Terror attack at Copenhagen free speech event featuring Swedish Mohammed cartoonist

At least there's a thread for people to ignore.

 

New York Times headline:

Anger of Suspect in Danish Killings Is Seen as Only Loosely Tied to Islam

When Aydin Soei, a sociologist in Denmark, met members of an inner-city gang in 2008, one teenage tough stood out as more intelligent than his peers, and more mercurial. He showed little interest in Islam, but a deep loathing for Denmark, the country where he was born and spent his entire life.
...
“This wasn’t an intellectual Islamist with a long beard,” Mr. Soei said. “This was a loser man from the ghetto who is very, very angry at Danish society.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/17/world/europe/copenhagen-denmark-attacks.html?smid=tw-share

 

Did anybody actually die in this attack?

 

But some crazy redneck for North Carolina clearly murdered 3 students because of their muslim faith.

 

So, the Times quotes a sociologist, who interacted with the Hussein seven years ago in an effort to disassociate his actions and motivations from Islam.

Well, I guess that's it, right? This has nothing to do with Islam. He was just a disassociated loser.

The man suspected of killing two people in Copenhagen swore fidelity to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in a posting made on what's apparently his Facebook page just before the weekend shooting spree.

The post pledges "allegiance to Abu Bakr in full obedience in the good and bad things. And I won't dispute with him unless it is an outrageous disbelief."

Denmark terror suspect swore fidelity to ISIS leader on Facebook page - CNN.com

 

It seems like it's the local Muslim community that is putting a tremendous amount of pressure on newspapers to consider that possibility, though, right? I think most of us realize that it wasn't a hate crime, or that it was quite unlikely that it was a hate crime or in any way related to them being Muslim. But when the community is making speeches about that and turning the funerals into a rally about that topic, what do you do?

 

For The New York Times? Not likely that they would bow to local community pressure. In for this story they were out so quickly with the motive that
the local Chapel Hill area muslim community was still asleep.

 

I'm still curious about the sociologist the Times quotes regarding the Copenhagen shooting?

How did they find him? Under what circumstances?

Did the guy interact with the shooter on more than one occasion, or was it one encounter, in a group setting?

It just seems like such a desperate attempt to find someone who would say he wasn't motivated by Islam.

 

Me too. His "expertise" just seemed tailor made to fit the NYT narrative.

 

Roger Cohen's op ed today is interesting and a bit of a contradiction to what the sociologist had
to say.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/17/opinion/roger-cohen-islam-and-the-west-at-war.html

After a Danish movie director at a seminar on “Art, Blasphemy and Freedom of Expression” and a Danish Jew guarding a synagogue were shot dead in Copenhagen, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the prime minister of Denmark, uttered a familiar trope:

“We are not in the middle of a battle between Islam and the West. It’s not a battle between Muslims and non-Muslims. It’s a battle between values based on the freedom of the individual and a dark ideology.”

This statement — with its echoes of President Obama’s vague references to “violent extremists” uncoupled from the fundamentalist Islam to which said throat-cutting extremists pledge allegiance — scarcely stands up to scrutiny. It is empty talk.

 

A radical Islamic extremist who couldn't afford passage to Syria:

The Danish Security and Intelligence Service on Tuesday said it received an alert from prison officials last year that the gunman believed to have been responsible for this weekend’s killing spree was at risk of being radicalized.

But the agency, called PET, said it had no reason to believe that the gunman was planning an attack.

In Denmark, correctional facilities report to the security agency if any inmates are at risk of joining extremist groups or carrying out radical acts.
...
Daily newspaper Berlingske Tidene reported on Monday that Mr. El-Hussein had spoken openly in prison about his desire to travel to Syria to join Islamic State, citing unnamed sources. His remarks prompted the correctional service to put his name on a list of other criminals at risk of radicalization, the paper reported.

PET said it received the report from prison officers last September, five months before the gunman killed two people and wounded five others in separate attacks on a free-speech event and a synagogue over the weekend.

Prison Warned Denmark Suspect ‘At Risk’ - WSJ

 

His downward spiral was triggered by hashish:

Arrested for stabbing a 19-year-old passenger on a commuter train in November 2013, Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein blamed the effects of hashish for his brutal, random and nearly fatal attack, telling a court last December that he had been gripped by wild fear and thought his victim wanted to hurt him.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/20/w...hesitates-to-blame-islam.html?smid=tw-nytimes