According to the ABC website (Spanish conservative daily newspaper), the Islamists blew themselves up rather than face capture. My Spanish is not great so any better linguists can check this out. (not permanent link). Three suspects implicated in the Madrid railway station bombing were pursued to the residential building where the explosion occured this evening.
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Update: Madrid explosionApril 3rd, 2004 |
 7 comments to Update: Madrid explosion |
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The BBC has the story story.
A Bomb exploded could have been accidental in echange of fire but more probably Islamists commited suicide. A special agent was killed too :(.
So, in the early years of the 21st century, did the western democracies plant the seeds of their own destruction. Grown indolent and complacent, they could not respond to the appearance of an external threat with a united front and, fell to squabbling amoung themselves and blaming one another for their troubles.
Terrorist attacks accelerated after the widespread election of governments whose leaders promised to retreat from areas deemed antagonistic to the terror masters. This happened despite assurances to the contrary by the leaders of the Ul Kayda faction whom the governments sought to engage in peace negotiations, and whom they began to subsidize with direct cash payments in the hope of further diffusing their anger. In late 2014, hopes were high that the latest Declaration of Western Responsibility for all Grievances Past, Present and Future, which had been accepted and signed in Baghdad (the seat of the new caliphate that was established after the Americans and their allies abandoned the region shortly after the US presidential election of 2004) would lead to “peace for all time”.
In early 2015, the first truly megaterrorist attack hit simultaneously in the United States in the cities of New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, with the detonation of tactical nuclear weapons in the city centres. Combined single day casualties exceeded one million, with a further three million doomed to death in the near term from other injuries and radiation poisoning. The US President declared martial law and shut the borders, bringing the entire global trading system to a screeching halt, sparking riots and popular insurrections worldwide.
Within days, it became apparent that Western Europe had also been targeted, when a devastating and previously uncataloged hemorraghic fever raced through the region, lancing out from epicentres in London, Paris, Madrid, Rome and Berlin. Within weeks, two million people were dead, half the population was either infected or carriers and, society crumbled into anarchy.
Even military chains of command were unable to cope with the sudden disintegration of normalcy and, rogue commanders in the top industrialized nations were able to commandeer nuclear assets, targeting them on the foes deemed to be most likely responsible for the state of affairs. The entire region from North Africa to Southeast Asia was bombarded relentlessly and haphazardly on a continuing basis for several months. It is still too radioactive for human habitation and will be so for approximately 3,000 more years. Radioactive dust clouds encircled the Earth, the climate was affected and, animal and human mutations were induced at an alarming rate.
In the end over 2 billion people lost their lives in the space of little more than two years. In the ensuing years, world population would shrink continually due to the stresses inflicted upon it. By 2085, there would be less than one billion inhabitants living in preindustrial societies scattered across the globe. By 2290, less than 400 million people managed to cling to life in a brutal and harsh environment. The climb back to a similar level of technology and standard of living as prevailed at the end of the 20th century took roughly 3 millennia, and is the subject of the next chapter…
Calling these people islamists insults Islam.
Compare and contrast this person http://www.muslim-refusenik.com/
Julian Morrison
Could you estimate the proportion between reasonable, moderate muslims like “muslim-refusenik” (which lives in the West), and the extremist ones who mutilate corpses and dance in the streets with genuine joy after each bombing ?
Being a good bloke, you wish to beleive that the moderates are a majority and the extremist few. But do you KNOW that ? You might just be wrong. Why not try to judge by the tone of the Arab press and media ?
Or better, judge from the utterances of Arab intellectuals that teach in Western Universities, and surely are not ignorant ant not afraid to speak up. All of them. with no exception preach for the annihilation of Israel and oppose the liberation of Iraq.
“Calling these people islamists insults Islam.”
No, unless you beleive that stating the truth is an insult, and lying is mandatory and helpful.
What I mean is that calling these nutballs Islamists is like calling the old Spanish Inquisition “Christianists”. They’re murdering literalist fanatics. They don’t represent the potential for good in Islam.
As you say, the mainstream of current Islamic culture isn’t very exalted at all right now. But people like Ms Manji demonstrate it could improve. So then, I look to the ideal rather than the current mess, because I don’t think the immoderate types deserve to be thought “definitive”. It’s precisely that they think of themselves as such, that’s a major cause of the problem.
Julian,
For a typical reaction of a “professor of middle-eastern studies” see here(Link) (scroll down to the comments).
Your idealism is admirable, but we need some realists to try and protect us from these nuts.