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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   32647 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 4, 2024

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Just because one owns an Al Qaeda training manual does not mean that one has been radicalized by Islamists. Al Qaeda knows a lot about terrorism, so if you want to do terrorism it might be a good idea to read their manual even if one's political ideology has nothing to do with Islamism.

Agreed, but the BBC was reporting there were 'no known links to Islam', presumably after police had searched the guy's house and found the ricin and Al Qaeda manual. At the same time, police had said they weren't currently treating it as a terrorist incident.

There was a huge loss in trust of the government to accurately report what they knew about the attack when they knew it. The latest excuse seems to be that reporting information about motives early 'might impact the legal case against the attacker', with no same standard being held to the Prime Minister quickly painting rioters as 'Far Right Extremists' with a sweeping broad brush prior to their trials.

In an attempt to mitigate ethnic tension in the short term via narrative control, the UK government has lost long term credibility in their reporting of future incidents.

Anyone that wants more information on this topic should check out the /r/unitedkingdom subreddit and search for 'southport stabbings'. Huge culture-war flareup over the last few days with some accounts seemingly doing damage control for the govt's early narrative.

The problem with this is that there is a very clear record of condemning people for their thought crimes on this exact basis.

You can't kick a non-white person and call them a slur without making the attack racially motivated.

You can't create a right wing political movement whilst owning ethno-based political material without being labeled a neo nazi terrorist organization.

By the very same token, you can't stab children in the face whilst owning an Al Qaeda training manual without being labeled a muslim terrorist.

So would you say it is unlikely that the dude got radicalized by Islamists, or are you just pointing out this is not a smoking gun? The latter claim is not interesting, as it's only a matter of time until it gets resolved now that there's a full-blown terrorism investigation. But I don't think this should be an argument that allows people to throw a wet blanket on the conversation around immigration and Islam.

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