certainly, and not to be made light of, however I still do not think the government can really do a whole lot to make the lightening go away!

Where Is The Outrage Now???

Posted on by under Global Issues, Rants, Social commentary

27 March 2016 – A bomb blast Sunday in a park in the Pakistani city of Lahore killed at least 71, injuring more than 340, mostly women and children.  While it is said that the attack targeted Christians, the victims were overwhelmingly Muslims.

22 March 2016 – Bombs packed with nails terrorized Brussels on Tuesday in the deadliest assault on the European heartland since the Daesh attacks on Paris four months prior, hitting the airport and subway system in coordinated strikes, killing 35 and injuring over 300.

Two horrific terrorist attacks killing and injuring far too many, mostly civilians.  Both were perpetrated by terrorist organizations, one by Daesh and one by a Taliban offshoot called Jamaat-e-Ahrar.  Similar terrorist attacks, yet with some major differences:

  • The Brussels attack was major news on every network within minutes; the Pakistan attack was not reported in the U.S. until several hours had passed
  • Monuments across the west lit up with the colours of the Belgian flag, but not a single western capital lit up with the colours of Pakistan.
  • Immediately following the Brussels attacks, there was an outpouring of sympathy from the western world. Following the Pakistan attack, only Canadian leader Justin Trudeau, French President Francois Hollande and the Russian Foreign Ministry passed on sympathies along with US presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders, but most world leaders said little.
  • The main difference, I suspect, is that Brussels is in Europe, a part of the western world, whereas Pakistan is in the Middle East.

April 2015 – Kenya was rocked with a terror attack at Garissa  University that left 148 people dead. Of those, 142 were students. Where was the outrage?  Where was the outpouring of grief and commiseration?  I am ashamed to say that I do not even remember hearing about this attack until I read it on the 1st anniversary of the attack (read memory of fellow blogger StuckInPerpetualSoliloquy here. )

November 2015 – The day before the terrorist attacks in Paris, a pair of suicide bombers struck southern Beirut on Thursday, killing 43 people and leaving shattered glass and blood on the streets. At least 239 others were wounded.  We all remember Paris, but does anybody remember Lebanon?

I could cite numerous other examples, as terrorist attacks are nothing new in the non-western world.  Relatively, terrorism is a rarity in the western world – Europe and the Americas.  However, listening to the western media, one would think that Daesh is the only terrorist organization and that the west is the only target.  Quite simply, the reverse is true.  Boko Haram is actually responsible for a larger number of deaths than Daesh, but since they are based in West Africa and operate primarily on the African continent, we never hear about them.  The Taliban, Hezbollah, Al-Shaabab … all rank in the top 10 most lethal terrorist organizations.  But we in the west are not told that.  We are told only that we must fear Daesh (“ISIS” or “ISIL”).  Terrorist attacks like the ones in Kenya, Pakistan, and Lebanon are far more frequent occurrences than those in Europe or the U.S., but we are not told that.  WHY????

Remember the attack on the French satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris in January 2015?  11 people were killed and another 11 injured.  Mainstream media brought us up-to-minute coverage for days.  Social media was jammed with outpourings of support and sympathy.  Yet, the number of victims was considerably smaller than, say, the attacks in Kenya, that we barely heard a peep about. Ah, but France is in Europe, part of the western world …

We in the western world are arrogant.  Perhaps it is the fault of the media that we have come to believe we are all important and that nations in the Middle East or the African continent simply do not matter.  Perhaps we would care if we were told, if the western media thought it was important enough to bring to our attention.  Or perhaps not.  There was a time I would have said that my fellow countrymen would be as distraught, as sad, as horrified over an attack in Kenya, Pakistan or Afghanistan as one in New York or Chicago.  I am not so sure now.  In the past decade, we seem to have been robbed of our humanity, of our compassion for others.  Compassion is being replaced by bigotry, humanity by greed.  Or apathy.  Perhaps we have heard of so many attacks in the Middle East that we have become inured to them, we simply shrug our shoulders and think that “it took place over there, and those things happen over there.”  Is the value of a human life any less because it is a Pakistani life or a Kenyan life or a Syrian life?  Is the value of a Muslim life any less than a Christian life?  I think not.

In my research for this article, I came across a comment on one of the news stories about the Pakistan attacks: “if world has to get some piece some countries has to be wiped out from world map. Pak, Afkhan, Turkey, Iraque, Albania, Bosnia, Saudi, and some Russian territories where Muslims are majority like Chech, Dage, Circassia, Bashkr,azarbaijn, Tartaristn .”  Sickening, disgusting, and utterly inhumane.  Is this the result of the hate speeches we hear almost daily by the bigots in our midst?

Even today, as I stroll through my Facebook timeline, kicking the garbage out of my way as I go, I see references to both the Paris and Belgium attacks, but nothing about Pakistan.  Human nature is such that we will likely always be more attuned to what happens in our own backyard than halfway around the globe.  Nevertheless, we should not simply shrug our shoulders and say “well, those things happen over there”, or  “thank God it wasn’t here”.  Other nations sometimes view the U.S. as arrogant, and they are not wrong.  But I wonder if we are arrogant because we have been spoiled by living in a nation that has been exposed to so little adversity, or if we are arrogant because we are sheltered by our own media, fed by the politicians only what they want us to know, allowed to believe that only we matter?  Think about it.

pak-brus flags

America’s #1 Bimbo …

Posted on by under Humour, Political commentary

Michele Bachman, on why she believes God caused terrorist attacks in Brussels this week in order to humiliate President Obama: “Maybe our president’s humiliation comes in a manner so devastating it makes one wonder whether the Creator of humankind isn’t reminding this world of the inferiority of foolishness in the face of wisdom.” Bachmann accused Obama of allegedly mocking Israel and Jews by bringing media attention to his historic trip to Cuba, rather than on the attacks in Brussels. Continuing, the former Minnesota representative also claimed that the president was upset about the attacks only because attention was being diverted from his visit. “Obama’s slavish press corps was forced to turn their uncritical gaze from adoring him to revealing the newest carnage in Brussels,” she wrote, “Our eyes were spellbound.”  And this … “Our feckless U.S. president appeared unfazed by the message he portrayed of American incompetence and historic irrelevance.”

Those were the words of the woman who once ran for president (2012).  Those were the words of America’s #1 bimbo, even more stupid than Sarah Palin, and that is saying a lot.  This is the same woman who, during the campaign of 2012, declared that Paul Revere, in fact, made his “midnight ride” to warn … not the patriots, but the British!  She obviously went to a different school and read a different set of history books than I.

Why, you ask, am I wasting my time with a has-been, a washed-out wanna-be, when there are so many more important targets for my snarky prose … things that that pose a real threat to the world?  The answer is two-fold.  First, Ms. Bachman is too easy, too much fun to leave alone!  I write about the Trumps, the Cruz’s, Daesh, immigration, the refugee crisis, racism, bigotry … nearly every day.  I’m not going to stop writing about the serious issues and trying to open the eyes of those who are not seeing the world clearly,  but every now and then, even I need a bit of fun, and quite frankly, Bachman is a hoot!  She makes me feel like an Einstein!  The second part of the answer is that she is still speaking and her words are still being noted by the press, which means that people are still hearing her.  Until she loses her public voice, people need to be reminded that she “knows not of what she speaks”. I must wonder how the good people of Minnesota allowed her to stay in the U.S. House of Representatives as their representative for a full eight years and the state senate prior to that!  I hear it snows a lot and gets very cold in Minnesota …

More dumb and dumber quotes by Michele Bachman:

  • “Our movement at its core is an intellectual movement.” –Rep. Michele Bachmann on the Tea Party movement, CPAC conference, March 2014  Seriously?  Could have fooled me, but then what do I know?
  • “Why should I go and do something like that? But the Lord says, ‘Be submissive wives; you are to be submissive to your husbands.” -Rep. Michele Bachmann, recalling in a 2006 speech at a Megachurch in Minneapolis that pursuing tax law wasn’t her choice, but she did so at the urging of her husband because she was certain God was speaking through him. No wonder I didn’t make a very good wife … I forgot that subservient thing.
  • “If we took away the minimum wage — if conceivably it was gone — we could potentially virtually wipe out unemployment completely because we would be able to offer jobs at whatever level.” -Michele Bachmann, Jan. 2005. Oh yeah … a lot of people want to work for $1.25 per hour!
  • “I find it interesting that it was back in the 1970s that the swine flu broke out under another, then under another Democrat president, Jimmy Carter. I’m not blaming this on President Obama, I just think it’s an interesting coincidence.” -Rep. Michele Bachmann, on the 1976 Swine Flu outbreak that happened when Gerald Ford, a Republican, was president, April 28, 2009. Hey, I wonder who she thinks is responsible for Ebola?  The first case was diagnosed in 1976, also when Gerald Ford was president …
  • “Carbon dioxide is portrayed as harmful. But there isn’t even one study that can be produced that shows that carbon dioxide is a harmful gas.” -Rep. Michelle Bachmann, April, 2009    I think she breathed a bit too much of that CO2.
  • “But we also know that the very founders that wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States. … I think it is high time that we recognize the contribution of our forbearers who worked tirelessly — men like John Quincy Adams, who would not rest until slavery was extinguished in the country.” -Rep. Michele Bachmann, botching American history while speaking at an Iowan’s for Tax Relief event in January 2011. The Founding Fathers did not work to end slavery, and John Quincy Adams was not one of the Founding Fathers. Slavery was not abolished until nearly 100 years after the ratification of the Constitution.  Somebody please put this woman out of our misery!  I knew that when I was 8 years old!

Again, I wrote this post mostly for my own humour and I did have fun with it.  But I do have to get serious for just a minute.  This person spent eight years representing the state of Minnesota, 5.457 million people, in the United States Congress.  How?  Why?  As a representative, she was up for re-election every two years, meaning she was actually elected at least four times by the people of Minnesota!  Prior to that, she was a state senator. Think about that.  Although I am a liberal who mostly votes democrat, I am also a long-time student of political science and I do understand the importance of a two-party system.  That said, with people like Michele Bachman and Donald Trump representing one of those parties, is it any wonder the GOP is going down for the third time?  It almost seems that it is a culture of stupidity, a culture that promotes the idea that if you say it loudly enough, it doesn’t matter how stupid it is.  Again … think about it.

 

A Day of Horror in Belgium … A Day of Shame in the U.S.

Posted on by under Global Issues

Yesterday morning just before 8:00 a.m. local time, 3:00 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time, terrorists detonated two bombs in the departure hall at Brussels Airport.  At least 14 people were killed and 92 injured*.  Less than an hour later, another bomb explosion in a subway car at the Maelbeek subway station in central Brussels, not far from the European Union’s core institutions, killed at least 20 people and wounded 106*.  The attacks occurred four days after the capture of Salah Abdeslam, who is a suspect in the Paris attacks last November and who, it is believed, intended to take part in yesterday’s attacks.  A third bomb was found at Brussels airport but was destroyed by security services before it could explode. Eight hours after the attacks, Daesh claimed responsibility, calling Belgium “a country participating in the coalition against the Islamic State.”

Brussels

I have no words for this horror.  Actually, that is not true. There are many words I could use here, but they are only words, and sometimes silence really is golden.  I have friends who live in the EU, and to them I have sent private condolences.  Other than that, words cannot comfort, words cannot “make it all better”, they really cannot do much.  Unfortunately, some of our not-so-illustrious presidential wannabe’s did not feel the same as I. It took only a matter of hours before they all leaped onto the attention-getting bandwagon.  The most obnoxious, rudest, loudest and crassest, of course, was the trumpeter who played as loudly and poorly as ever.

Donald Trump publicly speculated that harsh interrogation techniques, including torture, could have helped prevent the terrorist attacks in Brussels.  When reminded by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that International Law frowns upon torture, Trump remarked that he would suggest the “eggheads” who came up with the law should flip to CNN, which as Trump spoke played footage from the attacks. “And I would be willing to bet, when I’m seeing all of the bodies laying all over the floor, including young, beautiful children, laying dead on the floor, I would say if they watched that, maybe, just maybe they’ll approve waterboarding and other things,” he said.

And of course Ted Cruz also felt the need to weigh in, blaming President Obama in the process: “Radical Islam is at war with us. For over seven years we have had a president who refuses to acknowledge this reality. And the truth is, we can never hope to defeat this evil so long as we refuse to even name it. That ends on January 20, 2017, when I am sworn in as president. We will name our enemy — radical Islamic terrorism. And we will defeat it.”  Did he way when he is sworn in as president?  Wake up, Teddy.

Not to be outdone by the first two clowns, John Kasich had this to say: “The president must return home immediately and get to work with our allies to respond with strength against the enemies of the west.”  As I mentioned in an earlier post, what could or would it have accomplished for President Obama to cut short a very important diplomatic trip to rush home?  Could he have turned the clock back and erased the events of the morning?  Could he have single-handedly destroyed Daesh?  No, there is nothing he could have done beyond what he did do.  What the terrorists want is to instill fear, to cause us all to lose the sense of normalcy in our lives, to disrupt our lives.  The most sane response to terrorism  is to stay the course, to get on with our lives, with business as usual. The president made the right choice. Get over blaming President Obama for every single thing that happens, Gov.

Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders also made statements, but nothing beyond the usual, offering support to the European community and sharing grief, expressing horror.  The things we expect every politician to say, the things that we ourselves say.  I am, however, appalled at the comments by Trump, Cruz and even Kasich.  I cannot believe that, after hearing Trump’s comments, anybody with a shred of human decency would want to live in a nation led by this ‘man’.  His remarks and those of Cruz were not only inappropriate, given the circumstances, but offensive and disrespectful to the victims of yesterday’s attacks … indeed, disrespectful to us all. I hang my head in shame that we, as a nation, have allowed this person to rise to the level that he has in this election.

Last night, as I was writing this post, the city of Brussels, with a population of about one million, was virtually shut down. Residents were being advised to stay in their homes, and residents of other nations in the EU being advised against travel to Belgium. Today, the airport in Brussels remains closed, though some local public transportation has resumed.  Let us share their grief, but let us do so with kindness, with compassion, and without cheap, hurtful rhetoric.

  • Note that the number killed and injured are not final numbers, but merely best available estimates at the time of this writing.