Trump says stop standing for the slaughter of innocent people
The Manchester bomb is of course a gift to Trump: now he can yell that he was right right right about keeping out all the Mooslims except the ones from Saudi Arabia and other not at all Islamist places like that.
“This is what I’ve spent these last few days talking about in our trip overseas,” Mr. Trump said after a meeting with Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority. “Our society can have no tolerance for this continuation of bloodshed. We cannot stand a moment longer for the slaughter of innocent people.”
As if everyone else were standing for it, and only Trump thinks we should make it stop. The problem is that it’s not easy to make it stop, and just saying we won’t stand for it isn’t the magic solution.
Yaakov Peri, a former head of Shin Bet, the Israeli internal security service, said on Israeli television Tuesday morning that “the tragic attack in Manchester plays favorably for Trump, who in Saudi Arabia said that we will fight terror together.”
But the attack also poses some risks for Mr. Trump, whose responses to fast-moving events — sometimes dashed off in a tweet with a hashtag and an exclamation point — can sound off-key. In his first comments Tuesday morning, Mr. Trump used a playground epithet to describe people like the assailant in the bombing.
“I will call them from now on losers, because that’s what they are,” Mr. Trump said after the meeting with Mr. Abbas. “They’re losers. And we’ll have more of them. But they’re losers. Just remember that.”
I flinch. I hate the word “losers” and I hate it all the more coming from Trump, because to him it means men who don’t grab women by the pussy.
But.
But all the same I kind of know what he’s getting at and this one time I even kind of agree with him. I think disdain is the right reaction, or part of the right reaction. They want to be feared and hated; they don’t want to be seen as pathetic. The reality is it doesn’t take courage or genius or greatness to set off a bomb in a crowded place. It’s all too easy. Any schmuck can do that.
This was a suicide bomber. I think that does take courage, and Theresa May was wrong to call the bomber a coward. Courage is, of course, not always a good thing.
I don’t think it does, necessarily. If you’re deluded enough, it takes none, because you think it’s the doorway to paradise. If you’re furious or depressed enough, it takes none because you want to leave. If you’re malevolent enough it takes little because harming all those other people makes it worthwhile.
And calling them cowards is cant, and I dislike cant, but all the same there is an element of truth to it, which is that the bombers get an instant decisive death, while many many people get maiming, pain, terror, grief, ruined lives.
The bomber was 22 years old. Right now, I think I feel more anger towards those who radicalised an impressionable young man than the man himself.
I agree. Okay, the bulk of my sympathy goes out to his victims and their families, but there’s some compassion left for these painfully young men who have somehow become so disaffected by British society, and their place in it, that they become vulnerable to the evil old men who send them out to die.
There’s a lot of mainstream discussion about the responsibility of the British Muslim community to police their own culture and how mosques are sometimes used – but there’s also a question to be asked about how these young men have come to be so alienated. They’re so often the best and brightest, too. Educated, successful graduates with homes and wives and even children. How do we reclaim them? Or stop them getting lost in the first place? I think trying to make that a purely Muslim issue is setting it up to fail. What is our (dominant white culture) responsibility here?
I have no sympathy for them. I think it’s likely the ideology appeals to them because it flatters them; in any case it puts them at the apex of the totalitarian society they want to impose on the world.
I guess I see what he’s doing with “losers,” too. But it’s such a trivial-sounding word.
“These jerks who killed 22 people.” “These jackasses who kill innocent people.”
As rhetoric it doesn’t exactly soar.
I’m afraid I have to agree with Lady M. I feel the same way about people who want to give the young men spouting misogynist garbage on the internet a dose of compassion. They show no compassion to their victims.
I don’t think anyone owes these guys compassion – if you don’t feel it, I’m not going to say you’re wrong. As you say, they showed no compassion to the people they murdered.
But in another way, I think this is a bit like Blair’s statement, “we need to understand less and condemn more.” That’s all very well, assuming you don’t think there’s a problem to solve. I think disaffected young men who are willing to kill themselves in order to kill people they have othered is a pretty big problem. I don’t think we can solve it by condemning only. We need to understand in order to stop it happening and you can’t understand without a degree of compassion.
Morons spouting misogyny online – no, I don’t feel any compassion for them. They risk nothing, they certainly don’t sacrifice themselves to their toxic ideology. And nor are they used and manipulated for political gain by older men who take advantage of their need for – whatever it is that they are missing.
If we’re prepared to condemn a belief system that tells young men they’ll receive eternal (and largely sexual) reward for murder suicide, we’d have to address toxic beliefs in our own back yard. Without the Xtian Right there is no Trump.
Giving religion a free pass every damn’ time leaves us with no response to the real threat. This isn’t an army, or a criminal gang of any normal kind. Military and police fantasies of revenge and attack are almost pointless.
The thing is, though, that it’s not clear that the Islamization is a matter of disaffection in the sense of deriving from persecution or oppression or the like. The lure of the ideology plays a big part, and that doesn’t necessarily depend on persecution and similar. If their disaffection is just a matter of not liking to see all these women and girls swanning around being free, then I can’t summon any compassion for it.
Steamshovelmama, I understand the need to fix the problem, but I think we need to understand the problem first. And I’m not sure the radicalization is all that much from oppression, as Ophelia says above. I have seen similar patterns in my own family (though Christian, not Muslim). I have a nephew who spouts the kind of misogynistic hatred seen every day mocked on We Hunted the Mammoth. My son routinely argues with him on Facebook, but has found himself beating his head against a wall. This young man has not been particularly hurt – he did have a bit of a challenging first three years, but since then, he has been given what he needs, most of what he wants, and way too much tolerance for his ugly views. When he has wanted something, he has received it from his doting grandparents who seem incapable of seeing him as he is. When he says something, everybody shuts up and listens (he’s a 30 year old ego ridden young man with no education who has chosen not to learn anything on his own, and he presents himself as an authority on everything, particularly on women). He has not been denied sex by women (he’s not an incel) – in fact, he has treated his women like crap, and they have had to get restraining orders against him because he is dangerous. I could have felt sorry for him – I did when he was 3, when he was 6, but now? No. He’s had every chance, he’s had a lot more opportunities than most if he’d taken them, and so I am out of compassion.
That’s how I feel about most of these young men. If they were truly oppressed or mistreated, yes, I can feel some compassion. But I myself was abused in most every possible way, and have been oppressed in many ways, and I didn’t turn out to be a shithead that kills people. I had no one in my life to point me the right way; I was turned aside by almost everyone I reached out to. Still, I knew it was wrong to hurt people. They have been raised as part of a toxic religion, yes. I was also raised as part of a toxic religion that was used as an excuse to beat me, to torment me, to hurt me…and to keep me from reaching my potential. I left it, and said hell no.
I realize not everyone has the same exact experiences, and that some people will respond differently. I don’t know if that’s genetic or learned; I don’t have a clue why some of us come through that kind of crap and become decent human beings while others can be raised in every possible right way and grow up to be a killer. And every possible combination in between those two ends and beyond. If it is genetic, then they can’t help it, but if that’s the case, we’re screwed. If it’s learned, we need to address the learning at the root of it, and figure out why some people do not learn the same things from bad treatment.
Meanwhile, I choose to feel no compassion – and I really am a compassionate person. I’ve just become saturated with the nastiness to the point I can’t feel that sort of compassion for misogynists anymore. Even if their mother was mean to them when they were kids – my mother was pretty mean to me, too, and I don’t hate all women because of it.