Soldier attacked with meat cleavers and knives in Woolwich

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While I agree that rural people tend to be more helpful to strangers in general, I think the phenomenon as relates to the bystander effect is still more complex than that. People who live in large urban areas are much more likely to have experience with eccentrics and the insane or otherwise goofy-acting individuals, which could have a great impact on whether you would attempt to assist someone who is (potentially) acting goofy.

Goofy people sometimes do things like lie in the road. If you had a reasonable expectation that your assistance would actually just result in the 'victim' jumping up and focusing his continued goofiness on you, you would have pretty good reason to leave him alone. The experiment might be different if the victim was obviously visibly injured - bleeding, screaming in pain, etc.

 

Those of you asking 'why didn't people help'... I'd love to see you confront 2 guys who just savagely and brutally stabbed a guy to death. One woman did actually get in one of the killers faces and asked them why. Astonishing courage.

I'm just completely saddened by this, and annoyed again that psychotic loons are using Islam to excuse their actions. Nothing in Islam teaches this kind of stuff. I just feel so sorry for the young guy and what he had to go through... horrific.

 

Normally, I'd be firmly in the insane/crazy/idiot column in situations like this, but there is a line drawn here that even I wouldn't cross. I do have experience in confronting a couple of armed thugs (NOT armed with meat cleavers) attempting to rob/mug/assault a young woman when I had no weapon of my own. In such situations, bravado goes a long way - for the exact reason Tal articulates: What chance does one guy have against two if we have knives and he doesn't? .... that is, what chance does he have unless he knows something we don't.

However, in the situation I was in, I figured the guys didn't want an actual fight. They were picking on a weak target. In this case, the person just killed a soldier, so he obviously has no compunction against killing someone, and bravado isn't going to get you very far. You got to know when it's a bad time to only have your dick to draw in a fight.

 

I completely disagree. In this case, while doing the act and afterward they were spouting out rhetoric that should be an eye opener for anyone living in a Western society. Everyone there knew it wasn't some gang thing. I am surprised no one helped that heard the words.

 

As Arkite pointed out above, if this were an armed society this attack would have happened very differently

 

More information coming out, reports said a gun was found at the scene, wondered if that was the case why wasn't it used in the murder? An eyewitness said one of the killers pulled out a rusty old revolver when the police turned up, tried to fire it, it backfired and took his finger off. And then of course they tried to charge the police with their knives (suicide by cop?) and were shot.

 

Peeps seen the video of the bobbies putting the perps down?

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/woolwich-attack-video-watch-shocking-1907772

Perps charge straight at a female bobby who's unarmed apart from a taser, and someone nearby puts him down with a double tap. Incredible shot I reckon, I'm not sure I could take out a fast moving target!

 

What a horrible nightmare.

 

The bottom line is this: Something needs to be done about radical Islam. Not your workaday Muslim who is just trying to make it through life like the rest of us, but the radical element that cares nothing for the sanctity of life. The sooner this threat is addressed appropriately, the happier we all will be. The more we prevaricate, and try to lay it all off to ALL religions*, and other ridiculous crap, the more incidents like this we will have.

*Case in point for all of you "all religions are equally violent" folks -- be honest with me -- since "The Book of Mormon" Broadway play came out, how many Mormons have killed people in the streets over it, citing that they are offended by the insult to their religion? Any? Let me assure you that if they did, Church leadership would be all OVER their butts, excommunicating the perps and denouncing them firmly. The vast majority of Mormons would do the same.

However, to my knowledge not one physical attack has occurred. Now, if a Broadway play called "The Koran" were produced that was similarly disrespecful of Islam, what do you think would happen? You know damn well what would happen -- people would be killed. Don't hand me this prevaricating nonsense about it all being the same.

And don't hand me this crap about the play not being offensive. I've read the script and it bloody well is. I was horribly offended. But I dealt with it like a decent person and accorded others their right to speak freely and be offensive, like a good citizen of a democracy. I would, in fact, speak out against any government policy that sought to stifle the speech of the writers and producers, despite being offended by the content. That said, I'm saying don't you DARE compare me to these filthy killers just because we both happen to be religious.

 

Maybe controversial, but I think radical Islam loons and nutter American loons are the same kind of problem. Islam is a huge, huge religion, so if only 1% of them are radicals, you will have a certain volume of disgraceful acts. You can't really do a lot about it, without possibly punishing and ostrasizing normal, peaceful, every day Muslims.

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Wonderful touch by the New York Yankees by the way, wonderful touch.



Did this incident land quite heavily in the US?

 

I'm sure it might be difficult for someone in the United States or Canada to understand but Europe has a much bigger problem with the extreme right than with radical islam. For some reason though it's a much more interesting story always when two muslims kill a white soldier than it is when two skinheaded white guys kill a muslim on the street.

I think a simple googling of "golden dawn" will quickly show what that bunch of neonazi thugs are doing in Greece. Russia is another country where extreme racism and hard line violence make it difficult for anyone who does not happen to be white. A Finnish correspondent once told me that a dark skinned person walking out on night in the streets of Moscow was essentially putting his life at risk.

I guess what I'm trying to say that there's a much greater risk of a coloured person being murdered by a white guy than the other way around in Europe.

 

I am Albertan -- neither I nor anyone of my acquaintance has ever engaged in an act of violence against a Native, or anyone for that matter. Are their statistics that demonstrate that Natives in AB are more likely than other Natives in Canada of being assaulted by Whites?

 

That is sad. Such attacks should be punished harshly.

 

They may be equally crazy, Barms, but nutter American loons (and I'm assuming you mean religious fanatics here) aren't going around killing people. We certainly have nutters that DO kill people like Jared Laughner and Adam Lanza, but these people are not motivated by religion.

Hell yes. It was all over the news for days. Any type of terrorist attack in western Europe lands pretty heavily in the US, for obvious reasons.

OK, but to me there is a big difference between racism and religious fanaticism. Sure there are undertones of Christianity present in both the KKK and neonazi groups, but at least here in the states, their hatred is not based simply or even predominantly by their religion. Most of the African Americans terrorized by the KKK over the years were also predominantly Christian.

I perceive the difference as being that racist groups have their hatred fueled from within. Radical Islam is influenced by a perceived higher power. That in committing these acts they are doing God's work. Hell, the very word "jihad" is holy war. There is no similar word in neonazi and like-minded groups.

To me, Radical Islam is different than any other type of fanaticism. Christians, for the most part, stopped killing people in the name of God at the conclusion on the Crusades. It may seem convenient to draw a parallel in that one group hates based on a person's race, and the other based on a person's religion. But the difference of the latter feeling that it is God's will - that they are duty-bound by their religion to commit these acts - is significant IMO.

 

So....

A neonazi believes it's his imperative to exterminate all people of unclean non-aryan blood because it violates their racial ideals and enables a dangerous possibility of "contaminating" the aryan race.

A radical muslim believes that all Christians are infidels and should be put to the sword or be converted by force.

What's the major difference between the two? God? What's the practical difference issued by the inclusion of a higher power? Ideological worship can be easily taken to similar extremes. The personal cults of Hitler, Stalin, Kim Il Sung and others have been equally efficient in creating violent fervor. The one reason why radical Islam could be worse for me is that it might become easier for some individuals (particularly those on the extreme right) to generalize an entire religion because of it. Christians and neonazis rarely get thrown in the same basket.

My point is that racism and the ideology in general can be taken to very much similar extremes as religion. I refuse to acknowledge any significant difference. It's all violent fanaticism and equally dangerous.

 

This is why the US has worked and is working so hard at trying to convince the Middle East and the wider world that the war on terror is not a war on Islam. Not to play devil's advocate, but it would have to be incredibly easy to convince an ignorant, angry young man that the US is waging a holy war right now. This topic came up on Q&A on Monday night, and Lawrence Krauss and Amanda Vanstone (retired conservative politician) had some wise words, I don't want to misquote them so I'll just raid the transcript:

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LAWRENCE KRAUSS: The point is that obviously they were driven by hate. My point was that they were not killing that poor young man because they knew him, they knew anything about him. They had already labelled him by a bunch of labels: military, representative of a Christian state that had done supposed atrocities against Islam and that is the kind of labelling that leads people to be able to do these heinous acts because they no longer see people as people but representative of something they hate and that, to me, is one of the real problems of the us versus themness of religious groups that cause other people to no longer be people.

TONY JONES: Amanda, just taking the young man's question up there, I mean he’s asking whether the two things are fundamentally different: the stabbing to death, a racist attack of an elderly Muslim man and the killing with knives and hatchets of the British soldier?

AMANDA VANSTONE: I don't know the details of the second case but they would seem, on what you have said, to be inextricably related. I mean the more you have people saying Muslims want to go and kill everybody, the more you have whipping everyone else up into a frenzy of fear and apprehension and a feeling that they must deal with this. So it goes back to what my granny said: if you lead a good life, you will get into any heaven worth getting into and it follows that you - you know, if I get up to Heaven and St Peters says, ‘Gee, you made a mistake and you went to the Anglican Church and you should have gone to a Catholic one or you should have gone to some other church,” I’m going to be bitterly disappointed because I went to a Christian school and I was taught the need to be a good person and not judge people, as you say, on labels. It doesn't matter if they are Catholic or Anglican or Muslim or whatever. What matters is whether they are a good and decent person and that is how we should be dealing with each other. And once you start this, “Well, they’re Muslims. They want to kill you,” well, you’re separating it out, you’re getting into us and them and you will have battles, ugly ones, where people will be killed.

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Forgive the long post, throwing in the video as well if anybody is interested
They also had Gene Robinson on the panel, talked about religion, marriage and euthanasia, was some really good discussion, the bit I'm quoting is at 32:45 in the video: