Honoring London, Manchester, and Beyond

Just as the recent radical Islamist suicide bombing of an arena that killed 22, mostly children, in Manchester England was starting to fade from world news headlines, Britain was struck again with another terrorist attack, this time in London. The Islamofacist killers ran a van into people, then stormed out slashing everyone they could find with machetes, killing seven.

The dead of these two attacks and others are honored at the "Memorial to Victims of Terrorism Across the World," located in the Iris sim in the mainland atol continent. At a shrine, there are a number of flags representing a number of assaults across the world. This includes the Middle East, where most incidents of terrorist murders on civilians have happened. Some flowers have also been left.

The shrine itself is owned by Jessica Ornitz, The flags were provided by someone known to longtime Second Life residents, Prokofy Neva.

In recent years, Second Life has seen a number of inworld memorials to the dead from terrorist attacks, Paris 2015, Nice 2016, Orlando 2016 , Egypt Flight 804 2016, and others. Amazingly, in the past there was a sim built by people justifying terrorism, but was gone some time later, possibly taken down by Linden Lab.

Iris (197/200/21)

Bixyl Shuftan

Tragedy: Memorial to the Fallen of Nice and Paris

Je Suis Nice: "I am Nice." 

While much of Second Life was busy celebrating the Relay Weekend, there was a small corner with a memorial for a recent tragedy. On Thursday night local time, July 14,  in the French city of Nice, a large truck plowed into a crowd of people whom had gathered to enjoy the Bastille Day celebrations. The result was over eighty people crushed to death and over three hundred hurt before local police killed the terrorist, a Tunisian delivery driver with a criminal record including one previous charge of assault. While he had no known connections to any group, the ISIS terrorist organization has claimed credit for the mass-murder.

In the Paris 1900 sims a memorial was set up for the victims in this attack, and two other acts of terrorism last year. There was a list of names of the 130 whom were killed in a number of attacks on Friday November 13 in Paris France, and a hand holding a pencil with a list of names of those killed in the attack on the Charlie Hebdo magazine on January 7 2015. One could pick up a small copy of the small Charlie Hebdo memorial.

Earlier,  there had been a picture of a ribbon, a combination American flag and rainbow with the caption "We stand with Orlando," a reference to the terrorist attack on the attack on the Pulse nightclub last month. Beneath that were a few candles, one with the display, "Please allow peace." There was also a Belgian flag, possibly referring to the bombings in Brussels in March 2016, all of the attacks linked to Islamic extremism.

This marks the third time in a year and a half the Paris 1900 sims have been the location of memorials, the previous two for the attack on Charlie Hebdo and the November 2015 attacks.

Les Champs Elysees (248, 114, 24)

Bixyl Shuftan