Regardless of your religious beliefs, this is a sad day, over 200 killed and 400 wounded in Sri Lanka on Christianity's most holy day. It's ironic. Sri Lanka's Hindu Tamil Tigers recruited children to carry out suicide bombings against the Sinhala Buddhist majority. Islamic terrorists copied this. Now after 10 years of peace the suicide bomb has come back to Sri Lanka, probably via an Islamic terrorist attack on Christians.
Who did it? Sri Lanka's Islamic and Christian populations are a drop in the bucket compared to the Buddhist majority and the substantial Hindu minority. My bet would be on foreigners.
- Tiny
- 04-21-2019, 12:52 PM
- friendly fred
- 04-21-2019, 07:06 PM
I'm betting it could possibly might be radical...I'll wait for the official notifications.
- dilbert firestorm
- 04-21-2019, 11:06 PM
Regardless of your religious beliefs, this is a sad day, over 200 killed and 400 wounded in Sri Lanka on Christianity's most holy day. It's ironic. Sri Lanka's Hindu Tamil Tigers recruited children to carry out suicide bombings against the Sinhala Buddhist majority. Islamic terrorists copied this. Now after 10 years of peace the suicide bomb has come back to Sri Lanka, probably via an Islamic terrorist attack on Christians.
Who did it? Sri Lanka's Islamic and Christian populations are a drop in the bucket compared to the Buddhist majority and the substantial Hindu minority. My bet would be on foreigners. Originally Posted by Tiny
if christians are attacked, its most likely the work of muslims.
but heres the thing Tamils are for the most part largely muslims (they're not hindu).
its possible the Tigers (the remenant of) may have fallen under the sway of the radicals and are in their camp.
- Tiny
- 04-21-2019, 11:40 PM
if christians are attacked, its most likely the work of muslims.Dilbert, The Sri Lankan Muslims are about 10% of the population. I worked there for a short while, and they were considered distinct from the Tamils. In fact, the Hindu Tamil Tigers, the terrorist organization that was engaged in the civil war, forced the Muslims out of the territory it controlled and slaughtered Muslims.
but heres the thing Tamils are for the most part largely muslims (they're not hindu).
its possible the Tigers (the remenant of) may have fallen under the sway of the radicals and are in their camp. Originally Posted by dilbert firestorm
If local, Sri Lankan Muslims did this, one explanation would be that they're nihilists or anarchists and basically want to just blow things up, without bringing the wrath of the Sinhalese Buddhist majority down upon their communities. The Sinhalese get very nasty when riled and dish it out about 5 times worse than they take it. You see the government there clamping down on Facebook and other social media as a result of the attacks today on the churches and hotels. This was probably a good move, regardless of what you think about free speech. When something like this happens in Sri Lanka things can snowball and the next thing you know Sinhalese mobs are running wild.
To my knowledge, Muslims in Sri Lanka aren't particularly hostile towards Christians. They'd be much more likely to attack the Sinhalese. That's not to say there aren't local Al Qaeda cells or other foreign influenced cells that might have carried this out. Still, my bet's on foreigners from outside the country having done this, like the Saudis who bombed the World Trade Center here.
- I B Hankering
- 04-21-2019, 11:48 PM
- the_real_Barleycorn
- 04-22-2019, 01:52 AM
Pretty girl but she should speak english and not be such a skank.
- dilbert firestorm
- 04-22-2019, 02:32 AM
i've been noticing some image display issues
is there a reason why I can't see utube videos and images????
is there a reason why I can't see utube videos and images????
- eccielover
- 04-22-2019, 02:52 AM
- oeb11
- 04-22-2019, 08:20 AM
Sri Lanka Blames Radical Islamist Group for Easter Bombings
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world...bJY?li=BBnb7Kz
NEW DELHI — Sri Lankan officials said on Monday that the coordinated bombings of churches and hotels across the country on Easter Sunday had been carried out by National Thowheeth Jama’ath, a little-known radical Islamist group, with help from international militants.
Rajitha Senaratne, the Sri Lankan health minister, blamed the group at a news conference in Colombo, the capital, adding: “There was an international network without which these attacks could not have succeeded.”
The government announced that it was asking other countries for help in uncovering international links, and that it was assuming emergency powers in order to investigate the attacks. A dusk-to-dawn curfew was imposed for the second consecutive night. .
No one has claimed responsibility for the attacks on Sunday, which targeted Roman Catholic churches holding Easter services and high-end hotels favored by foreign tourists. On Monday, officials said the death toll had risen to at least 290, with about 500 others wounded. The Sri Lankan authorities have so far arrested two dozen suspects, but declined to identify them.
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A forensic analysis by the Sri Lankan government of human remains found at three churches and three hotels determined that seven suicide bombers had carried out the attacks, according to The Associated Press. Most sites were attacked by a lone bomber, but two targeted the Shangri-La Hotel in Colombo. Bombings at a guesthouse and the suspects’ safe house remain under investigation.
In interviews, counterterrorism experts said that such an extensively planned and coordinated attack would almost certainly have required considerable financing and expertise from a more experienced group overseas.
“The target selection and attack type make me very skeptical that this was carried out by a local group without any outside involvement,” said Amarnath Amarasingam, a specialist in Sri Lankan extremism at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a counterterrorism research group based in London. “There’s no reason for local extremist groups to attack churches, and little reason to attack tourists.”
Sri Lanka, an island nation in the Indian Ocean, was ravaged by decades of civil war that ended in 2009, but it has little history of militant Islamist violence. The suicide bombings that were pioneered there starting in the 1980s were mainly carried out by Hindu guerrillas from the country’s Tamil ethnic minority, not Muslims.
© Adam Dean for The New York Times St. Anthony’s Shrine in Colombo, Sri Lanka, on Monday. Hundreds were killed and hundreds more wounded in coordinated blasts at churches and hotels across the country on Easter Sunday. Anne Speckhard, the director of the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism, contrasted the attacks by Tamil guerrillas with those attributed to National Thowheeth Jama’ath. Unlike the bombings on Sunday, she said, those during the civil war were part of a nationalist or ethnic separatist movement, and they mostly targeted political leaders rather than religious ones.
“These attacks appear to be quite different,” she said, “and look as if they came right out of the ISIS, Al Qaeda, global militant jihadist playbook, as these are attacks fomenting religious hatred by attacking multiple churches on a high religious holiday.”
National Thowheeth Jama’ath is a small but violent group of young Muslims that started at least three years ago in eastern Sri Lanka, far from the country’s more cosmopolitan western and southern coasts. Until this month, the group was generally perceived as anti-Buddhist, counterterrorism experts said.
Radical Islamist groups like Al Qaeda also have experience in organizing and carrying out simultaneous suicide attacks — most notably those in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.
Local ties with such groups may have been strengthened in recent years by Sri Lankan Muslims who traveled to fight in wars in Syria and Iraq, said Sameer Patil, a national security fellow at Gateway House, a foreign policy research group in Mumbai, India. With the Islamic State having recently lost its last patch of territory in Syria, he said, the group’s foreign fighters are now more likely to return home to Sri Lanka and other countries.
“It was just a matter of time before that would hit them on their own soil,” Mr. Patil said.
Ms. Speckhard said the aim of National Thowheeth Jama’ath was to spread the global jihadist movement to Sri Lanka and to create hatred, fear and divisions in society.
“It is not about a separatist movement,” she said. “It is about religion and punishing.”
Sectarian divisions are ripe for exploitation in Sri Lanka, whose ethnic Sinhalese majority is mostly Buddhist. Sri Lankan Muslims, who make up about one-tenth of the population and mostly belong to the Tamil ethnic group, have a long history of conflict with the country’s Buddhists and Hindus, said Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi.
The conflict stems partly from statues and other human portrayals of Buddhist and Hindu deities, which some Muslims perceive as idolatrous.
In recent years, Buddhist extremist groups have sprung up among the Sinhalese, who make up nearly three-quarters of the Sri Lankan population. The groups seek to protect statues of Buddha from desecration and make Buddhism more central to Sri Lankan life, but they have also fomented violence. Last year, the Sri Lankan government declared a nationwide state of emergency after mob attacks against Muslims in the central district of Kandy.
National Thowheeth Jama’ath appears to have emerged as part of a backlash by Sri Lankan Muslims against these Buddhist extremist groups, said Kabir Taneja, a counterterrorism expert at the Observer Research Foundation, a public policy research group in Mumbai.
Until now, National Thowheeth Jama’ath was known mainly for vandalizing Buddhist statues. In November 2016, its secretary, Abdul Razik, was arrested on charges of inciting racism.
Four months later, the group was involved in a violent clash in Kattankudy, a mostly Muslim community near the eastern city of Batticaloa, where one of the church bombings took place on Sunday. Three people were hospitalized and 10 were arrested, according to local news reports.
Mr. Chellaney noted that there was also a large group called Thowheeth Jama’ath in the southeastern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, which lies across a strait from Sri Lanka and has a large Tamil population. Smaller chapters with the same name appear to have been set up in Sri Lankan communities in other countries, he said, often funded by groups in the Persian Gulf and subscribing to Wahhabism, an austere form of Islam that has its roots there. Mr. Chellaney described them as “sister organizations” but said the links among them were unclear.
Counterterrorism experts said that in Sri Lanka, National Thowheeth Jama’ath appeared to consist almost entirely of young people, especially recent graduates of Islamic schools. The group appears to have little hierarchy or organizational structure, and no older leaders.
The presence of mostly young people with deep roots in the community but no strong, mature leaders would make it similar to other local groups in the Muslim world with which the Islamic State has tried to form affiliations.
The Sri Lankan government has acknowledged that 10 days before the attacks, the police warned security officials of a possible threat to churches by National Thowheeth Jama’ath.
Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe said on Sunday that he and other top government officials had not been informed of the threat, and that “we must look into why adequate precautions were not taken.”
Keith Bradsher reported from New Delhi, and Sandra E. Garcia from New York.
Differing opinions - radical Muslim terrorists seem much more likely to be at the bottom of the bombings in Sri Lanka.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world...bJY?li=BBnb7Kz
NEW DELHI — Sri Lankan officials said on Monday that the coordinated bombings of churches and hotels across the country on Easter Sunday had been carried out by National Thowheeth Jama’ath, a little-known radical Islamist group, with help from international militants.
Rajitha Senaratne, the Sri Lankan health minister, blamed the group at a news conference in Colombo, the capital, adding: “There was an international network without which these attacks could not have succeeded.”
The government announced that it was asking other countries for help in uncovering international links, and that it was assuming emergency powers in order to investigate the attacks. A dusk-to-dawn curfew was imposed for the second consecutive night. .
No one has claimed responsibility for the attacks on Sunday, which targeted Roman Catholic churches holding Easter services and high-end hotels favored by foreign tourists. On Monday, officials said the death toll had risen to at least 290, with about 500 others wounded. The Sri Lankan authorities have so far arrested two dozen suspects, but declined to identify them.
Sign Up For the Morning Briefing Newsletter
A forensic analysis by the Sri Lankan government of human remains found at three churches and three hotels determined that seven suicide bombers had carried out the attacks, according to The Associated Press. Most sites were attacked by a lone bomber, but two targeted the Shangri-La Hotel in Colombo. Bombings at a guesthouse and the suspects’ safe house remain under investigation.
In interviews, counterterrorism experts said that such an extensively planned and coordinated attack would almost certainly have required considerable financing and expertise from a more experienced group overseas.
“The target selection and attack type make me very skeptical that this was carried out by a local group without any outside involvement,” said Amarnath Amarasingam, a specialist in Sri Lankan extremism at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a counterterrorism research group based in London. “There’s no reason for local extremist groups to attack churches, and little reason to attack tourists.”
Sri Lanka, an island nation in the Indian Ocean, was ravaged by decades of civil war that ended in 2009, but it has little history of militant Islamist violence. The suicide bombings that were pioneered there starting in the 1980s were mainly carried out by Hindu guerrillas from the country’s Tamil ethnic minority, not Muslims.
© Adam Dean for The New York Times St. Anthony’s Shrine in Colombo, Sri Lanka, on Monday. Hundreds were killed and hundreds more wounded in coordinated blasts at churches and hotels across the country on Easter Sunday. Anne Speckhard, the director of the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism, contrasted the attacks by Tamil guerrillas with those attributed to National Thowheeth Jama’ath. Unlike the bombings on Sunday, she said, those during the civil war were part of a nationalist or ethnic separatist movement, and they mostly targeted political leaders rather than religious ones.
“These attacks appear to be quite different,” she said, “and look as if they came right out of the ISIS, Al Qaeda, global militant jihadist playbook, as these are attacks fomenting religious hatred by attacking multiple churches on a high religious holiday.”
National Thowheeth Jama’ath is a small but violent group of young Muslims that started at least three years ago in eastern Sri Lanka, far from the country’s more cosmopolitan western and southern coasts. Until this month, the group was generally perceived as anti-Buddhist, counterterrorism experts said.
Radical Islamist groups like Al Qaeda also have experience in organizing and carrying out simultaneous suicide attacks — most notably those in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.
Local ties with such groups may have been strengthened in recent years by Sri Lankan Muslims who traveled to fight in wars in Syria and Iraq, said Sameer Patil, a national security fellow at Gateway House, a foreign policy research group in Mumbai, India. With the Islamic State having recently lost its last patch of territory in Syria, he said, the group’s foreign fighters are now more likely to return home to Sri Lanka and other countries.
“It was just a matter of time before that would hit them on their own soil,” Mr. Patil said.
Ms. Speckhard said the aim of National Thowheeth Jama’ath was to spread the global jihadist movement to Sri Lanka and to create hatred, fear and divisions in society.
“It is not about a separatist movement,” she said. “It is about religion and punishing.”
Sectarian divisions are ripe for exploitation in Sri Lanka, whose ethnic Sinhalese majority is mostly Buddhist. Sri Lankan Muslims, who make up about one-tenth of the population and mostly belong to the Tamil ethnic group, have a long history of conflict with the country’s Buddhists and Hindus, said Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi.
The conflict stems partly from statues and other human portrayals of Buddhist and Hindu deities, which some Muslims perceive as idolatrous.
In recent years, Buddhist extremist groups have sprung up among the Sinhalese, who make up nearly three-quarters of the Sri Lankan population. The groups seek to protect statues of Buddha from desecration and make Buddhism more central to Sri Lankan life, but they have also fomented violence. Last year, the Sri Lankan government declared a nationwide state of emergency after mob attacks against Muslims in the central district of Kandy.
National Thowheeth Jama’ath appears to have emerged as part of a backlash by Sri Lankan Muslims against these Buddhist extremist groups, said Kabir Taneja, a counterterrorism expert at the Observer Research Foundation, a public policy research group in Mumbai.
Until now, National Thowheeth Jama’ath was known mainly for vandalizing Buddhist statues. In November 2016, its secretary, Abdul Razik, was arrested on charges of inciting racism.
Four months later, the group was involved in a violent clash in Kattankudy, a mostly Muslim community near the eastern city of Batticaloa, where one of the church bombings took place on Sunday. Three people were hospitalized and 10 were arrested, according to local news reports.
Mr. Chellaney noted that there was also a large group called Thowheeth Jama’ath in the southeastern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, which lies across a strait from Sri Lanka and has a large Tamil population. Smaller chapters with the same name appear to have been set up in Sri Lankan communities in other countries, he said, often funded by groups in the Persian Gulf and subscribing to Wahhabism, an austere form of Islam that has its roots there. Mr. Chellaney described them as “sister organizations” but said the links among them were unclear.
Counterterrorism experts said that in Sri Lanka, National Thowheeth Jama’ath appeared to consist almost entirely of young people, especially recent graduates of Islamic schools. The group appears to have little hierarchy or organizational structure, and no older leaders.
The presence of mostly young people with deep roots in the community but no strong, mature leaders would make it similar to other local groups in the Muslim world with which the Islamic State has tried to form affiliations.
The Sri Lankan government has acknowledged that 10 days before the attacks, the police warned security officials of a possible threat to churches by National Thowheeth Jama’ath.
Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe said on Sunday that he and other top government officials had not been informed of the threat, and that “we must look into why adequate precautions were not taken.”
Keith Bradsher reported from New Delhi, and Sandra E. Garcia from New York.
Differing opinions - radical Muslim terrorists seem much more likely to be at the bottom of the bombings in Sri Lanka.
- gnadfly
- 04-22-2019, 08:29 AM
Not getting much headlines on the US websites. Mueller headlines still outpointing it.
- I B Hankering
- 04-22-2019, 10:35 AM
Pretty girl but she should speak english and not be such a skank. Originally Posted by the_real_BarleycornShe's (Mathangi Arulpragasam) Tamil. She's a rap artist that calls herself M.I.A. She's born in England, but her parents are from Sri Lanka, and she was raised in Sri Lanka; thus, learned English latter in life. She's Hindu, and her politics are radical. Her father was associated with the Tamil Tigers.
- gfejunkie
- 04-22-2019, 10:38 AM
I guess "some people did something".
- Austin Ellen
- 04-22-2019, 10:59 AM
I'll never be able to understand that level of hate. You should be able to practice your religious beliefs in peace.
Religious freedom seems to be under attack all over the world and here in the U.S. too. Honestly, I just don't understand attacking someone for their religious or spiritual beliefs. I was brought up to respect everybody's religious beliefs. I don't have to agree with it but I respect it. This was very sad indeed.
Religious freedom seems to be under attack all over the world and here in the U.S. too. Honestly, I just don't understand attacking someone for their religious or spiritual beliefs. I was brought up to respect everybody's religious beliefs. I don't have to agree with it but I respect it. This was very sad indeed.
- oeb11
- 04-22-2019, 11:52 AM
AE- Agreed!!!
- nevergaveitathought
- 04-22-2019, 12:24 PM
I'll never be able to understand that level of hate. You should be able to practice your religious beliefs in peace.in this case I think it boils down to people practicing their stated religious tenets all too well
Religious freedom seems to be under attack all over the world and here in the U.S. too. Honestly, I just don't understand attacking someone for their religious or spiritual beliefs. I was brought up to respect everybody's religious beliefs. I don't have to agree with it but I respect it. This was very sad indeed. Originally Posted by Austin Ellen
in the u.s., the dims do hate christianity, that's in the record