...

Indeed. I just heard on radio that man. His vision of what happen to him is admirable. What a guy.
Hard to not to be full of hatred but we have to.

i don't know about some of these 'summary' videos. nI am not a scholar in history. just old enough to remember a bunch of it. or, maybe i have too much hope in the human race to believe that - i'll intentionally use general terms .. 'the west' is incenting 'people in the middle east' to rape and torture their own people, prevent their women from education or rights, destroying gains in all kind of social ways, impeeding free trade, propogating hatred against jewish people, etc, etc, etc. i mean consider the power you assign to 'the west' to create puppets of hate around the world. again, call me naive, but , i am not willing to go that route. you must start with history.. not politics, history. maybe start with the lead up to WWI, how it ended, the lead up to WWII , how it ended, Korea, Vietnam, Gulf war 1 , gulf war II, etc. and many skirmshes in between. its massivly complex.. and to boil it all down to 'the elite power brokers in the west' .. eh. not sure on that. true i am in 'the west' however, my family lineage ties to germany and greece within a few generations. i have travelled the world, i dont see anything as being this easy to summarize. with history you also have to ask - what would have happend if xyz hadnt have happened. what would the world look like had any of the major wars gone the other way.. what would the world look like if 'the west' truly left the middle east alone fully completely. i certainly dont know. i will tell you this. people like to talk about the fall of rome when discussing 'the fall of the west' and completely overlook that after the fall of rome came a period basically referred to as 'the dark ages' in our history books. need an example of this. look at north/south korea. look at west/east germany up through the wall coming down. everything in history has a point and counter point. I have adopted children from orphanages, i have tried to educated myself on history.. and i try to avoid 'simple answers' i will never be an elite power broker - whatever that means- i vote in public elections - i'll end on what i believe to be a historical fact.... no two countries with democratic elections have been at war with eachother in the modern age. think. vote. pray that more people get the right to think and vote. and that includes women around the world.

ok, back to the art threads

Nuart... if you want to call Russia having democratic elections for Putin .. i'll give it to you on a technicality. same with Lebanon.. but if you believe those are true free elections we can just agree to disagree. History is very messy and complex. It would be interesting to take your list - i certanily dont have the time - and say 'ok. why was 'the west' messing about in those places and what would have happend if the west hadnt stepped in in some way. .. maybe some the west caused the mess.. but i can see a few where it was in RESPONSE to a mess. and suretly these are different scenarios in the same list.. example - it is hard for me to talk historical facts that i recall (i am not a historian) and come to the conclusion that the west CAUSED what was later to be called ethnic cleansing in Bosnia but only got involved in response to what was happening. here's wikipedias take on it <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_cleansing_in_the_Bosnian_War> i have no idea if it's right. but 'the west bombed Bosnia' is certanily not the correct historical response?

we dont need to debate this.. i am happy in my wrongness if i am wrong. i am not a power broker.. i simply read books and such and dont mind complex answers to complex situations

i don't want to step in a heated debate but for sure I am quite curious about this list and where it came from... I would seriously question the motivation behind the inclusion of Bosnia and Kosovo in a list of muslim countries bombed by the West...

Holland, secret services and French police known all these terrorists ( most, all of them were in " the box " , even some had made jails and vave been liberate ) , but they did not put them out of order - If I can say - , apart ot put a " S " - under survey - on their Id.
Well, I read a good letter against Hollande - never saw a so unpopular president in France - and I want to share it with you.

I totally agree with this Deutsch man and writer , David Van Reybrouck, François Hollande is a big wanker and tw.t, and to send boats and war in Syriah does not mean anything apart to capt attention in France and of the rest of the world( The Power ! ) , and to forget French social problems, to make a Police state with less liberty and to make laws against the people ( retreat age is now 63 instead of 62 per example ) ... Remember Brazil the movie.
Its called ! Mr the President, you felt in the trap.

Dear Mr President,

That was a rather foolhardy choice of words in your speech on Saturday afternoon when you repeatedly spoke of an "act of war" perpetrated by a "terrorist army". You said:

What happened in Paris and Saint-Denis is an act of war and faced with war a country must take the appropriate measures. It was an act committed by a terrorist army, Daesh (IS or Isil), against what we are, a free country that speaks with the entire planet, an act of war that was prepared and planed from without with support from within that is now the subject of an investigation. It was an act of total barbarity."

I am in total agreement with those last words, but the rest of your speech is a horrible, nearly word perfect repetition of the words of GW Bush to the US Congress shortly after the 9/11 attacks: "The enemies of freedom have committed an act of war against our country."

The consequences of those historic words are well known. A head of state qualifying an event as an act of war is obliged to come up with an appropriate response. It led Bush to invade Afghanistan, which is defensible as the regime provided a home for Al-Qaeda - even the UN agreed on that. This was followed by the totally mad invasion of Iraq, without UN mandate - for the sole reason that the US suspected it possessed weapons of mass destruction. None were found, but the invasion led to the total destabilisation of the region that we witness to this day. When US troops left the country in 2011 a power vacuum ensued. When civil war broke out in neighbouring Syria shortly afterwards as part of the fallout from the Arab Spring it became clear to all how destabilising America's military intervention had been. In the North West of a dismembered Iraq and in the East of a Syria shot to bits there was room, next to the Syrian army and the FSA for the establishment of a third, major player: Isil, Isis or IS.

In short, without Bush's idiotic invasion of Iraq there would never have been any talk of IS. Millions of us demonstrated against the invasion in 2003. I was among them. It was a worldwide protest. We were right. Not that we were able to look twelve years ahead into the future. We were not that clairvoyant. But now we do realise it: what happened in Paris on Friday night is an indirect consequence of the war rhetoric that your colleague Bush employed in September 2001.

And what do you do? How do you respond within 24 hours of the attacks? You use exactly the same terminology that your US counterpart at the time employed. You are making wine from the same barrel.

You walked straight into it, with your eyes open, Mr President. You did it because you could feel the hot breath of Nicolas Sarkozy and Marine Le Pen in your neck. True, you already had a reputation for being a weakling. Elections are on the way on 6 and 13 December, even though these are only regional elections, following the attacks they will be dominated by national security issues. You walked straight into it, because you gave the terrorists what they wanted: a declaration of war. With great pleasure you accepted their invitation for a Jihad. In your attempt to respond in a forthright fashion you are risking an escalation of the spiral of violence. To me this doesn't seem like a good idea.

You spoke of a "terrorist army". First of all, no such thing exists. It's a contradiction in terms. A "terrorist army", that's a bit like a bulimic diet. Countries and groups can have armies, when they fail to establish one they can opt for terrorism. This means that they commit incidental actions aimed at a maximum psychological impact instead of a structural, military deployment of power involving geopolitical ambitions.

But an army? Let's be clear: so far we do not know if the perpetrators are returning Syria fighters or people dispatched from Syria on purpose. We do not know if the attacks were planned in the caliphate or in European suburbs. Even though there are indications for a Syrian master plan (the near coincidence of the attacks in Lebanon and the Russian plane crash), it strikes me that the IS communique came late in the day and hardly contained any elements that had not circulated on the internet. Is this a question of co-ordination or recuperation?

For equal measure, these could be individuals who have simply run amok, probably chiefly French nationals who have returned from Syria where they became experienced in explosives and fire arms and where they were submerged in a totalitarian ideology, crypto-theory and acts of war. They became monsters, but not an army.

The IS communique spoke of locations that had meticulously been chosen, your own services stress the professionalism of the perpetrators. As far as that is concerned you both speak the same language. But the facts beg to differ. The three who went to the Stade de France where you were attending a friendly against Germany seemed amateurs. They clearly wanted to get inside, possibly to launch an attack against your person; it is possible. But whoever blows himself up next to a McDonald's and only manages to kill one other person is a poor terrorist. People who need three suicide attacks to kill four others, while minutes later a human mass of 80,000 souls sets itself in motion are bunglers. Someone who together with four others wants to exterminate a concert hall but fails to block the emergency exit is no strategic genius. Someone who steps from a car are shoots at unarmed, innocent civilians on pavement cafes isn't a soldier schooled in tactics, but a coward, a bastard, a loner who has completely gone off the rails and who has aligned his fate with several other completely derailed individuals. It's a pack of lone wolves.

Your analysis about a "terrorist army" does not hold water. Your term "act of war" is exceptionally biased, even though this bellicose rhetoric has unashamedly also been adopted by the Dutch Premier Mark Rutte in the Netherlands and Belgian Interior Minister Jan Jambon in Belgium. In your attempt to placate your nation you threaten to make the world less safe. In your attempt to use forceful language, you have shown your weakness.

Other forms of firmness to bellicose language do exit. Immediately after the attacks in Norway Prime Minister Stoltenberg unreservedly called for "greater democracy, greater openness and greater participation". In your speech you spoke of freedom. You should also have pointed to two other values of the French Republic: equality and fraternity. I believe there is greater need of these at this minute than of your questionable war rhetoric.

David Van Reybrouck is the author of the award-winning "Congo. A History". He is a writer of prose, poetry and drama as well as an essayist.