Sydney hostage crisis

[Felicity, I guess so]

Sydney hostage crisis

Or the British squaddie making nail bombs recently, 'fervent hatred of immigrants' but only got 18 months, iirc.

[Janik]

Sydney hostage crisis

.

[garcia]

Sydney hostage crisis

It's quite possible for something to be both an act of terror and the work of a madman, in other words.

breivik's killings fit that description. he did claim to be part of a wider "knights templar" movement but i think it existed mainly in his head. i mean there are lots of sort of nazi-sympathising, white supremacist heavy metal fans out there across northern europe, but i doubt many of them took the rhetoric quite as literally as breivik. he was a child-man with a totally egocentric perspective on the world, a deeply pathetic weakling who had kind of crawled into this nazi-warrior shell identity like a hermit crab. i don't know if things could have turned out differently if he hadn't been so isolated. he sort of strayed off the reservation without anyone noticing. but of course people like that tend to repel others. it's not like the others know in advance that leaving him to his own devices is going to end in mass murder. there are plenty of completely harmless lunatics.

mcveigh was a totally different case. i don't think he was crazy in the way breivik is. breivik's political agenda was sort of warhammer-flavoured nuttiness. the sort of stuff only someone who had neither any real self-knowledge nor any real experience of the world could believe in. there was obviously a touch of the x-files to mcveigh's worldview but it was rooted in reality in a way that breivik's wasn't. mcveigh had been in the army, he'd been to war, he had seen something of the world. he believed he understood something about the way american power worked and he was convinced that the government had betrayed the founding ideals of the republic. and in this sense he had a point.

the madness only became evident at the moment when he concluded that blowing up a building and killing nearly 200 people was in some way a logical next step.

[Felicity, I guess so]

Sydney hostage crisis

What's appalling is the contrast in reporting/political response in the two cases (Islamist/fascist sympathisers).

As well as the would-be squaddie bomber, there was a father and son duo up here (Co. Durham somewhere) a few years back who had ricin and all sorts of bomb-making gear and clear plans to attack gays, lefties and immigrants.

A pair of local nutters, apparently, as it barely hit the national media at all.

[Felicity, I guess so]

Sydney hostage crisis

local bbc report on it

2010, from Burnopfield. Note- not a single politician asked to comment, nothing about the threat these extremists pose blah blah.

Guardian and Telegraph both reported the convictions, but nothing else on p1 of google search to indicate national media interest.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Sydney hostage crisis

It's coming to something if you can't even homebrew your own ricin these days. Political correctness AND health and safety gone mad.

[Posty Webber]

Sydney hostage crisis

The perpetually level-headed Waleed Aly on the siege and how these situations are uncontrollable.