Millennial Couple Bikes Near ISIS Territory to Prove ‘Humans Are Kind and Gets Killed

[19th Hole]

.



Millennial Couple Bikes Near ISIS Territory to Prove ‘Humans Are Kind’ and Gets Killed
Michael Sinkewicz15 AUG 2018
"Evil is a make-believe concept we've invented to deal with the complexities of fellow humans."

An idealistic young American couple was killed in an Islamic State-claimed terrorist attack last month while on a cycling trip around the world.
Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan, both 29, last year quit their office jobs in Washington, DC, to embark on the journey. Austin, a vegan who worked for the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Geoghegan, a vegetarian who worked in the Georgetown University admissions office, decided that they're were wasting their lives working.

https://www.pluralist.com/posts/1824-millennial-couple-bikes-near-isis-territory-to-prove-humans-are-kind-and-gets-killed
.

[SEAHAWKHARRY]

Democrats liberals natural selection taking place there.

[KVB]

Just doesn't sound real here.

They really pour it on in when talking about what they eat.

That's strange.

I wonder if it's real.

[kidcudi92]

lmfao

[Sam Odom]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/travel/were-the-american-cyclists-killed-in-tajikistan-naive-for-traveling-there/2018/08/14/f8212ca8-9b36-11e8-b60b-1c897f17e185_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.af98e991cdc1

Dont look for this on CNN

[KVB]

So I was right, it wasn't real news.

Or misleading at least.

All this talk of Isis and being near Isis territory are kind of true, but not nearly the whole story about those two facts alone.

I only read the paragraph in the OP, then Sammy's link.

I wonder if MSM will run with this.

[jtoler]

dont believe everything out there you live in a fake world remember

[Sam Odom]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifes...=.af98e991cdc1


Dont look for this on CNN

"On July 29, five terrorists in Tajikistan rammed a car into a group of seven Western cyclists, then set upon them with knives. Four of the cyclists were killed: two from the United States, one from Switzerland and one from the Netherlands.

The Islamic State asserted responsibility for the attack..."

[Sam Odom]

Tune In to Alex Jones for the truth

[dlowilly]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifes...=.af98e991cdc1


Dont look for this on CNN

Cant read it without signing up

[dlowilly]

So I was right, it wasn't real news.

Or misleading at least.

All this talk of Isis and being near Isis territory are kind of true, but not nearly the whole story about those two facts alone.

I only read the paragraph in the OP, then Sammy's link.

I wonder if MSM will run with this.

What was misleading?

[KVB]

Cant read it without signing up

I saw it.

No evidence of Isis, claim to possibly be some banned political group.

If it hits TV, it will get spun.

[VeggieDog]

[KVB]

What was misleading?

Overblown Isis in the OP paragraph.

Near Isis territrory, claimed by Isis, sure, that can all be said to be reported, but that's not the story here.

[KVB]

How do you post nothing?

I gave you a point, Veggie.

[dlowilly]

Overblown Isis in the OP paragraph.

Near Isis territrory, claimed by Isis, sure, that can all be said to be reported, but that's not the story here.

Oh I got u, ur saying they used the isis thing for the title but there is minimal evidence it was isis

[VeggieDog]

How do you post nothing?

I gave you a point, Veggie.

I copy/pasted the pic, but then it didn't appear to show up, so I had to do it again.

[KVB]

Oh I got u, ur saying they used the isis thing for the title but there is minimal evidence it was isis

Right, in fact, attacks on Western tourists in that area are very rare.

Maybe a bad thing starting up, but it's not like they rolled through Main Street Caliphate in their biking shorts and helmets.

[jtoler]

nothing to see here

[dlowilly]

Democrats liberals natural selection taking place there.

I know what ur saying but that isn’t natural selection

Naive or ignorant people don’t deserve to get run over and stabbed

It seems they had several run ins with drivers, so maybe they were assuming a share the road mentality that isn’t welcomed in much of the world

[KVB]

more than likely a cover story for 2 spies

So possible, but there are some daring tourists as well.

Sounds a like a hit, in a way.

[packerd_00]

They got white guilt written all over their faces,bloody yuppies.

[KVB]

Hey Pack, let's meet up for a bike ride through the local Caliphate.

Maybe we'll stop for an ice cream on Main Street!

[packerd_00]

Why not im in the mood for some Tiger Tail.

[ChuckyTheGoat]

Lauren Geoghegan. Geoing-geoing-gone.

[19th Hole]

If you're on your bike tonight...
Wear white. Honk Honk.

[19th Hole]

ROAD TRIP...
Let's all go bicycling through every country ending in "stan".

[SBR_Guest_Pro]

2 vegetarians missing? didn't see this on the news.. hmmmm

[billyloco]

I'm glad neither of you were knifed to death, i've been stabbed and it sucks.

Just don't think I'm non-violent .

[Thrilla]

19th Hole find a decent source next time.

Has nothing to do with Isis territory.
All mainstream media covered this.
Happened in Tajikistan.
5 Isis sympathisers responsible.
4 tracked and killed by Tajik authorities.

[OTL]

Sounds like the kind of satire you'd read in The Onion.

However, these globalist Liberal morons that are ruining the developed world are that stupid.

[hostile takeover]

Self draining of the swamp?

[Ebumdude]

Wtf. You can't make this crap up.

[Chi_archie]

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/07/w...ke-attack.html


Asked why they had quit their office jobs and set off on a biking journey around the world, the young American couple offered a simple explanation: They had grown tired of the meetings and teleconferences, of the time sheets and password changes.
“There’s magic out there, in this great big beautiful world,” wrote Jay Austin who, along with his partner, Lauren Geoghegan, gave his two weeks’ notice last year before shipping his bicycle to Africa.
They were often proved right.
On Day 319 of their journey, a Kazakh man stopped his truck, said hello and handed them ice cream bars. In a meadow where they had pitched their tent on Day 342, a family showed up with stringed instruments and treated them to an open-air concert. And on Day 359, two pigtailed girls met them at the top of a pass in Kyrgyzstan with a bouquet of flowers.
There were hardships, too, including punctured tires, snarling dogs, freezing hail and illness. But for Mr. Austin and Ms. Geoghegan, both 29, these were far outweighed by moments of human connection.

ADVERTISEMENT

Then came Day 369, when the couple was biking in formation with a group of other tourists on a panoramic stretch of road in southwestern Tajikistan. It was there, on July 29, that a carload of men who are believed to have recorded a video pledging allegiance to the Islamic State spotted them.


Image
SPAIN Mr. Austin was working for the Department of Housing and Urban Development when he decided to make the trip.CreditSimplycycling.orgA grainy cellphone clip recorded by a driver shows what happened next: The men’s Daewoo sedan passes the cyclists and then makes a sharp U-turn. It doubles back, and aims directly for the bikers, ramming into them and lurching over their fallen forms. In all, four people were killed: Mr. Austin, Ms. Geoghegan and cyclists from Switzerland and the Netherlands.
Two days later, the Islamic State released a video showing five men it identified as the attackers, sitting before the ISIS flag. They face the camera and make a vow: to kill “disbelievers.”
It was a worldview as diametrically opposed as imaginable to the one Mr. Austin and Ms. Geoghegan were trying to live by. Throughout their travels, the couple wrote a blog together and shared Instagram postsabout the openheartedness they wanted to embody and the acts of kindness reciprocated by strangers.

ADVERTISEMENT

“You get a feeling of wanting to give back, not just to this person who has welcomed a stranger into their home, but to the wider world,” Mr. Austin wrote. “You become someone who wants to welcome others into yourhome. You become a merchant in the gift economy.”
Back in Washington, where the pair met, Mr. Austin lived in a tiny house, an experiment in the principles that eventually led him to his journey around the world.


Image


MALAWI The couple camped along route.CreditSimplycycling.orgAfter earning a master’s degree from Georgetown University, he began working at the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development. Convinced that many of the belongings people accrue are unnecessary, he began adopting a minimalist lifestyle, said his childhood friend Ashley Ozery.
With his own hands, he built a house, nicknamed “The Matchbox,” that was so small — just 140 square feet — that it was profiled on numerous TV shows. To free up space, the walls were constructed with built-in magnets, so that he could store metal objects by sticking them to the paneling, like his spice collection.
If one of his goals was to pare down his life to the bare essentials, another was to enlarge his world. Because he had no mortgage weighing him down, his miniature house meant that he could take unpaid leave from his government job and travel the globe.
“At HUD at the end of each year, you could ask for a higher salary or more vacation,” said Ms. Ozery. “He always chose more vacation.”

EDITORS’ PICKS


What the Mystery of the Tick-Borne Meat Allergy Could Reveal


The Age That Women Have Babies: How a Gap Divides America


Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change

ADVERTISEMENT

First, he took a scooter trip around the United States. That was followed by a rail voyage in Europe. Next came a stint in Namibia. Then it was a weekslong trip across India, said Ms. Ozery, who became friends with Mr. Austin in 1999 at their elementary school in Manalapan, N.J.


Image


SPAIN Mr. Austin and Ms. Geoghegan posted photos and writing about their journey.CreditSimplycycling.orgIn 2012, he met Lauren Anne Geoghegan, a native of Southern California, who like him had graduated from Georgetown and was now working in the college’s admissions office.
“Outside-the-box.” “Challenges me to grow.” “Adventurous.” That was how Ms. Geoghegan described Mr. Austin to her closest friends, said Kristen Bautz Robinson, who had known her since their first year at Georgetown.
Although Ms. Geoghegan, too, was a seasoned traveler — she had spent a summer in Beirut learning Arabic and a semester in Madrid becoming fluent in Spanish — the rugged, do-it-yourself journeys that had become Mr. Austin’s hallmark were new to her.
His values began to rub off on her, say her friends. She bought a bikeshare day-pass, which turned into an annual membership. Soon she purchased her own bike.

ADVERTISEMENT

Mr. Austin was a vegan. Ms. Geoghegan became a vegetarian, said her close friend Amanda Kerrigan.
It was in 2016 that Ms. Geoghegan told Ms. Kerrigan that she was planning to quit her job and bike around the world. Ms. Kerrigan could not suppress a little concern. “I said, ‘This is not the Lauren I know,’ ” she said, adding: “Jay changed the trajectory of Lauren’s life.”


Image


KAZAKHSTAN Drying clothes at a hotel room in Almaty.CreditSimplycycling.orgIf the plan seemed far-fetched, the couple was methodical in their planning. They did a monthlong test-run in Iceland, cycling across its valleys.
And since they had to carry everything themselves, they focused with laserlike attention on each object they planned to bring. One reporter who dropped by to write a profile of Mr. Austin found him in front of a scale, weighing the possessions he planned to pack — hat: 2 ounces; tablet: 11 ounces.
Online, they found a deck of cards measuring just 1 inch by 1 inch. “A regular deck of cards is not that big — that shows you the degree to which they planned,” said Holly Geoghegan, the young woman’s aunt, who was visiting them when the tiny deck arrived in the mail.
They spent months saving, but then it was time for big decisions: The trip was not one that could be covered by an extended leave.
“I quit my job today,” Mr. Austin posted the month before their departure last summer.
“I’ve grown tired of spending the best hours of my day in front of a glowing rectangle, of coloring the best years of my life in swaths of grey and beige,” he wrote. “I’ve missed too many sunsets while my back was turned. Too many thunderstorms went unwatched, too many gentle breezes unnoticed.”


Image


EGYPT Mr. Austin and Ms. Geoghegan met in Washington.CreditSimplycycling.org

ADVERTISEMENT

The day Ms. Geoghegan and Ms. Kerrigan said goodbye, the two friends hugged outside Ms. Geoghegan’s apartment.
“The minute your instinct tells you something is wrong — leave,” Ms. Kerrigan told her. She was concerned for her friend, in part because of how bighearted she was and in part because she feared that Mr. Austin had a higher tolerance for danger than Ms. Geoghegan did.
“When someone dies, people will always say, ‘Oh that person was wonderful,’” Ms. Kerrigan said. “Lauren was not just a good person. She was exceptional at connecting with people — exceptional at giving to people, in a way that would have been exhausting to me.”
The couple began their voyage at the southernmost tip of Africa with a miscalculation that left them stranded.
It was July 23, 2017 — winter in South Africa, when the sun sets at 5:30 — and they hadn’t realized how far they would need to travel on congested freeways before they could get out of Cape Town. At dusk, they found themselves with a punctured tire on the chaotic R27. There was nowhere to pitch their tent except for a ditch adjacent to the busy freeway.


Image


A PLEDGE TO KILL Two days after the cyclists were killed, the Islamic State released a video in which these men swore allegiance to the terrorist group.CreditIslamic State group, via Associated PressIn a post about why he chose to cycle — as opposed to, say, drive around the world — Mr. Austin spoke about the vulnerability of being on a bike. “With that vulnerability comes immense generosity: good folks who will recognize your helplessness and recognize that you need assistance in one form or another and offer it in spades,” he wrote.

ADVERTISEMENT

In the middle of the night, a security guard patrolling the grounds of a nearby nuclear plant spotted their tent. He radioed for help and arranged for a truck to drive them across the city to a campsite.
Their journey was a series of tedious, and occasionally grueling, physical tests, punctuated by human kindness.
They continued north, crossing deserts where the sand was so deep they had to dismount and push their bikes. In Botswana, a concerned man stopped his car to offer them ice water as they pedaled in 95-degree heat.
They cycled on dirt paths, through dry riverbeds and on cracked asphalt, going days without a shower. In Morocco, a family offered the couple a room, and then sent them off the next morning with homemade bread.


Image


TAJIKISTAN The Ak-Baital Pass in the Pamir Mountains. This was the last photo the couple posted to social media.CreditSimplycycling.orgDays turned to weeks, and then into months. Their bodies began to break. An ear infection landed Ms. Geoghegan in the emergency room in France. They both contracted pinkeye. They shouldered on through upset stomachs and sore throats.
It was winter by the time they reached Europe last December. Torrential rain soaked through their waterproof gloves. “Utterly hopeless, wet and cold,” they posted from Spain.

ADVERTISEMENT

A few hours later, a couple in a white van stopped, handed them a toweland insisted on driving them to their house, where they dried their sopping clothes in the dryer.
But in the course of their travels, their blog posts also noted flashes of cruelty.
On one mountain pass, a group of men blocked their path and tried to shove the couple off their bikes.
And just 50 yards from the Spanish border in bumper-to-bumper traffic, Mr. Austin signaled to a driver that he wanted to cut into his lane. The driver let him enter and then — slowly and deliberately — began to run him over, trapping Mr. Austin’s bike between the advancing car and the vehicle ahead of them.
Still, by the time they reached that bend in the road in Tajikistan just over a week ago, they had embraced the notion that the world was overwhelmingly good, the dozens of annotated photographs and the thousands of words they left behind show.
“You read the papers and you’re led to believe that the world is a big, scary place,” Mr. Austin wrote. “People, the narrative goes, are not to be trusted. People are bad. People are evil.
“I don’t buy it. Evil is a make-believe concept we’ve invented to deal with the complexities of fellow humans holding values and beliefs and perspectives different than our own … By and large, humans are kind. Self-interested sometimes, myopic sometimes, but kind. Generous and wonderful and kind.”
“No greater revelation has come from our journey than this,” he wrote.
In the video released by the Islamic State after the couple’s death, the men pledging allegiance to the group can be seen sitting on a stone slab, an aquamarine lake partly visible over their left shoulders. It’s the kind of panorama that the young couple might have stopped to capture and post on their blog.
But in the clip, when these men point to the scenery around them, they vow to slaughter the “disbelievers” who have overrun their land.

[Chi_archie]

oh shit I think one of the guys that drove over the bikers was Bobbyfk! far left