posted 10-26- 07:09 AM               

Israel must be recognised as a Preconceituous State, a non declared Aparteith to palestina people.

Damn World! No sense in mind of this people who can do something better and nobble!

posted 10-26- 11:58 AM               

Therefore, I will restrict my comments to a practical level. I think Israel is way out of bounds. They demand that the Palestinian Authority catch and turn over the perpetrators in accordance with their signed agreements (fine) but then they occupy Palestinian areas in violation of those same agreements, immediately, giving the Palestinian Authority no time to comply before the situation gets out of hand with the mobs due to the Israeli presence.

It is one thing to hold the Palestinian Authority directly responsible for the unrest, which I am sure it is responsible for at times and not at others, but it is entirely another to pin direct acts like the recent assination on them. The latter acts are carried out by those who would stop the peace process at any cost, and I do not believe the Palestinian Authority falls into that category whatever their faults.

posted 10-29- 08:41 PM               

They can't think up a path that will lead them towards their goals, or even reasonable goals.

Children!

posted 10-30- 12:33 PM               

To say that they've been fighting in the Balkans for a thousand years is a gross over simplification. They are no more "warring" than anywhere else in Europe. In fact, a study of the historical record shows many stretches when the Balkans were more stable and tolerant than the rest of Europe. By buying the "they've always been fighting" line without doing some serious investigation, one is allowing one's self to be manipulated by the people who really are the problem, leaders like Milosovic and Tudjman (much like the masses there were, leading to the horrors of the last decade).

As just a tiny example, Serbs who want to present the ancient battle of Kosovo Polje as a Serb crucifixion very conveniently forget to mention that there were Serbs fighting on the other side and that there were other Balkan peoples fighting with the Serbs. Even after WW2, there were uprisings in Yugoslavia in which Serbs and Croats rose up together, yet for political convenience, both in the Balkans and beyond, they were portrayed as eternal blood enemies in the '90s.

My knowledge of the Middle East is less extensive, but I'm learning. I suspect that much the same is true there. If we allow our opinions and policies to be driven by ill-informed stereotypes, we make a grave error and will only lead to us being part of the problem, not the solution.

Recommended reading:

The Balkans: Nationalism, War, and the Great Powers 1809-1999 by Misha Glenny

Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation (also the companion six hour documentary of the same name)

One Day in September: The Full Story of the 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and the Israeli Revenge Operation "Wrath of God" by Simon Reeve

Suez by Keith Kyle

posted 10-30- 08:41 PM               

People fight wars in different ways. In the 80s we fought a war of Capitalism with the Japaneese. In the 50-90s we fought a war of global domination with the Russians. Women and Men fight wars in their homes. All wars are interconnected.

War will always continue.

War is healthy!

Th West and Far East have learned how to make war pay, and has generally move beyond bloody battles (the litteral kind).

posted 10-30- 11:57 PM               

Much easier that way.

Who's a thousand years behind who?

posted 10-31- 04:22 AM               

as for the palestinians...as i recall, after israel was established, the were given land in jordan. not 5 years later the were kicked out for causing trouble! they were kicked out of a fellow muslim country!! how can this not tell u something about them???

posted 10-31- 05:10 AM               

quote:

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israel belonged to the jews 5,000 years ago

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quote:

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they fucking demand the city of jeruselum (im tired) and over half of the land area of israel!! NOTHING BUT GREEDY! last year they were offered abouth 85% of what they demanded!

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posted 10-31- 07:42 AM            

[Bush is pressing for the creation of a Palestinian state. But as long as this violence goes on, Sharon won't move for a Palestinian state, right?]

Absolutely not. Look, as long as Arafat is in power there will not be a Palestinian state. What's changed for centrist Israelis like myself and for many left-wing Israelis who devoted their lives to reconciliation not just with the Palestinians but with the PLO, is that we don't believe that Arafat ever intended to live in peace with Israel. The root of the deep depression that Israeli society has gone into in the last year, more than the violence, is the realization that we were fooled. We brought Arafat here. Nobody forced us to do that. People forget that. We initiated the Oslo process. We took a gamble on this guy. We armed his police. They are shooting at us with weapons that we gave them.

The terrible thing for Israelis like me who really wanted this peace to work is that the Israeli right, whom I still don't identify with, turned out to be right about the peace process. If you want to sum up Israel's dilemma, the Israeli left was right about the occupation and the Israeli right was right about the peace process. Which leaves us in the situation where we can't occupy and we can't make peace.

posted 10-31- 10:17 AM               

Perhaps "ancient" was too strong a term to describe Islam, but the point is still valid. Because it came along however many years after Christianity, etc., does not mean that it is neccessarity that many years "behind". In the middle ages, many Europeans who travelled to the Middle East, or even as near as Spain, were astonished at how much more advanced they were than the rest of Europe of the time.

No religion is "inherently" compatible with a secular society, its all in how it's practiced. Make no mistake, there are many in the U.S. who would love to see a Christian Theocracy here, and they are very dangerous people.

If anyone's interested, there's apretty good, if a little sparse in places, documentary being re-aired by PBS at the moment called "Islam: Empire of Faith". It's very informative and worth the time. Check your local listings!

------------------
Be seeing you,
3dp
Visit RAF Harkness!

posted 10-31- 10:59 AM            

From the article:

This development of the religious community outside of the halls of political power gives both Judaism and Christianity the flexibility to adapt to the secular concept of the separation of church and state that come out of the Enlightenment, and to embrace ideas of modernity and secular civil society. Put simply, neither faith requires the existence of a theocratic state to function fully as a religion because both their origins and endpoints exist above and beyond concerns of statehood.

Not so with Islam. The fact of Muslim military might is the rock on which the entire community of the faithful is erected. The Muslim state, with Muhammad at its head, predates the collection of the Hadith (narrations about the life of Muhammad) and the writing of the Quran itself. In Islam, it is not the religious message that promotes the faith into the halls of political power as in Judaism and Christianity, it is an original state of political and military strength that promotes the religious message.

Looked at this way, jihad is not a secondary concept in the development of Islam -- something grafted onto the original religious message -- rather it is the very origin of Islam, the sine qua non of the faith.

posted 10-31- 12:40 PM               

Although characterizing all of them as you do I think is a great injustice (I genuinely believe the majority in Pakistan support us), a documentary covering the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the colonial period through the modern day would be fantastic. I've got my eye open for one.

The Munich Olympics book I mentioned earlier is quite enlightening from a political perspective, but it would be very interesting to see in detail how the religion was co-opted into the fray at such a high level.

------------------
Be seeing you,
3dp
Visit RAF Harkness!

posted 10-31- 01:56 PM            

Islam too started peacful but also started with a signfigant advantage in technological knowledge over the west thanks to the remnants of the Egyptian empire and the fragments of knowledge left behind by that very technically advance (for the day) civilization. So, when Europeans went to the middle east they found a techically advanced civilization that was still in it's religious infancy... a religion that many competing groups and not enough power to fight themn so it remained peaceful. Now it is so deeply ingrained into Arabic society that it IS Arabic society and any attempt to secularize Arab goivernments is percieved by the population to be an attack upon thier very way of life. Islam has become the all encompassing society of the vast majority of the Arab world, not merely the religion of choice. this is why people are executed for not being Muslim in countries like Afghanistn... much as people were executed for not being Christian during the Inquisition.

I keep hearing that this is not a war against Islam...and from our point of view it is not. From the Islamic point of view it most certainly is. I fear that this will continue to grow into a true war between Islam and the West but we are really not left with any choice in our response. We must try to stop these people who would kill indiscriminately with weapons of mass destruction and hope the rest of the Islamic world wakes up and realizes that those who would commit these acts are not worthy of the name Muslim. I doubt they will though and I feel sorry for them...for this is one Jihad which they cannot win. They simply do not have the ability to fight a full scale war with the western world and if they try it will only lead to the death of Islam as a world religion - and that would be sad thing as a peacful Islam truly does have much to offer the world.

-Stark

posted 10-31- 08:38 PM               

quote:

---

Originally posted by 3dp:
. . . Much better to condemn rich and ancient cultures, cultures without which Western culture would be several hundred years behind where we are now (I'd say more about that, but I guess it would just be more intellectual gobbledyguk), and those who try to have a modestly well informed opinion on the situation than to bother learning anything beyond the headlines first.

Much easier that way.

Who's a thousand years behind who?

---

Obviously if you had somehting to say you'd have said it. But YOU DON'T!

Islam was a cutting edge idology 1000 years ago. But now it is a has-been, stringing along its followers like Johns.

Secularism is the key concept that brought us to the current "modern" age.

Secularism is to Democaracy what Islam is to Communism.

posted 10-31- 09:01 PM               

There is only conflict and submission. Very simple ideas that all animals live by. Conflict decides who is to be submissed.

All conflict is a search for power (I love how Germans pronounce the word "power" btw, if you are an english speaker and haven't heard it..politely ask a German to say "power").

Now, you can argue the "goodness" of this or that ideology, but mine will always trump yours, despite the stated good intentions of yours.

In the more sophisticaed West (and Far East), power is achieved through business means. Only idiots like Hitler want to start crazy wars that go no-where.

Islam has only idiots running the show and (like Jack Welsh and HP's Carley) they don't have a clue how to get power. Lacking ideas of how to build something better from what they already have, they DESTROY to give the appearance that progress is being made.

Simply brillient for an ancient and learned culture, wouldn't you say?? I'd say so.

Given that that my other ideology is that TIT-for-TAT works, I only hope the US has the stomach to NUKE THE SHITE out of them if they start touching off Nukes in this country.

Let Isreal have ownership of what remains.

posted 11-01- 12:28 AM               

Secularism is the best thing since sliced bread in my opinion, but two key aspects of it are tolerance of all and not mixing government and religion. And yes, it is one of the key flaws of Islam as currently PRACTICED in much of the Middle East. I for one just do not believe that it's all bad. In its proper place (serving spiritual needs, not temporal ones), it is as valuable to society as any other major religion you could name. Even in its most brutal Inquisition days, Christianity gave us much of what we still cherish today, art springs immediatly to mind.

At their roots, most religions are wonderful things with peace and kindness to ones fellow man at their centers. It is when they are perverted for very down to Earth motives that they become the evil that is things like Militant Islam. Then that aboration is compounded when others looking in do not bother to try and see why things are the way they are, how they got that way, and how they might best be mended, often because such an examination often reveals ones own complicity in the current state of affairs.

Our supposedly advanced way of fighting in your opinion, which in reality saw us use others as surrogates during the Cold War, can be blamed for much of what we are dealing with now. There were certainly other contributing factors, but a major reason for the situation in Afghanistan today is that we used them like so much cannon fodder to help bring down the Soviets, and once we had done so, we abandoned them like garbage.

Islam has no monopoly on religious intrusion into the states life. There are plenty of people who would have Creationism taught in our public schools. I have no problem with them telling their kids what they want (although I pity the children), but when they try to foist it on me and my children, with public money no less, it is then that they become dangerous by trying to impose their beliefs on me.

I must admit that I find many of your comments interesting. What religion to you practice if I may ask? I have nothing to hide, I'm an athiest and proud of it. How 'bout you?

posted 11-01- 10:23 AM               

Don't get me wrong, I do not believe that it was entirely our responsibility to rebuild Afghanistan, or anywhere else for that matter. But history seems to show that it is a matter of enlightened self-interest in such situations to get such regions back on their feet politically and, more importantly, economically. When people are destitute, it breeds the kind of hatred we are seeing now. It should have been Afghanistan's neighbors which stepped up to the plate to help stablize the country, but they didn't, and neither did we, to our cost.

Finally, I want to make it absolutely clear that I am not one of those "blame the West for everything because of colonialism, the Cold War, etc." types. The primary responsibility lies with the people directly involved (our weapons would have been useless against the Soviets if there was no one there willing to use them), in this case the Afghans. I am just trying to point out that we (the West) do have some responsibility and we must recognize that so that we don't repeat the same mistake next time.

posted 11-01- 12:52 PM               

And why does it always have to be the US? Where were all the oil rich Muslim countries when Afhanistan was in such dire need? I read just this morning that 80% of all the food given to Afhanistan during the current 3 year drought has been from the US!

When we "interfer" with other countries America gets criticized. When we don't "interfer" with other countries we get criticized. People just like to criticize the US because we are big and powerful. We can't help it if our system works best.

You say the "West" is at fault for breeding such hate and discontent. But it is the US that is under attack! If your "theory" is correct where is the European anthrax? How many European high-rises have been destroyed?

We do more than the rest of entire "West" combined to help other countries and we are the ones attacked. Sorry, you and Richard Holbrooke are both wrong. It has nothing to do with who helps who. It has to do with whose political and economic system poses the greatest threat to the dictatorial radical Islamic extremists who want to live in the Dark Ages. It has to do with who is most responsible for the survival of Israel. It has to do with which country represents Freedom to the world.

posted 11-01- 03:47 PM               

Helping nations improve crop yields and medical services, and building houses and railways is not "Westernizing". I suggested nothing of the sort. I'm the athiest, remember? I want no one imposing their culture or religion on me!

You are absolutely right about why does it always have to be us and I think I made it clear that it was not primarily our responsibilty in my post. We agree on that. What's the problem?

And yes, we're the biggest kid on the block and we draw the lion's share of the fire because we are the most visible. There are tremendous benefits to being the world's only remaining super power, but there are costs too, as you well know. We are very much in a damned if we do, damned if we don't situation most of the time. We should not let that stop us helping countries get back on their feet when the situation calls for it, or bombing the living crap out of those who threaten our wider interests.

While we're on pet peaves, Here's one of mine. Much is made about us understanding "them" and this is an entirely valid point. Many of my posts are about just this. However, when I hear Middle Eastern 'experts' talking or writing about our need to understand 'them', there is never any mention of their need to try and understand us. Almost everything I've said is applicable to them as well. If we all understood each other and our histories more clearly, we'd all be much better off.

posted 11-01- 05:56 PM               

Then you say “Helping nations improve crop yields and medical services, and building houses and railways is not "Westernizing". Oh really? And where do the Afghans get the hybrid seed and the fertilizer and the irrigation equipment and the tractors and training to improve these crop yields, if not from the West? And where do the doctors and medical equipment and facilities come from, if not from the West? And where do the home building materials and construction knowledge and equipment and city infrastructure come from, if not the West? And where does the track and switches and locomotives and freight cars come from, if not West?

Sorry, but you can’t bring an 18th century country into the 21st Century without westernizing it. If all these things can be done by their “Eastern” neighbors, why isn’t it being done? Muslim extremists are seeing this “westernization” happening all over the Middle East and it’s one of the things they want to stop.

Besides, even if we wanted to, how were we supposed to do all these things with a civil war going on? From the moment the Soviets left, the Afghan factions have been fighting one another. That’s how the Taliban came into power. Millions have been killed. Just what side were we to support and get permission from in order to come in and do all these things? Taking sides in civil wars is what gets us into the most trouble. Tell me how we were supposed to do all these things and not incur the wrath of one side or another at no risk of life to those over there doing the helping?

Sorry, 3dp, but you’re talking out of both sides of your mouth without looking at the realities. The Afghans themselves, 3 years of drought and no help from their rich Islamic “brothers” caused their current economic mess – 100%. Bin Laden just took advantage of it using religion as a front. The US can’t, and shouldn’t be expected to, bail out every backward country that can’t even govern itself. But of course, we get blamed for everything else, so why not this?

posted 11-01- 09:13 PM               

quote:

---

Originally posted by 3dp:
Todesvogel,

What religion to you practice if I may ask? I have nothing to hide, I'm an athiest and proud of it. How 'bout you?

---

Todesvogel is developing the Church of the Vulture. It isn't very far along, but the text is contained within the FSIC.

posted 11-02- 10:37 AM               

When I said 10%, I was trying to respect your opinion and others. I noted that it was for the sake of example. A percentage I think is major, you may not.

Another point of apparent confusion is the term "Westernize". I and many others define it as a cultural occurance, things like secularism, a free press, and McDonalds. The things I mentioned are pretty basic to simple existence, food, shelter, etc. Not that I think "Westernizing" (by my definition above) is a bad thing. I do agree that it is the only way forward.

Again, I agree about Afghanistan's Arab neighbors completely. I feel like I've said it before, but to try and be clearer again, I see the responsibility hierarcy for the situation in Afghanistan as this:

1st: The Afghans themselves. No doubt. They (like the Iraqis) have allowed an evil regime to remain in power and are now paying the price for that regime's actions.

2nd: Those directly taking advantage of their situation (Bin Laden and his cronies, etc.).

3rd: Regional neigbors (Pakistan, Iran, etc.) and their agendas.

4th: The wider Muslim world. If they're such brothers, why don't they help each other out?

5th: The wider world (U.S., Britain, etc) and their agendas.

Finally (for this thread, really!), all I'm really trying to say is that looking at anything in the world of international relations as simple and cut and dried is very rarely an accurate or wise way to view things if you want to have any hope of really solving the problems.

posted 11-04- 01:53 PM               

see:
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:sJvOLtPU6wU:www.nsulaw.nova.edu/student/organizations/ILSAJournal/5-1/Gravelle%25205-1.htm+liberal+islamic+countries+where+drinking+is+permitte d

Choice is a threat to Islam. Interestingly, there are some Islamic counties in the Middle East that allow all the Islamic sins, so rich-bastard Arabs fly to these countries for vacation, and naughty little weekends!

Westerners' lives are 100% about choice (what do I want to buy, what do I want to wear, what do I want to eat, how much sex can I have before marriage (and after), what show do I want to watch, which team(s) do I like, what do I like to drink, how many times do I want to go to X religions building, what political party do I like, how much money should I be making, is Playboy X playmate sexy, where do I want to go for vacation, blaa ba blaa blaa blaa). This is as true for a European as a North American, and Far Eastern Asian (and, to an extent, Indian et al).

Islam is freaked out about the possibility that average people could choose to move away from the restrictions of Islam.

Americans pratice religion because of choice (and some sense of community/peer pressure). What a radical idea!!

Don't believe that these ideas are a REAL THREAT to Islam? Ok, call up the Saudi consulate, and ask for an application for Visa. Those bastards will treat you as if you are SATAN HIMSELF, trying to break into their pure holy land. If they freak out at the idea that one Westerner can disrupt the Saud's country, imagine what they think all the Western products and broadcasts might do.

Using a Star Trek analogy:

The West is like the Federation, you can join if you want, and there are some agreeable rules you must follow.

Islam is like a Borg+Klingon society, you must be assimulated and the penalty for breaking rules is death.