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> when (large) parts of communities are complicit you put parentheses around the "large" but I'm still gonna pick on this. For my part, I have yet to hear of

> when (large) parts of communities are complicit you put parentheses around the "large" but I'm still gonna pick on this. For my part, I have yet to hear of a major jihadist attack in the west in which the perpetrators and their supporters were not completely surrounded by police and intelligence personel. In Germany we're watching a parliamentary commission pick apart what happened in the "lone wolf" case where someone drove a truck into a christmas market in Berlin. "You can't do anything about these things!" people exclaim. They're lone wolves after all. BS. That guy, and his supporters, were in constant contact with embedded sources around their milieu. I'm not a big friend of the police state as it is, and especially of intelligence services. And this story and others like it make it really hard to still believe in incompetence and bad coordination as the sources for all the fuck-ups that lead to him succeeding in the first place, and then the crucial witnesses being conveniently deported days after. But my real point (sorry for digressing here for a bit) is that even in this in-depth investigation, the number of active supporters was tiny. And they were not even really organized. It was more like "I have a friend here ho will help me out, and one here, and one here." Your statement (even with parentheses) does not reflect how small these "parts" are.

luckylion 7y ago
Certainly, intelligence services do play a role, both in pushing actors over the threshold and in hindering investigations. In the case of the Bataclan attacks, the perpetrators fled to Belgium and hid in their local communities. It's also where they recruit, get support from and funnel funding through. Obviously it's not "everybody there is on board", but there is an enabling base and little push back from those opposed to the measures chosen by radicals.

luckylion 7y ago

Certainly, intelligence services do play a role, both in pushing actors over the threshold and in hindering investigations. In the case of the Bataclan attacks, the perpetrators fled to Belgium and hid in their local communities. It's also where they recruit, get support from and funnel funding through. Obviously it's not "everybody there is on board", but there is an enabling base and little push back from those opposed to the measures chosen by radicals.