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Brussels Rocked by Terrorist Attacks
- jackgavigan 11y agoPresented without comment: "This is a solid Moment to get up to speed on the Brussels situation. Click the follow button to stay in the loop." - @sacca https://twitter.com/sacca/status/712270790037610499 https://twitter.com/sacca/status/712270790037610499
- mikeyouse 11y agoI know @sacca is a huge promoter of twitter (and investor in..), but I was in bed this morning putting off getting ready to go to work and I saw his tweet about the Moment. It was actually really useful, much easier than trying to aggregate wtf was happening from 20 disparate tweets and feeds.
- rplnt 11y agoThe comments there are... as expected I guess.
- odinduty 11y agoI guess it's hard to feel in any other way when recent migration policies have translated into a sharp decline of our own security in our own developed countries.
- eveningcoffee 11y agoMaybe yes, maybe not, but you are a troll who created the account about 24 hours before the attacks.
- odinduty 11y agoMaybe I was behind the attacks. Or maybe your comment is a senseless ad-hominem.
- tobltobs 11y agoWhat do you expect with such a fag nickname?
- eveningcoffee 11y agoObvious troll is obvious.
- maze-le 11y agoSeems he even bought a clique of downvoters with him.
- ascorbic 11y agoThe Paris attackers were French and Belgian, not immigrants. This has been the case with almost all attacks in Europe, where the perpetrators have almost always been local.
- odinduty 11y agoMohamed Abrini and Salah Abdeslam really do sound like francophone names! Come on, let's try not to have to discuss this...
- ascorbic 11y agoThere we go. Barack Obama really does sound like an anglophone name. I bet their skin colour is really suspicious too.
- raverbashing 11y ago"Local", yes, keep telling yourself that 2nd generation immigrants I'm not against immigration per se, but there's a lot of problems coming from people who fail (because it's mostly their responsibility) to integrate
- ascorbic 11y agoIf they're born in the country and lived there their whole life, they're local by any non-racist definition.
- pjc50 11y agoDo they think of themselves as local?
- jbmorgado 11y agoEven when they don't speak the local language like it sometimes happens? Truth is, you can be so enclosed in a foreign culture that you will actually stay a foreigner trough all your life. P.S.: I'm not saying that was the case here, I'm just answering your broader remark.
- matthewmacleod 11y agoNo they haven't. The recent attacks in Europe have not been caused by 'recent migrants'. That's just a bald-faced lie.
- ptaipale 11y agoIn November Paris attacks, two of the nine actually were "recent migrants" as explained in another comment. So perhaps that "bald-faced lie" needs to be toned down a bit.
- DanBC 11y agoCaitlin Moran - > Always good, on days like this, to remind everyone that the guys blowing up Brussels are THE PEOPLE THE REFUGEES ARE RUNNING AWAY FROM
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- braythwayt 11y agoA throwaway account called “odinduty” is espousing anti-immigration sentiments? Will wonders never cease. But let’s stick to what HN does best, discuss the wonders of technology. In this case, I’d liek to administer a Turing Test: The hypothesis is that ”odinduty" is a reasonably sophisticated bot, trained to emulate the kind of comments you find on /r/Europeans. Can we find it making a statement inconsistent with this hypothesis?
- DanBC 11y agoIt's probably better to flag, downvote, and ignore the obvious trolls.
- Kequc 11y agoIt seems to be a discussion about whether or not this is Donald Trumps fault, how is that to have been expected?
- akerro 11y agoWhat didn't you expect? Hug-protest and tolerance march? People in Benelux are scared since November, after Paris attacks underground was blocked for a few days and military with full armament was on every corner.
- plehoux 11y ago"2 bombs exploded close to where I was sitting, so scary." - https://twitter.com/lrz/status/712173581103448064 https://twitter.com/lrz/status/712173581103448064 "Bombs at Brussels airport. I'm alive but I think there are casualties." - https://twitter.com/lrz/status/712173286281650176 https://twitter.com/lrz/status/712173286281650176 Laurent Sansonetti MacRuby & RubyMotion's creator and lead developer was near the blast.
- andremendes 11y agoCould someone provide a link to a not paywalled version? Going through google didn't helped.
- dmichulke 11y agoAs sad as it is, I think the responses will be: - we need more surveillance rights and money for the secret services - we need more police and higher spending - and possibly bomb some country (Syria is en vogue) What won't be said is: - How come this happens again without anyone having seen it coming? - What does it say about the success of the Western anti-terror foreign policy adopted ~2001?
- odinduty 11y agoWhy would we bomb Syria? Isn't the al-Assad government working against ISIS and related organisations?
- subliminalpanda 11y agoAssad is anti-west.
- george_soros 11y agoWell, what is he suppose to do, take orders from merica ?
- balabaster 11y agoThere are many of us Westerners that have some anti-west tendencies - like anti-surveillance, anti-government-sticking-its-nose-in-where-it-shouldn't-be, anti-corruption-caused-by-lobbyists-and-big-business-running-our-government, etc. etc. But we're not completely anti-west, we enjoy the freedoms and religious autonomy we're granted and we enjoy the cultural mix that "the West" affords us. It also doesn't mean we wish to maim and murder the innocent (on either side of the argument!) in order to make our point. I think 99% of us can agree that groups (like ISIS) who think it's acceptable and act to torture and kill the innocent to make their political point need to die in a hell-fire and be damned to all eternity. Or maybe that's just me.
- marcosdumay 11y ago> I think 99% of us can agree that groups (like ISIS) who think it's acceptable and act to torture and kill the innocent to make their political point need to die in a hell-fire and be damned to all eternity. Oh, completely agree with that. The only problem is that this description fits not only ISIS, and its opposing government by Assad, it also fits the US friendly Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, and the US government itself, and anybody else that has the intention of doing anything there.
- coldcode 11y agoPeople always freak out when this happens. As long as there have been people with enough hate (or often political motives) there has always been terrorist attacks. Even the Romans suffered as much. I don't think there is any solution which makes everyone perfectly safe. Politicians always want to guarantee perfect safety but it's not possible. Some things you can prevent, some things you can stop, but some horrible thing will inevitably happen.
- michaelmcmillan 11y agoYou seem to attribute a lot to politics. I would argue that religion is the variable that plays the dominant role in this war of ideas.
- ascorbic 11y agoIn these situations, religion is politics.
- swiley 11y agoThis isn't talked about enough. More people in both secular and religious contexts need to notice how bad this can get sometimes.
- michaelmcmillan 11y agoHow does the actual belief in paradise have anything to do with politics?
- twoquestions 11y agoYou and many others seem to post that there is a mental cancer infecting 1.5 billion people on this planet, and at any time it could transform its host into a bloodthirsty murderer seemingly at random. I don't buy it.
- kbart 11y agoAll religions are mental cancer, some just have more serious consequences than others.
- themartorana 11y agoThis is a mess larger than I can comprehend, with scores of innocent dead. The spectrum of political issues this crosses is vast. We're talking nationalism, immigration, religion, extremism, surveillance, privacy, and war to name a few. The nuance required to understand and attack the big picture is almost nowhere to be found. I saw the French PM said something like "we're at war" - I'm not sure who they're at war with but onward with the endless war. I've seen plenty of comments about ISIS. It's like a 99.999% chance it's not ISIS - maybe Al Qaeda, maybe a different extremist group. (For why it's probably not ISIS and one of the most fantastic explanations of the what's and whys of ISIS, see [0].) But it shows just how vastly uneducated most people are about the issues that lead to attacks like this. This breeds calls for extremism in response, like expelling all Muslims (and can only help Trump's campaign) or comments like the one from the French PM above. I can't imagine being in charge of trying to address all of the underlying issues that feed into attacks like this. And I don't know that those in charge are up to the task. [0] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isis-really-wants/384980/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isi... Edit: ISIS inspired maybe, but not ISIS planned and backed. "During his visit to Mosul in December, Jürgen Todenhöfer interviewed a portly German jihadist and asked whether any of his comrades had returned to Europe to carry out attacks. The jihadist seemed to regard returnees not as soldiers but as dropouts. “The fact is that the returnees from the Islamic State should repent from their return,” he said. “I hope they review their religion.”" I always stand to be corrected.
- noobie 11y agoHonest question that always crosses my mind. Why do we always assume a terrorist group is behind such attacks? Couldn't it be a couple of deranged persons acting on their own?
- swombat 11y agoConsidering it comes 4 days after the arrest of the man who planned the Paris attacks, it's possible that this is just a couple of deranged people but it's unlikely. In this context, even with no detailed information about the attackers, it's quite likely that this is a terrorist attack somehow connected to fundamentalism/etc.
- xchaotic 11y agoThe more coverage this gets, the more you feed the terrorist troll.
- noobie 11y agoI am almost certain they are not doing this for attention.
- geon 11y agoThe whole point of terrorism is attention.
- noobie 11y agoIs that so? Why is it that terrorism goes hand in hand with religion then? Terrorism is about fulfilling an arguably skewed view of religion.
- gotchange 11y agoThat's just one strain of terrorism i.e. religious terrorism or more specifically Islamic terrorism as I may speculate that's what you intended. There are many other strains of terrorism like the last terrorist attack in Ankara last week where a female Kurdish ultra-nationalist militant blew herself in a bus killing about 40 civilians in the process. This was just an instance of a political/nationalist violence/terrorism that has nothing to do with religion or Islam for that matter.
- noobie 11y agoI stand corrected.
- ageofwant 11y agoWhy do you think that ? What possible aim could it serve other than getting attention ?
- HemanHeartYou 11y agoRiveting tech news right here.
- ageofwant 11y agoI'm standing with you brother. Let them drag us down together.
- Cenk 11y agoFacebook has activated Safety Check. — https://www.facebook.com/safetycheck/brusselsexplosions-march2016/ https://www.facebook.com/safetycheck/brusselsexplosions-marc... I guess it’s official. Facebook Safety Check is for terrorist attacks in white, western countries only. Good to know. Edit: I was wrong and I take back what I said: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Safety_Check#Other_deployments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Safety_Check#Other_de...
- Cyph0n 11y agoLooks like Turkey, Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Tunisia (my home country) and others are not Western enough for Facebook.
- tobltobs 11y agoMaybe Facebook thinks that the Safety Check wont work for countries waging civil wars.
- Cyph0n 11y agoAh I didn't know Tunisia and Turkey had civil wars. I was in both 6 months back, must have happened recently.
- tobltobs 11y agoHow would you call it?
- Cyph0n 11y agoHow would I call what? A civil war is when two or more parties are actively fighting each other within one country. Current examples in the Middle East: Yemen, Libya, and Syria. My country Tunisia is quite peaceful and is a young and successful democracy. Turkey is a stable country but is unfortunately sharing its border with Syria and has some trouble with extremist Kurd separatists. I don't see what you're getting at mate.
- george_soros 11y agofuck you George Soros.
- george_soros 11y agoDear Europe, this is just the beginning. ;)
- elcapitan 11y agoBelgium hasn't had stable governments for many years, with many observers, especially in the aftermath of the Paris attacks, calling it a 'failed state'. I read an article about that a while ago, couldn't find it directly, but I found this one: http://www.politico.eu/article/belgium-failed-state-security-services-molenbeek-terrorism/ http://www.politico.eu/article/belgium-failed-state-security...
- t0mk 11y agoWhy is this on Hacker News? There are ten other channels through which people will get this message.
- george_soros 11y agoJews like me are responsible for everything that is going on in Europe today :)
- mtgx 11y agoHopefully this doesn't end up as another call to "be united". I've seen how the governments in question abuse that. If they get all the support they need, then they start doing awful things, even illegal things against European laws and whatnot. But because the countries are "united", nobody says anything anymore. What we need is to think this through, which also means challenging conventional wisdom, not just be "be united in following whatever said government wants to do".
- matthewaveryusa 11y agoWe havent seen a group of 50 militants take over a city and reck havoc because our surveillance systems can detect such levels of organization. As horrible as this sounds, anyone with an IQ above 60 can plot and kill 30 people because there's not enough signal in the vast noise our communication networks generate to pick up on it. If we can prevent terrorist attacks that kill thousands of individuals we've won.
- kbart 11y agoIf entering a major airport strapped with explosives undetected and blowing up twice killing tens of people isn't a spectacular security failure, I don't know what is. I agree that it's nearly impossible to detect/prevent random shootings/stabbings (like in Paris attacks), but this is not such case.
- matwood 11y agoIn a free society people can move where they please. The explosions happened before the security checkpoints at a very busy airport, so I don't see how this was some security failure. Intelligence failure yes, but airport security? I'm not so sure. Are you suggesting that a perimeter be setup around the entire airport and people are checked before entering the grounds?
- 0x4a42 11y agoA third bomb exploded just now.
- kup0 11y agoSource? I have yet to see any proof of this statement. All of the live coverage still only points to two attacks...
- 0x4a42 11y agoI was watching french info TV (BFMTV) when they announced the third bomb exploded a few sec ago. The airport was already empty though. EDIT: it was a controlled explosion made by the mine-clearing experts.
- DoubleMalt 11y agoWhat I find reassuring in the midst of this tragic mayhem however, is how little actual damage the terrorists could do. They had explosives, weapons, the resolve to sacrifice themselves and tried their best to do as much damage as possible. And they managed to to kill less than 30 people (provisional count). Of course every death that brought on by this fanatic mob is too much, but we should keep our perspective. A bus accident in Spain last week left 11 exchange students dead, in the US alone every day more than 50 people die in road accidents. Of course we should root out the people that try to bomb our freedom away. But don't let us be terrorized by something that doesn't make a statistically recognizable dent in our probability for survival.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- rawTruthHurts 11y agoComparing terrorist attacks with traffic accidents is quite a display of originality.
- Zigurd 11y agoA million people worldwide die every year in collisions with cars, half of them pedestrians and cyclists. Millions more are injured. Compared with traffic regulation and enforcement, the response to terrorist events like this are vastly out of proportion, and well into the range of irrational response that the terrorists know is the only way to really damage a large powerful nation - by making it turn on its own people and put them in a security-state panopticon.
- rawTruthHurts 11y agoI see there is a real interest in sneaking a completely unrelated subject into the conversation.
- gotchange 11y agoThis is what I wrote in the aftermath of the Paris attacks with regard to the comparison of "road fatalities vs terrorism casualties" every time this topic is brought up after these tragic incidents. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10689118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10689118
- vigilant 11y agoHow can technology help prevent such attacks without infringing on the basic right to privacy? Perhaps some sort of real time image recognition of video streams from major public areas (like airports), which can detect things like guns and unattended packages and alert authorities automatically? Of course, that doesn't help detect the suicide bomber scenario. Automatic facial recognition of known criminals? That would be hugely open to abuse.
- pluma 11y agoMy first visceral reaction was "Fuck it, just kill them all and bomb them back to stone age". I know I'm not alone on this -- the recent rise of nationalism, isolationism, Euro-scepticism and hostility towards refugees all over Europe is painful evidence for this sentiment. But it's important to understand that these feelings are what such attacks are intended to invoke. They're intended to harden the gap between "us" and "them", to make Westerners despise anyone who looks conveniently foreign enough to be suspicious of belonging to "them" and to use them as scapegoats for the perpetrators who have often already escaped justice through death. These atrocities weren't committed by "Muslims" just like the atrocities in the UK during the Troubles were not committed by "Christians". The perpetrators were individuals -- even if they belonged to a group that group wasn't "Muslims", it most likely wasn't even "ISIS"; just a small group of like-minded dangerous individuals who were convinced they would aid mankind by committing atrocities like these. In so far as certain ideologies led to these convictions it is important to understand that you can't kill ideas with weapons. Yes, where there are armies fighting for dangerous ideologies they need to be stopped, but where you can't even clearly distinguish the soldiers from the civilians you need to destroy the ideology, not the people. But unlike people, ideologies are very difficult to destroy and take a long time to fully extinguish. And in times like these it's far too easy to fall prey to politicians promising fast satisfaction rather than a long-term strategy towards a shift in ideologies. We need to embrace our humanity and liberties. We have already had our period of enlightenment and we have overcome totalitarianism and theocracy. We must not allow ourselves to regress to the dark age, no matter how appealing it may seem in times like these -- neither here in Europe, nor oversees in the US.
- gerbilly 11y ago> ideologies are very difficult to destroy and take a long time to fully extinguish I like that you used "extinguish" here. I'm not sure if you intended it, but I think the behavioural psychology definition of "extinguish" is especially relevant. In other words, to get rid of the ideology, we'd have to not reinforce it: i.e. to neither reward it or punish it. And yes extinction[1] takes a long time. Also see "extinction burst". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_(psychology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_(psychology)
- ikeboy 11y agohttps://archive.is/hJm1m https://archive.is/hJm1m
- protomyth 11y agoThe BBC is once again doing their live update site: http://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-europe-35869266 http://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-europe-35869266
- mtgx 11y agoRelevant: https://www.wnyc.org/story/breaking-news-consumers-handbook-terrorism-edition/ https://www.wnyc.org/story/breaking-news-consumers-handbook-...
- fweespee_ch 11y agohttp://bigstory.ap.org/article/511cf974eea64581814f9777a40f0fd6/explosion-heard-brussels-airport http://bigstory.ap.org/article/511cf974eea64581814f9777a40f0... If you want a link without a paywall.
- sydneysider 11y agoI wonder how long it will take for people to connect the dots... Meanwhile Europe has no borders, massive security risk which we are only beginning to see the consequences of.
- qb45 11y agoThe problem is mainly with external borders, not internal. They are likely getting weapons and other aids from outside, you can't just buy AK47 in EU.
- sydneysider 11y agoShould have been clearer, I meant external. But honestly, I don't mind having to show my passport while crossing internal borders.
- eis 11y agoI wonder why this important event is getting not many upvotes and also ranks lower than other stories with less upvotes but older. Is it getting flagged for being off-topic?
- spriggan3 11y agoSo what will the excuse be ,manufactured by pundits on the other side of the Atlantic this time ? "Belgium didn't integrate these people well" /s ? just like for Paris ?
- altotrees 11y agoToday is the first time since 9/11 that I can remember hearing the news of a terrorist attack and not being gripped by panic. I guess the Boston Marathon Bombings, Paris Attacks (Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan both) shootings and other events have kind of led me being in an oddly calm state when I hear news like this now. This is not the way I want to feel. If you would've told me around 8:30 a.m. on September 10th the way things would be changed, I couldn't have fathomed it. I was sitting in my high school Spanish class, trying to get the attention of a girl who probably doesn't even remember my name now. But things changed and I kind of came into my own with those changes, growing up, going to college, getting one job, then another. It became normal. Data is the buzzword now. I eat it and breathe it every single day. I work with collections of numbers and information. These are the same things that keep us safe from attacks - collections numbers and information. The NSA and others rely on it. For every attack we hear about, I cannot even venture a guess on how many are thwarted. Given that numbers and information are critical tools in trying to prevent future tragedies, I struggle with the same question we all do: how much is too much? What do I want to let the government know about me? About my family? About where I travel and when? Is there an inevitable trade-off between safety and privacy? I think abut these things at work, at home, while driving. It seems now that we are facing a new breed of terror that has evolved, even since 2001. It is calculated yet seemingly random, completely lawless yet in their eyes the only lawful way to live, more violent, vile and sadistic any other terrorist cell I have heard about. So you would think, given the way I feel about this new iteration of terror, and the struggle I have with personal privacy questions, I would've been paralyzed with anxiety this morning, seeking meaning, trying to configure a strategy in my head for how the governments involved will deal with it and prevent future attacks. But I did not feel or do those things. I poured my coffee and walked out the door. Of course I feel horrible for the poor innocent lives lost, but as far as worrying and obsessing about it, I just cannot. This is not how I want to feel. I fear that my not panicking signals attacks like this as a new normal for me, something my 17 year-old self never could've or would've wanted to imagine. Thanks everyone for sharing thoughts and insights on this, I think it is helping me process yet another attack in my own way.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
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- r721 11y agoOther discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11334908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11334908 (67 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11335167 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11335167 (79 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11335518 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11335518 (115 comments)
- amai 11y agoErdogan knew it was coming: https://www.rt.com/news/336769-erdogan-warning-brussels-attacks/ https://www.rt.com/news/336769-erdogan-warning-brussels-atta...