Nigeria: Militants kill students in college attack

[Valin]

Townhall/AP:

9/29/13

 

POTISKUM, Nigeria (AP) Islamic * extremists attacked an agricultural college in the dead of night, gunning down dozens of students as they slept in dormitories and torching classrooms in an ongoing Islamic uprising in northeast Nigeria, the school's provost said.

 

Molima Idi Mato, provost of the Yobe State College of Agriculture told The Associated Press that as many as 50 students may have been killed in the attack that began at about 1 a.m. Sunday in rural Gujba. He said he could not give an exact toll as security forces are still recovering bodies.

 

The other 1,000 students enrolled have fled the college that is about 40 kilometers (25 miles) north of the scene of similar school attacks around Damaturu town, he said.

 

(Snip)

 

* Translation: Murdering Islamic Terrorist.

[Valin]

I'm sorry, but we have to talk about the barbarism of modern Islamist terrorism

Brendan O'Neill

September 28th, 2013

 

The aftermath of an Islamist bomb directed at Pakistani Shiites (Photo: AFP/Getty)

 

In Western news-making and opinion-forming circles, theres a palpable reluctance to talk about the most noteworthy thing about modern Islamist violence: its barbarism, its graphic lack of moral restraint. This goes beyond the BBC's yellow reluctance to deploy the T-word terrorism in relation to the bloody assault on the Westgate shopping mall in Kenya at the weekend. Across the commentating board, people are sheepish about pointing out the historically unique lunacy of Islamist violence and its utter detachment from any recognisable moral universe or human values. We have to talk about this barbarism; we have to appreciate how new and unusual it is, how different it is even from the terrorism of the 1970s or of the early twentieth century. We owe it to the victims of these assaults, and to the principle of honest and frank political debate, to face up to the unhinged, morally unanchored nature of Islamist violence in the 21st century.

 

(Snip)

 

Time and again, one reads about Islamist attacks that seem to defy not only the most basic of humanitys moral strictures but also political and even guerrilla logic. Consider the hundreds of suicide attacks that have taken place in Iraq in recent years, a great number of them against ordinary Iraqis, often children. Western apologists for this wave of weird violence, which they call resistance, claim it is about fighting against the Western forces which were occupying Iraq in the wake of the 2003 invasion. If so, its the first resistance in history whose prime targets have been civilians rather than security forces, and which has failed to put forward any kind of political programme that its violence is allegedly designed to achieve. Even experts in counterinsurgency have found themselves perplexed by the numerous nameless suicide assaults on massive numbers of civilians in post-war Iraq, and the fact that these violent actors, unlike the vast majority of violent political actors in history, have developed no alternative government or political wing and displayed no intention of amassing territory to govern. One Iraqi attack has stuck in my mind for seven years. In 2006 a female suicide bomber blew herself up among families including many mothers and their offspring who were queuing up for kerosene. Can you imagine what happened? A terrible glimpse was offered by this line in a Washington Post report on 24 September 2006: Two pre-teen girls embraced each other as they burned to death.

 

(Snip)

 

What we have today, uniquely in human history, is a terrorism that seems myopically focused on killing as many people as possible and which has no clear political goals and no stated territorial aims. The question is, why? It is not moral masturbation to ask this question or to point out the peculiarity and perversity of modern Islamist violence. My pennys worth is that this terrorism speaks to a profound crisis of politics and of morality. Where earlier terrorist groups were restrained both by their desire to appear as rational political actors with a clear goal in mind and by basic moral rules of human behaviour meaning their violence was often bloody, yes, but rarely focused narrowly on committing mass murder todays Islamist terrorists appear to float free of normal political rules and moral compunctions. This is what is so infuriating about the BBCs refusal to call these groups terrorists because if anything, and historically speaking, * even the term terrorist might be too good for them.

 

 

* I'm purposing instead of extremists..militants....radicals, that we use today in the media, we go with Blood Thirsty Murdering Islamic Assholes.

Examples: Today in Iraq a group of Blood Thirsty Murdering Islamic Assholes killed some Muslims while they were praying....

or Today in Indonesia Blood Thirsty Murdering Islamic Assholes threatened the Miss World pageant with murder and chaos if they didn't change the rules of the pageant......

Today in Pakistan a group of Blood Thirsty Murdering Islamic Assholes killed a bunch of Christians while they were praying.