I'm sorry. I can not feel bad for the bombers. I can't. For their families, fine. For them? No, I can't. They killed innocent peopl. People they didn't even know. People who had done nothing to them personally. That's cold. It's REAL cold.
Again, I feel for the families, but not for them.

edited because I didnt catch the sarcasm the first time around. damn don cossack.

[Edited on Jul 17, 2005 by TheBastard]

Every time some serial killer asshole gets busted in the US someone goes on TV and says, "he was such a nice quiet young man, always very polite, never made any trouble" What the hell did you expect, that all the terrorists were assholes in every aspect of their lives? Did you expect that they told their parents to "fuck off" every chance they got, and beat up the nerds at school? Its entirely possible that someone in your life has a secret, ugly side that you've never seen and probably never will. So, stop trying to paint this as the BBC being apologetic or sympathetic. Rather, it looks like an attempt to demonstrate that even the most evil among us don't necessarily have horns sticking out of their head and mumble "kill kill kill kill" all the time.

Yeah, this story seems very gratuituous, and I wonder what you're wanting the BBC to do. Doing a report that shows that the people who knew the bombers thought of them as nice, in a way, shows the horror of this more starkly. How do you know who it's going to be? What happens to someone to make them do this? How do they live in a community so completely as they plan to kill themselves and as many people as possible?

I'm sorry the BBC's report wasn't just people coming on saying "The people who did this were pure evil and talked about how much they wanted to kill infidels all the time," but it was true to the way that they were thought of in the community. And the BBC apparently believed that the viewer is intelligent enough to know this distinction. I suppose not.

I don't feel sorry for them either (not that I think that was the point of the article), just kinda puzzled. Were they living elaborate lies that involved duping everyone including their own families? Brainwashing is probably not that likely....

And Hitler was an art student. Who gives a shit? Nazis?

It -is- nice to remind people that these were real people too, demonizing doesnt help at all. But I also share the sentiment that you have to be truly callous and malicious to do anything like this. Over-empathizing is just as bad as under.

In a large sense, it doesn't matter. The fact that they would blow themselves up in a train to kill as many people as they did kind of overrides any sort of sense of societal responsibility; it shouldn't matter how isolated you feel from society, how much you feel discriminated against, you just don't do this. It violates a universal sense of decency and respect for life beyond any other factors.

But it is something to think about. How can it be that in a society as wealthy and stable as Britain, you can find 4 young men to do this? It's one thing in Palastine, where the "government" in place there is corrupt as hell, where unemployment is well over 50%, and there just seems to be no hope. Either keep on doing what you're doing and live and die in poverty, or make a gesture that you've come to believe might bring what you see as the source of your misery down a bit quicker. But in Britain? How does this happen?

And, of course, if you can recruit suicide bombers in Britain, you can definitely do it in the United States, or any other rich Western nation. I want to know how this is going on, and what can be done to stop it. Do we do more to silence radical Islamist speakers? Do we work on issues of discrimination towards Arabic populations?

Of the many horrible, cynical things Karl "Hey, Guess Who's a CIA Agent" Rove has said in his career, one of the worst he ever said was his truly moronic statement about how liberals want to offer terrorists counselling, or something like that. (I can't remember the exact quote, and I don't want to look it up.) A blanket statement like "Terrorism is what the West deserves for crimes against the Third World" is ridiculous and offensive beyond words. But we damn well better care about what makes people terrorists. And I don't think it's Islam itself, any more than Christianity makes abortion clinic bombers. There's more to it than that (which is why the "clash of civilization", Islam vs. Christianity talk infuriates me all the more; that's what the terrorists want. They want to prove a cultural war here. They want non-insane Muslims to feel that they too are at war with infidels.)

So, yeah, we should care about this.

i don't think the article was meant to generate sympathy for the bombers, perhaps a sympathetic nod to their families. if i didn't believe it, i'd call it alarmist fear-mongering. it's positively freaky for four different dudes (+?) to be that duplicitous in their behavior.

Vilification of the bombers achieves nothing. Recognizing that real people with real lives turn to extremism is a tiny first step in stopping other people from doing the same.

We don't need to look for the frothing at the mouth loons with hooks for hands. We need to understand why a respected, liked, family man turns away from his life and decides that bombs are the answer.

People are asking "The Muslim Community" to look to themselves to find and stop extremists. They'll have more chance of doing this once they realise that extremists start as normal people; as the well behaved 18 year old son.

I think it will just provoke more fear of Islam. No good can come of making them sound like "good people".

It should be obvious to nearly anyone that they wipe their butt like everyone else and arent all saying "derka derka jihad".

"He was a good man, quiet," said one parent, speaking outside the school.

yeah, quietly contemplating mass murder...

although I will be honest, I feel for folks who are suddenly blindsided by the blatantly obvious cruelty they've chosen to ignore. it happens, and what can anybody do?

Maybe what should really be done is make the media leave these people the fuck alone.

Also, that CCTV image was released by investigators who want more information about these people and their movements.

Funny how no one ever asks the "Christian Community" to do the same, isn't it?

And I realize that you never hear about Christians as suicide bombers; that doesn't mean that their own form of extremism isn't dangerous, y'know?

See
my post about chemists the other day.

I don't think the BBC article was a loving tribute to anybody, the article was written to give the public a sense of who these terribly misguided madmen were, ordinary people who were radicalized.