Gunman holds Hostages at Lindt Chocolat Cafe (Sydney)

[Ben D]

The gunman was demanding that it be reported as an Islamic State attack.

You mean the gunman was claimed by the media to be demanding it....and they also claimed that he wanted an Islamic State flag.

However....have you or anyone else ever heard of a Salafist Shiite....it's an oxymoron?

[Iamwhomiam]

No Ben, it's called a conversion. Kinda like, "I once was lost but now am found" kinda thing, with a radically fanatical bent. Or maybe, "I saw the light!" Take your pick.

I heard it's a growing trend, such conversions of faith.

[Ben D]

Haha....the media is now saying that he left a message "on a now shut down web site that is purported to be his" the he converted to Sunni in December 2014. B/S

Video here...http://www.wsj.com/articles/gunman-behind-sydney-cafe-siege-had-history-of-rage-1418681772?mod=WSJ_LatestHeadlines ...if it is paywalled...google search Gunman Behind Sydney Cafe Siege Had History of Rage

[TheDuke]

The gunman was demanding that it be reported as an Islamic State attack.

You mean the gunman was claimed by the media to be demanding it....and they also claimed that he wanted an Islamic State flag.

However....have you or anyone else ever heard of a Salafist Shiite....it's an oxymoron?

I know but i saw the video that he had the hostages record. They repeatedly said the media was to report as an Islamic State attack. Someone sent me the liveleak video this morning

[TheDuke]

http://m.liveleak.com/view?i=ea1_1418646267

[SonicG]

Now this:

The Shia Muslim community asked the Australian federal police to investigate the gunman Man Haron Monis in 2008 when he was claiming to be a ayatollah, according to a news report from the Australian at the time:

FEDERAL agents have been urged by the nation’s senior Shia leader, Kamal Mousselmani, to investigate an Iranian man purporting to be a prominent Islamic cleric.

Sheik Mousselmani told The Australian yesterday the mystery cleric - who has been identified as Ayatollah Manteghi Boroujerdi on his website after appearing under the name Sheik Haron - was not a genuine Shia spiritual leader.

He said there were no ayatollahs - supreme Shia scholars - in Australia and none of his fellow spiritual leaders knew who Ayatollah Boroujerdi or Sheik Haron was.

“We don’t know him and we have got nothing to do with him,” Sheik Mousselmani said. “The federal police should investigate who he is. It should be their responsibility.”
http://www.theguardian.com/australia-ne ... e-coverage

With all the high taxes in Australia, I would demand to know why this was not investigated, not to mention letting someone with 40 charges of indecency and sexual assault charges wander about freely...It's such an uber-nanny state that to think no one was looking at this guy is, well...

[seemslikeadream]

LIHOP

[Ben D]

http://m.liveleak.com/view?i=ea1_1418646267

I call fake....the authorities are wanting this event to go down as an attack by IS on Australia...the man was a loner by all accounts and was a Shiite right up to yesterday when the media have him converted to being a Sunni salafist...there's a brand new Wiki page opened for him yesterday having him a Sunni convert from Shiite. I would like others to view the video, particularly Nordic, and decide....the man was there alone and yet he coerced all these supposed hostages to put together that video by themselves....the voices and overall impression I get doesn't seem right for the plight they were supposedly in.....and how about the 'that's it...one, two, take' woman orchestrating the making of the video?

And apparently this security expert agrees that this was not an ISIS attack but a loner....

http://www.9news.com.au/national/2014/12/15/10/00/major-police-operation-in-sydneys-martin-place#kgYfs0HrbgHPGR40.99

“What ISIL has done recently is actually claim credit for a number of these lone actor attacks even if there is no intelligence, let alone evidence, to indicate that it had a connection to these individuals," security expert Neil Fergus, who is the chief executive of Intelligent Risks, said.

"So it will again try to use this type of tragic event to [spread] its message.

"They will try to claim it is one of their terrorist events and the reality is that we've got a very disturbed criminal individual who has carried out this attack with some very murky political agenda but it will now go into the litany of these lone wolf attacks that seem to have been occurring around the globe in recent months."

[TheDuke]

Ben I don't believe for a minute he is connected with IS. I just think that the paper has a pedantic defence due to the video and other social media posts. As for the attackers motives in claiming IS status - who knows? A poorly thought out attempt to defame local Sunnis? It's bizarre for sure.

[Ben D]

Fine Duke...

[Joe Hillshoist]

LIHOP

Nah i don't reckon. He was just another arsehole. The country is full of them. There was a siege in the US in Pennsylvania at the same time and 6 people were killed. The Taliban just killed 100 schoolkids somewhere.

This is a sad but unremarkable* event I reckon, hyped by Murdoch who is a fuckhead and a bunch of jerks trying to save their political arses.

With all the high taxes in Australia, I would demand to know why this was not investigated, not to mention letting someone with 40 charges of indecency and sexual assault charges wander about freely...It's such an uber-nanny state that to think no one was looking at this guy is, well...

Or its a nanny state that doesn't actually excessively track its citizens and subject them to unreasonable legal sanction.

The fact that this prick was out on bail as an accessory to the murder of his ex wife (and he claimed he was framed by ASIO and the Iranian Intelligence services) - and the magistrate in the case possibly gave some credence to his claims doesn't mean our state failed. It means that people get bail and don't get locked in gulags on suspicion. Surely this is a good thing.

Its quite possible that his freedom reflects our slack attitude to women in general and that we don't see threats to women as deserving the same treatment as threats to men.


*in terms of deep state such and such. Obviously its a remarkable and tragic event.

[SonicG]

LIHOP

Nah i don't reckon. He was just another arsehole. The country is full of them. There was a siege in the US in Pennsylvania at the same time and 6 people were killed. The Taliban just killed 100 schoolkids somewhere.

This is a sad but unremarkable* event I reckon, hyped by Murdoch who is a fuckhead and a bunch of jerks trying to save their political arses.

With all the high taxes in Australia, I would demand to know why this was not investigated, not to mention letting someone with 40 charges of indecency and sexual assault charges wander about freely...It's such an uber-nanny state that to think no one was looking at this guy is, well...

Or its a nanny state that doesn't actually excessively track its citizens and subject them to unreasonable legal sanction.

The fact that this prick was out on bail as an accessory to the murder of his ex wife (and he claimed he was framed by ASIO and the Iranian Intelligence services) - and the magistrate in the case possibly gave some credence to his claims doesn't mean our state failed. It means that people get bail and don't get locked in gulags on suspicion. Surely this is a good thing.

Its quite possible that his freedom reflects our slack attitude to women in general and that we don't see threats to women as deserving the same treatment as threats to men.


*in terms of deep state such and such. Obviously its a remarkable and tragic event.

I should have been a bit clearer here...I am sure that the Oz budgets for "anti-terrorism" are massively inflated - the troops that swooped in there seemed to have super-swell equipment - so it begs the question as to how those resources are being spent if certain obvious red flags are not tipped. Obviously I agree that there shouldn't be excessive tracking but "mentally unstable religious criminal nutjob (of any stripe)" should be getting special attention but again and again, any sort of even semi-nuanced approach is getting steamrolled over by increased spending on war-like weapons and armor that will eventually be turned on the populace at large. Very much agree that embedded sexism could have been a factor also...

[Morty]

So much media coverage, so little news.

The barrister and mother of three who died from a heart attack in the cafe, it's highly likely that the stun grenades were what killed her. We can assume that the cops killed and wounded most if not all of the casualties (especially given that we are not breathlessly being told, in minute detail, about the carnage caused by the gunman), but we're not going to talk about that. Instead we'll keep reminding ourselves how wonderful we really are, as demonstrated by our response to this travesty, and how deeply touched we are as a community by it all, and why was this guy out on bail anyway, for crying out loud?!?!?

And even if we were to confront the fact that the cops caused injury to the hostages, the point, we say, is that they were put in that position by the crazy gunman. He is ultimately and completely to blame for their injuries. Fair enough, but a) why the censorship? Why can't the blanket media coverage contain a little news about what actually happened here and there? and b) That means Victoria Nuland is 100% responsible for the civil war in Ukraine, yes?

All those flowers are going to start stinking soon.

I googled "stun grenade dawson" this morning and found Bob Ellis's blog post:

http://www.ellistabletalk.com/2014/12/18/28882/

The Lindt Cafe Fire-Fight

(First published by Independent Australia)

The rate at which we’re learning things about the Lindt Cafe fire-fight is among the slowest in modern history.

We don’t know yet whose bullets, or stun grenades, killed Katrina Dawson. We don’t know yet whose weaponry wounded four others. We don’t know the others’ names.

We don’t know why there were so many shots fired; and whether, in the dark, they knew who they were shooting at. We don’t know why this has not been revealed.

We don’t know why the police forbade the hostages to give any detailed media interviews. We don’t know why the Prime Minister refused them help when two of them begged for it. We don’t know why a Muslim cleric was not allowed to talk to the ‘terrorist’, as has happened in similar situations, hundreds of times, thousands of times across the world.

We don’t know much about anything. And we can only surmise an enormous cover-up is taking place.

Kate McClymont is nowhere to be seen. Somehow this case, involving Liberals, does not interest her in the way the Craig Thomson case did. Somehow she finds in it nothing to care about.

A plausible scenario is that both Monis and Johnson were alive when the cops came blam-blamming in, and both dead a second later, and Katrina Dawson gravely wounded. Another is that Johnson was dead, and in the ‘cross-fire’ police bullets, in startling numbers, wounded Dawson, and four others. If Monis’s weapon wounded six people we would have known of it, and the survivors would have been on television by now.

Or there may be some other explanation. Were there helmet-cameras, as there were in the raid on the home of Osama Bin Laden? What has happened to that videotape, if any? What has happened to the footage shown on Russian television, and nowhere else?

Why have the witnesses been told they can’t speak? Even John O’Brien, who left the premises eleven hours before the fire-fight happened?

It is almost certainly something to do with the Prime Minister’s refusal to help the hostages out, and thus let five of them, the women, probably, out of there. It is a massive cover-up, probably, of the Abbott cowardice, last seen when he cuddled koalas with Vladimir Putin. Or it may be something else.

It would be good if we knew something soon.

[RocketMan]

Ah, terrorist chatter, that good old stand-by.

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/12 ... g-d27.html

From the outset of the police siege in central Sydney on December 15–16, the response of the federal and state governments was based on a lie: that hostage-taking by a lone gunman in the Lindt café constituted a national “terrorism” crisis justifying the activation of the entire counterterrorism apparatus and the deployment of thousands of police, not only in Sydney, but other major cities around Australia.

The lie serves a definite political purpose. On December 17, Prime Minister Tony Abbott announced a joint review with the state government of New South Wales (NSW), not to investigate what had taken place, but to focus entirely on the hostage-taker Man Haron Monis as the pretext for deeper inroads into basic democratic and social rights. The incident is also being exploited to justify Australian involvement in Washington’s predatory new “war on terror” in the Middle East against Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) militias.

However, the official story of the Sydney siege is riddled with discrepancies and contradictions and has provoked widespread suspicion and questioning. In response, Abbott sought to maintain the atmosphere of fear and hysteria, declaring on Tuesday that there had been “a heightened level of terrorist chatter.” The tragic death of two innocent hostages has been mercilessly exploited to construct an image of a nation under siege coming together and thereby to render any criticism of the police and government illegitimate.

A massive cover-up is underway to whitewash the actions of the governments, the police and intelligence agencies. The extraordinary regime of censorship imposed during the 16-hour standoff at the Lindt café has continued. There is no official account, even in outline, of what took place during the siege or its tragic denouement. In the early hours of December 16, heavily-armed paramilitary police stormed the café, leaving Monis and two hostages—Katrina Dawson, a barrister and mother of three, and café manager Tori Johnson—dead.

Nor is there likely to be for weeks, if not months. No date has been set for the coronial inquiry which has been tasked with examining the events. Staff at the NSW State Coroners Court told the World Socialist Web Site they had been instructed to say nothing to the media and to refer all inquiries to the Department of Justice where the media officer declared that no information would be released until the inquest. Likewise, the police media unit refused to answer any detailed questions, confirming only that a Critical Incident Investigation was underway, for which no time frame had been set.

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