Yes specifically it was that these are the people that are killing people in Afghanistan, therefore, they wanted to kill them.

It's been confirmed in the Guardian that the victim was a soldier who served in Afghanistan.

Who then?

Maybe? Just maybe they thought that a mass of loons would come and join them in their fight against whatever they disliked on that day. And no one came !!

Yeah, crazy people. Just sad.

Sorry to bring up another sad topic, but I just saw the article about that guy in Miami the last/prior year that had his face bitten off by a man? There is weird stuff in this world, this one had the political/religious angle to it. UK is on Level 3 alert for terrorism, helps with all the publicity I guess.

It is a possibility, and as the police investigation unfolds we will find out whether others were involved and what the perpetrator's true motivations were.

However, at the current point in time it seems that the two were mainly concerned with making a very public display of their grievance with the British authorities. On scale from pure (self-centred) nut job and ideologically driven terrorist, they seem to be closer to terrorist.

How did the killers know that that this poor man was a soldier as he wasn't in uniform?

Help for Heros T-shirt and barracks two blocks away.

Apparently the young man was in his early twenties. Very sad.

But as Jings pointed out, far worse than this happening all the time in far away lands.

I was thinking about this yesterday actually - well kinda - I can't articulate it in the way that you guys can.

But if you are a white person from english parents born in Canada, you would probably associate yourself with being Canadian more than English because there is the skin colour which allows you to immediately belong to the country you are in and presumably vice versa.

However if you are black Nigerian, Chinese, Mexican, Asian or whatever skin tone can immediately identify you as having roots from elsewhere, would you always feel like you don't fit in and therefore have to try and find 'like' people to congrgate with.

Does that make sense??? I don't really know what i'm trying to say but the colour of these guys skin and their 'roots' is an easy reason to then go a lot further off on tangent.

You're not in Toronto. Skin colour is not, in any way, a marker of Canadianism in Toronto.

Cant get over the locals all standing around acting like this happens everyday. The old lady wandering passed him with his bloody hands and waving his selection of knives, not even batting an eyelid. You should of read the utter toss on Twitter from the local youths, sickening.

So is this a predominantly British thing then (i'll admit to being very clueless about this so apaologies for the dumbness but just trying to understand why someone would turn against their country of birth by hacking to death one of its armed forces).

I mean, whether or not you agree with wars or the military, the general concensus is that 'our' soldiers are supposed to be there to protect our freedom (if you out aside the oil / politics and all the other stuff that goes with it).

Is it because there is so much more tension over there now that it's making people associate with groups that they feel they can easily identify with and picking sides???? Because as you say, Toronto is multicultural but this doesn't seem to be happening over here (not that you hear of that much anyway)

Mind you - all that being said it's happening in the states too (Boston bombings)

Excepting the connection with skin colour, I think the point does make sense. Children born to parents who live in countries with which they have no connection will, I think, tend to be disaffected. As in Shard's example, they may grow up, move "home", and find that they don't fit there either. They're then in a kind of cultural limbo and so, perhaps, inclined to radical views. It's easy, and perhaps justified, to criticise the parents in such circumstances, the more so if they peddle a line like "doing it for the children".

I don't know that to be a widely held view. I certainly don't think that. The most sympathetic view of soldiers I'm exposed to is that, as individuals, their domestic circumstances were dire and we should not blame them for taking the King's Shilling or Uncle Sam's Buck. I see the purpose of the military, British, US and Canadian as being colonialism, Rhodesia then, Iraq now, Afghanistan through all ages.

It is only religious indoctrination (radicalisation is the buzzword) that can cause someone to act in this way.

he has now been named.

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/woolwich-te...7.html#GM8k4Wy