Sydney hostage taking

Hamm

Hamm

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Apparently the hostage taker is dead and one hostage.

Not sure why (unless something comes about, i.e., there doesn't appear to be any bomb etc) a sniper/long range shooter couldn't take him out earlier as with night vision and the dark, you'd imagine they could have gotten pretty close and got a good shot at his head.

Seems he was well-followed by the authorities so this will bring about all kinds of strong opinions..
 
Not sure about that, had the 'wrong' flag and asked for the 'right' one to be delivered. The report I heard said he started shooting which is why they went in.
 
Hope everyone is fine that is innocent in this.

looking at how news is reported these days, everyone wants their second of fame on twitter and it's comparables.
 
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Did anyone see those people taking selfies of themselves with the cafe in the background?

A real shame they weren't caught in the crossfire. What would make you do such a thing?
 
People who do selfies should be rounded up and checked for actually being real..saddo culture isn't it?

can you imagine the sad selfie culture being around on 9/11..ffs..don't bear thinking about
 
My daughter is still in Sydney and works very close to this. In fact she meets friends at this cafe regularly. She was evacuated (along with many), with little information, leaving thousands of people terrified fearing something bad. Transport links were closed and it was impossible to get away from the city. To the extent she was still stuck there well into the night.

I can say this jihadist/fruitcake had maximum effect, and Australia will carry this for sometime to come.
 
I was wondering the same Colin (hence the edit) but BBC to their credit are seemingly switching their running order to reflect the gravity of this one (I'm actually wondering if there's been a worse single attrocity - sure there's been bigger body counts, but this one is pure evil). Sky by contrast are still basing everything on Sydney
 
Colin Phillips said:
Will today's happenings be given as much media coverage as yesterday's?
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It's an unreasonable expectation, Col, given the vast differences in accessibility between Sydney and anywhere in Afghanistan.

Less coverage does not equal less interest, in my view.

I actually find it hard to believe that any group would view action against children, who - by their very definition- are too young to be held responsible or accountable, to be in any way legitimate. These people are like a virus; attacking indiscriminately and without conscience, and placing no value whatsoever on human-life. They're Ebola with Kalashnikovs, and it's about time we started treating their threat with just as much urgency.
 
The attack took place is Pakistan Grasshopper (not Afghanistan) and it also took place in Peshwar (not some tribal badland in the middle of nowhere)

What is most notable for its brazen challenge though, is that it appears to be a school for military children! or one run by the Pakistani military
 
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But Sky are leading with the Pakistan massacre and giving it live coverage at the top of each hour. And deservedly so.
 
They certainly weren't doing. They were doing very repetitive broadcasts from Sydney when the BBC were leading with it. One suspects that as the death toll mounts (126 now) they've switched. Also their own staff have to sleep too. They were probably very slow and caught for a few hours obsessing on Sydney when a much greater attrocity was unfolding
 
I think there's an interesting discussion to be had about exactly what constitutes a terrorist act as opposed just a one-man lunacy mission.

I remember thinking when Lee Rigby was killed that the act by the two killers was a criminal act, but as things transpired, it seems a terror charge was more likely.

As for the Sidney hostage taking and killing....if the bloke had no connections to any Islamist groups, but carried out the crime in the name of Allah, do we take him at his word?

Or do we challenge that notion, and look at his violent, mentalist history to say this was a violent act of crime?

To Colin...I think the media has adapted and so much information and stories are out there, including tragic one's, that some are naturally given more publicity. The publicity on certain stories plays (or perpetuates) itself in a way.

E.G, anybody heard much about what happened to those 200 girls that were abducted by Boko Haram, news one day, forgotten the next it seems. This is the effect of an increased globalised world and knowledge based society, who will quickly (and rightly) move on from one thing to the next. There's only so much any one persons brain can take in and want to digest on any given day, however crude that might sound
 
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Warbler said:
The attack took place is Pakistan Grasshopper (not Afghanistan) and it also took place in Peshwar (not some tribal badland in the middle of nowhere)

What is most notable for its brazen challenge though, is that it appears to be a school for military children! or one run by the Pakistani military
Click to expand...

My mistake, Warbler....though same probably applies, in terms of accessibility.
 
I don't think any one would dispute that Sydney is more accessible Grassy, so there's clearly an element of truth in what you're suggesting. I had to throttle back from my immediate allegation of one eyed reporting when it became apparent that the BBC were on the case. From my brief flicking at Sky, they seem to have packed their studio out with experts in the Australian case (i assume in anticipation of filling the morning with analysis) and probably needed to readjust as this much bigger story broke around them

I did post and then stopped, something yesterday that would have supported your notion that the Sydney character was a lone nutter. Outside of Beslan which was a Chechen separatist issue as much as it was Islamic, the fundamentalists don't tend to do hostage taking. Quite the opposite. They tend to do rapid and indiscriminate body count. That means tooling themselves with as much ammo as they can carry (aka Mumbai or Nairobi) and then adopting a 'get as many as we can before they get us' approach to the maths of the task.

The Sydney siege was of course almost unique therefore in the context. So far as we know, he only had a sawn off (hardly an assault weapon) so it did look pretty much like you suggested. I was going to suggest (but thought better of it) they if he were serious terrorist with IS/ AQ, DNA running through him, he'd have killed a couple of dozen. Sadly this is what we've seen today, and this is a much harder attack to defend against. I'm not sure where it ends, but if you roll it out with a few more scenarios I suppose the answer becomes obvious in the long term
 
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I hate these people more than anyone ive hated im my life. I could genuinely take real pleasure from actually killing them .

The only good that can come out of this is a real awakenibg and determined slaughter if isis aq and the taleban
 
Absolutely right !
No reasonable person with a shred of humanity could argue with you there, Clive.
 
icebreaker said:
Absolutely right !
No reasonable person with a shred of humanity could argue with you there, Clive.
Click to expand...

Could be a turning point in the way aq's attacks on jordan lost a huge amount of arab support.

I find it a bit odd that the debate is about sky coverage which for the record, is generally pretty fair even if it doesnt back saddam and stalin
 
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Only because you're a johnny come lately to the debate yourself. Had you been around when this was developing at about 10.00am (ish) this morning, you'd have seen stories about it leading the other agencies whilst Sky were doing their bit to seemingly shore up the Australian tourist industry.

I should point out, that with the death toll in the 80's and climbing Sky still ran it as "and in other news when we come back" preferring instead to have a whole studio set up for Sydney with all sorts of terror experts and pyschologists on line, as well as vox pops from English ex-pats in Sydney and someone from a NSW promotional agency telling us how great and safe Sydney is. There was a time when the two stories ran concurrently and Sky continued to put Pakistan as very much second fiddle. I suspect this is what had irked Colin? Personally I checked a few other outlets first before turning my own ire on the media per se, but discovered they were on the case and it was Sky that were behind the curve

The concept of white news isn't new (normally associated with America) but various media analysts have identified it before. I believe it's been tagged specifically to missing people, but for a few hours Sky exhibited all the traits that broadly fell into the trap of 2 Australian deaths are more important than over 100 Pakistanis. You saw a similar thing a few years ago in Boston of course when 3 people were killed at the Marathon, yet we were given 5 days wall to wall global coverage because it had happened in America, whereas without any sense of irony, more people had been killed by bombs during that period in both Iraq and Syria and never got mentioned

Which reminds me, how is Kobane these days. This was flavour of the month in November wasn't it. I assume they're still fighting and that people are still dying, but has the media got bored of reporting it?
 
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could get into all sorts of discussions about shades of media coverage, but its not the time and place.
 
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Islamic extremist violence is growing at such a pace, can anyone predict where it will end up?
moderate Islam can't seem to stand up to it.
 
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