The Independent: Phoenix shooting: Three-year-old girl hid under bed as father killed mother and sisters.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 69776.html
Mr Smith shot Mr Freeman after he told him “he was crazy” to think his wife was cheating on him, according to the court filing. He allegedly fired at him repeatedly even as his body laid on the floor and also shot and injured two of Freeman’s friends, a man and a woman, as they tried to help him.
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Police who searched Mr Smith’s car found a 9mm handgun, a .45 calibre handgun and a .223 calibre rifle believed to have been used in the rampage.
Trick wrote:grzegorz wrote:Also we should drop shooter and call these people what they are mass murderers.
yes its annoying. same whith calling IS terrorists for IS warriors as a lot of media does...not annoying but rather disturbing i say
Steve James wrote:Um, IS has claimed credit for the attack, and they say it's a retaliation for the attack on the mosque in New Zealand.
Frankly, isn't it expected? It's exactly what the mosque and synagogue attackers wanted. Aren't we waiting for something like this to happen in the U.S.? I mean, people bomb or shoot synagogues, churches, and mosques here. Though, usually, it's not Muslims doing it.
So, imo, yeah, call them terrorists; call all of them terrorists, though. Maybe the Easter bombing was a result.
I know they'd like me to, but I can't hate Muslims for this, or for attacking a church. I save my hatred for the people who would do such a thing. I recall after a guy walked into a Christian church in the U.S. south and gunned down Christians. His captors took him to Burger King before they went to the station. I even remember a Christian church that was bombed while children were inside. Yep, I feel exactly the same about all of them. How do eliminate them all?
That brings us back to the question, what is terrorism? I have been assuming we understandit. Well, what is it? Well, there happen to be some easy answers to this. There is an officialdefinition. You can find it in the US code or in US army manuals. A brief statement of it takenfrom a US army manual is, fair enough, is that terror is the calculated use of violence or thethreat of violence to attain political or religious ideological goals through intimidation,coercion, or instilling fear. That’s terrorism. That’s a fair enough definition. I think it isreasonable to accept that. The problem is it can’t be accepted because if you accept that, allthe wrong consequences follow. Now there is a major effort right now at the UN to try todevelop a comprehensive treaty on terrorism. When Kofi Annan got the Nobel prize theother day, you will notice he was reported as saying that we should stop wasting time on thisand really get down to it.But there’s a problem. If you use the official definition of terrorism in the comprehensivetreaty, you are going to get completely the wrong results. So that can’t be done. In fact, it iseven worse than that. If you take a look at the definition of Low-Intensity Warfare which isofficial US policy you find that it is a very close paraphrase of what I just read. In fact, Low-Intensity Conflict is just another name for terrorism. That’s why all countries, as far as I know,call whatever horrendous acts they are carrying out, counter-terrorism. We happen to call itCounter-Insurgency or Low-Intensity Conflict. So that’s a serious problem. You can’t use theactual definitions. You’ve got to carefully find a definition that doesn’t have all the wrongconsequences.There are some other problems. Some of them came up in December 1987, at the peak ofthe first war on terrorism, that’s when the furor over the plague was peaking. The UnitedNations General Assembly passed a very strong resolution against terrorism, condemningthe plague in the strongest terms, calling on every state to fight against it in every possibleway. It passed unanimously. One country, Honduras, abstained. Two votes against; the usualtwo, United States and Israel. Why should the United States and Israel vote against a majorresolution condemning terrorism in the strongest terms, in fact pretty much the terms thatthe Reagan administration was using? Well, there is a reason. There was one paragraph inthat long resolution which said that nothing in this resolution infringes on the rights ofpeople struggling against racist and colonialist regimes or foreign military occupation tocontinue with their resistance with the assistance of others, other states, states outside intheir just cause. Well, the United States and Israel can’t accept that. The main reason that theycouldn’t at the time was because of South Africa. South Africa was officially called an ally.There was a terrorist force in South Africa. It was called the African National Congress. Theywere a terrorist force officially. South Africa in contrast was an ally and we certainly couldn’tsupport actions by a terrorist group struggling against a racist regime. That would beimpossible.And of course there is another one. Namely the Israeli occupied territories, now going intoits 35th year. Supported primarily by the United States in blocking a diplomatic settlementfor 30 years now, still is. And you can’t have that. There was another one at the time. Israelwas occupying Southern Lebanon and was being combated by what the US calls a terroristforce, Hizbullah, which in fact succeeded in driving Israel out of Lebanon. And you can’t have... allow anyone to struggle against a military occupation when it is one that we support sotherefore the US and Israel had to vote against the major UN resolution on terrorism. And Imentioned before that a US vote against is essentially a veto. Which is only half the story. Italso vetoes it from history. So none of this was every reported and none of it appeared in theannals of terrorism. If you look at the scholarly work on terrorism and so on, nothing that Ihave just mentioned appears. The reason is that it‘s got the wrong people holding the guns.You have to carefully hone the definitions and the scholarship and so on so that you comeout with the right conclusions; otherwise it is not respectable scholarship and honorablejournalism. These are some of the problems that are hampering the effort to develop acomprehensive treaty against terrorism. Maybe we should have an academic conference orsomething to try to see if we can figure out a way of defining terrorism so that it comes outwith just the right answers, not the wrong answers. That won’t be easy.
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