Apparently, an attacker drove a vehicle across Westminster Bridge, mowing down pedestrians along the way, crashed into the security barrier surrounding Parliament close to Big Ben, and then entered the compound and stabbed a police officer before being shot.
CNN is speculating that he was a right-wing fanatic, so it’s most likely an Islamist terrorist attack.
It may have been two simultaneous attacks. Security is super tight around parliament area.
Yeah. The whole area is on lock-down at the moment, so it looks like the media doesn’t have the full story (or narrative) yet. The knife has just been upgraded to a machete, two people have been shot, and all the MPs are locked inside Parliament. And Scotland Yard is now treating the attack as a “terrorist incident.”
A clue that this is jihadi terror…the attack occurred on the one-year anniversary of the attacks in Brussels.
News flash update! The London Attack has already inspired a meme:
The death toll so far is five, including the attacker, whose identity appears to be known to authorities, but not revealed yet.
It’s bad, don’t get me wrong.
But people get blown up in Iraq and Pakistan and Afghanistan all the time , in their fifties and hundreds, and nobody seems to reallly care. 52,000 in Iraq alone.
Quite true, and all the more reason why other countries need to keep these terrorists from infiltrating their borders.
Could it have been just a garden variety psycho who wanted suicide by police? A juiced up overdosed junkie? Those are aplenty everywhere.
OTOH, a one man army can do a lot of damage. Difficult to control if he used his car to mow people down, it used to be just trucks. At least he only had a machete/knife, not a bomb or an AK-47.
There’s a billion-and-a-half of them and this thousand year religious war is barely seventy years old. A hundred years from now you’ll have to strip naked in order to enter London and even then it will only be if you have a chip implanted. Everything will be on the table and they’ll have caught up technically by then so nobody will be safe anywhere.
British authorities apparently know the identity of the attacker, and they’re treating this as a terror investigation, so it doesn’t seem likely that he was a random psycho…more like a non-random psycho.
If it happens all the time, it’s not news. Every coupla years some poor kid goes berserk in Taiwan and kills a few random strangers. That’s news.
Parts of the world that have been shit for ages are still shit: not news. Parts of the world that we think of as okay are starting to get bad: news. Unless you can suppress coverage.
News is what threatens our complacency, not what confirms our preconceptions.
People jump fences all the time. It’s only news if it happens at the White House.
Oh, and…
Khan has a point, but it’s the sort of point he’d be better off not making. That is to say, there’s a point behind the point that he’s missing.
Kabul, Afghanistan 1970
kind of true.
and that was a pretty pathetic thing to say from the mayor. i don’t need to remind people living in taipei for example that we don’t hav any islamic terrorism here. not to mention that people walking down the road next to big ben could just as easily be tourists and not living there.
In fact, five of the injured (one seriously) were Korean tourists.
Ah, a psycho with a sort of agenda-ish.
What did the mayor say?
The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has said that living with terror attacks – like the one that hit New York at the weekend – is ‘part and parcel of living in a big city’.
“Normal” is shorthand for “Don’t question it. Just accept it.”
You could also say, “Submit!” But that’s perhaps a bit too blunt,
“Part and parcel” is the language of absolutism. Reality is a package deal, the only objective absolute. Anyone who speaks in those terms may be insinuating that he is the arbiter of reality.
Condolences to the victims and their families. Terrible news.