I’ve been warning since 2002 that the West really is in a war to
defend civilization against Islamic barbarians, and had better face up
to that fact before the consequences of whitewashing Islam as
a “religion of peace” get worse.
Comes now Fjordman, a blogger from Norway who tells us that Moslem
immigrants to Sweden report themselves to be
at war with Swedes. See also his earlier post about how Swedish
society is disintegrating — not despite its commitment to
‘multiculturalism’, ‘tolerance’, and the welfare state, but because
that commitment is being ruthlessly gamed by Islamofascists who see
themselves as the conquering vanguard of the Dar al-Islam.
“The Swedes don’t do anything, they just give us the stuff.” is a
telling quote from the interviews in “Vi krigar mot svenskarna” (“We
are at war with the Swedes”). The most chilling revelation is that
young Islamists’ contempt for native Swedes is not self-inflating
propaganda, but soberly justified by the the facts of Swedish
behavior. The rest of the Swedish population has been systematically
disarmed both physically and psychologically, taught that the only
proper attitude towards criminals and barbarians is one of cowardice
and appeasement.
The result? 85% of Sweden’s rapes are committed by immigrants or
their unassimilated first-generation offspring. Most of the rapists,
like most of those immigrants, are Moslems. The Moslems boast of
Swedish society’s lack of will to stop them. And the Swedish
establishment averts its eyes.
If more evidence is needed, consider Abdul Rahman’s narrow escape
from execution for apostasy in Afghanistan. The charge, which carries
a death penalty under Islamic shari’a law, has been dropped “for lack
of evidence”, but could be revived at any time. We have failed to
confront the central problem: shari’a law is not compatible with
Western civilization. One of the two must go. The Islamists
understand this very clearly, even if too many Westerners are still in
denial about it.
If the elites of the West — academics, journalists,
politicians — persist in that denial in the face of evidence,
our near future will be a descent into hell. Conditions in Sweden are
ripe for the rise of a neo-fascist/racialist movement in reaction to
the Islamic threat. In the 1930s, Hitler rose to power in Germany on
the back of a “Jewish threat” that was wholly fictional; dare we
assume that today’s fascists will fail to exploit an Islamic threat
that is all too chillingly real, and gleefully announced by the
Islamists themselves?
Here
is one of its victims:
Sweden has long held itself out as the cutting edge of social
progress, exhorting the rest of the world to the virtues of
multiculturalism, open immigration, and an indulgent welfare state.
The blood on that rape victim’s face is the visible sign of one end of
the road down which Sweden has tried to lead the West; the other
possible end, even more horrifying but daily more likely, is the
swastika.
Either way, any society that can summon neither the means nor the
will to protect its young women from forcible rape by barbarian
invaders will have failed in the most basic possible way.
Yeah well I’m a Swede and this is a serious problem. I ain’t been to the city of Malmö for a long ass time because of the crime there.
On a positive note, it’s spurred me to start working on a Swedish RKBA lobby/info group. Maybe you got some tips?
Also, I’m writing my paper here in law school on American gun laws. Any tips?
>On a positive note, it’s spurred me to start working on a Swedish RKBA lobby/info group. Maybe you got some tips?
Maybe your slogan should be “Arm the Women!” How does that go in Swedish?
And maybe one of the things the men in your RKBA group should focus on is personally teaching women not just how to shoot, but why.
Five hundred years ago your ancestors were the most feared warriors in Europe. The Byzantines hired them to fight — and frighten — invading Islamic hordes. Perhaps you should call your RKBA group the Varangians. Don’t use a throwing-axe as a symbol, though, the Vichy French crapped all over that one.
Yeah well the Varangians were 12th century mostly I think
Oh and it’s “Beväpna kvinnorna!”
The hard part about your idea is to, like, do it legally, seeing as how this is Sweden :)
How about calling it “Molon Labe”?
>How about calling it “Molon Labe�
Er…what’s it mean?
>How about calling it “Molon Labe�
Er…what’s it mean?
If I am right, molon labe is really a phonetic representation of what the ancient Spartans told representatives of Persia. It literally means “come and get it”. In the case of Sparta and ancient Greek city-states, I believe it was earth (ground turf) and water, as signs of surrendering to Persian rule.
IKD
Perhaps one unintended consequence of gene-based morality is a weak spine. The Poles don’t seem to have this problem.
“come and get them”…a quote from a famous Spartan battle. Upon receiving a demand to lay down arms and ‘peaceably’ surrender to *massively* superior forces, the battle cry was given “Molon Labe” (pronounced mo-lone lav-eh if I remember correctly) and the fierce warriors kicked the shit out of the massive opposition.
A great 2nd Amendment subtext if ever there was one :-)
http://www.thefiringline.com/HCI/molon_labe.htm
>If I am right, molon labe is really a phonetic representation of what the ancient Spartans told representatives of Persia.
Ahh. I grok in fullness. I will now render this into modern street English. Doubtless Pete Bessman will correct me if I mistranslate:
“Come get some, suckaz!”
>Perhaps one unintended consequence of gene-based morality is a weak spine. The Poles don’t seem to have this problem.
Um. Neither do I. Faith-based religion wasn’t a requirement for me to grow a backbone, so it probably isn’t a requirement for the Poles, either.
By the way, ESR, the link you gave to the site telling the story of that bloodied, brutalized girl, is quite possibly the most horrific thing I have read to-date…and I speak as one with quite the concrete stomach.
If that were to happen here, I dread to think of the backlash…
“Come get some, suckaz!â€
That’ll do…if you’re Mr. T ;-)
>If that were to happen here, I dread to think of the backlash…
Which is why those of us who don’t want to see fascism come back must demand that our politicians take the threat seriously — which means, among other things, an end to all the appeaser bullshit about Islam being a “religion of peace”. We can’t fight the enemy if we can’t bring ourselves to face its nature squarely.
On this subject, I am in utter agreement with you ESR…my experiences with euro-arabs goes back a long way before 9/11…this day was inevitable.
I’m pessimistic ESR. In Sweden, Norway, and Britain appeasement is the order of the day. In the UK the Cartoonafada protesters threatened death with their signs with no police response at all, while already a pro-Free Speech protester last weekend has been charged with a hate crime for carrying one of the Mohammed Cartoons. Norway is no better than Sweden.
Denmark has somewhat of a spine, the Mohammed Toon Jihad was based on their restrictive immigration policy. However Labor in the Netherlands has erased Pym Fortune’s party with Muslim councillors. And the Netherlands is openly debating a blasphemy law to appease Muslims. While Gert Wildeers and Ayaan Hirsi Ali live under 24/7 police protection (yes threats by Danish Imams against “moderate Muslims” and the government also go on).
Meanwhile in Australia “surfies” and Muslims from Lebanon and Pakistan battle for who will control the beaches, and if Sharia applies or Aussie customs. Muslims spit on bikini-clad women (or sexually assault them) and scream whore at little girls aged 9 or younger. “Surfies” used text messaging to arrange a showdown with the Muslim mob after they beat a Lifeguard (the Aussie national Icon) into critical condition. After which the Muslim mob went rampaging in other neighborhoods and car-b-queing and so forth. Police response? Arrest the Surfies and apologize to Muslims.
The dynamic is that no Liberal Western government will crack down on Muslim jihad by small steps because they are most afraid of being called racist, along with genuine fear of Muslim reaction. Much easier to appease and kick the can down the road. Until as you predict you get various racist-Volkish groups being the only ones to stand for Western values under assault by Dark Ages religious fanaticism.
The leader of the BNP (a rather loathesome racist group) is under trial for saying, several months prior to 7/7; that native born Muslims from near where he was standing would commit terror acts against Britons based on their Islamic beliefs. The Court has already cautioned that being factually correct (as the man was) is no defense against his charge of prohibited hate speech.
Need I point out how utterly disastrous this is? Government derives it fundamental legitimacy from foremost, protecting the welfare of the people. Sacrificing protection of the majority for PC nostrums about a minority only makes the BNP look rational and reasonable to a desperate people.
Humble opinion from an admittedly uninformed atheist –
If the disciples of Muhamed believe the prophecies will be fulfilled, no matter how long it takes, then Islam is a religion.
If they believe they are tasked with fulfilling the prophecies, then it is a cult.
Eric, how do you verify your sources?
You always have interesting links to follow, but I was just wondering what sort of “bullshit filter” you use – I’m not referring to this article in particular, I mean in general.
For this article specifically, I would hope that any female I tried to rape would do her utmost best to remove my genitalia in a permanent fashion.
How does one fight a religion?
>You always have interesting links to follow, but I was just wondering what sort of “bullshit filter†you use – I’m not referring to this article in particular, I mean in general.
I have several bullshit filters. One of the most important is that politically-motivated BS has recognizable cliche patterns. There are certain kinds of semantic deletion to watch for, especially pronouns with an unspecified scope and panchrestons (claims which the speaker can make unfalsifiable by perpetually shifting the terms of reference).
It helps to have a large knowledge base too, especially when (like me) you collect things that “everybody knows” that ain’t so. Most political propaganda is written by people who are either naturally stupid or have been rendered artificially stupid by their political belief system. A good example of the latter is the constant stream of idiocies emitted by left-wingers whose beliefs require them to ignore basic microeconomics. To be fair and balanced, I’ll add another example: right-wingers whose beliefs require them to ignore the possibility that morals can be grounded elsewhere than in some myth about a theistic Nobodaddy.
“Come get some, suckaz!â€
Duke Nukem would be proud.
\m/ (>.and bear arms, people, and for good reason. Anti-gunners talk about less lethal alternatives like they’re amply effective — they’re not. They were invented for law enforcement and military agencies to limit liability, and only wound up in the hands of civilians thanks to the likes of Brady et al.
Any reasonably tough, or even just sufficiently pissed male can fight through pepper spray. I know, because I own and carry a can of ALS TopCop (the best you can get), and I’ve sprayed myself — yeah, it sucks, but don’t expect to take anybody down with it. And it’s not like this is special knowledge on my part. Basic training of practically any branch of law enforcement or military involves direct and deliberate exposure to a large dose of some form of oleoresin capsicium, because the data shows that when OC is deployed, you’re just as likely to get hit as the bad guy. For comparison, the firearms qualification requirements for basically all police departments are a complete joke. What this means is that, if a beat cop can deal with it, so can the psychotic religious zealot trying to rape you.
Pepper spray is better suited to pranking your friends or making a bad burrito bearable than combat. As if the above wasn’t proof enough, consider that it takes a minute or two to kick in full force anyway. You can be dead in a second.
Wow, sorry for the somewhat OT rant — just had to get that off my chest. Molon fuckin’ labe motherfuckers.
>Any reasonably tough, or even just sufficiently pissed male can fight through pepper spray. I know, because I own and carry a can of ALS TopCop (the best you can get), and I’ve sprayed myself — yeah, it sucks, but don’t expect to take anybody down with it.
I second this. I accidentally zapped myself the same way once. While it was damn unpleasant, all it would have done if I were in a violent mode was piss me off enough to make me more violent.
Hey eric…
ur article doesnt sound logical at all.I mean after all islam is a religion,with out knowing whats islam and what are its teaching,how do u say islam is at war with us.Have a look at its doc thats the quran and try to point out one verse which sounds not logical.In every society there has been gud and the bad and will continue to be like that,y point out islam alone ,what do media get from it?????these points have to considered……i m a big fan of ur articles but this was way too illogical.
>If that were to happen here, I dread to think of the backlash…
Which is why those of us who don’t want to see fascism come back must demand that our politicians take the threat seriously — which means, among other things, an end to all the appeaser bullshit about Islam being a “religion of peaceâ€. We can’t fight the enemy if we can’t bring ourselves to face its nature squarely.
Can’t help thinking you’re working yourself up into a lather over very little here. For one thing, there are some precedents for what can happen to persons of colour even *suspected* of offences against white American womanhood, and I hardly imagine the small and nervous American Muslim community is interested in going there. Moreover, Fascism in Germany took root thanks to a whole raft of grievances which don’t appear to have a lot of parallels in your view of America’s future (though they do in mine), absent some putative backpack nuke which the mullahs are plotting to deliver to Hamas even as we speak.
The guys doing this aren’t ‘representatives of Islam’. They’re just fucking punks, and they’ll provoke a backlash eventually. The Dutch and the Danes are already talking about ‘post-political-correctness’. The Swedes may well be peace-loving to a fault, but everyone has a tipping point, much as some people like to imagine that America and Israel are the only repositories of upright heathen-confronting manliness left in the world.
Some people in this world are just born to lose.
>with out knowing whats islam and what are its teaching,how do u say islam is at war with us
I say “Islam is at war with us” precisely because I do know what it teaches. Jihad, dhimmitude, jizya, and taqqiya.
>The guys doing this aren’t ‘representatives of Islam’.
They think they are. So do their imams and mullahs, who tell them welfare is “jizya”, the tax infidels rightfully pay to Muslims and that infidels may be used as brutally as one likes until they have submitted to Islam.
Your belief that these punks aren’t “representatives of Islam” seems to me to be pure denial, a futile attempt to wish away the intrinsic barbarity of that religion.
>Sacrificing protection of the majority for PC nostrums about a minority only makes the BNP look rational and reasonable to a desperate people.
Yes. This is how the descent into hell begins.
Oh, guys, what do you know about Islam except those stupid semi-intelligent idiots who make stupid things and call themseves muslims? Do you think that calling all the muslims “barbarians” and instigate people to beat them can improve the situation?
>Oh, guys, what do you know about Islam except those stupid semi-intelligent idiots who make stupid things and call themseves muslims?
I’ve been studying Islamic history and doctrine since 1974, and was therefore one of those least surprised by 9/11. I’ve read the Koran. The behavior of these thugs is justified by what the Koran says about behavior in the Dar al-Harb. Next question?
>there are some precedents for what can happen to persons of colour even *suspected* of offences against white American womanhood,
I meant to note that this is a facile and specious analogy. The American blacks who were lynched didn’t boast of being “at war with whites”, nor adhere to a religious doctrine that (at the time they practiced it) not merely excused by condoned rapine and murder against infidels.
Moreover, Fascism in Germany took root thanks to a whole raft of grievances which don’t appear to have a lot of parallels in your view of America’s future (though they do in mine), absent some putative backpack nuke which the mullahs are plotting to deliver to Hamas even as we speak.
Care to elaborate?
Assigning all of these problems to Islam is a very simplistic analysis of the problem. It is equally simplistic to characterize Muslim immigrants as agressors who hate Swedish culture and want to destroy it.
You have an immigrant community which feels isolated, has difficulty getting employment, is poorer than the rest of the society, has few opportunities for youth, and is concentrated in an urban area (ghetto). More importantly, they are easy to distinguish from the rest of the population by race, religion and culture. It is virtually guaranteed that there will be resentment and conflict on both sides. Yes, Sweden has been more welcoming than most societies, but the fact is that it is much more difficult to get a job if you are a second generation immigrant from North Africa. And many Swedes don’t accept the Muslim immigrants and don’t want to hire them.
Swedish xenophobia and resentment and xenophobic reaction against the muslim immigrants has increased dramatically since 1995 after a wave of immigrants arrived in the late 1980s and early 1990s. According to the Swedish National Crime Prevention Council, the number of reported xenophobic and hate crimes to the period from 1992-1995 was approximately 100 per year. Since 1995, there has been an explosive increase, with 865 offences being reported during the year 2000. Roughly half of these crimes are committed by White Swedish youth under 20. In 46% of the convictions, Nazi chants and salutes were reported. In 3/4ths of the cases, the convicted person had â€expressed contempt for non Nordic ethnic groups.†Now many Americans would say that these aren’t crimes–this is simply free speech under American law. Without getting into that debate, we can safely say that there has been a noticeably rise in the amount of resentment directed toward these Muslim immigrant youth. They didn’t simply start rejecting Swedish culture in a vaccuum. They also had hatred directed toward them. There is a complex interplay between rejection from the larger society and ethnic solidarity in opposition to the larger society. It is important to keep in mind that many societies have experienced these sorts of conflicts between immigrant communities and larger societies when Islam wasn’t a factor.
Almost anytime that you have an urban concentration of poor people, there is a rise in crime–look at the crime statistics for New York city in the 1800s after the Eastern Europeans started flooding in. Look at the crime statistics today for blacks and hispanics in ghettos in American cities. Attributing this crime to religion and culture is very simplistic.
It is interesting that most muslim immigrants in America don’t seem to be having any greater problem than any previous ethnic group in our history. Look at the race riots during WW II in New York and Detroit, or the riots in 1968 after King was assassinated, or the LA riot after the Rodney King beating–they are remarkably similar to the recent Muslim immigrant riots in France, but religion had nothing to do with these riots. In fact, immigrant muslims to America seem to be incorporating themselves into American culture better than many other ethnic minority groups in our nation’s past. Look at what people were saying in America when the waves of Irish immigrants arrived in the 1840s or the Eastern European Jews arrived in the 1890s. WASP culture in the America was directing just as much hatred toward Irish Catholics in the 1840s and Jews in the 1890s as what is currently being directed toward Islamic culture today. Read the writings of the No Nothing party in the 1840s or the comments in US newspapers about Eastern European Jews in the 1880s-1890s. Read what was being said in Northern American cities in the 1940s and 1950s when millions of blacks immigrated north from the Missippi delta to find work in places like Detroit and Chicago, We tend to forget our own history, because over time these groups were absorbed or accomodated within the larger society, but at the time people thought that it was impossible to deal with these immigrant and ethnic groups. There were labeled a threat that would destroy the culture of the larger society, but over time it didn’t prove true. My own ancestors spoke Polish for 3 generations after coming to America in the 1850s to Texas and their Catholic religion was deemed alien and strange to most of Protestant Texans. I read T Lindsey Baker’s book about the first Polish Americans in Texas and I was shocked to learn how much the Protestant majority of society rejected them and the Polish rejected the larger society in turn.
The major difference is that Sweden has never had this sort of immigration before, so they attribute these all these conflicts to Islam. They have never incorporated an outside ethnic group before, so they see it as a destruction of their society, but Americans know from their own history (if they bother to study it) that previous “threats” from outside ethnic groups didn’t didn’t destroy their society. If you had talked to many Americans in the 1840s they would have told you that the Irish were destorying Protestant America. They wanted to ban all immigration to keep them out. In the 1890s those dirty Eastern Europeans were driving up crime in Northern cities,degenerating the white race, and leading to the moral decline of America.
Today many people say that Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism is a new phenomenon and totally different from any threat that Western society has faced before. Maybe. But people also said that the Anarchists coming off the boats in the 1890s were a threat that our society had never faced before and they would also undermine Western society. In 1919, many Americans believed that the Bolsheviks would destroy our society as well. When Anarchists were killing heads of state and seeking to overthrow governments, it looked a lot like the terrorism of today and was perceived as just as much of a threat to our society. Attributing terrorism to religion is simplistic. Robert Pape’s work at the University of Chicago shows that the majority of suicide bombers since 1980 have been secular, not religious.
The funny thing about this whole debate about how to incorporate the muslim immigrants into the wider society is the fact that we are portraying the immigrants as the agressors and we are victims of their aggression. But I suspect if you actually talked to some of those Muslim second generation immigrant youths who say that they hate Sweden, they would tell you that they feel like they are the victims and just trying to defend themselves or get back at people who have despise them. Their culture is constantly denigrated and they are constantly told that they have no place in society–lashing back is the natural reaction. Saying you hate Sweden is a natural reaction. Look at what Black Panthers were saying in the late 1960s about America–it seems a very similar phenomenon to me. Rejected and alienated minorities through out history have reacted in similar ways and it can’t just be attributed to Islam.
In the final analysis, Sweden doesn’t have much a crime or ethnic problem compared to America. Sweden has much lower rates of theft, rape, and murder than the US. I bet a careful analysis would show that US ghettos which are majority Christian are much worse places in turns of crime and rape than Muslim ghettos in Sweden. Let’s stop attributing this problem solely to Islam and look at all the socio-economic factors involved. It is not just a simple story of multi-cultural Sweden accepting the Muslim immigrants with open arms and the Muslims rejecting Swedish culture and jobs in favor of islamic fundamentalism, unemployment, and crime.
The big question is how do we incorporate these people so they don’t feel so alienated. If we follow the path advocated by ESR, we will only see more alienated muslim immigrant youth in the future. Islamic fundamentalism will only become more appealing. The more Swedes wall off the immigrants and refuse to give them jobs and opportunities, the more likely that crime and ethnic hatred will increase. (In the larger context, the more that America attacks muslim nations, props up dictators in muslim countries, and supports the stealing of Muslim land in Isreal, the more Muslim youth in places like Sweden will be attracted to fundamentalist ideologies which give them the feeling that they are fighting back and defending their culture from assault.)
You have an immigrant community which feels isolated, has difficulty getting employment, is poorer than the rest of the society, has few opportunities for youth, and is concentrated in an urban area (ghetto). More importantly, they are easy to distinguish from the rest of the population by race, religion and culture. It is virtually guaranteed that there will be resentment and conflict on both sides. Yes, Sweden has been more welcoming than most societies, but the fact is that it is much more difficult to get a job if you are a second generation immigrant from North Africa. And many Swedes don’t accept the Muslim immigrants and don’t want to hire them.
The history of America proves this to be false.
>It is equally simplistic to characterize Muslim immigrants as agressors who hate Swedish culture and want to destroy it.
Why, when this is what the immigrants are telling us — loudly — about themselves?
I would bet that we’re going to find ourselves arguing against yet another tautology.
Immigrants’ experiences and the behavior influenced by these experiences will vary greatly with the availability of jobs – which in western societies tends to be inversely proportional to the degree to which socialism is practiced. (More generally, economic growth is proportional to the degree to which private property is protected and contracts are enforced, noting that socialism violates both principles, but not as badly as thuggocracy.) When a country doesn’t even have enough jobs for their own youth, why should they give them to immigrants?
Like earlier immigrants to the USA, Arabs and other Muslim immigrants to the USA can find jobs, and even our worst and lowest paid jobs are better than what most immigrants could get in their home country. Furthermore, in the USA, if you are hardworking and can forgo present pleasures for future advantage, every job is a step on a ladder upwards to a better life for your children. In Sweden … exactly why would anyone immigrate to a country that offers no opportunity?
So I don’t know for sure why Muslims in Sweden, France, and other European countries are so much more likely to turn to violence. Is it only because of the lack of opportunity? I’d suspect not. I think people who chose to immigrate to a country where the main opportunity is to collect welfare were different to begin with.
Plus, America doesn’t make exceptions for you because you’re a Muslim (or whatever). If you go on a killing spree, and we catch you — say hi to Tookie for us, will ya? Or as Ron White says, “We Texans are sending a message with the death penalty: you kill us, and we’re gonna kill you back.”
Not to mention that 46 of our states issue concealed-carry permits for firearms, with 36 of them being shall-issue (anyone can get one if they don’t have a history of violent crime). The huge difference in crime between concealed-carry states and the alternatives is enlightening, but not as much as the huge difference between crime rates of inner-city welfare cultures and the rest of the nation. That should drive a lot of points home, but horses and water aren’t usually all that miscible.
to scandian redneck: tips on gun laws – – yeah! join the NRA. everyone who owns a firearm should belong. the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action and NRA Second Amendment Foundation can tell anything and everything about gun laws. our anti-gun pols,(hillary, schumer, feinstein, boxer, et.al.) sincerely think that disarming and emasculation of American patriots will be easy. well – they’ve forgotten one thing – – – WE ALREADY HAVE OUR ARMS AND WE WON’T BY GOD GIVE THEM UP ! !
Care to elaborate?
Which bit? I don’t take the notion of a suitcase nook very seriously, afaict those things are difficult. Though paying a little more attention to container port traffic might not be a bad idea.
>The guys doing this aren’t ‘representatives of Islam’.
They think they are.
Thay can think what they like, they’re arseholes.
So do their imams and mullahs, who tell them welfare is “jizyaâ€, the tax infidels rightfully pay to Muslims and that infidels may be used as brutally as one likes until they have submitted to Islam.
While I’ve no doubt that there are *some* mullahs who’ve come out with such crap, where I have to get off is where you manage to extend it to all of them. I’m sure there were a few Jewish landlords in prewar Germany who fit the Nazi stereotype as well, you know?
I’m not denying that there are some nasty characters around whom Islam is in some instances making even nastier, and I’d be just as happy as you (if probably less surprised) to see a few of them made into lamppost ornaments ‘pour decourager les autres’. There are Swedish neo-nazis, and although they tend not to be the sharpest knives in the drawer they’re bound to figure out eventually that there are opportunities awaiting (the trouble with them is they’re quite likely to string up the wrong guys).
Your belief that these punks aren’t “representatives of Islam†seems to me to be pure denial, a futile attempt to wish away the intrinsic barbarity of that religion.
Well, I’ve known a fair number of Muslims, that’s all (I used to teach ESL in the UK). And I haven’t come across the sort of poster children for atrocity you seem to want people to think are typical of the breed. They’re mostly pretty mellow, however much you may want to claim that it’s only a thin veneer overlying yawning abysses of jihadi badness. The Kurds can be a little lazy, admittedly. But that might be a UK thing.
> I’ve been studying Islamic history and doctrine since 1974, and was therefore one of those least surprised by 9/11.
> I’ve read the Koran. The behavior of these thugs is justified by what the Koran says about behavior in the
> Dar al-Harb. Next question?
Did you read Koran in Arabic? Islamic doctrine? Uhoh :) I was not surprised at all by 9/11, because some people nosed into other countries’ deeds for too long. It’s not surprising that someone punch them findally. It’s sad but it’s true – 9/11 is not the cause, it’s consequense.
#It’s not surprising that someone punch them findally. It’s sad but it’s true – 9/11 is not the cause, it’s consequense.
I agree – 9/11 was more of a blowback of the CIA’s/US’s meddling in Middle Eastern affairs.
Raymond, I can’t agree with your stand on Islam. I’ve understood that religion is finally what its practitioner wants it to be. The way I practise Hinduism, for instance, is a far cry from the way the self-appointed caste-discriminating temple priests practise it, or the manner in which religio-political groups like the VHP propound it.
I have many Muslim friends, and these guys haven’t really bought into the crock of shit that these jihadis have been attempting to spread. To the best of my knowledge, such idiots represent a minority of the Islamic world. I’d rather target the terrorists, than Islam itself.
Did you read the Koran in it’s original, Arabic verse? Or was it an English interpretation? I haven’t read either, so you’re one up one me on this. Consider this however: Most Christians and Muslims consider Hindus a primitive bunch of idol worshippers, where in reality our conception of God is IMO, far more philosophically profound than either Jerusalemic faith. Their scholars have read our texts, surely, but they’ve read translations that do not convey the idiomatic semantics of the Devanagari languages. Could the same not be true with you?
Hi! If Sweden did “protect its young women from forcible rape by barbarian invaders,” would that mean arming them; or outlawing Islam; or more policing; or would it mean something else?
>I say “Islam is at war with us†precisely because I do know what it teaches. Jihad, dhimmitude, jizya, and taqqiya
do u know what jihad actually means…. it the fight with urself to stay on the right path….it doesnt mean “go kill someone who is not a muslim”.I wish u could use ur reasoning power to study islam more closely…
Mmm… now begins the revisionist history, where the Islamic terrorists do not actually rape their women, and self-detonate in school busses full of their own children. Why? Classic sheep vs. sheep dog mentality.
The sheep are weak, and they fear the wolves. They attempt to rationalize them away by putting the blame on themselves — “If we just fix ourselves, they wouldn’t hurt us,” the logic goes. It is psychologically satisfying to the weak, because it tells them that they won’t have to confront the enemy warriors. This is why so much breath is expelled to equate Bush with Hitler: the simple fact is that he isn’t anywhere near Hitler, which is the very reason the sheep attack him. Because they *know* they can do so with impunity.
But the sheepdog knows that appeasement is always a bitch. And he knows the enemy, and he will kill him. But until that task is complete, with every blow he strikes, the bleating of the sheep will increase. “Don’t provoke them!” they shout.
9/11 was our fault? Baaaaaaa…
Adrian, this bit:
Moreover, Fascism in Germany took root thanks to a whole raft of grievances which don’t appear to have a lot of parallels in your view of America’s future (though they do in mine)
And yes, we are at war with Islam, until Islam decides to condemn Sharia law. I don’t care WTF the Koran actually says, they’re the ones who are supposed to know that. It’s how they act, not what they’re little instruction manual from god says, that actually matters.
You stupid jerk, we are war with islam, we are try to kill them but oh no stop u have some ideas ha?
And here are pics of some victims of “civilized” western civilization democracy operations against “barbarians”…
http://www.robert-fisk.com/iraqwarvictims_mar2003.htm
ESR talking, the rest of the world is listening…
> And yes, we are at war with Islam, until Islam decides to condemn Sharia law.
Why just you don’t leave the world alone?
Are you think you’re the smartest?
Who give you rights to deicide for others how they should live?
Leave your life, and don’t touch others until they touch you. And if someone beat you, beat him personaly, and don’t escalate this on the whole religion.
Isn’t it simple enough?
Hey, JohnD…how about posting some more graphic pictures of dead/dying/injured children and weeping adults? I don’t think I understand how terrible war can be, or how evil we really are, yet. Twat.
Check this out! An interesting article in swedish! Can somebody that are NOT lazy translate it? http://www.dn.se/DNet/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=147&a=531981&previousRenderType=6
I think “USA is at war with world”. There may be a war. It depents where from you are looking? If you try to look as an Iraq people, you will see it.
There are many pictures “soldiers are killing palastian childs or american soldiers are killing iraqian people”.
Nobody knows what is happening in Iraq because of govenrments TVs.
Go to iraq, somali and others… See how USA steals their riches like oil.
ESR, just do coding or visit the 3th world to see “how USA exploits them” and then talk about islam.
Told ya… bleat louder, bitches.
I caaaaan’t heaaaar yoooooou…
Sorry ladies — I know it makes your vaginas ache, but there are evil men out there. They’ve built totalitarian nations, and used them as platforms to launch terrorist attacks against the modern world. So we’re replacing those totalitarian nations with free nations, and we’re killing the terrorists when they rear their ugly heads. We fight evil — that’s how we roll.
Kinda funny when you think about what these people are actually protesting *for*. “Leave Saddam as ruler of Iraq!” “Let the Taliban control Afghanistan!” I smell veiled anti-americanism. That’s probably why JohnD fails to mention that the victims in his linked-to photographs were actually attacked by terrorists. Which was a bad idea, since now revenge-killings are the leading cause of death in Iraq — turns out that Iraqi parents don’t take too kindly to having their kids blown up. Neither do our troops:
http://www.michaelyon-online.com/cart/images/FramedPhotoLarge.jpg
People don’t want to end America’s “hegemonic praxis” because it’s a danger to the world — they want to end it because their back-asswards societies just can’t seem to catch up. And the amount of egg on their face when all is said and done, and the Iraqi people are enjoyi a modern society, god that’s gonna be difficult to bear.
“Granpa, you mean you actually *opposed* liberating all those people?”
“Well you can’t trust those damn Americans, sonny…”
I just what to make a comment. You write “85% of Sweden’s rapes are committed by immigrants or their unassimilated first-generation offspring. Most of the rapists, like most of those immigrants, are Moslems.†Were you get the numbers from I don’t know but I just want to add that the biggest group of immigrants in Sweden are Finnish, witch are Christians not Moslems.
> “Well you can’t trust those damn Americans, sonny…â€
Why should you trust in an undemocratic country?
“Kinda funny when you think about what these people are actually protesting *for*. ”
Excellent point. “Say No To” slogans always a lot sexier than “Say Yes To” ones because they are lot harder to falsify.
“Why should you trust in an undemocratic country?”
…meanwhile, back on planet Earth…
“…the biggest group of immigrants in Sweden are Finnish…”
Apparently so, but this is not pertinent. Muslims come from many different countries…indeed, the top slot is occupied by the Finns, but now add up the totals from *other muslim countries*…
ESR’s factoid stands.
“…Can somebody that are NOT lazy translate it?…”
If you know it’s interesting, then presumably you can read it…so if you’re too fucking lazy to do the job, why should anyone else carry your ass? Twat.
I could just about make out a snippet about Tom Jones getting his knighthood…about time too.
I’ve missed all the fun, so let me try engaging Nohar in conversation:
/* [esr] I say “Islam is at war with us†precisely because I do know what it teaches. Jihad, dhimmitude, jizya, and taqqiya
[nohar] do u know what jihad actually means…. it the fight with urself to stay on the right path….it doesnt mean “go kill someone who is not a muslimâ€.I wish u could use ur reasoning power to study islam more closely…
*/
that’s funny cuz the palestinians think jihad means u fight with israel to wipe them off the map…they’ve been saying this for thirty years.how do I know ur translation is right and their translation (all 5 million of them) is wrong?
hey american you say “Islamic barbarians” he, we see what are you doing in Iraq clearly, open your eyes and see the real barbarians
Why should you trust in an undemocratic country?
Countries don’t do shit, dickhead — they’re blocks of land. The alternatives are government and people. If you would put full trust into any government, you are a fool, and you would never comprehend America’s constitutional republic to begin with. Suffice it to say that I do not desire to live under mob rule, which is what a pure democracy is: witness the French youth protesting in favor of keeping their unemployment levels at double the American rate. I don’t know what’s more pathetic, the fact that they’re too stupid to figure out that’s what they’re doing, or that it’s going to work and they’re going to get their way by virtue of making the biggest stink.
That leaves our people. Apparently, you have a problem with us. You’d rather take the word of people who blow up subways and knock over towers and self detonate on schoolbusses — they say they’ll go away if we appease them. Appeasement has a track record of not working. But we go out to get these people and send them to whatever god they wish, and we have a track record of fixing broken nations (you’ve heard of Germany and Japan, right?) — and we’re the deceivers?
that’s funny cuz the palestinians think jihad means u fight with israel to wipe them off the map…they’ve been saying this for thirty years.how do I know ur translation is right and their translation (all 5 million of them) is wrong?
Yeah, right, like he’d actually type an ellipsis properly. ‘A’ for effort, though.
>While I’ve no doubt that there are *some* mullahs who’ve come out with such crap, where I have to get off is where you manage to extend it to all of them. I’m sure there were a few Jewish landlords in prewar Germany who fit the Nazi stereotype as well, you know?
OK, here’s the problem. Within Islam, there is no principled way to oppose the “extreme” mullahs. None. You see, they have the Koran on their side, and the Islamic tradition of Koranic literalism runs much deeper than the Christian analog. The would-be “moderates” have no place to stand, so the only options they have are to renounce Islam or stand mute. Why else do you suppose the entire Islamic world has been able to summon up more than a few muted protests against Islamic terrorism since 9/11? This is not an accident. Violent absolutism is wired into the DNA of Islam.
I knew this thirty years ago. I remember thinking, after I read my third history of the religion, that there was serious danger to civilization if we didn’t manage to corrupt Islam out of existence within the next couple of generations.
To make your analogy work, the Torah would have to tell all Jews that non-Jews not only may be abused without limit, but that it is actually a Jew’s duty to fulfil anti-Semitic stereotypes. And, furtherrmore, that when a non-Jew asks, the Jew is required to deny the existence and force of this doctrine.
“hey american you say “Islamic barbarians†he, we see what are you doing in Iraq clearly, open your eyes and see the real barbarians”
I’m opening my eyes, and I’m looking right at you…and I have a loaded gun. I have no tolerance for your raghead bullshit.
Fuck with me and die. Fast.
>> Violent absolutism is wired into the DNA of Islam.
There is no difference between Adolph Hitler and you.
People makes mistakes. I know Kuran thoroughly, and there is no anything about war but there are to many sentences about the peace. But i also know many muslim, they are in war. Adolph Hitler was in war, today America is in war just for oil nothing more. 9/11 is just an excuse. A real muslim don’t accept it, never never…
So, muslim’s mistake does not connected to Islam or Quran but connected to humanity. I know there are so many killer in San Francisco, but i never think that, Christians are killer. That is the point.
From Holy Quran, Maida 32:
“On that account: We ordained for the Children of Israel that if any one slew a person – unless it be for murder or for spreading mischief in the land – it would be as if he slew the whole people: and if any one saved a life, it would be as if he saved the life of the whole people. Then although there came to them Our messengers with clear signs”
Note about palastian: I don’t accept suicide bombs. But please think that, if somebodies occupy your lands, build a new government there and banish you and kills your childs everyday, what do you feel? To understand that, you have to live it. Americans spends some billions dollars to become thin. Do you know with this money we can save African childrens in hunger.
Although, we should learn to live together. There is only one world to live and all of us are child of Adam. White/black/blonde/asian there is no difference. This article by Eric Raymond, just helps warriors, weapon merchants and so…
At last, destroying is easy but building is not so easy. Building is the mission of good mans.
Baris Simsek
http://www.enderunix.org/simsek/
Let’s put it this way: It isn’t the Islam that is at war, it is a bunch of people who think they are muslim. You didn’t state otherwise, but I think this needs to be said as often as possible, since many people completely fail to see the difference between Islam and muslim terrorists.
Because there is none. The difference is not between Islam and terrorists, but between Islam as a meme and peaceful, normal people who consider themselves Muslim, but are actually not.
The point is the following: it is impossible to both be good guy and a good Muslim. One has to choose. One can be a good guy and may claim he is Muslim, but he actually isn’t, he’s rather practicing approximately the same warm, fuzzy mix of cultural heritage and faint theism that most Christians do. If one really cares about Islam and wants to follow it really closely, then he has to fight for imposing the sharia as legal law, because there is simply no choice, the Quran is quite clear about it, and do a lot of other things that automatically eject him from the “good guy” basket.
So, to understand it clearly, the enemy is Islam as a meme, not the masses who consider themselves Muslim. Terrorists are those Muslims who understand Islam correctly and follow it closely. Peaceful, normal Muslims are who don’t really understand Islam or don’t really care.
Nobody wants to kick Ali’s ass, who is a falafel retailer in the Cairo bazaar, because Ali doesn’t really understand Islam or does not really care about it.
Mr. Dan Kane you show that you are a real barbarian, please look your mirror. And we dont need your tolerance. And God knows who die fast and first, we are ready to fight with your injustice and die for justice
Shenpen, that was utterly pointless. Islam is a religion of love and peace, even if many muslims think otherwise. I do agree that the Islam is “the same warm, fuzzy mix of cultural heritage and faint theism that most Christians do” as you put it. Even though there is a part of the Koran that states that a good muslim should engage into Jihad, it doesn’t explicitly state what that Jihad means. Therefore, muslims make a difference between the Jihad with the Sword, and the Jihad without. Obviously terrorists (if they really fight for their religion and not simply against the western world) interpret it as Jihad with the Sword.
>So, to understand it clearly, the enemy is Islam as a meme, not the masses who consider themselves Muslim. Terrorists are those Muslims who understand Islam correctly and follow it closely. Peaceful, normal Muslims are who don’t really understand Islam or don’t really care.
Well put. As I said earlier, I figured this out thirty years ago. I was hoping the pathogen would die off before it hit another virulent phase, but it was not to be.
ESR, you’re no different than hitler? I never knew.
How’s the concentration camp going? Killed any millions of people today? How about the whole centralized economy thing, got any new tricks up your sleeve there.
Wow. He’s just like hitler! I never knew. Hey, he has a mustache, so it must be true, right?
i can’t believe what i’m reading. i know you will delete this reply too, as you did the one before but it’s ok. someone will read it and it’s enough for me.
[ed. note: this is, to my knowledge, the first commebnt posted by this fellow.]
someone reads Quran and decides to become a Muslim, a lot of Americans did that…
someone else reads Quran and thinks that the world should get rid of Islam…
now, correct me if i’m wrong but it’s in the eye of the reader; if you want to see evil, you see evil, and esr, you definitely see evil :) so please, i want to see you try to get rid of billions of Muslims. it will be really fun to watch.
you americans really think that you know too much and the world is at your mercy. it was clearly seen that you went into Iraq to liberate… dont make me laugh, it was oil, everyone knows it.
one government decides to get the oil, starts a war, “liberates” a country, then its citizens start mocking with a religion. the real evil happens to the people who live there, children who die, people who cannot live in peace. and thank you all for this.
i dont defend that saddam or others were “good”. they were evil too, it’s just another beast on them again and those people will keep on suffering. so so so, you’ve got your oil, now let’s see you get these “barbarian” muslims out of the way. ah, my fool american, please stay in your own continent, just don’t come over here and make our lives a living hell.
and peter, if you read this, somehow, you’re second to esr, it’s fun to read your comments. when one says hitler, he always mentions the concentration camps… you’re really proud of yourself, right? think what you want to think…
lastly, you all believe that you understand Islam and we, who are living with it don’t? i’m a muslim for 26 years and i never wanted to kill anyone and was never TOLD to do so.
it was fun to read and gave me a second opinion how really stupid and narrow minded you americans could be. thank you…
“Mr. Dan Kane you show that you are a real barbarian…”
Yeah…whatever…whodathunkit…zzzzzzz
“…we are ready to fight with your injustice and die for justice”
For you all, death is indeed justice. Unfortunately, it comes too easy…look at the kill-count in Iraq…you just die like a bunch of pussies, where’s the sport in that? I’d get a greater sense of accomplishment from killing ants.
Baris Simsek:
/* I know Kuran thoroughly, and there is no anything about war but there are to many sentences about the peace.
*/
That’s great. I don’t know the Quran that well. However, I’m curious how Muslims thought the Quran was about conquering the rest of the world for 1200+ years, and only after they were whupped badly in WWI did they rethink that. Are you sure that there isn’t anything in there about war? Especially since there is a lot in there about jizya, the caliph as a great military leader, the ability for a new caliph to arise by being a great military leader, and the passages bin Laden read to the people of Iraq on how they ought to take refuge in the sand and conduct a guerrila war?
/* But i also know many muslim, they are in war. Adolph Hitler was in war, today America is in war just for oil nothing more. 9/11 is just an excuse. A real muslim don’t accept it, never never…
*/
If America wanted Iraq’s oil, wouldn’t it have been easier to go along with France and Russia with the Oil for Food program?
And, if real Muslims don’t accept 9/11, why weren’t there any public demonstrations to that effect on 9/12? What about the Saudi royal family offering to donate money to rebuild the WTC, but only if it could give a statement that the US brought 9/11 on itself? Why did the Council on American-Islamic Relations take six weeks to decide to denounce the attacks? Really, it seems that CAIR’s mission is to let us know what real Muslims would accept. Why did they take so long? What kind of relationship does CAIR want between America and Islam?
And why did “real Muslims” shrug when Filipino Muslims, IN THE NAME OF ISLAM, behead Christian school girls less than ten years old? Why did “real Muslims” shrug when Muslim teachers IN THE NAME OF ISLAM would not let Muslim girls escape a burning building because their heads were not covered?
Sorry, but what you’re saying and what everybody else is doing doesn’t jive all that well.
>>I know Kuran thoroughly, and there is no anything about war but there are to many sentences about the peace. But i also know many muslim, they are in war. Adolph Hitler was in war, today America is in war just for oil nothing more. 9/11 is just an excuse. A real muslim don’t accept it, never never…perfect faith.
“Slay them wherever you find them. Drive them out of the places from which they drove you. Idolatry is worse than carnage…[I]f they attack you put them to the sword. Thus shall the unbelievers be rewarded; but if they desist, God is forgiving and merciful. Fight against them until idolatry is no more and God’s religion reigns supreme…(From the Koran, 2:190-193)
>>I know Kuran thoroughly, and there is no anything about war but there are to many sentences about the peace. But i also know many muslim, they are in war. Adolph Hitler was in war, today America is in war just for oil nothing more. 9/11 is just an excuse. A real muslim don’t accept it, never never…
(Not sure why my reply was truncated)
Nice to see the True Scotsman fallacy knows no religious bounds.
As far as I can see, Islam is what Muslims do. Allah threatens unbelievers with a miserable life and eternal punishment, and his faithful are only too happy to assist. The nineteen hijackers exhibited perfect, not imperfect, faith. Islamic Moderates cannot criticize them without cutting off their own branch of support, namely, their own devotion to their scriptures and prophets.
“Slay them wherever you find them. Drive them out of the places from which they drove you. Idolatry is worse than carnage…[I]f they attack you put them to the sword. Thus shall the unbelievers be rewarded; but if they desist, God is forgiving and merciful. Fight against them until idolatry is no more and God’s religion reigns supreme…(From the Koran, 2:190-193)
>I know Kuran thoroughly, and there is no anything about war but there are to many sentences about the peace.
When a Moslem says this, the safe bet is that he is lying. You see, there’s a doctrine called “taqqiya” under which it is not only correct but required for a Moslem to lie about the content of his faith when in the Dar al-Harb.
and peter, if you read this, somehow, you’re second to esr, it’s fun to read your comments. when one says hitler, he always mentions the concentration camps… you’re really proud of yourself, right? think what you want to think…
Somehow, I read that — I guess because Allah wills it. He also wills for me to tell you your kinda fulla shit. And Allah gave me a gold star for having a huge cock, so yeah, I’m proud of myself. It’s that aryan supremacy, what can I say. Don’t question it.
When a Moslem says this, the safe bet is that he is lying. You see, there’s a doctrine called “taqqiya†under which it is not only correct but required for a Moslem to lie about the content of his faith when in the Dar al-Harb.
This taqqiya ain’t in the Koran, it’s in some commentary and is probably only going to be known to people studying to be imams. Nothing outside the Koran constitutes a requirement.
I doubt esr has really read the Kuran. If he did, he would cite the following part of the Kuran instead of talking about “taqqiya”:
86:15 Lo! they plot a plot (against thee, O Muhammad)
86:16 And I plot a plot (against them).
86:17 So give a respite to the disbelievers. Deal thou gently with them for a while.
Adrian, this bit:
Moreover, Fascism in Germany took root thanks to a whole raft of grievances which don’t appear to have a lot of parallels in your view of America’s future (though they do in mine)
We’ve been over this, I’m sure – I’m less sanguine than some people about the magic power of the market to bring new energy sources online at convenient moments when others are declining. There are long lead times involved, and lots of people have been listening to economists when they should have been listening to engineers. And I’m afraid many Americans have been fed such a rosy picture of the future for so long that the disappointment should they ever decide they’ve been lied to on a large scale could lead to them voting for some fairly extreme people. It wouldn’t be like German fascism, but I can see a strong parallel to the master race ideology in the American conviction that their way of doing things is the best possible. Combine that with a sense that they’d been cheated out of something and it could get ugly.
Needless to say, I don’t expect you to agree with any of this (or to really register how happy I would (or will) be to be proved wrong).
So the USA is lucky… the most immigrants are Christians from Mexico. The US should encourage more Mexicans and South Americans to come to the US, as they will prevent any Muslims from taking over as in Sweden. And Catholics are much more closer to the Anglos than the Arabs.
>I doubt esr has really read the Kuran.
Doubt anything you like, idiot. Your doubts have no effect on the truth of the matter.
>> America is in war just for oil nothing more. 9/11 is just an excuse.
That’s a popular cry from people who don’t know Americans very well.
If America was in the war just for oil, there would be no dead Americans. You seem to have lost your clue, so I’ll share one with you: We’re doing things the hard way *because* we aren’t in it for the oil.
If we were in it just for the oil, we’d destroy everything from the air. Anyone in the way would die without so much as a moment to pray. When the dust settled, we’d come for the oil. Clearly this is not what’s happening now.
>> A real muslim don’t accept it, never never…
Right, and there’s that tolerance we associate with all religions of peace. :/
The Christian Bible says some pretty horrible things, too. The difference between Christians and Muslims is that when the Bible says “stone the adulturer to death”, we don’t actually do it … whereas Muslims do. And as Eric says, the definition of a good Muslim is somebody who adheres more literally to exactly what the Koran says. Part of the problem is that the Koran has never been translated[1], so every copy of the Koran still says exactly what Mohammed said. There’s no question about killing, because Mohammed said exactly that. There is no room for doubt — a good Muslim kills without question, without doubt, when in the situation that Mohammed told him to kill.
Whereas the Christian Bible was written three hundred years after Christ’s death, and we don’t have any original copies even of THAT Bible. So there’s much less reason to think that the Bible is actually Christ’s word, much less God’s word.
[1] You may have read a corrupt version of the Koran[2], translated into a wicked language. If so, you are an unholy blasphemer; how dare you say that you have read the Koran?
[2] And Mohammed[3] wrote the Qu’ran, not Koran, you ignoramus.
[3] And it’s Mu’hammed, ninny.
>>I doubt esr has really read the Kuran.
>Doubt anything you like, idiot. Your doubts have no effect on the truth of the matter.
Man, you ARE a moron. You didn’t even read my post. The quote I gave from the Kuran supports your affirmation that a muslim is required to lie to non-muslims, without having to resort to the outside doctrine of taqqiya.
Learn to read, esr.
[esr] Doubt anything you like, idiot. Your doubts have no effect on the truth of the matter.
Do you think you are the truth? Hahaha…
You know nothing about history it seems. Look, Islam is 600 years younger for Christian, right? Now stress your brain and try to remember what did Chrisitans about 600 years ago. I know it will be hard, because americans know nothing except shooort 300-year history of USA, but I believe in you. Come on, Eric!
>The quote I gave from the Kuran supports your affirmation that a muslim is required to lie to non-muslims, without having to resort to the outside doctrine of taqqiya.
Agree with me or not, you have no warrant to doubt that I have read the Koran. Or at least Pickthall’s translastion of it.
>If America was in the war just for oil, there would be no dead Americans. You seem to have lost your clue, so I’ll share one with you: We’re doing things the hard way *because* we aren’t in it for the oil.
Indeed. People who think America is run by and for bloodthirsty warmongers make me laugh. If that were really true, America’s enemies would scarcely have time to scream before they died. A single American carrier battle group has more destructive capability than the entire militaries of most nations, and that’s before we even get to the missile submarines.
I’m not an unthinking patriot; in fact I think all governments are evil and fundamentally distrust mine. But the fact of the matter is that given the U.S.’s overwhelming abiility to project force it is the kindest and gentlest hegemon the world has ever seen.
[esr] A single American carrier battle group has more destructive capability than the entire militaries of most nations, and that’s before we even get to the missile submarines.
You call that girls, battle group? Hahaha, omfg, oh no, lolumc. Answer one question:
ANYONE ASKED YOU TO BOMB IRAQ AND BRING so called DEMOCRACY THERE?
I bet noone from Iraq asked for that, so who got you right to deicide for others?
> If America was in the war just for oil, there would be no dead Americans. You seem to have lost your clue, so I’ll share one with you: We’re doing things the hard way *because* we aren’t in it for the oil.
No. It’s because all you can is bombing until there is only ruin. Your so called soldiers (it’s really girls crying “oh mummy, get me out of there”) just don’t know how to fight. That’s why there’s dead Americans.
Islam is a peaceful religion when you meet someone you say “Hi” but in Islam we say “Assalam wa
alikom” it mean peace for all .
In coran we have this sentence:”when you are punished you can punish by th same way that you are
punished by but if you forgive it is better for you”
Maybe an understanding of the live of the prophet Mushamed can teach good things to non muslim people
To J. Alan Brown:
> “Slay them wherever you find them.
This is a censored ayath. Good job ;) Read it from start, it says :
90. Fight in the cause of Allah those who fight you, but do not transgress limits; for Allah loveth not transgressors.
Didn’t see this??? If somebody start to fight you, fight with them but never be extereme!! That is from Quran. So what is wrong? War is legal just if somebody attacks you. If somebody kills a man from you, Quran permits you to fight with them. But after this permit it always add this rule “do not transgress limits, and always be mercifull, coz God loves it more than fight”
To J. Alan Brown:
Do you know many Turkish imam said that, bin Laden is not muslim. (I live in Turkey) Most of the people think same with me.
Why America in Iraq? It is a big topic i cannot deal. Oil is just one reason. May be another reason is USA’s extreme/radical Jewish managers.
Where is bin laden? Why America cannot find it? is it just an image? And where is the weapons in Iraq President Bush told us? Everybody know that, Saddam is man of the USA, when he was in war with Iran. Since USA and irael has nuclear rockets, why not Iran? Why USA helps to India for nuclear guns? If it is dangerous, all the countries has to left it? These are polical games. Turkey is neighbour of both Iran and Iraq. I can see everything more clear than you i think. Dont tell me about saudi royal family or president of Egypt or others. We know all of them also mans of the USA. May be we are in the Matrix? These are not so important for me. My main target is Qoran.
> behead Christian school girls less than ten years old?
Yes, i watched same videos before. But all the muslims know that (it is not my rule, rule of the Qoran) children are sinless and innocent. Just this info is enough to show their mistake. But they are muslim??? may be they say” we are muslim”, but the rule is clear. I think they are ignorant and need some education.
I want to notice that, all these wrong things happens in a poor country which has no money for education. They learn quran from their fathers, not from Quran.
I believe that all the religions are for peace. But politics is not. The politics is just for to get more share from world. I want to add same message from pervious post:
We should learn to live together. There is only one world to live and all of us are child of Adam. White/black/blonde/asian there is no difference. This article by Eric Raymond, just helps warriors, weapon merchants which feeds with blood and hatred.
To Baris Simsek:
Thanx, your post is the only meaningful in all this crap and flame
Great … er … debate. This thread is a great example of what happens when you try to have a reasonable argument with people who reject reason outright. You can say that Muslims want peace all you want, but (almost literally) the only Muslim I’ve seen saying that the Quran needs to be read with a grain of salt is on this thread.
Stas, et al. – you can frame this debate any way you want. You’re simply following the poor attempts of imams, fascists, and socialists as they attempt to dissuade the West from an increasingly inevitable conclusion. But the West is now fighting for its life, and rhetoric will become less important before it becomes more important. Your own rhetoric is supporting Eric’s position – as you frame the debate in terms of socialist memes and multicultural slogans that the West can never achieve, you do two things: you ignore the real underlying issues, and you force our politicians and military to cope with the real issues as they waste time answering the empty rhetoric. This is not the problem of our politicians, but of yours.
I have no problems with Muslims. I have problems with West. So I will fight for my life, ok?
Needless to say, I don’t expect you to agree with any of this (or to really register how happy I would (or will) be to be proved wrong).
Honestly man, I have a hard time understanding a lot of what you say — hence my constant asking for clarification, since I don’t want to (unintentionally) respond to a straw man. A cultural/linguistic divide, perhaps? But I digress…
Anyway, if what you’re saying is you don’t see the free market as being able to keep us from getting screwed when/if oil runs out, I can sympathize with that. However, I’m of the position that if it can’t do it, nothing can. The free market is really short hand for “all the billions of people consuming and producing energy,” in this instance. If their evaluation of the costs and benefits of producing an alternative in a given time frame — vis-a-vis sticking with the status quo — should turn out to be catastrophically wrong, I see no reason to expect them to vote in support for governmental measures which will address the problem.
Put another way, if the people, by and large, are too dumb to figure out that it’s time to move on, a democratic government can’t fix the problem because it’s just going to reflect the will of the people. Now, if somebody gets the government to do what it wants in a non-democratic fashion, this point becomes moot. But then we face a different problem: when is the behavior acceptable, when is it not, and most importantly, how do we ensure that it doesn’t get out of control? History seems to indicate that if you give government a centimeter it will take a kilometer, so I’m leary of this approach.
So, my personal opinion is that the situation is a bit of a wash, factually. In general, I tend to default in favor of the liberty-oriented approach because, the way I see it, it’s better to give the government too little power than too much — historically speaking, the penalties of the former seem to be orders of magnitude less than the penalties of the latter. And the fact that this particular subject is such a topic of conversation seems to indicate to me that it’s unlikely to become a crisis. But we’re in the realm of speculation here, so I’m not going to proffer this as fact — I just ask you to reconsider what the least sucky course of action actually is, in the long-long run.
Good lord, look at the opposition. It is to laugh. And lo, how do I laugh — deep and viscerally. Ho ho ho.
“It’s just a war for oil!”
…as our gas prices go up…
“Nobody asked you to liberate Iraq!”
…so, obviously, leaving Saddam Hussein in power is the right thing to do…
“War never makes anything better!”
…oh yeah, apart from ending fascism, nazism, communism, and slavery, war never solves anything…
This is congnitive dissonance in action. American civilization has done more to improve this world than any other country. Don’t believe me? Name a civilization which has done better. Or better yet — suppose an asteroid was on a collision course with Earth, and nevermind where it was expected to impact. What country would you expect to spearhead an effort to deflect this disaster?
Oh wow, my frothing-at-the-mouth-o-meter just broke. Fancy that, eh?
>…so, obviously, leaving Saddam Hussein in power is the right thing to do…
No argument.
By the way, would you (Peter Bessman) mind to name a few things the US have done for “this world”?
> It wouldn’t be like German fascism, but I can see a strong parallel to the master race ideology in the American conviction that their way of doing things is the best possible.
That ignores the fundamental American isolationism.
American foreign policy gyrates around a center described by:
(1) If you’ve got cool stuff, Americans would like to buy it.
(2) If you’ve got money, Americans would like to sell you cool stuff.
(3) If you kill Americans or tolerate those who do, we’ll kill you.
Angry America isn’t a threat to anyone. However, frightened America is.
Folks who behave consistently with (1)-(3) can pretty much do as they please.
Of course, if other folks insist on interventionism (Kyoto anyone?), don’t be surprised if Americans play the same game.
” >…so, obviously, leaving Saddam Hussein in power is the right thing to do…
No argument. ”
How very thoughtful of you. Perhaps you can launch a legal defense of Saddam, get him out of jail, install him as fuhrer, and ‘educate’ the Iraqi people about how much better off they will be once the torture, rape and genocide are back in full swing. Ahhh…the good old days. Cunt.
“…mind to name a few things the US have done for ‘this world’? ”
OK…put the crack pipe down and fire up a neuron or two to expend a picosecond of thought about what you’re asking…or are you so shit-suckingly stupid you are incapable of *at least* glancing back over the last 65 years?
> American civilization has done more to improve this world than any other country.
Americans do nothing to make this world better. Never.
> Don’t believe me? Name a civilization which has done better.
USSR, at least they escape us from nazis,
Rome, they give us Roma law,
Greece, they give us many artifacts of art,
China, they give us paper, paper money, silk, and many other goodies
do you need me to continue this list?
> Or better yet — suppose an asteroid was on a collision course with Earth, and nevermind where it was expected to impact. What country would you expect to spearhead an effort to deflect this disaster?
Russia and China
Stas, I have something America has done that made the world better:
The Internet.
You know, the thing you are using to post your whining……….
Americans do nothing to make this world better. Never.
And there you have it.
This isn’t dissonance – it’s insanity. This is like the mullahs who would steal American nuclear technology to destroy America because technology is evil. Or the net warriors who use the internet and cell phones to generate organic terrorist cells implicitly designed to rid the world of the scourge of internets and cell phones.
LMFAO! China > USA because China gave us silk. And “many other goodies.”
And the USSR escaped you from the Nazis — into Stalinism. Brilliant!
Well America has TastyCakes and Duke Nukem, so nyah-nyah!
BTW — Russia and China leading the way on a cutting edge space mission? Oh man. That’s awesome. I guess they’ll use all their silk to make big capes, and then the Russians will fly into space and look at the asteroid with their really fierce Stalin-esque mustaches, and the asteroid will be all such as “FUCK THAT! Crazy mustachioed crackers givin’ me the hairy eyeball — I’m outta here like a fat kid in dodge ball.”
That’s at least as plausible as the notion that Russia and China are more competent in matters space than the USA. Have you paid any attention to the Russian space program after the collapse of the USSR? Did you notice how it just vanished? And I’m guessing your familiarity with the taikonauts ain’t all that extensive — quick quiz, when did China finally succeed in putting a man in space?
Ladies and gents, what we have here is plain and simple anti-Americanism. No depth, no underlying ideology — just a pure hatred of the ol’ US of A. Meh. Illegitimi non carborundum.
Hi there…
I came across this weblog looking for the site of the wonderful man who wrote “How to become a hacker” and “The Cathedrale and the Bazaar”. The first post I read was this one. I confess myself deeply disappointed: I had never realized just how tolerant intorlerant people think they are.
I understand what you say about jihad being in the Coran and the tone of the book can seem a bit agressive at times. But I think things should be put into perspective: the Coran was written in a time where the people who were to become muslims were being oppressed. Indeed, these were hard times and I don’t think the expression “fight for life” is ill-suited. In fact, in many ways, the story of Islam ressembles that of Christianity: first, persecution when the believers are a minority. Then, they persecute in return, so that the faith establishes itself, survives and prospers: the jihad for islam and the crusades for christianity.
The similarity between the Coran and the Bible texts is also remarkable (well, the Old Testament of the Bible, that is, i.e. the Tora). The Old Testament is very aggressive sometimes and had to be “explained” by the New one. It is as if times had changed between the Old and the New Testament and the message needed was different. For the believers, it can be interpreted as “God sends a message appropriate for the current times”. For the non-believers, it’s simply that the influence of the surrounding civilization on the authors is different and therefore the wording is different.
You say that the tolerant “minority” (well minority for you, in any case) of the islamic world have to accept the fact that what the extremists are doing is in accordance with the Coran. Well the religious leaders during the Crusades and the inquisitors who burned witches were also convinced they were reading the Bible correctly. But both books hold the equivalent of “thou shallst not kill”: what to believe? A religion is what its believers make of it. And, as one of your best authors puts it “no method or discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert” (H.D. Thoreau): in other words, think and don’t take anything (be it CNN, the Bible or the Coran) too literally… Don’t be too quick to generalize: it’s not because the news mentions a lot the few extremists who bomb out heretics regularly and not the millions of people living in peace that the latter don’t exist: “not seeing” is not the same as “having a proof that it does not exist”.
I think what matters is the interpretation people make of a religion, how they live it from day to day. Therefore, I think reading the Coran is not enough. I had similar views to yours, a while back. But one day I did this big trip, backpacked my way accross Asia and Europe and ended up in Morocco. By that time, I was getting really annoyed with beggars and stuff and I was starting to becoming pretty intolerent and arrogant, without even realizing it. But then I talked to a few Moroccans (muslims), and I realized how much prejudices I had. I knew a few things from the Coran (I had not read it, which makes spite much easier to live with) but my interpretations were not correct. For example, I thought the veil was something horrible that women hated. Then I met this girl, whose parents did not want their daughter to wear it, but who wore it just the same. She said going out without it would feel to her like she was naked. It had a strong meaning for her. There were many other such examples, but maybe quoting them all is not necessary.
Now don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying blowing everybody up, choping someone’s head off if their not a believer (a heretic?) is good. I’m saying, quite on the contrary, that it is very difficult not to generalize and very easy to stop thinking.
I met deeply religious people from various religions and in the end I listened to what they had to say, even though I thought I had it all worked out. And it turned out I hadn’t. I do hope you will have the same opportunity, to meet good people with very different views from yours, with whom you can discuss without fighting (this is pretty rare so if you ever get the chance, don’t miss it!).
Cheers,
Charly.
Peter, be clear…. *Philadelphia* has Tastykake… The rest of us poor b*stards are stuck with Little Debbie and worse.
At least we have a Philly cheesesteak chain in Orange County CA that uses Amoroso rolls, the right meat, and imports TastyKake and Wyse products…
/* Why America in Iraq? It is a big topic i cannot deal. Oil is just one reason. May be another reason is USA’s extreme/radical Jewish managers.
*/
I find it odd that all these extreme/radical Jewish managers are running America but nobody’s ever seen them, and nobody can name one of them. Let’s look at the short list: Colin Powell, not Jewish. Condeleeza Rice, not Jewish. George W. Bush, not Jewish. Dick Cheney, John McCain, Donald Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzales, not Jewish. Even under Clinton, I don’t think Madaleine Albright, Janet Reno, Al Gore, or Newt Gingrich are Jewish. Not even under Bush (1) or Reagan. Could you please name one?
Oh, and why would Jewish people have a problem with Muslims? Any ideas?
/* Where is bin laden?
*/
Hiding, so scared about turning into radioactive slag that he won’t make a video. He does talk on video tape, but without a video we don’t have any idea if he’s still got both legs.
/* And where is the weapons in Iraq President Bush told us?
*/
No longer pointed at Turkey. At least Turkey doesn’t have to worry if there are weapons pointed at them.
/* Everybody know that, Saddam is man of the USA, when he was in war with Iran.
*/
And everybody knows that a different President was in charge of that policy. And while it’s impossible to “know,” I believe that if Iran had won the war, the Middle East would be a far more dangerous neighborhood.
/* Since USA and irael has nuclear rockets, why not Iran?
*/
Do you want Iran to have nukes?
/* Why USA helps to India for nuclear guns?
*/
Because we don’t expect India to give weapons to terrorists. We do expect that India would give a loud warning to anyone it wanted to nuke. We don’t trust Iran on either of those.
/* Dont tell me about saudi royal family or president of Egypt or others. We know all of them also mans of the USA.
*/
Then why not demonstrate against them? I haven’t seen a single demonstration in the Muslim world. However, the example I cited about the Saudi royal family was about an attempt to appease Muslims and stick a thumb in the eye of the US.
/* [me] behead Christian school girls less than ten years old?
/* [response] Yes, i watched same videos before. But all the muslims know that … children are sinless and innocent. Just this info is enough to show their mistake. But they are muslim???
*/
Then why did you just shrug your shoulders when you saw those videos? Why didn’t any Muslim, anywhere in the world, write a letter to their local newspaper saying “it’s wrong to kill little kids, even non-Muslim kids”? They didn’t say “we are Muslim.” They said “BECAUSE we are Muslim, we will kill these children IN THE NAME OF ISLAM because it’s our religious duty.” And no Muslim, *anywhere* in the world said anything about that.
And can I remind you of Chechnya? “BECAUSE we are Muslim, and IN ORDER TO HAVE OUR MUSLIM COUNTRY, we will take these school children hostage, and blow up this school IN THE NAME OF ISLAM.”
/* I want to notice that, all these wrong things happens in a poor country which has no money for education. They learn quran from their fathers, not from Quran.
*/
But the smart Muslims have never said that they are wrong. The smart Muslims don’t seem to expect anything more out of them. “What, the school teachers stayed in a burning building so that girls wouldn’t dare leave without covering their heads? I think I’ll send my girls there, they really believe in traditional values.”
Amoroso rolls are key. That, and using the scrappiest beef you can find and frying it in a lot of grease.
(I had one of these for lunch today. My local pizzeria makes better steak sandwiches than people who live more than 50 miles from Billy Penn’s hat even know to exist. I pity them in their ignorance.)
Oops.
/* He does talk on video tape, but without a video we don’t have any idea if he’s still got both legs.
*/
He does talk on CASSETTE tape, but without a video we don’t have any idea if he’s still got both legs.
I’m actually pretty lucky to live right next to a rather happenin’ cheese-steak joint (free plug for Jeno’s — be sure to check ’em out if you’re ever in Severna Park, MD). Cheat meals don’t get much better than a greasy cheese-steak, a side of cheesy fries, and some fried mushrooms.
/me remembers he’s an American
Oh yeah, and a vat of petroleum and some toasted babies. Or something.
Max Lybbert:
The standard line is that the Jewish masters of civilization are a kleptocracy who secretly run the world’s markets from the shadows, etc. When backed into a corner it never hurts to fall back on tried-and-true conspiracy theory, elders-of-Zion nonsense.
Just like the canonical leftist response to a damning, difficult-to-refute piece of evidence that undermines their position is, “I heard that was fabricated by the Bush administration.” I’ve heard this about the Rathergate memos; the Iraqi documents that are beginning to show ties between Bin Laden and Saddam’s regime are likely next to be widely dismissed as forgeries orchestrated by Karl Rove.
Eric, come down to Philly’s Best in Fountain Valley before condemn us to gastronomic hell……
I have a cartoon in my files: Gastronomic Heaven – A street vendor calling out “Cheesesteaks, Soft Pretzels, Scrapple….. Get your Cheesesteaks, Soft Pretzels, Scrapple!”
I don’t know if you saw those videos of Wafa Sultan’s verbal pwnage of the imams on — I believe — Al-Jazeera, but she illustrates this point nicely. She has been trotted out by conservative commentators as a shining example of Muslim opposition to terrorism, even though she states herself that she is at best an agnostic.
I think even conservatives have unrealistic can’t-we-all-just-get-along dreams.
Jeff, that is because we really don’t want to “nuke ’em ’till they glow” and turn Mecca and Medina into glass…. Of course, it was about 50 years from Cato’s call for “Carthago delenda est” until Rome did destroy the city, so we have some time yet….
Yes, Stas. Rome removed Carthage from the map because they were a commercial threat.
> It wouldn’t be like German fascism, but I can see a strong parallel to the master race ideology in the American conviction that their way of doing things is the best possible.
That ignores the fundamental American isolationism.
Iraq is isolationism? I appreciate the American people have a long-standing and honourable taste for it, but I reckon they have less control over their government than the think they do. “Looky, we can choose between Republicans and Democrats!”
Whoop dee do.
American foreign policy gyrates around a center described by:
(1) If you’ve got cool stuff, Americans would like to buy it.
(2) If you’ve got money, Americans would like to sell you cool stuff.
(3) If you kill Americans or tolerate those who do, we’ll kill you.
This is all very fine and dandy, but some might wonder why nearly fifty percent of the world’s yearly arms spend is required for the off chance of (3).
I don’t know if you saw those videos of Wafa Sultan’s verbal pwnage of the imams on — I believe — Al-Jazeera, but she illustrates this point nicely. She has been trotted out by conservative commentators as a shining example of Muslim opposition to terrorism, even though she states herself that she is at best an agnostic.
As an aside, I believe mathematician’s are now using Wafa’s moxie as a way to illustrate the concept of infinity (o.O)
Iraq is isolationism?
Isolationism is not getting into a war unless you need to, so all this does is reassert your position that Iraq is a war we don’t need to get into. Obviously, that’s a bone of contention. But more to the point, interventionism is characterized by wars of expansion, and while you might argue that some neocon tucked away in the fabric of the vast right wing conspiracy aims to annex Iraq in the long run, I submit that popular opinion does not favor that notion. So perhaps we’re mistaken in evaluating this to be a war of necessity — a war of survival — but have no doubt that such is the predominant reason why we support its execution.
>> Max Lybbert Says:
>> March 31st, 2006 at 5:13 pm
>> nobody can name one of them. Let’s look at the short list:
Don’t waste your time with this, since most of the bilionaires in USA are Jewish. I don’t have any problem with a Jewish personally. I still don’t want to use overall titles like Jewish, Muslim, European, Russian etc… I am just interesting in acts, not groups. I said Jewish, because the topic was Iraq and Palastian. I think there is nothing connected with USA in this area. Is there? As result, i think it is about Israel, and its powerfull lobby in USA.
>> Hiding, so scared about turning into radioactive slag that he won’t make a video.
I don’t want to believe that, eyes of the USA (nasa) cannot see him? I think dont want to see. Because of he is one the most important excuse to attack Iraq. I am thinking by myself: after 9/11 USA signed all muslims as terrorists. So what Laden did? Did it help the Islam with 9/11??? I think ‘no’. Now in this blog, many guys abase Islam because of Laden. So how he can be muslim? But he helps USA to attack Iraq.
Another info, at the time of war between Russia and Afghanistan, bin Laden was fighting for USA. That is another hint to unserstand Laden, whose man?
>> No longer pointed at Turkey.
Coz there was no nuclear gun in Iraq. I still cannot find answer of my question? Where are the guns?
>> Do you want Iran to have nukes?
No.
>> Because we don’t expect India to give weapons to terrorists.
No, because of China!!! USA worry about China. And find India as a partner against China.
That is wrong view. “My man is good, but others not good” What is your reference?
If you look from Iran’s point, they also don’t trust USA. With this idea, all countries can get nuclear gun. If my enemy has nuclear gun, there is nothing abnormal if i try to get too…
>> I haven’t seen a single demonstration in the Muslim world.
Come here, and ask a question about 9/11 to people. %99,99 will refuse this terrorist action. There are so many book and article about the 9/11. But you are right, there was no any powerfull demonstration. But i know why (this cannot reasonable for 9/11 but the answer is that): Coz every year about 4 millions of child die because of hungry. In Iraq everyday some thousands of people die. In Israel many palastian kids killed by soldiers. In middle Europa 200.000 bosnian were killed in bosnia war in 1995. Yes, you didnt read wrong. In this age, somebody can kill 200.000 people. And where? at the middle of the modern Europa… So, muslim world losts some thousands of people every year. So death is an ordinary event in muslim world.
– Why Iran has not got any problem with Brasil? teh answer is clear
– Tell me some countries have oil and gold? Iraq and africa.
– Tell me some poor countries? Iraq and africa????
– Tell me the biggest name of the oil companies? BP, Shell.
– Tell me their nationality? UK, USA and so…
– Tell me why USA comes from fars to middle asia?
– Will USA attack Syria, after it Iran?
– …
Why i am asking these? I am not an anti-american or anti-jewish. And i am not Arabic. I just want to show reality from middle asia. I hope somebodies see the reals. I believe that, if the people in USA can see reals, government cant come to Iraq. But you are looking at world from governments CNN.
As result, what can we do:
– West should leave their colonist action in Africa. So they can buy food with their oil or gold. But today they haven’t got their oil and gold. West countries steal all of them. As result they are poor, they are hungry. I saw a woman, don’t know how to cook meat. Coz she has never ate it.
– If they have money and can buy food, i think they wont hate rich countries by this way.
– If all countries live just in their borders, nobody need to produce gun.
– All countries should left nuclear guns. Not just Iran.
– Rich countries may help poors for education. The education is the most powerfull solution.
I am a computer engineer, not a sociologist. These are my ideas.
OK, thats enough for me. I just want to write to correct some missing things about the Holy Qoran. But i said many things about politics. I hate politics. Boooo…
Don’t waste your time with this, since most of the bilionaires in USA are Jewish.
Yeah right. Here’s the billionaires — let’s play “find the Jews.” Hopefully you’ll do better than I did, I wasn’t finding very many Jews on that list. Not at all.
http://www.forbes.com/2003/09/17/rich400land.html
I don’t want to believe that, eyes of the USA (nasa) cannot see him? I think dont want to see. Because of he is one the most important excuse to attack Iraq. I am thinking by myself: after 9/11 USA signed all muslims as terrorists. So what Laden did? Did it help the Islam with 9/11??? I think ‘no’. Now in this blog, many guys abase Islam because of Laden. So how he can be muslim? But he helps USA to attack Iraq.
That’s just insane on so many levels. It took us a damn long time to find Saddam Hussein, and only then because of turncoat informants and the cooperation of the Kurds. The NSA (not nasa) is just not some omnipotent god of knowledge. And if the USA signed all muslims as terrorists, why haven’t we just nuked the middle east and called it a day? Why haven’t we jailed or deported our own muslims? And the rest of that paragraph isn’t even intelligible, although that’s probably just a language breakdown.
Another info, at the time of war between Russia and Afghanistan, bin Laden was fighting for USA. That is another hint to unserstand Laden, whose man?
And during the Iran/Iraq war, Saddam was “our man.” Look where it got him. Put differently, geopolitics in general, and those of the cold war in particular, are way more complex than you seem to grasp.
Coz there was no nuclear gun in Iraq. I still cannot find answer of my question? Where are the guns?
If I give you evidence of WMD in Iraq, will you support the war? If yes, then why are you not also asking for war against Iran and North Korea? If no, why bring up the topic of WMD at all?
That is wrong view. “My man is good, but others not good†What is your reference?
You mean to tell me that you look at India, and then you look at Iran, and you don’t see a difference? Both these countries are just as good? Then why bust the balls of the USA? What makes them any worse than Iran? I mean, if no country is any better than any other country, what the fuck do you care about any of this, anyway?
Why Iran has not got any problem with Brasil? teh answer is clear
Because Brazil won’t do shit to stop them from getting Nukes.
Tell me some countries have oil and gold? Iraq and africa.
And America.
Tell me some poor countries? Iraq and africa????
And Haiti.
Tell me the biggest name of the oil companies? BP, Shell.
No, that’s the Saudi Arabian Oil Co.
Tell me their nationality? UK, USA and so…
Saudi.
Tell me why USA comes from fars to middle asia?
Because middle asia is far away.
Will USA attack Syria, after it Iran?
Depends.
Why i am asking these? I am not an anti-american or anti-jewish. And i am not Arabic. I just want to show reality from middle asia. I hope somebodies see the reals. I believe that, if the people in USA can see reals, government cant come to Iraq. But you are looking at world from governments CNN.
Clearly, you do not watch a lot of CNN, because it has been one of the most anti-war, anti-Bush networks since OIF got started. You are also blatantly anti-american, since you are tying yourself in knots to try and make the USA look no better — worse, even — than Iran and China. And you obviously don’t have a grasp on the reals — do some fact checking next time before you spout off.
West should leave their colonist action in Africa. So they can buy food with their oil or gold. But today they haven’t got their oil and gold. West countries steal all of them. As result they are poor, they are hungry. I saw a woman, don’t know how to cook meat. Coz she has never ate it.
Africa has received the equivalent of four Marshall Plans from the US since we started giving them aid, and it has actually made matters worse. But don’t take my word for it — talk to a leading African economist:
http://africa.oneworld.net/article/view/83183/1/4197
If they have money and can buy food, i think they wont hate rich countries by this way.
As it happens, tyrannical nations like Saddam-era Iraq have very poor people and miserable living conditions. Getting rid of the dictatorial, socialist regimes and replacing them with prosperous liberal-democracies is historically proven to fix this. You are making an argument in favor of the current war in Iraq, and you seem to be unaware of this.
If all countries live just in their borders, nobody need to produce gun.
So I guess you come down in favor of making all immigration illegal, then? Which is just one of the ways in which this statement is ridiculous.
All countries should left nuclear guns. Not just Iran.
Wish in one hand and shit in the other. See which one fills up first.
Rich countries may help poors for education. The education is the most powerfull solution.
Socialized education is failing here and abroad. America’s educational costs have quadrupled over the past decade, but our performance has gone nowhere. Private industry can educate people hella better than the state. Do you really want the state teaching kids how to think? Sure, if “your people” are running it, it’s ok. But what happens if the people running it aren’t your people? And what assurance do you have that that will never happen?
I’d like to return to the original focus of ESR’s blog. I don’t know much about Sweden, but after an hour of reading, here is what I found out:
300,000 immigrants came to Sweden in the late 80s and early 90s. They have had poor employment opportunities and faced a great deal of housing segregation. There been a dramatic rise in xenophobia and hate crime against foreignors in Sweden, partially because the Swedish economy (unlike the Finnish economy) has been weak and ethnic Swedes see the immigrants as competitors for their jobs. At the same time there has a been a rise in reported crime and rapes.
The official Swedish government body for crime statistics, the National Council for Crime Prevention, has done two studies on immigrants and crimes between 1985-1989 and 1997-2001.
In 1985-9, an immigrant born abroad was 2.1 times as likely to be registered for a crime as a native-born Swede with both parents born in Sweden as well. In 1997-2001, this rose to 2.5 times.
In 1985-9, a native born swede with one or both parents born abroad (2nd generation immigrant) was 1.5 times as likely to be registered for a crime as a native born Swede with both parents born in Sweden as well. In 1997-2001, this was 1.6 times.
The statistics indicate that immigrants are more likely to be involved in crime than native-born Swedes, but the report also shows that second generation immigrants are less likely to commit crime. Also foreign born immigrants who come to Sweden at an early age are less likely to commit crime than immigrants who come later in life. In other words, the second generation immigrants are turning into better citizens and we should not think they won’t assimilate over time.
Plus the report says that immigrants are more often less educated, less employed, poorer and younger than native born Swedes. All of these are factors which are a higher risk for committing crime. After controlling for these factors, the likelihodd of a foreign born immigrant being registered for a crime increases decreases from 2.5 times to 2.1 times a native born Swede.
I can’t read the original report in Swedish, but here is an english summary.
News articles examining the full Swedish report say that the Swedish police has been racially profiling immigrants as likely criminals. Immigrants were three times more likely to be investigated for assault and five times more likely to be investigated for sex crimes. The police too often assume that immigrants are criminals and many immigrants describe harrassment from the police. (It is a situation which reminds me of what happens with Blacks in the US.) To stop racial profiling and the recent rise of xenophobia, the NCCP recommends a national anti-descrimination campaign. 3/4ths of polled Swedes think that people in Sweden dislike Muslims.
Recently a prominent feminist politician has been demanding that the Swedish government do something about rape. The feminists in Sweden aren’t just saying that rape is a problem with the immigrants. They are also saying that rape is a problem with Swedish men in general and many attribute the rise in rape to the fact that Swedish women are more likely to report rape than they were in the past. Nonetheless, there is evidence that immigrants are more likely to be involved in rape, just like they are more likely to be involved in crime. According to the US State Department’s Human Rights report, in 2004, there were 2,141 reported rapes of persons over 14 years old and 467 reported cases of child rape in a country of roughly 9 million. Although rape statistics are always problematic, it would appear that the US has a larger problem with rape than Sweden since the US had 204,370 reported rapes in 2004 according to the Department of Justice. (0.029% in Sweden vs 0.071% in the US). I couldn’t find the souce for the statistic that “85% of Sweden’s rapes are committed by immigrants or their unassimilated first-generation offspring.” I suspect that 85% is an exaggeration, considering the fact that first and second generation immigrants only constitute 1/5th of society and feminist groups think that rape is a general problem, not just an immigrant problem. If anyone can read Swedish, I would greatly appreciate it if you could read the full NCCP report and tell me what it says about rape and immigrants in Sweden.
Now the question is how do you reduce rape in the immigrant population. Yes, there are misogynistic elements in Islamic law. It reminds me of the classic virgin Maria vs whore complex in Latino culture. Women are only due respect if they are considered good virtuous (and meek) women. But gender attitudes are rapidly changing in parts of Latin America, and I don’t think that we should view them as static. If I wanted to change attitudes about rape, I wouldn’t start attacking Islam in general. You start with educational campaigns and ad campaigns in the immigrant community about gender attitudes and rape. You have meetings with immigrant religous leaders and ask them to preach about how rape is wrong no matter what the woman does or wears. You form women support groups in the immigrant community and safe houses for rape victims where immigrant women are welcome. I’ve been reading about how women in NGOs in Palestine have challenged patriarchy and I think we have underestimated what can be done by trying to get Muslim women themselves to take up this issue.
I think there is another issue here. Every religion has its critics who examine it and poke holes in it. Christian scholars have taken the bible and challenged most of the literalist readings of the bible with the historical critical method. This is already happening with Islam, but it is only a small subsection of the religion. I have a number of Muslim friends and I see it all the time. The challenge of Islam is to develop critical schools of interpretation of the sacred texts which throw out literalism but still seek the divine which is compatible with present-day progressive humanism. It took mainline Protestantism a long time to do this and Catholicism even longer, but most have done it (I’m not talking about George Bush here), and I don’t see why it won’t happen among Muslims as well.
> You mean to tell me that you look at India, and then you look at Iran, and you don’t see a difference?
> Both these countries are just as good?
Actually, in terms of agression toward neighbors and nuclear armament, Iran is considered to be pretty good compared to India. Let’s look a Iran’s history. Iran overthrew a corrupt dictator in 1979 and implemented a limited democracy with strong veto power by religious leaders. The last time a popular revolution happened, the US CIA intervened and overthrew the popular government and reinstituted the Shah as dictator. Iranians were angry because of US support for the Shah and they held American captive after they overthrew the Shah. Holding captives was clearly illegal, but wasn’t crossing another country’s borders. In contrast, the US involvement in Iran in 1953 was clearly an act of aggression against another country and illegal under international law. Iran had a nasty war with Iraq in the 1980s which by most accounts Iraq started. Iraq dropped poisonous gasses on Iran, but there is no indication that Iran ever used any poison gas or other WMD’s on Iraq. Iran helped fund Hizbullah in Lebanon after Isreal invaded Lebanon. This is the only act of agression that Iran has engaged in. And by international law standards it was legal for Hizbullah to defend itself after Isreal invaded Lebanon. It wasn’t legal to target civilians as Hizbullah did with terrorist bombings, but Isreal committed a far greater act of agression by shelling and then invading Lebanon. So Iran had some justification in claiming that it was just helping the Shiite Lebonese defend themselves against outside agression. Remember that Isreal has 200 nukes and the shiite lebonese were very weak militarily. There is no evidence that Iran had anything to do with Al Quaeda.
Iran signed the Nuclear non-proliferation treaty and has thus far not broken it. Under the treaty, they have the right to develop nuclear facilities as long as they aren’t used for military purposes. In other words, Iran is perfectly in its right to do what it has done thus far. No country has the legal right to tell it that it can’t. Most analyst think Iran is 5 years away from being able to develop a nuclear bomb. Right now Iran is being actively threatened by the US. We have openly made plans for how we would invade Iran and we have called IRan the axis of evil. If we invade Iraq it will be a gross violation of international law. So far, Iran hasn’t violated the law or the non-proliferation treaty.
Let’s look at India. Yes, Indian has been a democracy since 1947. It has also fought 3 wars with Pakistan. It was on the brink of starting a nuclear war with Pakistan a couple years ago. India has a long history of meddling in the affairs to Nepal and Bhutan to a lesser degree and is currently threatening to invade Nepal. India has refused to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and developed a nuclear bomb (which thus far Iran hasn’t done). Of course under international law, India could legally develop its bomb, but Iran has generally been a greater respector of international opinion and non-proliferation than India.
The challenge of Islam is to develop critical schools of interpretation of the sacred texts which throw out literalism but still seek the divine which is compatible with present-day progressive humanism. It took mainline Protestantism a long time to do this and Catholicism even longer, but most have done it (I’m not talking about George Bush here), and I don’t see why it won’t happen among Muslims as well.
There’s a bit of a problem there, as it’s pretty easy to get branded an apostate, for which the penalty is not a smack on the wrist. The Bible was written by a whole bunch of people, some of them clearly on drugs, so when people the time came to pick it apart doing so was relatively straightforward. The Koran, written/dictated by one guy, has markedly fewer obvious contradictions. Some people reckon that Mohammed was aware of the problems the Christians had had with Gnosticism and whatnot, and designed his project to be resistant to such things, in the process more or less “Enlightenment-proofing” it.
Wow. So, not only do folks see India and Iran as essentially equivalent, but some of them see Iran as superior. Awesome. I guess that’s possible when you rewrite history to suit your position, though.
> I guess that’s possible when you rewrite history to suit your position, though.
What history am I rewriting? Please be more specific. I’m trying explain to explain why Bush has been so roundly criticized in the world press for making a deal with India while simultaneously threatening Iran. By most criteria, India is a greater threat to its neighbors than Iran. Yes, India is a much better democracy than Iran, but in terms of international security, India is much more dangerous, because it could start a nuclear war with Pakistan or send troops into Nepal at any moment.
The comments about Israel by the new Iranian president received wide coverage in the US, but they need to be put in context. The new president was responding to the fact that Isreal together with the US has been openly formulating plans for attacks on Iran. Presidents of countries which are threatened often make brash statements for local political consumption. But the fact is that everyone knows that Iran has little ability to attack Israel or the US, whereas both those countries have the ability to attack Iran. Our state department is claiming that Iran is a rogue nation that threatens to attack other nations, but there is little evidence of this. Their only act of agression has been funding Hezbollah in the past, which many saw as helping people to defend themselves against an illegal invasion. Our state department claims that Iran is currently trying to provoke a civil war in Iraq and has agents in Iran committing terrorism. From what I have read, this is not true and it doesn’t make any sense anyway. The last thing that Iran wants is a destabilized Iraq in civil war, nor do they want a return to a despot like Hussein because he might attack Iran. Iran would like to have Iraq as an ally, but the best way for that to happen is there to be a peaceful and stable government in Iraq with an elected government. Any government that gets elected in Iraq will be majority Shiite and will be a natural ally of Iran or at least won’t want to harm Iran. So Iran essentially wants what the US wants in Iraq.
The funny thing about this whole debate is that the US is actually the rogue nation. Iran hasn’t violated any treaties by seeking to develop nuclear power. If it tries to develop a nuclear weapon, then it is in violation, but thus far it hasn’t as far as we know. Likewise, India hasn’t violated the non-proliferation treaty because it never signed it. The only country which is violating international law is the US which is breaking the non-proliferation treaty by making this deal with India. Furthermore, we will be breaking international law if we attack or sanction Iran for developing nuclear power.
Um…. Which country’s leader wants to trigger a nuclear war to bring back a religious figure that DIED 1200 years ago? That isn’t the sign of a rational leader who’s actions can be predicted, that is a jihadi who can only be deterred by force.
Last time I saw India was trying to acheive peace with Pakistan, not further into war. And sending troops into Nepal to support the government against Maoist rebels is bad how?????
Iran attacked US soil when they invaded our embassy per your precious “International Law”.
Um…. Which country’s leader wants to trigger a nuclear war to bring back a religious figure that DIED 1200 years ago?
Eh? Is that what he’s said? Mohammed coming back? I’m not too up on Muslim eschatology. There *are* some US Christians who are quite into the idea of backing the nutters in Israel who want to tear down the Dome of the Rock or whatever it’s called and rebuild the Temple, which is supposed to trigger Apocalypse, Rapture and all kinds of good stuff. If I thought Bush was particularly sincere in his Christianity I’d be concerned.
>India is much more dangerous, because it could start a nuclear war with Pakistan or send troops into Nepal at any moment.
That is not likely when both nations have nuke’s, they both know what the result will be,
‘devastation on both sides’.
The larger danger is not knowing what a nation has concealed!
everybody gets nervous….
and reports end up at U.N security council…
also since Islam is a hiding place for terrorists these days, there is weight to what
to what Eric is saying here..
Islam could end up defunct and on the ash-heap of history if the virus of terrorism
goes any further…
> Our state department claims that Iran is currently trying to provoke a civil war in Iraq and has agents in Iran committing terrorism. From what I have read, this is not true and it doesn’t make any sense anyway.
does this make sense?
Text of Fatwah Urging Jihad Against Americans
http://www.ict.org.il/articles/fatwah.htm
guess who else is in iraq and iran?
and here is the Boss virus…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osama_bin_Laden
Three in a row is not like me, but this will bake your noodles….
Al-Qaida and the War on Terror after Iraq
http://www.ict.org.il/articles/articledet.cfm?articleid=560
Yes, the US trusts India more than Iran because India seems to have internalized more British culture than Iran did. It’s not like we said “let’s back India” and then decided India was the good guy. Rather, we chose to back India because they think more like us, and they won’t give nukes to terrorists.
/* [Amos] [Funding Hezbollah] is the only act of agression that Iran has engaged in.
*/
Nope. While I’m sure they’ve done more that I’m just not familiar with, Iraqi insurgents are currently getting a lot of high quality bombs with Made in Iran stamped all ove them ( http://www.intel-dump.com/archives/archive_2006_03_05-2006_03_11.shtml#1141843481 ).
Amos did consider funding Hezbollah, in reaction to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon (in reaction to Lebanon’s attempted invasion of Israel) an act of aggression, so this seems to fit that definition as well. However, my big point is that Iran is trying to keep a Shiite majority government from taking power. What do they want to replace it with? Looks like they prefer a failed state.
RickT said:
“Jeff, that is because we really don’t want to “nuke ‘em ’till they glow†and turn Mecca and Medina into glass….”
Yeah, much they’re much too convenient as places to distribute samples of the 1918 flu virus. [By the way, “;-)”. At least for now.]
I agree it is a very disturbing problem. I used to be “anti-war” so to speak, but when these poor kids from a Nepal (a country) got slaughtered like they were pigs to muslims back in ’04, I could not help but face the fact: Islam creates savages. Normally when foreigners gets kidnapped by muslims in Iraq, they draw up demands for their release. In that instance, none, they slit their throats, shot them in the head from behind and threw them down the ditch, 22 of them total. They were aged 17 to 21.
People who love muslims would sooner or later have to come to the same realization.
Sweden is doomed to extermination due to the Socialdemocratic Government’s betrayal against the Swedish people.
I Denmark we happily don’t have the same situation, due to the fact that the only libertarian party has warned against it since early 1980’es. We’ve suffered from that, but none-the-less it’s legal to talk about the problem, and the Danes have been stamped World wide as “islamofobes” (meaning, we’re pretty scared about the potential future).
We will not let Swastika be our opposite choice. But war is at our hands. And I don’t trust in USA anymore. You’ve already let us down once this year. You’ll do it twice, thrice and so on.
The doom of the Swedish people also brings to mind the problem of Skåneland. Turning Skåne, Halland and Blekinge into a saudiarabian district is utterly unacceptable.
But it sorf of explains why Denmark and Sweden tend to go from one diplomatic crisis to another.
The debate has degenerated, even though it was solved in the first three comments:
/* esr: Maybe your slogan should be “Arm the Women!†How does that go in Swedish? */
/* Scanian Redneck: “Beväpna kvinnorna!” */
I love inflected languages that don’t need articles and prepositions for everything; it makes for snappy slogans. I wonder if it’s too long to be the name of an actual political party. If so, would the Swedish translation of “bikini holster” work? It has a subtle-as-apple-pie anti-burqa connotation.
This would solve the rape problem independently of whether Muslims are at fault or not. And it would provide us with valuable data as to whether they are: just wait six months and count the bodies.
If you’re right about the state of Sweden, then it seems the two competing memes are appeasement and emergent fascism, so there’s probably a way to sell that to both wings. But politics have a way of supporting bad memes like those, and of squashing good memes like providing a group of potential crime victims with the ability to defend themselves.
Keep your eyes on the holster… if you can
http://www.holster-us.com/collections.htm
This looks like a .44 ….
http://www.bikiniscience.com/models/RW19_SS/RW197110_S/RW197110.html
the gun that is…
send in the big girls first !
Now, I did skip to the end because it was getting little off topic. But, obviously, nobody here has heard of godwins law, (actually ESR, must have). BTW, WTF does “panchrestons” mean. Google and dictionary.com aren’t helping…
Well, Godwin’s Law is basically invalid.
It’s useful only for people who cannot properly handle the art of rhetoric, and those who want to put an end to a debate.
Joe:
I think a good example of a panchreston would be “intelligent design”. The theory of “intelligent design” is a way for Biblical literalists to get their foot in the door through pseudoscientific handwaving. Since the term itself is scientifically meaningless, it can be conveniently redefined at any point in the game to make the theory unfalsifiable, and hence resurrect it in order to dupe the scientifically unsophisticated (i.e., most Americans).
For me India and Iran are perfectly equal concerning nuclear weapon. And BTW Iran wants nuclear energy, not weapon. Why you don’t believe Iran? :) I have no problem with this. What’s a surprise, eh?
> Iraq is isolationism?
Iraq is a problem that no one else was going to do anything about. And, for all the whinging, no one else is going to do anything about. (If the US pulls out, who goes in? Nato-US doesn’t have the capacity.)
If you don’t like the US solution, feel free to do something better. It’s not like there’s any shortage of opportunities.
>>(3) If you kill Americans or tolerate those who do, we’ll kill you.
>This is all very fine and dandy, but some might wonder why nearly fifty percent of the world’s yearly arms spend is required for the off chance of (3).
Why would you care? Unless (3) applies to you, it’s money that we’re not spending to compete with you in other areas.
> In 1985-9, an immigrant born abroad was 2.1 times as likely to be registered for a crime as a native-born Swede with both parents born in Sweden as well. In 1997-2001, this rose to 2.5 times.
I don’t suppose that they broke down “immigrant” into smaller categories. For example, we’ve been told that Finns are one of Sweden’s largest immigrant groups. Are Finns part of the immigrant criminal problem?
/* Stas Myasnikov Says:
For me India and Iran are perfectly equal concerning nuclear weapon. And BTW Iran wants nuclear energy, not weapon. Why you don’t believe Iran? :) I have no problem with this. What’s a surprise, eh?
*/
I guess I ought to clarify that the the fact that India acts more British than Iran doesn’t make India better, it just makes it easier for America to predict what they are likely to do.
I laughed pretty hard when President Bush said he couldn’t figure out why they needed nuclear reactors when they had all that oil. But I also can’t overlook the fact that Iran makes s big stink about it’s ability to hold on to uranium that’s no longer useful for energy, but great for weapons. If they *just* wanted energy, would they fight so hard to keep this waste?
The difference between Christians and Muslims is that when the Bible says “stone the adulturer to deathâ€, we don’t actually do it … whereas Muslims do.
Russ left out the whole “let he who is without sin cast the first stone” part. Deliberately, I think.
Otherwise his point fails. Turns out Christians try (very hard) to follow the Bible, as written.
> But I also can’t overlook the fact that Iran makes s big stink about it’s ability to hold on to uranium that’s no longer useful for energy, but great for weapons. If they *just* wanted energy, would they fight so hard to keep this waste?
Why USA want it too? Why not?
/* [me] If they *just* wanted energy, would they fight so hard to keep this waste?
[Stas] Why USA want it too? Why not?
*/
OK, that was one of the best, short, comments.
“The Bible was written by a whole bunch of people, some of them clearly on drugs”
… writing reports contradicting to each other generations after Jesus spoke in Aramic, translated later to Greek, later from Greek to Latin, later from Latin to English / any other living language… gee, whenever I ask my Christian friends how can they image this complete mess can have ANYTHING to do with Jesus could have actually said, at least the Catholics are clever enough to understand “Maybe not much, but it does not matter, the Bible is just the first step in a two thousand-years-old development of theology…”. This why I am not as strongly anti-Christian than, for example, ESR: I mostly know Catholic people, who tend to a be a whole lot more reasonable than Protestants.
Muslims are like Protestants on the Nth degree. Not only they stick to the letter of a book, they don’t even accept translations, the official Quran in only the Arabic one, translations are mere unofficial explanations. And not a letter changed throughout almost one and half millenia.
And, contrary to popular belief, Quran is not the only book considered holy. There is also the Hadith, which is the bio of Muhammand etc.
There is an interesting website, http://www.prophetofdoom.net , which contains interesting quotes. I would not call it an impartial analysis site, it is clearly biased somewhat against Islam and some parts of it hint that the author is either a religious Christian or Jew and speaking from a my-religion-is-better perspective than from a liberal-secular perspective.
I still recommend this site, because it is scientific, because it’s falsifiable: it shows quotes from Quran, Hadith etc. with noting their exact location. For example:
“Qur’an:47:4 “When you clash with the unbelieving Infidels in battle (fighting Jihad in Allah’s Cause), smite their necks until you overpower them, killing and wounding many of them. At length, when you have thoroughly subdued them, bind them firmly, making (them) captives. Thereafter either generosity or ransom (them based upon what benefits Islam) until the war lays down its burdens. Thus are you commanded by Allah to continue carrying out Jihad against the unbelieving infidels until they submit to Islam.—
So if there is anyone thinking this quote is false or is shown in a false light, is free to open the Quran at 47:4 and argue by putting one direct, testable fact against the other instead of the typical fuzzy, unprovable, untestable and unfalsifiable pseudo-intellectual bitching America-is-evil and Islam-is-a-religion-of-peace.
Mr.Eric, you keep telling us you know much about islam, and you did read Quran and know what it teachs,
Well i can’t believe this, and even if you did, there is a simply explaination for your ignorence of islam(peace), Your heart is BLACK Even though you claim you did read quran your heart is still black , becuase GOD didnot enlight you with the faith, there is Ayya in quran says – i hope i did translate it good- “allah do not change their soul unless they do change it themself” , well sir you have an issue here !
However, this shitty people who call themself mullah’s DONT and i repeat DONT represent us the muslims They do represent the “Wahabi wave”, islam is about peace that is, and i encourage you to read some biography about prophet muhammad and i hope you can see his peacefully character and deeds with his enemies.
fahad khalid:
You wrote:
/*However, this shitty people who call themself mullah’s DONT and i repeat DONT represent us the muslims They do represent the “Wahabi waveâ€, islam is about peace that is, and i encourage you to read some biography about prophet muhammad and i hope you can see his peacefully character and deeds with his enemies. */
If they do not represent you, why do you let them dominate the discourse on Islam? Why do you let them fester to the point where they can threaten others?
When they commit atrocities, why do you shield them?
When they commit atrocities, why do you fail to understand that if YOUR culture will not curtail them, OURS will?
All religions have an element of war in them. The quotes at http://www.prophetofdoom.net/quotes.aspx?g=405, even if only a few of them are translated accurately, cause one to doubt Islam’s label of the ‘religion of peace’, a neologism that, according to Wikipedia, originated after the 9/11 attacks (and was notably, and ironically, used by George W. Bush to differentiate the 9/11 hijackers from the rest of Muslims). Islam has its fair share of past ‘by the sword’ conversions. ( Don’t worry; Christianity has plenty as well.)
What differentiates Islam from Christianity, and makes Islam more of a threat, is that Christian doctrine has, in the words of ESR, ‘had the epistemological stuffing kicked out of it for about four centuries’, and the numerous additions and translations has made weary of its authenticity, while the exact words of Muhammad are uniform and can be read even now.
I know that there are plenty of Muslims who are good people. I worry because a larger percentage of Muslims literally interpret the Quaran than Christians literally interpret the Bible (especially Deuteronomy).
Iraq is a problem that no one else was going to do anything about. And, for all the whinging, no one else is going to do anything about. (If the US pulls out, who goes in? Nato-US doesn’t have the capacity.)
If you don’t like the US solution, feel free to do something better. It’s not like there’s any shortage of opportunities.
I reckon most Euros could live with a nuclear Iran, even if the governments are trying to follow the Americans and be hard-line about it. Iran isn’t going to be in a position to whack anyone other than suicidally, and increasing economic ties could eventually make that small chance negligible (cue cries of “Dhimmitude! Appeasement! Munich!”). But instead, what the Euros are likely to have to live with is an Iran that’s been preemptively attacked and is feeling mean about it. Plus the consequences for the oil markets, of course. And this is assuming the situation doesn’t escalate. I guess seeing what the Bush administration has accomplished in Iraq doesn’t really make one enthusiastic about seeing them try it with a country three times the size, in much better condition *and* capable of blocking the Strait of Hormuz.
This is all very fine and dandy, but some might wonder why nearly fifty percent of the world’s yearly arms spend is required for the off chance of (3).
Why would you care? Unless (3) applies to you, it’s money that we’re not spending to compete with you in other areas.
As I believe Madeleine Albright once said to Colin Powell: “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”
The rest of us have to live with the consequences of what your government does.
Nope. While I’m sure they’ve done more that I’m just not familiar with, Iraqi insurgents are currently getting a lot of high quality bombs with Made in Iran stamped all ove them ( http://www.intel-dump.com/archives/archive_2006_03_05-2006_03_11.shtml#1141843481 ).
From the article linked to:
What the United States says links them to Iran are tell-tale manufacturing signatures — certain types of machine-shop welds and material indicating they are built by the same bomb factory.
“The signature is the same because they are exactly the same in production,” says explosives expert Kevin Barry. “So it’s the same make and model.”
This is supposed to be proof? Sounds like “suspicion” to me.
What can i say… Guns guns guns, Bullets and Nukes…
You, dear westerners, have it.
And, Probably in some not so distant future, you will use them. (atleast the guns and the bullets)
I live in Eastern Europe, Bulgaria, and the muslim problem is not that important right now.
(but rising steadily)
We, Bulgarians, are struggling to survive (physically) for the last two decades.
Our nation is slowly disintegrating into oblivion.
Years of communism (upg. feodalism), false democracy, corrupt goverments, etc. have taken a toll on us.
Now in the break of the new millenia, we have troubles both with muslims, and hard right movements:
1. Such as ‘our’ new ‘Ataka’ pol. party that is dividing people by their ethnicity.
(skins, fascists (The schools are full of skinheads… etc. etc. etc. ))
2. Such as ‘our’ Ahmed Dogan and his party: “The movement for ‘rights’ and ‘freedom’ ”
So, what to do?
1. You have experience with Democracies… Tell us, open the code for us.
2. Shall we close our borders totaly, and increase production of AK’s, increase our army (100,000 lost souls)?
3. EU? please unite? for what…
—
Boril Boyanov , (I_trust_Google)
P.S.:
Sorry for the bad English and randomicity of thoughts.
(Pardon my french, gentlemen)
It’s the American dream: being able to drop a guy at 100 yards, but never actually having to.
This is nuts.
ESR, I read about the humour of your blog on ‘Everybody Loves Eric Raymond’, but the reality surpassed my expectations. Aside from implying that we must save ourselves with another ‘Crusade’ what are you adding to this already troubled debate apart from things that people know? If you had some ideas for a peaceful resolution that would be an interesting read, but it seems that this is just another opportunity for you to fantasise about getting your guns out.
Dan Kane, shame on you. ‘Raghead’ and ‘Cunt’ are not especially helpful. Does nobody stop to think before posting on the net these days?
I agree with the points made that overt PC-ness is inverted racism. That needs to stop. You’re not going to reach any kind of resolution with inflammatory post titles though. You will, however, create a storm of comment from fringe nutcases on both sides of the argument, and therefore can use these to prop up your grossly over-proportioned ego.
I feel sick. This stinks.
/* This is supposed to be proof? Sounds like “suspicion†to me.
*/
It may be surprising, but in a war zone you’re not always able to call in the high-tech CIS guys. However, it was enough suspicion to have diplomatic talks. Something tells me those talks went something like this:
US: From now on, we’ll shoot first and ask questions later at your border.
Iran: You infidels! We will crush you!
US: If you don’t like it, stay away from the border.
Iran: You infidels! We will crush you!
The rest of us have to live with the consequences of what your government does.
And to deal with the consequences when we don’t do anything.
Frankly, this isn’t about you. You are welcome to defend yourselves as you will (or won’t), but a nuclear Iran is not in American interests. If it’s between our survival and your sensitivities, you’ll have to cope.
If you want to partner with America, I’m sure favorable terms can be arranged.
>Frankly, this isn’t about you. You are welcome to defend yourselves as you will (or won’t), but a nuclear Iran is not in American interests. If it’s between our survival and your sensitivities, you’ll have to cope.
Well put. And let me add that is not up to anyone but Americans to evaluate whether or not a nuclear Iran would be a threat to our country.
“Dan Kane, shame on you.”
Color me scolded. Go fuck yourself.
“‘Raghead’ and ‘Cunt’ are not especially helpful. Does nobody stop to think before posting on the net these days?”
I didn’t have to think particularly long and hard about calling that raghead a cunt…I’m a maven with respect to the divination of such truths.
And my maven-senses are tingling with the possible gay-ass cuntish nature of your ‘silent protest’ bollocks…
> Well put. And let me add that is not up to anyone but Americans to evaluate whether or not a nuclear Iran would be a threat to our country.
Of course. But it’s your and only your fault that you are in this situation. E.g. I feel no danger from Iran. May be it’s good time to analyse your behavior in the past, and think next time what are you doing?
> Well put. And let me add that is not up to anyone but Americans to evaluate whether or not a nuclear Iran would be a threat to our country.
Well, I’d say everybody can evaluate whether or not a nuclear Iran is a threat to USA or not. But only americans can decide what USA should do about it. Personally I’d be all for a military intervention in Iran, and hopes Denmark would once more join USA in its battles.
Even though we (obviously) cannot trust USA to come to our aid, americans must know that you can trust in us coming to your aid. And a nuclear Iran is a threat to any democracy (especially countries publishing Muhammed-cartoons).
Hey Fahad Khalid, calling him black hearted doesn’t change anything he says. If you’re so sure that he’s wrong, you have to come up with a point to argue. Name calling works against you, because it means you cannot prove him wrong, and your only response is weak name calling.
“However, this shitty people who call themself mullah’s DONT and i repeat DONT represent us the muslims…”
Unless the Muslims fight against these “Non-Muslims”, then there is no difference. Let me give an example…
Imagine that Canada had a group of anti-americans who sneak down into the US and kill Americans, and then run back across the border.
Canada does not have a policy of killing Americans.
Canada will not hide these people because they are Canadian, they will hunt them down and punish them.
What have the “Pure Muslims” been doing with these “Not true Muslims”?
“Even though we (obviously) cannot trust USA to come to our aid…”
WTF?!?!? *Obviously*?!?!? Which nation were you ‘thinking’ has shoveled the most global shit over the past century?
Who are the current coalition members?
our allies…
http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/iraq/news/20030327-10.html
Why in the hell is Iran not on this list?
if i can find a more current list i will post it………
our current allies … with the war on terrorism…
http://www.centcom.mil/Operations/Coalition/joint.htm
our only hope….
Of course. But it’s your and only your fault that you are in this situation. E.g. I feel no danger from Iran. May be it’s good time to analyse your behavior in the past, and think next time what are you doing?
If by fault, you mean the American polity elected Jimmy Carter, who had the boorish self-centeredness to undercut the Shah in 1979, the only reliable leader in the region, then you are correct in a democratic Hegelian sense. I suspect, though, that you mean that it’s our fault from some social-justice left talking points, to wit, Sadaam / OBL were American Puppets who grew to power then turned on their masters, replete with American funding and training. Or do you mean that in the Marxist the-capitalists-will-make-the-rope sense? Or do you mean that on some cosmic scale of justice, America simply sucks and is set up to be punished?
In a little place i like to call reality, we were attacked, along with the rest of the civilized West. Only a few countries have presented a reasoned, measured, consistent response to this threat – a response that has been violent. But it has also been incredibly compassionate, as places like Tehran, Darfur, Sana’a, and Meccah are still standing. Baghdad was not only not destroyed, but is becoming a center for mercantilism and freedom in the Middle East. Contrast America’s response with the typical violent, chaotic response of a homicide bomber or 9-11 – indiscriminate killing and slaughter in the service of vague political ends or, worse, Armageddon-like theocratic blathering.
You say Iran poses no threat to you? They do – their rhetoric, wargames, sponsorship of terror, and hatred of israel are creating an American target. It’s been a regional war for 4.5 years now, and the Iranian situation threatens to make the situation escalate. Their escalation – not ours.
Leave your sanctimony out of this.
And to deal with the consequences when we don’t do anything.
No, that Europe could probably manage in this case. Academic, of course.
Frankly, this isn’t about you.
Really? I’d never have guessed.
You are welcome to defend yourselves as you will (or won’t), but a nuclear Iran is not in American interests.
I don’t reckon you even know what your interests are. Being able to beat on anyone you disapprove of with impunity, sounds like.
If you want to partner with America, I’m sure favorable terms can be arranged.
Hey, I’m British, I know all about those.
Well put. And let me add that is not up to anyone but Americans to evaluate whether or not a nuclear Iran would be a threat to our country.
The American government, sure. The rest of you are just passengers.
> No, that Europe could probably manage in this case.
What has Europe done that would suggest that that’s true?
Europe is welcome to deal with Iran but we know where more of the same is going to lead, so it’s pretty clear that Europe can’t deal with Iran. Europe could have dealt with Iraq or Afghanistan, but didn’t bother. Europe has pretty much failed central Africa – is that going to change? How about Bosnia, in Europe’s backyard?
For the last 50 years, Europe’s contribution has been to wait for the US to do something and then say “we could have done better”. The available evidence is says that Europe won’t do, let alone better, and probably can’t do even if it tried.
I suppose that that’s the US’ fault too.
DDG – do not feed the smarmy troll
Europe is welcome to deal with Iran but we know where more of the same is going to lead, so it’s pretty clear that Europe can’t deal with Iran.
This will sound more impressive once America’s putative upcoming attempt to deal with them hasn’t led to the most appalling clusterfuck.
Europe could have dealt with Iraq or Afghanistan, but didn’t bother. Europe has pretty much failed central Africa – is that going to change? How about Bosnia, in Europe’s backyard?
Europe could have dealt with Afghanistan? Kind of outside its sphere of influence by most measurements, might as well say Europe could have sorted out the problems in the Taiwan Straits. And Bosnia/Kosovo was a special case, they were worried about the Russians. Course, we know *now* that the Russians are pussycats, but it was less clear then.
For the last 50 years, Europe’s contribution has been to wait for the US to do something and then say “we could have done betterâ€.
Where have Europeans said that? All we do is raise an eyebrow when you try to gloss over your fuckups.
DDG, I mean Iraq and Yugoslavia.
> You say Iran poses no threat to you? They do – their rhetoric, wargames, sponsorship of terror, and hatred of israel are creating
> an American target. It’s been a regional war for 4.5 years now, and the Iranian situation threatens to make the situation
> escalate. Their escalation – not ours.
I they hate Israel, let Israel fix it. It’s their problem in this case, not yours. I don’t know what escalation do you mean. May be you mean that Iran told you “fuck you guys! we want nuclear power, and we will have it” against your “hey you, third-sort barbarian, we want you to sit in the stone age and stay barbarian”?
I’m not against nuclear Iran. I don’t see any problem here.
> Course, we know *now* that the Russians are pussycats, but it was less clear then.
It was clear all the time :)
“IF they hate Israel” in 3rd paragraph of course ;)
> Europe could have dealt with Afghanistan? Kind of outside its sphere of influence by most measurements
Huh? If Europe can’t have dealt with Afghanistan, what can it do about Iran? Besides talk that is.
It’s not like Iran was a big secret. Europe has had plenty of time to do something.
> America’s putative upcoming attempt to deal with them hasn’t led to the most appalling clusterfuck.
Adrian10 confuses “things went badly” with evidence for “we could have done better”.
> And Bosnia/Kosovo was a special case, they were worried about the Russians.
There’s always an excuse.
As I pointed out, central Africa is full of opportunities for Europe to show ignorant Americans how it’s done, but that would require that Europe do something, and do it better, and that’s not the European way.
> Where have Europeans said that? All we do is raise an eyebrow when you try to gloss over your fuckups.
It’s the basis of “oh, look at the horrible things that the Americans have done”.
We’re still waiting for any reason to believe that Europe can do better. Surely there must be some examples of “do” with good outcomes.
Dear ESR
I learned from you much and great things , you make me believe in hackerdom,opensource and the great fantastic community of hackers,I respect your technical writing very much, I’m shocked when i read this blog, i say to my self “is this ESR thoughts about me- muslim guy – barbarian ” no ESR I’m not that one and I couldn’t be , you became like any person around the world who watch the media and see pictures that’s not true read things, I’m not defend here for Islam he is far greater,furthermore my English language is bad i struggled to improve it time to time , i hope that u understand me ESR we are not barbarians ,barbarians who made 9/11,barbarians who killed people in Iraq and Palestine every moment .don’t lose my respect ESR and please make your reading about Islam from different resources and read the history in the true way .I’m not teaching you but i say that because I still respect you,
last thing ” talk to us you will know us” , i hope u visit Egypt where I’m from,talk about opensoure and see us barbarians or not
/* For the last 50 years, Europe’s contribution has been to wait for the US to do something and then say “we could have done betterâ€.
*/
No wonder Kerry was so popular with Europeans.
@ Dan Kane
> WTF?!?!? *Obviously*?!?!? Which nation were you ‘thinking’ has shoveled the most global shit over the past century?
The answer is USA and its allies. A part of the truth is that USA has also been creating a lot of the global shit. However, that was unavoidable during the cold war, where one couldn’t be picky about the nature of allies.
However, my post is to be understood in relation to recent events, and you cannot truthfully deny, USA has betrayed one of its closest allies several times recently.
In Denmark we know now that we can trust nobody. Only in Europe did we find supporters on government level.
I’m aware that Joe Average has a different opinion than your government, but we have no faith in your government’s will to keep faith. Therefore, we cannot trust you in coming to our aid.
> No wonder Kerry was so popular with Europeans.
Well, he actually wasn’t popular at all. Popular among socialists and leftist social liberals, but not popular among the rest of us. Nor is Bush. I can’t speak for people in other european countries, but in Denmark politicians are generally unpopular. I know of no popular politicians.
Besides, there is no such things as Europeans. Europe do not exist as anything but a geographical area.
I don’t buy the notion that the Koran preserves the exact words of Mohammed, even assuming the book actually dates to his lifetime. Even in the age of the printing press, a single book encounters corruptions from one printing to the next. I cannot believe a work 1400 years old, subject to a manuscript tradition for 800 years, is not riddled with errors and interpretations. It is no more the word of God than the Bible.
There is no word of God.
>“is this ESR thoughts about me- muslim guy – barbarian â€
I have bad news for you. I think anybody who has bought into a faith-based religion like Islam or Christianity is insane. I don’t mean that in a polite, metaphorical way, either: I mean that these belief systems are lethally loony, they requre one to believe crazy things and kill people in volume. So, if you are a believing Muslim, I think you are by definition dangerously crazy. I’m just as harsh on devout Christians, though, so don’t feel picked on.
As to whether you yourself are a ‘barbarian’, here’s a two-part test:
1) Do you aspire to a world ruled by shari’a law and excuse terrorism performed with that goal? If your answer is yes, then you are indeed an Islamic barbarian and a mortal enemy of my civilization, and I will cheerfully shoot you on sight if I ever meet you and I think I can do it without going to jail.
2) Supposing your answer is to (1) is ‘no’, do you speak out against Muslims who want to enforce shari’a on the entire world through terror? If you do not, you are an ally or enabler of Islamic barbarians. I won’t shoot you on sight, but I won’t necessarily stop anyone else from shooting you either.
Here’s a related question: do you think it would have been right for Afghani courts to execute Abdul Rahman for ‘apostasy’ because he converted from Islam to Christianity? And if not, why did you not speak out against it?
Bearing in mind that I consider both these religions to be forms of dangerous mass insanity, it is possible to notice a difference: in the 21st century, Christians (having agreed to ignore the harshest and intolerant parts of their religion after four hundred years of losing all the arguments) don’t try to kill anyone for the ‘crime’ of converting to Islam. This makes Christianity better than Islam in a very real sense.
Islam seems to me to be divided into two groups: barbarians, and enablers of barbarians. I don’t see anyone speaking for genuine peace and tolerance in Islam, and having studied Islamic history and read the Koran I am completely unsurprised that I don’t see anyone speaking for peace and tolerance. There is effectively no theological ground for it — the violent crazies have all the best arguments.
> The blood on that rape victim’s face is the visible sign of one end of the road down which Sweden has tried to lead the West; the other possible end, even more horrifying but daily more likely, is the swastika.
The crescent and the swastika are the same end. Arafat’s mentor, the grand mufti, was a close friend of Hitler, and he raised a whole division of Muslim Waffen SS for him; it was not the only such division. Additionally, the second best selling book in the Muslim world, after the Koran, is Mein Kampf. If either group comes to power, the other will be empowered by default.
“The answer is USA and its allies.”
Utter horseshit. If your view of world history is truly *this* corrupted, there’s no hope in engaging you further.
“…you cannot truthfully deny, USA has betrayed one of its closest allies several times recently”
Denial is trivial. I deny it. Truthfully. That’s real easy. What’s difficult is *you* meeting *your* burden…of proof…not just *asserting* something (in this case, that the USA has *betrayed* an ally). Asserting something is as easy as denying something…if you wish to engage in rational debate on the issue, you have to *prove* your point – which you have yet to do.
“…we cannot trust you in coming to our aid”
I suspect that you do not speak for the Danish nation. I suspect that most Danes believe that the USA is a powerful (and often maligned) yet ultimately *benevolent* nation…and can be relied upon to tirelessly shovel others’ shit. We’re pretty nice about things like that…and don’t shirk the real work, unlike the rest of Europe.
“Besides, there is no such things as Europeans…”
Errr…WTF?
“…Europe do not exist as anything but a geographical area.”
So…Europe doesn’t exist except in the form in which it exists…IOW…Europe does exist…and the dawdling little bipeds that reside within this ‘geographical area’ are called….? *All together now*
EUROPEANS
dumbass
“…the second best selling book in the Muslim world, after the Koran, is Mein Kampf”
Are you shitting me? Tell me you cannot back that up…
“The answer is USA and its allies.â€
One of the worst positions to be in with America is to be our ally. The South Vietnamese in 1975, the Shah in ’79, and the Kurds in ’91 and again in 2003 are good examples. Rather than take this as a slap in our face, I think it’s a reality that must be borne by those who wish to piggy back on America’s might. The smaller the country and the less the problem can be defined explicitly, the more likely the situation is to be turned into a pawn in our political process. But there is a flip side as well – America gets into fights regularly on principle. I would have to say that if Denmark were threatenedd or invaded, America would come to its defense post haste. But the thesis holds – we’re great allies if you’re fighting for survival, for example, and that can be well defined.
There are two excellent examples of post-facto American interference that are instructive – Germany 1945-1950 and japan during the same period. We were successfully involved in both countries, to both countries benefit (hold the flames), but we also didn’t have to share the floor with anyone. Both countries adopted an American-like federalism, in spirit if not in fact, that has served them both well and allowed for wealth to reemerge in the shortest term possible.
Iraq may still find a successful post-war story. It’s too soon to say.
Our best allies are those countries that can hold their own all by themselves – Great Britain comes to mind. India might be another one.
Specifically to Denmark – you’re painting with a broad brush to say Denmark can’t trust us. But you’re right to be cautious. I always liked the Chinese parable about having the lion in to take care of the mouse problem.
The answer for the first question surly NO , and the answer for the second surly NO either , ESR I’m not enabler of barbarians cause i respect my Islamic believes in every moment in my live who did you call them barbarians when they saw me that they may think that is the true Islamic religion and many many other like me do that you didn’t want to see other Muslims except those barbarians because when you say once in become a hacker How TO that are any one who’s curious to become a hacker must learning English and you afraid that people think this a sort of cultural imperialism. believe me ESR you have that culture every word you write here say that
and let me consider that you believe in thoughts of Huntington ” clash of civilizations ” this your thoughts and believes , Islam believes is not ” clash of civilizations ” it’s alliance of civilizations and this is peace , those who killed civilians are not Muslim’s shame of them but you still didn’t answer me are you consider USA army barbarians or not ? and are you enabler of those who killed civilians too , tell me who’s the barbarian?
after all that last thing i wish to tell you that I’m very proud to be a Muslim and i hope one day I’m sure it’s coming soon that you change your thoughts about us and consider us friends not enemies , and all that discussions didn’t prevent me from keep in touch with your essays in CS field and I’m very sad ESR cause I want tell you much things about Islam religion and the prophet Muhammad “peace be upon him ” but you know that my languages is still bad however i wouldn’t stop learning.
>>“…the second best selling book in the Muslim world, after the Koran, is Mein Kampfâ€
>Are you shitting me? Tell me you cannot back that up…
It’s almost invariably on the top ten list of any particular region dominated by Muslims, and, afaik, overall it’s second best after the Koran, but I don’t seem to have bookmarked my source for that statistic. Googling “Muslim world mein kampf best seller” will give you a pretty good idea of the situation; the source I had might be in there somewhere, but I don’t see it on the first page of results and I don’t feel like digging for it.
Also, if you check memritv.org regularly you’ll find that Holocaust denial is the norm in the Muslim world.
OK, OK, I’ll take you at your word…man…even though “Mein Kampf” is an interesting read, an entire cultural trend towards it is just disgraceful.
If it’s possible, I guess ragheads are declining in my estimations…
PS. sadly, the google search was depressingly revealing…planet Earth has a ‘roach problem, and its name is Islam
Huh? If Europe can’t have dealt with Afghanistan, what can it do about Iran? Besides talk that is.
Establish economic ties. One of the reasons France and Germany are very unlikely to ever fight again is because they’re too closely interlinked economically. The principle could be applied more generally, though it’s obviously not going to appeal to those who find something sinister in everything Islamic (“FOOLS! THEY’RE JUST WAITING TILL YOUR BACK IS TURNED!”).
Adrian10 confuses “things went badly†with evidence for “we could have done betterâ€.
Well, since the thing your government is probably going to do (and which is probably going to go badly) is going to foreclose any possibility of the Euro approach working, there is kind of a point to this.
We can discuss this more after the attack, if any. I mean, I can write something about it and you can “call attention” to what I’ve written in that quaint little arm’s-length third-person fashion of yours.
There’s always an excuse.
Europe just isn’t that interested in military power projection any more. They used to be, but they had these two big fuck-off wars you may have heard about, after which America seemed to be left holding all the cards militarily, and they got kind of burnt-out on the whole thing. And now, when Americans strut around boasting about how powerful their military is, the Euro tendency is to wait expectantly, peanut gallery style, and see what you’re going to do with it. And when you get in over your heads, well, yes, there’s a certain amount of amusement to be had – all the more when you’re in deep denial about it.
Hubris and nemesis is a very old story.
As I pointed out, central Africa is full of opportunities for Europe to show ignorant Americans how it’s done, but that would require that Europe do something, and do it better, and that’s not the European way.
The biggest thing Europe could do for Africa is reform the CAP. Unfortunately the French turned selfish on this big time.
Nobody cares much about Africa, except for the bits with oil.
ahmed: I’m sure that you are a reasonable person. From my readings, and personal knowledge of serveral Muslims, it’s not possible to be both reasonable and a good Muslim. A good, observant Muslim is not a reasonable person (e.g. not urinating while facing Mecca). Thus, my assumption that you are a reasonable person implies that I think you are a bad Muslim.
“Islam seems to me to be divided into two groups: barbarians, and enablers of barbarians. I don’t see anyone speaking for genuine peace and tolerance in Islam…”
Now there’s a sweeping generalization. Just because something is rare doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. And if you haven’t seen it, its because you haven’t looked. I’m currently reading ‘The Trouble with Islam Today” by Irshad Manji. You might want to check it out.
I hate Islam so fucking much. It really destroy’s our society.
> Well, since the thing your government is probably going to do (and which is probably going to go badly) is going to foreclose any possibility of the Euro approach working, there is kind of a point to this.
Note the refusal to acknowledge that we got where we are the European way. Why would it suddenly start working when it hasn’t yet? How long do we try it before we admit that it isn’t working?
At what point is it fair to say “we tried it your way and it failed”?
As I’ve asked, where’s the evidence that Europe could do better? What problems has Europe dealt with?
>The answer for the first question surly NO , and the answer for the second surly NO either
Those are the answers I was pretty much expecting. Like most Muslims, you are not a barbarian yourself, but you will do nothing to stop them either. That makes you part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Note the refusal to acknowledge that we got where we are the European way.
Note the inability to remember that I said I reckoned Europe could live with a nuclear Iran despite being in range of its missiles, having lived with assloads of Russian stuff pointed at us for years and thus grown a little nonchalant. And Europe hasn’t been sticking its oar in in the Middle East all that much since Suez, I think you’ll find, so some of how we got where we are is your lot’s fault. But what are you saying? We should have got on with it and attacked before now?
The implications of this one go a bit further than those of attacking Iraq did, you know. The blithe confidence of every gung-ho asshole in blogworld that We Have The Technology notwithstanding, the Strait of Hormuz is kind of a critical place, and letting fly with all available ordnance there has one or two potential downsides.
At what point is it fair to say “we tried it your way and it failed�
I don’t think we are “trying it Europe’s way”. If we were there wouldn’t be the constant threats in the background. Europe’s attempting to negotiate because the Americans refuse to, as they’re still in a snit about the hostage crisis a quarter of a century ago. Thankless task and no mistake.
As I’ve asked, where’s the evidence that Europe could do better?
You didn’t see where I mentioned France and Germany?
assloads of Russian stuff pointed at us for years
We all did. You are not a special snowflake.
And Europe hasn’t been sticking its oar in in the Middle East all that much since Suez, I think you’ll find,
this is factually incorrect on so many levels. Start with the French and German ties to Iraq, unless Iraq isn’t in the Middle East. Britain has a hard-wired tunnel into Iran diplomatically, and has taken the lead in relations with them since 1979 when America first capitulated, then took a stand. Russia has had constant connections with Iraq and Sudan militarily and diplomatically and economically.
If we were there wouldn’t be the constant threats in the background.
You do understand the threats are there because of a lack of credible diplomatic alternatives. America did not stand up yesterday and decide to start a hard line.
the Strait of Hormuz is kind of a critical place
I just don’t see anyone being overly confident here. In fact, my unofficial poll is that everyone has screwed up the Iranian situation to the nth degree and we are reticent about having to unequivocally deal with this issue, especially when “dealing with it” could be nucular. There have been a host of voices in America asking for our government to support pro-democracy revolution / reforms in the last 10 years. First, politically when the Clinton Admin re-opened diplomatic channels (97? 96?), and after 9/11, it was the prerogative of the CIA assist grassroots liberal thinkers and students within Tehran and ishfahan. They failed, due in part to the crackdowns within the regime (The July Massacres in Tehran).
The Straits of Hormuz are critical, of course. Tehran’s latest propoganda (torpedoes) is explicitly directed at every merchant fleet that runs that route. By the way, this propoganda is some of the escalating that Tehran has been participating in and encouraging.
It would be a lot easier if you would just copy and paste “I hate America and categorically reject any attempt she makes as over the top and aggressive.” It will save you from carpal tunnel.
DDG – A snide, self-delusional, effete malcontent would never take such an easy route…it affords far too little opportunity for whinging ;-) And carpal tunnel is a Bush-induced manifestation of America’s hegemonic imperialism…
>> As I’ve asked, where’s the evidence that Europe could do better?
>You didn’t see where I mentioned France and Germany?
The US was occupying Germany during that time.
> having lived with assloads of Russian stuff pointed at us for years and thus grown a little nonchalant.
Of course you were nonchalant – the US promised to nuke said Russians if they did anything. In other words, the US did that too.
Surely there must be some examples of Europe doing the right thing that aren’t a consequence of US backing.
> And Europe hasn’t been sticking its oar in in the Middle East all that much since Suez, I think you’ll find, so some of how we got where we are is your lot’s fault.
As I wrote before, a bad outcome does not imply that a good outcome was possible, let alone likely if Europe had taken the lead. That’s why I’m asking for examples where Europe has gotten it right, where Europe has, in fact, “done better”.
Impotence isn’t a virtue.
A snide, self-delusional, effete malcontent
Toady, I’ve been leaving your contributions alone, but it suddenly looks as if my charity may have been misplaced. Do you want some attention? You didn’t appear to enjoy my dissections of your last episode of pointless posturing, but I assure you that more of the same is available.
About the “war for oil” – theory:
The underseas oil basin under Iraq and Kuwait has has a slope towards Kuwait. So every barrel Kuwait sucks up gets refilled from under Iraq. So these two countries are in a race situation of who sucks up the oil first, with Iraq being quite handicapped. This was one of the reasons Saddam attacked Kuwait in 1991 (the other was his heavy state debts towards Kuwait). In the last 15 years, due to the quarantine, Iraq’s odds in this race worsened. So, only a complete moron would attack Iraq for oil. Americas economic interests would be to keep Iraq in quarantine and invest into the Kuwait oil industry. Therefore this war is not waged for economic interests. (Actually, these are the very reasons some non-liberals like Jerry Pournell didn’ t support the war on Iraq.)
Stas,
based on your name, I think you must be living somewhere geographically close to me (I’m Hungarian). Let me ask a question: Muslim troublemakers at our southern borders – Chechnia, Bosnia, Kosovo – didn’t make you understand what’s going on? What will you say when some Chechen terrorist performs a 9/11 at Moscow? (And if your hobby is to whip America, whip’em for the war on Serbia, which was quite a bad decision – short-term humanitarian reasons made Clinton forget the strategic viewpoint on the conflict and the future of the region.)
Shenpen,
1. I live in Belarus,
2. I don’t associate terrorists with muslims,
3. If someone peroform 9/11 at let’s say Minsk, I’ll say that we should punish that concrete person, but not all the muslims.
4. And my hobby isn’t to whip USA. I just think that USA behave like they are the kings of the world, but they aren’t. And if they keep doing it, I will not surprised if the number of terrorists will increase.
We all did.
Maybe, but we had the tactical stuff, which in most scenarios was going to be used first, whether or not the ICBMs went off.
this is factually incorrect on so many levels.
Then I’ll be more specific: by “sticking its oar in” I mean trying to throw its weight around – “Suez” might have been a clue here to those inclined to read for content. Of course they’ve been involved out there diplomatically and economically. Duh.
You do understand the threats are there because of a lack of credible diplomatic alternatives.
I understand the Americans are claiming the right to decide what’s credible and what isn’t, certainly.
The Straits of Hormuz are critical, of course. Tehran’s latest propoganda (torpedoes) is explicitly directed at every merchant fleet that runs that route.
Tell me about it. But I worry more about some of the other stuff they’ve got. Blocking the Strait is trivially easy. Preventing it…well, good luck.
By the way, this propoganda is some of the escalating that Tehran has been participating in and encouraging.
And US and Israeli discussions of their strike options aren’t?
It would be a lot easier if you would just copy and paste “I hate America and categorically reject any attempt she makes as over the top and aggressive.â€
Don’t be silly, America is a fine place full of great people, not to mention my old man, and a source of massive innovation and creativity, particularly from the blue states for some reason. What I don’t have much time for is the people who go around acting like the administration is the manifest embodiment of The Will Of The People and whatever it does must therefore be respected. Not bloody likely.
The Quaran says the same things as the Bible, and Muslims beleive in the same God Christians do. If you kill someone, then you go to hell. Islam is as much a “violent religion” as Christianity and Judaism. Jihad means “religious struggle” not “religious war” – two very different ideas. I am a deeply devoted Muslim and a patriotic American, and do not beleive any type of killing is right. To say that “Islam is at war with us” is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard in my life – you obviously do not understand the Quran. The acts of terrorists groups can not represent Islam just because they say they do, so don’t make the assumption that because they say what they do is in the Quaran that it really is. It says in the Quran that if you commit suicide you go to hell also.
“Like most Muslims, you are not a barbarian yourself, but you will do nothing to stop them either. That makes you part of the problem, not part of the solution.”
Muslims can stand up for what they beleive in, argue what the Quran stands for, and tell the truth about their religion. I know many Muslims in the army and have a friend that recently died in Afghanastan. Unfortunately, there is not much the average Muslim can do to stop a tyrant or terrorist who advocates lies, except spread the truth about their religion themselves.
“What history am I rewriting? Please be more specific. I’m trying explain to explain why Bush has been so roundly criticized in the world press for making a deal with India while simultaneously threatening Iran. By most criteria, India is a greater threat to its neighbors than Iran. Yes, India is a much better democracy than Iran, but in terms of international security, India is much more dangerous, because it could start a nuclear war with Pakistan or send troops into Nepal at any moment.
The funny thing about this whole debate is that the US is actually the rogue nation. Iran hasn’t violated any treaties by seeking to develop nuclear power. If it tries to develop a nuclear weapon, then it is in violation, but thus far it hasn’t as far as we know. Likewise, India hasn’t violated the non-proliferation treaty because it never signed it. The only country which is violating international law is the US which is breaking the non-proliferation treaty by making this deal with India. Furthermore, we will be breaking international law if we attack or sanction Iran for developing nuclear power. ”
While India has a large population of Muslims, it is still is dominated by Hindus, and really can’t be compared to Iran or Iraq in any way. India is a democracy in which every citizen votes on everything, making it the largest true democracy in the world – in many ways ahead of the U.S., having already elected female prime ministers and having a better education system. India, while it will always be fighting with Pakistan, is still way too poor of a country to be a real threat to anyone – a reason why it refused to accept money from the U.S. when the tsumani hit, not wanting to be in debt. It also is very new, only becoming independent after WW2, a reason why it is so poor. In any case, America doesn’t care how much of a threat Iran or Iraq is to its neighbors, but how much a threat it is to us – which has always been true of the States.
> Unfortunately, there is not much the average Muslim can do to stop a tyrant or terrorist who advocates lies, except spread the truth about their religion themselves.
Actually, there is. You can start condemning the folks who call themselves Muslims who are committing attrocities. You can start turning them in. You can stop sending them money.
Telling me that they’re not good Muslims is worse than useless. Telling them, working against them, and so on, is useful.
Stas,
I’ll make a last attempt to make you understand us.
First, I think Muslims are no way worse than the aveage medieval king, priest or landlord. Actually, there were ages where Islam was clearly superior morallly – I mean, the University of Córdoba boasted such a freedom of expression and a rich intellectual life that was unheard of in Christian Europe. To understand it clearly, I actually think that my own grand-grand-graddads haven’t been morally superior than Muslims: maybe they were Transsylvanian landlords treating Rumanian serfs as animals or maybe they were Jewish slave traders – actually, Muslims were somewhat bettter than then because at least they are non-racist and non-nationalist.
So I don’t mean that Islam is a unique,special evil phenomena in history. To the contrary, throughout most of history, people who were thinking in a similar way than Muslims were actually the rule, not he exception.
What is a unique phenonena in history, is liberal democracy. And the problem is Islam fundamentally incompatible with it – as would be views of my own granddad, or the views of every average medieval ruler or priest, if they have been resurrected now. I mean basically anybody from before 1700 or so if would have been resurrected, and given power and popular support, would be need to be considered as much as a danger to liberal democracy as Islam is. So it’s not a crusade against Islam: it’s the centuries-old freedom fight of liberal democracy against ALL kinds of medievalism – with Islam being only the last kind of medievalism, that was still not defeated (like monarchs and landlords) or pacified (like the Catholic church) – nothing different, nothing worse. It’s just the last stage of the freedom fight of liberal democracy.
>Like most Muslims, you are not a barbarian yourself, but you will do nothing to stop them either. That makes you part of the problem, not part of the solution.
As opposed to you? When does your tour in Iraq finish up?
Why did you approve my postings, then delete them after your side ran out of spurious arguments? Do you feel I somehow derailed the discussion, or are you just uninterested in a fair debate?
[Ed. note: I have not deleted any comments by this respondent.]
Regarding esr ‘deleting’ my posts – I had this confused with esr’s next post. My apologies.
ESR, I have read your article, and your response to some of the comments which asks you to study Islam.
It seems like you are too sure (over-assured) that you have studied Islam and that you fully understand it. Let me tell you that your knowledge about Islam is very little, because if you would have studied it, you wouldn’t have been against it, you would have become a Muslim yourself after seeing all the miracles that Quran has, and the way of life Islam suggests.
The fact that Islam teaches Jihad and such stuff, you should know that it specifically teaches to “fight against evil” in the form of Jihad, just the way you are telling the Swedish to arm themselves against evil. There is nothing wrong in eliminating the evil from planet Earth, and Islam teaches the very same. Islam has very specific rules and regulations about every aspect of life. Just that a few people call themselves Muslims, but act totally like barbarians (just like the US army acted in the Abu Gharib prison), doesn’t mean that there is something wrong with Islam. It merely means that the Muslim community too has got a minority of nuts who act weird, just the way all the other religions and communities of the world have got some.
Talking about you not surprized at the 9/11, well, it seems like you too like so many of the other prejudiced anit-Islamic nuts have not considered some very weird things about the 9/11. The event occured, and all those prejudiced anti-Islamic lobbies closed their eyes to facts and tried to put it all on Muslims so that they can initiate “a war on Islam.” There are numerous questions about the event of 9/11 still unanswered. Just search the web for “9/11 facts” and you will come to know what I am talking about. Just in case you are too dumb to use Google properly, let me know, I will send you a documentary film which I have on my harddisk. It questions the events of of 9/11, and the way controlled media reported it, and the falsified information the US agencies provided.
Finally, I know you want to look cool and strong and want to be one of those who are dreaming of ruling over the world one day and being the supreme leaders of the world, but, you must consider that in trying to achieve this goal by the negative propaganda, and violence, you are not doing anyone good, not even yourself.
Lets bring peace to this world. Lets stop all those who are killing innocent people (US army in Iraq, Israel in Palestine, India in Kashmir), and let the people of all religions come closer to each other, supporting one another, and making this planet a place worth living. I know it sounds dreamy, but so does the “ruling over the world” dream of yours. By supporing peace, at least you would be able to say that you were preaching something positive, rather than the situation in which you are now, i.e. teaching violence.
>Finally, I know you want to look cool and strong and want to be one of those >who are dreaming of ruling over the world one day and being the supreme >leaders of the world, but, you must consider that in trying to achieve this goal >by the negative propaganda, and violence, you are not doing anyone good, not >even yourself.
.. how about Islam with concept of caliphate? with Mohammedan military army in the past? being a supreme leader too, rite? ;-) same dude .. but living in the freedom still worth .. freedom is exspensive :-)
>.. how about Islam with concept of caliphate? with Mohammedan military army in the past? being a supreme leader too, rite? ;-) same dude .. but living in the freedom still worth .. freedom is exspensive :-)
That age (caliphate) was one of the best times that the planet Earth ever encountered on its face. Those were the times when everything on Earth flourished, the Science, the economies, the relations between people, even the non-muslims used to wish to live under the Islamic rulers due to their extremely good governance. Which ever area came under the Islamic rulers, it was converted into a place of peace. In contrast, take a look at the places where US has been i.e. Iraq (violence), Afghanistan (Violence) Vietnam (Violence), and the list goes on…
Islam has the answer to every problem the human beings ever encounter. It’s just that the problem is with those, who won’t open their minds, and would keep it shut to any kind of enlighntment. These are the people whom would at once put everything on Muslims when the 9/11 occurs, without any sort of proof. These are the very same people, whom would close their eyes to any kind of injustice taking place in the Muslim regions (Iraq, Afghanistan, Kashmir, Palestine…). These are the people whom just simply hate Muslims without any specific reason, and would go to any degree of violence to remove them off the face of the Earth. Be it Eric Raymond, Ariel Sharon, George Bush, they all have their means to launch “a war on Islam”. Some uses their weblogs, some uses their Armies, some uses their money.
C’mon! Stop terrorising Muslims, and start making planet Earth a peaceful place.
to Kawish:
.. i doubt about it. Really. If it good then why it collapsed?? Give me a logic reason. The good thing will last forever. Perfect.
> Islam has the answer to every problem the human beings ever encounter.
Are you sure? Why many of moeslem country poor? not invent high technology. If islam has every answer, why Marie Curie not born in saudi arabia? Why Intel processor not born in saudi arabia? why car not invented in saudi arabia? why satellite no invent in saudi arabia? why .. oh so many why (because i know saudi arabia is the center of islam)
>Those were the times when everything on Earth flourished, the Science, the economies, the relations between people, even the non-muslims used to wish to live under the Islamic rulers due to their extremely good governance.
.. many moeslem science is not original (sorry for this, read history), it comes from Greece, the ten numeral concept comes from India, i respect your moeslem culture but you never respect another culture. That`s the point. That`s called FASCISM. Chauvinism.
>C’mon! Stop terrorising Muslims, and start making planet Earth a peaceful place.
I want to. Stop suicide bomb. Your holysh*t war. Don`t poison & kill dog.
to Kawish:
>Iraq (violence), Afghanistan (Violence) Vietnam (Violence), and the list goes on…
.. here the reason son:
Iraq –> Saddam killed hundred of kurd, Kuwait expansion, .. etc.
afghanistan –> taliban otoriter regime which shoot a woman in the public, throw stone law, not allow women to work, ..and many of “evil” do ..
Vietnam –> communist which move by stalin who in his country famous with his GREAT TERROR.
for Kawish .. please read more (read more quran carefully not only the first until ten verses but the whole verses and think deeply) & measure your general knowledge of the world by read book history in your “liberal” library (of course not islam lib.) .. ok that`s my advice, i know you are intelligence enough and not a zombie .. :-)
““Surfies†used text messaging to arrange a showdown with the Muslim mob after they beat a Lifeguard (the Aussie national Icon) into critical condition.”
I just noticed this post. Sorry for the out-of-order-reply.
“Mobs of youths [about 5000 people at max] chanting racist slogans and carrying Australian flags attacked youths of Middle Eastern appearance. Five police were injured when the mob turned on them. … A group of about 60 men of Middle Eastern appearance and armed with baseball bats smashed about 40 parked cars at about 9 pm (AEDT) Sunday night. The group then clashed with a local group, the Bra Boys, outside the Maroubra Bay Hotel.”
It’s gang violence. It’s not a showdown.
—
Um, ESR, if you’re still reading this… :P
You have made an argument that Islam is the problem. You have said that the argument applies equally well to Christianity, but (I infer) there are fortunately no real, genuine Christians left these days. So when you say that some Muslim is not a real Muslim, why does it sound like an insult? That’s what you want! No more real Muslims!
Because Islam is not going to suddenly vanish. Nobody is going to say, “I guess I won’t be Muslim anymore.” Stop communicating to any Muslim reading this blog that a real Muslim would murder the unbeliever. Sure, if they believe you it’s their own fault. But why are you telling them to do it?
PS. As near as I can figure, what you are advocating is that the public figures, politicians, blah blah take a hostile attitude, not to men of Middle Eastern appearance, nor to Muslims in general, but to fundamentalist Islam and anyone associated with it. And this is not intended to drive immigrants out of the country, either, but to break them loose from the fundamentalists. Maybe.
(Another thing they should stop doing is not arresting Middle Eastern criminals. Yeah, because you know that’s exactly what the police are doing. “Hey, stop, this rapist is a Muslim.” “Oh, sorry sir, didn’t realize, you’re free to go of course.”)
—
“Which ever area came under the Islamic rulers, it was converted into a place of peace. In contrast, take a look at the places where US has been i.e. Iraq (violence), Afghanistan (Violence) Vietnam (Violence), and the list goes on…”
Um, the present American/European age is better. A lot better. And it has been better than the caliphate at its best for a couple hundred years. >_>
>.. here the reason son:
Iraq –> Saddam killed hundred of kurd, Kuwait expansion, .. etc.
afghanistan –> taliban otoriter regime which shoot a woman in the public, throw stone law, not allow women to work, ..and many of “evil†do ..
Vietnam –> communist which move by stalin who in his country famous with his GREAT TERROR.
Well, Ariel Sharon killed thousands of Palestinians. Why won’t US attack Israel to help the innocent Palestinians if US at all cares about the sufferers?
>Well, Ariel Sharon killed thousands of Palestinians. Why won’t US attack Israel to help the innocent Palestinians if US at all cares about the sufferers?
.. you, moeslem, just care about yourself. Israel (Jew) has right to have homeland. It doesn`t makes me agree with the killing of human. US cares make the Road of Peace with Yaser Arafat and Ariel Sharon in Bill Clinton`s era. I think you don`t read or hear it. Israel suffered in the past time. Holocaust. Why you just care about yourself?? I am not in Jew side or US side or Palestinian side. This is humanity.
I don`t like Hamas because they don`t respect life itself by its suicide bombing. And it`s inspired from your evil-jihad-holysh*t. You`re not ashamed to use Western tech while you hate them?? you must consistent, if you don`t like them don`t use internet, cellphone, watch TV (soccer etc.), car, bus ..etc. If you stand for islam you should consistent in age of stone with stone throw`s law, polygamy etc.. If you have any question more, don`t hesitate to post again. :-)
Sakharov, not using western tech will be as stupid as if I suggest you not to use Muslim’s oil. Why won’t I use western tech even though it has been built upon the knowledge that got transferred to west from Muslims? :)
As far as your point about humanity is concerned, that is exactly what I have been trying to tell you actually. Jews want a state? They better go ahead and get it, but not by bulldozing other’s houses. The haven’t got the right to have a land by snatching it from others. That’s barbarism.
Why don’t you people get it that peace is just too important? That war will not just kill your imaginative enemies, but will bring destruction onto your own self too?
Start listening to good music, start reading light and peaceful fiction, and throw away the violence that has arisen in your minds. If you won’t, don’t stop the ones whom are the victims of your violence to try to defend themselves by what so ever means, whether it be suicide bombing, or throwing stones at the tanks that are wandering around in their streets.
BTW, why do you all go so shhhh when it comes to discussing facts about the 9/11 event? Feeling guilty, eh? :)
Do you aspire to a world ruled by shari’a law and excuse terrorism performed with that goal? If your answer is yes, then you are indeed an Islamic barbarian and a mortal enemy of my civilization, and I will cheerfully shoot you on sight if I ever meet you and I think I can do it without going to jail.
So ESR doesn’t like freedom of speech! SHISES!!!
>I suggest you not to use Muslim’s oil.
to Kawish:
.. without western tech. you can`t get that oil :-), also not only moeslem country has oil ..
>Start listening to good music, start reading light and peaceful fiction, and throw away the violence that has arisen in your minds.
.. hey , i think you do this-> your suicide bomber, hijacked plane, etc. evil do … not me :-)
Sakharov, learn proper spells and proper grammar before you act being a poser.
> Sakharov, learn proper spells and proper grammar before you act being a poser.
.. wanna run away from the topic? .. ok i will stop before you are being a loser :-)
“I’m writing my paper here in law school on American gun laws. Any tips?”
Sure: don’t adopt them. America has a gun murder rate that’s a thousand times higher than the rest of the industrialized world. Americans have a hell of a lot more to fear from their fellow God-fearin’, gun-totin’ Americans than they do from Muslim terrorists.
Hint – don’t use Blargy as a source.
Today’s questions – why is the murder rate for Japanese-Americans about the same as (actually somewhat lower than) the murder rate for Japanese in Japan? Why don’t Canadians smuggle guns? (That’s a trick question – they do, they just don’t smuggle the violent prone demographic groups from the US. Yes Virginia, a huge fraction of US violence is concentrated in groups that aren’t found in other “industrialized” countries, which is code for “majority white/european”.)
Andy Freeman, what do you suppose is the root cause for all that violence concentrated in specific “groups”?
> Andy Freeman, what do you suppose is the root cause for all that violence concentrated in specific “groups�
That violence is a fairly recent phenomena – it started in the early 60s but didn’t really get going until the late 60s and kept accellerating through the mid-late 90s. I’d expect the causes to have roughly the same timeline. (It’s unclear how much earlier the causes were.)
Let’s dig a little deeper:
Might you consider the possibility that the violence among certain groups has its origins and may be based a model established entirely outside those groups?
Well, the 60s had the civil rights acts, two gun control acts, great society, rock and roll, antibiotics, and the vietnam war, among other things. Oh, and color TV and the sitcom.
Where do you want to start?
Someone told that Jew’s needed a homeland then Sweden will be a better place for them not Palestine. We did not made the Genocide you lovely humanist europeans made the Genocide.Just like you made Genocide in Algeria.But you blame the Muslims all the time.
You have double standarts for everything and you always change the referances.
@Ali Rıza Says
Even the “great nation” USA is build on bloody earth. Have you already forgotten the Genocide on Native Americans (American Indians) or that hundred thousand killed black slaves? This terrible shit is happen everywhere in the past on this planet.
“The result? 85% of Sweden’s rapes are committed by immigrants or their unassimilated first-generation offspring.”
I’m a swede. And I really wonder where you got this fucked up statistic.
That is not true. Most rapes in Sweden are committed in the home, by native swedish men.
>And I really wonder where you got this fucked up statistic.
Obviously you didn’t bother reading Fjordman’s links.
Wow, just wow…
All four have disparaging views on Swedish girls, and think this attitude is common among young men with immigrant background. “It is far too easy to get a Swedish whore…… girl, I mean;†says Hamid, and laughs over his own choice of words. “Many immigrant boys have Swedish girlfriends when they are teenagers. But when they get married, they get a proper woman from their own culture who has never been with a boy. That’s what I am going to do. I don’t have too much respect for Swedish girls. I guess you can say they get fucked to pieces.â€
Pay no attention to that war of ideologies in the room, there’s still a few cubic centimeters of air left for us non-elephants to breathe.
I don’t have the time or energy to do a big article about sources and arguments, but I just want to warn you that you’re basing so much of this on the word of this one person (Fjordman), who seems part of the loony semi-nazi Swedish right. His “facts” are mostly screwed up and/or out of context.
Here’s a Swedish text picking apart his writing: http://kornet.nu/blindhona/arkiv/001912.html I’ll just translate a few points from it:
— Of the 11 interviewed boys in the study, only 3 mentioned anything about waging war against Swedes.
— Fjordman claims the study says this criminality is part of a war against the Swedes. It actually says it is IN PART a such a war. BIG difference. And you really shouldn’t base significant parts of your world view on what these three young punks decide to tell some researcher.
If that’s not enough, consider his claim that Malmö, the third biggest city in Sweden, will have a muslim majority within 10-20 years. To this Swede that sounds utterly absurd. I quickly googled up some statistics, and the current muslim percentage in Sweden is between 1.5% and 3.5%, depending on how religious you have to be to count.
/Swedish Libertarian living in the US
> – Of the 11 interviewed boys in the study, only 3 mentioned anything about waging war against Swedes.
That’s okay then.
Sweden’s 1-3% muslim average today does not imply that the majority of Malmö’s won’t be Muslim in 10-20 years.
Sweden has about 9M people. 1% is 90k, 3% is 270k. Malmö’s population is around 250k, so 1.5% would be a majority.
Sweden’s population is growing very slowly. However, its women are producing only 1.66 children, about a third below break-even, so net immigration over a life-time is producing about a third of Sweden’s population. If Muslims are more likely to immigrate, non-Muslims are more likely to emmigrate, or Muslims are more likely to produce children, Sweden will quickly become more Muslim than it is today.
Which of those three things isn’t happening?
Dude, read my post again. Make sure you’re not shaking with anger and indignation and have some clarity of thought.
If you do, I’m confident you will realize that none of the things you argue against is said in it.
I read the post.
The claim that Malmo will soon be majority Muslim is not contradicted by Sweden having a Muslim population of 1-3.5%. Distribution matters, and is hidden by national averages.
I’m not the one who thinks that “only” 3 of 11 is somehow comforting. (Yes, they could be lying, or the other 8 could be lying. Isn’t it somewhat interesting that the three would tell that lie? Maybe they’re not actually waging war now, but they think that it’s cool enough to say that they are. If that’s their ambition….)
Lars is silent on how quickly the Muslim fraction is growing in Sweden; I mentioned that growth because he seemed dismissive of that growth. I note that he’s a member of one of the groups that is contributing to that growth.
You clearly know nothing of Sweden. To anyone with the slightest knowledge, the claim that almost all muslims might live in Malmö, while the rest of the country is entirely empty of them is too absurd to discuss.
But don’t take my word for it. We’re not sifting through archelogical clues to some long lost civilization here. Millions of Swedes are on the net. Find some others and ask them. Here’s the usenet group for Swedish politics: http://groups.google.com/group/swnet.politik/ It’s mostly in Swedish, but everyone knows English there as well.
Fjordman and ESR are making an extraordinary statement. The muslim minority in Sweden is waging an organized war on their host country! Without the majority population even being aware of it!! While important truths *can* be hidden, the basic rule is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. And when you look at the evidence presented here in support, I say it is is enormously underwhelming. Many less fantastic theories can explain these results.
I find it entirey unsurprising that street criminals who routinely assault random people would sometimes lie.
And that’s all I say about those 3 kids. Your fantasies about how I find them comforting and what they’re doing is OK, only exist in your head. They are not in my text.
I don’t know how fast the muslim population is growing. I’m sure the numbers can be found somewhere, but I have better things to do. My guess would be that they’re growing at a moderate pace. Perhaps 1% per decade.
Remember why I brought this up. For the same reason I mentioned Fjordmans misleading reporting of this student research report: To demonstrate that Fjordman is an unrelible fact source. The exact mechanics of the demographic developments have no bearing on that. I don’t think you’re even addressed my point, much less refuted it.
When you say I “seemed dismissive”, you’re again imagining what my state of mind is, rather than addressing what I actually write.
I never claimed to know a lot about Sweden. I merely pointed out that Lars’ refutation wasn’t.
I don’t know what fraction of Sweden’s Muslim population lives in Malmo. If Lars does, he’s not saying. Immigrants “clump” in other countries, so it would be surprising if they didn’t in Sweden. Could a clump be in Malmo? Again, Lars isn’t saying.
> I find it entirey unsurprising that street criminals who routinely assault random people would sometimes lie.
As do I, as I wrote. I also find the lies that they tell to be rather interesting. Why would an interesting fraction claim to be at war with Sweden? (BTW – How do we know which group is lying? Could both groups be lying?)
> Your fantasies about how I find them comforting and what they’re doing is OK, only exist in your head.
My mistake – I’m confusing Lars with the Lars who wrote “Of the 11 interviewed boys in the study, only 3 mentioned anything about waging war against Swedes.” as part of a paragraph arguing that there’s no problem. Only 3 of 11 – no big deal. They’re lying.
> The muslim minority in Sweden is waging an organized war on their host country!
Interestingly enough, no one made that claim. Instead, the claim is that an interesting fraction of Muslim youth who commit crimes say that they’re waging war. Such youth are unlikely to be “organized”, but their stated attitude is interesting. Is it aspiration?
> I don’t know how fast the muslim population is growing. I’m sure the numbers can be found somewhere, but I have better things to do. My guess would be that they’re growing at a moderate pace. Perhaps 1% per decade.
Sounds like dismissive to me.
I’ll repeat my question “If Muslims are more likely to immigrate, non-Muslims are more likely to emmigrate, or Muslims are more likely to produce children, Sweden will quickly become more Muslim than it is today. Which of those three things is not happening?”
Lars is not obligated to care about the answer to that question. However, his disinterest does not imply that the answer is insignificant.
OK, when my claim that the muslim population is growing is taken as evidence that I’m dismissive of the idea that the muslim population is growing, I know I’m talking to somone who’s just arguing with a mental model in his head, not with me.
I have better things to do, and now I will go do them. Goodbye Andy.
Saying that it is growing moderately is dismissive of it growing quickly.
We’ll know soon enough if Sweden has a problem. If it does, the interesting question will be if they know soon enough to do something about it without too much cost.
Israel was afraid of the truth that Kach proclaimed: The Arabs are traitors in our midst and have caused nothing but misery and terror. The only way to ensure the survival of Israel is to remove all the Arabs from Israel. Get the Arabs out of Israel!
Unfortunately, there is a lot of FUD spread here than can be discussed in few lines. However, if you haven’t done so before, I refer you to Chmosky (MIT professor) speeches at:
http://www.chomsky.info/audionvideo.htm
You cannot apply a standard to others that you don’t apply to yourself if you are not a hypocrite.
The very basic rule put by Chmosky upon which you can base such a discussion is to assume that if something is right for you it’s right right for them and if it’s wrong when they do it it’s wrong when you do it. So, unless we can at least rise to that minimal level of moral integrity, we should at least stop talking about things like human rights and right and wrong, evil and good, …that’s obviousâ€.
Hi,
Sir, related to this topic, Mumbai Attacks have yet again created
tension in south-asia. India has finally provided the official
dossier[1] to Pakistani Govt on January 5, 2009, which allegedly
contains facts.
The Pakistani Govt is preparing official reply, however, various
Pakistani analysts are also analyzing this dossier. It turn out that
official dossier contain many factual errors. Unfortunately much
material is in Urdu, but following link is quite comprehensive:
http://www.brasstacks.pk/pdf/BrassTacks_014_Dance_of_the_devil.pdf
you can skip to page-13 and specially for Dossier analysis skip to
page-66. All I can say, security agencies (like CIA, Mossad, RAW) in
order for __greater good__** kill their own people to create a bigger
plot.
Sir, It should be noted that India-Pakistan tension is not just this
terrorism issue but it is infact beyond that. For example, violation
of “Indus Water Treaty”[2] by building “Baglihar Dam”[3] in the
southern Doda district in Indian Occupied Kashmir, over Chenab river.
It is really unfortunate that in-competent Pakistani Govt didn’t took
stand on this issue[4] (an alleged US-Govt pressure was also
involved).
This leads to following questions:
(1) Don’t you think that Stealing the water of Chenab River is a
threat to Pakistani Agriculture and Pakistani Nation?
and is an example of “state sponsored” terrorism from India?
(2) How can peace process be continued with this back-stabbing?
regards
** possibly to justify their existence and high funding
[1] http://www.hindu.com/nic/dossier.htm
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_Waters_Treaty
[3] http://thecurrentaffairs.com/index.php/india-violated-treaty-in-baglihar-dam-case-indus-water-commissioner/
[4] http://www.dawn.com/2008/09/22/ebr4.htm
why would anybody 10000km away would like to be in war with somebody…. I wonder….
I see not much othe r hope than killing
– satanists
-nazis
-black people in our countries
-policemen
-commies
-danes, finns and norwegians all over the world- they ar e all nazi pigs
-freemasons
-muslims in nordic countires
-chinese, etc. in nordic conuntries
-highest elite politicians and elite
etc. etc.
Those people rule e verything- satanic new world order illuminati bloodlines rule evrything.
If you have a problem with them they destroy everything in your life.
There is probalbly tens of thousands or more victims of this kind of hrassment and surveillance in EU and in the world- it is manid control harassment, and destoroys everything from you.
Now they create this nazi world order – NWO to whole world police state- and satanic distatorship – communism, f.ex. EU.
–
you must understand that thes e immigrants ar e BULLSHITTERS – they are not refugees, etc. – they are here in order to destroy and take over our countires- take our money, jobs, etc.?
Have you seen them doing anything but take money from society , or get easy jobs?
http://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/article870802.ab
—
http://sioe.wordpress.com/
http://www.siad.dk/
http://svt.se/svt/play/video.jsp?a=911665
http://europeanalliance.blogspot.com/2009/10/artist-kurt-westergaard-who-set-off.html
http://muhammed-cartoon-contest.blogspot.com/
http://bp2.blogger.com/_Cq2P0ssFV0Q/RvVCaS5CZ1I/AAAAAAAAAAM/hCEUQYQTUMs/s400/Propeht+Muhammed+Contest+in+Finland.JPG
http://media.putfile.com/Taliban-Destroying-2000-year-old-statues-of-Buddha ,
C/Bruse – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Wt_yxAuO-4 .
sweden islam vilk denmark westergaard seppo lehto
—
link funny a video here for Seppo Lehto http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sO_gQmKt8kMIf, so they can see how he is paying the price for your freedom with silly youtube clips and then link http://transatlanticconservative.blogspot.com/2008/02/jailed-for-printing-islamic-cartoons.html. and when you are having a great yuk over all of that you could sing a song with your liberal friend as their freedom dies: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmyGZ64J9yg and then after a good drink or 5 and a lovely night you can clap them on the back, and smile, because you know inside they think you are the crazy radical, and creeping Shariaa is the new social norm most have relegated themselves to…
—
There is alot of problem description re the Islamofascists. The program I favor is to:
1. identify radical islamists–people who believe in violent jihad, having sharia law, etc.
2. taking those individuals into custody.
3. deporting those people back to their country of origin.
Deportation is not the death penalty, and it is not permanent intenment. They want to kill or convert us all, we just want to deport them.
This is my take on this issue as a BNP suporter.
mohamid = hitler
mein kamph= koran, koran = mein kamph
bun in the air point it to mecca= nazi salute, pointit towards germania=twice a day
allah ,there is no other god be he= hitler there is no other god but he.
hitler wanted to fuck this own neice=mohamid fucked a 6 year old arab girl= both kiddy fuckers.
the british and germans are swore enemys,HITLER, mohamid ,do not take jews or christains as your friends,instead kill them were ever you find them.
O DEAR I CAN FEEL A BNP SHIT COMEING ON,Both these books are interchangable useful to wipe my bnp bum ,i think .
1 ,eighty years old the other 1300, yet is the same crap in it it,seems.
lET THESE FUCKERS DEAL WITH THE BRITISH NATIONISTS PARTY, we will soon sort them out,
for we are not nice like the americans ,or you sweds,for
we are blunt beings ( maths alone is what we believe in)
and like the british white lion of old ,we dont give a rats fart weither you like use or not,
I say old chaps please close
the the door if you dont mine ,
as we
the BNP white lion, shits you out of our white arse?
BELOW IS A POEM, FOR MERDOCS ,BBC MEDIA AS WELL AS SEARCE DARK,UAF, SPEACIAL BRANCH, AND OTHER STAREI UNDERLINGS, AND OTHERS THAT BEND OVER WHILE THEY ARE FUCKED UP THE ARSE, BY THE POLICTAL WESTMINISTER QUISLINGS
, IN THE PAYMENT OF THE MOMAMADIN , THE WHORES,
A BNP POET.
BEWARE OF THE BNP, WHEN WE MOCK YOU
O IM ALUMBER JACK AND IM OK i work for the party all day
on friday night i put on womens clothing and ,put my JACK BOOTS AWAY
O THERE LUMBERJACKS AND THERE OK ON FRIDAY WE GO TO TOWN ,AND PUT OR MEINM KAMPHS AWAY.
WE IN THE BNP SEE THE LIEING WHORES THAT RULE US IN EUROPE FOR WHAT THEY ARE
And finally, of course, the residents decide “Enough is enough” – http://www.theage.com.au/world/sweden-steps-right-to-join-its-neighbours-20100925-15rjk.html
It’s a tough issue, but if Government policy is significantly more laissez-faire than the community attitudes, obviously, sooner or later something has to give.
Wake up people, Muslims hate all non Muslims, FACT.
They are infiltrating western countries with the single and sole intention of waging war from within, the modern equivalent of the Trogan horse.
Muslims lie, cheat, steal, rape, murder and are generally the most hypocritical religious cult ever to infest this planet.
If the World is not at war with Islam…..it should be.
>Wake up people, Muslims hate all non Muslims, FACT.
Don’t oversimplify. This is not true, and relatively tolerant varieties of Islam have existed. Sufism, for example. What is true is that Islam has an even worse case of instability in the direction of theocratic fascism than Christianity does. The moderates always eventually lose the internal argument.
>They are infiltrating western countries with the single and sole intention of waging war from within, the modern equivalent of the Trogan horse.
If by “they” you mean Wahhabist/Deobandi and other fundamentalist fanatics, then…yes. But to oppose the enemy more effectively you need to understand it better, and grasp that the same memetic DNA is at the center of Christianity, too.
I don’t know if anyone can still see this 12 years later, but holy shit was this post prescient. Despite all the denial, deflection and obfuscation the problem has gotten worse at a compounding rate. If this continues, in another 12 years it will be far more horrifying. Either Apartheid, genocide or Sharia in every European state.