Soldier attacked with meat cleavers and knives in Woolwich

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Well, if you're the dead person it doesn't make any difference, but that's about as far as I'm willing to go.

Hitler didn't offer 72 virgins and eternal happiness to those who would follow him. That's the thing with religion - it's not this life that is important, it's the afterlife. With that mindset, it is much easier to have things like suicide bombers, or this attack we saw in London that was virtually a suicide attack. That the attackers survived being shot afterwards is moot. They made that video immediately following the killings to get thier message out. I doubt they expected to survive. Neonazis generally don't strap bombs to themselves.

 

Why is everyone commenting on the crowd's failure to 'help?' Who were they supposed to assist? The soldier? He was already dead. The police were contacted (probably numerous times) and armed officers were on their way. The perpetrators were not going on a rampage, they were caught on camera, and they weren't even trying to flee the scene. Had they been attempting to harm someone else, the crowd would have had need to subdue the assailants. This was not the case, so the crowd stood to gain nothing by subduing them. Hell, allowing them to flee would have been reasonable as well. That car wasn't going anywhere, they had pictures of the perpetrators, and the care was probably registered to one of the perps, anyway. These guys were going to be arrested no matter what they did, which is probably why they didn't flee the scene.

 

Pretty much everyone on my mother's side of the family is involved in the medical industry. A few minutes can and often does mean the difference between life or death when it comes to serious injuries like that. Contacting the police while a man is being repeatedly stabbed simply isn't going to have a very good chance to save his life if the stabbing isn't stopped. Assuming the crowd didn't appear until after the stabbing, which wasn't what it looked like but I could be wrong, the argument that he was already dead makes no sense. Sure, he could have died on the first stab, but generally it takes a while or at least multiple shots to kill someone, and if they could have been stopped early in their attack there's certainly a window here where intervention could have saved his life. Really, 5 or more people (though it looked like way more were around) could have stopped them without any serious injuries. If just one person had called to the crowd for help and tried to do something, I have a feeling others would have followed. Most people wait until someone else takes a stand before supporting them.

 

The guy was hit by a car and nearly beheaded before any one could act. Medical science is amazing, absolutely. We have re-attached fingers, toes, arms, legs, even John Wayne Bobbit's penis (although the bastard was probably better off without it). Not to be insensitive, but have we ever surgically re-attached a head? Didn't think so. He was irrevocably dead before anyone would have been able to save his life. There was no recovering from his injuries. Subduing the attackers would not have saved that soldier's life, would not have reduced the danger they posed to the witnesses, and it would not have lead to the capture of a murderer who would have otherwise escaped. We know this because the assailants were captured, alive, without harming anyone else. For this particular isolated situation, under this controlled set of circumstances. The inaction of the crowd was the correct action. We could indeed be saying something different if the crowd stood by and watched someone else be killed, or if they stood by and watched the assailants escape to go on a murder spree. Since that did not happen, I re-assert that inaction was the correct action in this particular case.

 

Woops, didn't know about that part.

 

This is an outrageously deplorable act, and it saddens me to see that it proves so many prejudices about foreigners right. To put some slight nuance on the story, this was committed by uneducated, angry young adults. Too much brawn and not enough brains, and there are examples of such people in all walks of life, race culture and nationality (though black youths are often quite a lot more intimidating than most). These idiots had no proper realization of the results of their acts. They wished to assert themselves and their world view, but ended up confirming other people's biases of them. It's sad in more ways than they will ever come to realize, unfortunately. I hope Guantanamo has a vacancy for them - they deserve to go there more than most of the inmates there do.

 

It proves no prejudices whatsoever about foreigners right. We don't conclude that all white American men are serial killers just because most American serial killers are white. In the same vein, we aren't going to conclude that all foreigners, all Muslims, or even all Islamic extremists are terrorists just because a pair of foreign Islamic extremists committed a heinous act. The only thing this incident really proves is that Islamic terrorists commit acts of terror in the name of Islam -- and I'm pretty sure we already knew that.