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Home » They don’t call him “Dhimmi Carter” for nothing, but perhaps they should call him Neville

They don’t call him “Dhimmi Carter” for nothing, but perhaps they should call him Neville

The New Neo Posted on by

Jimmy Carter is planning a dialogue with Hamas.

And he’s remarkably unapologetic about it, despite requests from both Washington and Israel to cease and desist:

Former President Carter said he feels “quite at ease” about meeting Hamas militants over the objections of Washington because the Palestinian group is essential to a future peace with Israel.

Carter seems never to have heard of William Lloyd Garrison’s handy guide to the art of negotiation:

With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter…”

Carter’s faith that unrepentant terrorists such as the leaders of Hamas can be persuaded by the tools of reason or pleading, and that any positive responses they might come up with are truthful and not a form of strategic playacting for the gullible, is certainly nothing new. He has been one of Hamas’ biggest Western boosters for quite some time. And it wouldn’t be his first dialogue with Hamas.

Back in February of 2006, after monitoring the Palestinian elections in which Hamas gained power, Carter had a tete-a-tete with the new leaders. It was highly productive, as you might imagine:

Carter said “there’s a good chance” that Hamas, which has operated a network of successful social and charitable organizations for Palestinians, could become a nonviolent organization….The 39th U.S. president said he met with Hamas leaders in Ramallah, in the West Bank, after last week’s elections.

“They told me they want to have a peaceful administration. They want to have a unity government, bring in Fatah members and independent members,” Carter said.

Carter’s next sentence gave some evidence of a rare moment of sanity on his part (although not good grammar):

What they say and what they do is two different matters.

But Carter snapped back quickly enough to his dreamworld when he pointed out that:

…Hamas has adhered to a cease-fire since August 2004, which “indicates what they might do in the future.” He said Hamas is “highly disciplined” and capable of keeping any promise of nonviolence it might make.

Well, we all know how well that turned out, didn’t we? Then again, maybe the problem was that they didn’t do enough talking to the extraordinarily persuasive Jimmy.

In June of 2007, Carter went on to harshly criticize the US for not being evenhanded in dealing with internal Palestinian politics, and blamed divisions among the Palestinians on US favoritism for Fatah over Hamas:

Far from encouraging Hamas’s move into parliamentary politics, Carter said the US and Israel, with European Union acquiescence, has sought to subvert the outcome by shunning Hamas and helping Abbas to keep the reins of political and military power.

“That action was criminal,” he said in a news conference after his speech.

“The United States and Israel decided to punish all the people in Palestine and did everything they could to deter a compromise between Hamas and Fatah,” he said.

Yesiree, folks, if it weren’t for the meddling of the big old bad old US and Israel, Hamas and Fatah would be holding hands and singing Kumbaya. And Jimmy would be standing right in the middle of the circle of love, basking in the glow—and his own glory.

Carter would dearly love to return to the halcyon days when he was broker of the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt. That meeting must have strongly solidified his faith in the power of talk—the fact that formerly bitter enemies could change, if not into friends, at least into countries that are not in an active state of war. The special conditions and personalities that allowed that brokerage to happen have not stopped him from generalizing it to any and all enemies, any and all regimes, any and all dictators.

Carter especially has never retreated from the idea that this can happen on a much wider scale in the mideast, and that he, Jimmy Carter, is the one person who can do it (see, for example, the last paragraph in this article). The fact that Egypt and Anwar Sadat back in the late 70s were a far cry from Hamas today, which is sworn inexorably to Israel’s destruction and with no indication of an iota of movement from that position, is irrelevant to Jimmy’s faith in his own power to persuade.

When Carter says his current willingness to talk with Hamas is nothing new, “I’ve been meeting with Hamas leaders for years,” he isn’t just harking back to 2006. According to an interview he gave in 2006 to the Toronto Star, Carter was eager to negotiate between his good friend Yassar Arafat and Hamas ten years earlier:

As a personal favour to the late Palestinian leader, and in the spirit of the newly minted Oslo Accords, Carter went hunting for Hamas, to lasso them into the political process….A series of meetings ensued with various Hamas leaders in the Israeli-occupied territories…[T]here were indications Hamas might be ready to make the great leap forward into reason and rationality—and perhaps even to accept Israel as its legitimate partner in a future that would become two states living side by side.

Finally, a secret summit was arranged for Cairo involving every voice that mattered to Hamas. And just as Carter was preparing for the flight to Egypt, Hamas called it off.

“They cancelled the meeting. Either they decided no, or they decided I wasn’t the right person. But they cancelled,” said Carter.

You can almost hear the mystification and disappointment in his voice. I doubt Hamas came to the conclusion he was the wrong person; it’s hard to imagine they could have found a more useful idiot than Jimmy. My guess is that they were laughing at him the whole time.

As for the meeting with Hamas that Carter is currently proposing, these are his goals. l think you’ll all agree they are quite modest, realistic, and achievable:

I think that it’s very important that at least someone meet with the Hamas leaders to express their views, to ascertain what flexibility they have, to try to induce them to stop all attacks against innocent civilians in Israel and to cooperate with the Fatah as a group that unites the Palestinians, maybe to get them to agree to a cease-fire—things of this kind.”

For Hamas, “things of that kind” exist only in the fevered imagination of the likes of Carter. Hamas is not exactly the definition of an honest broker; even Neville Chamberlain at the time of Munich had more reason to trust Hitler’s word than Carter would have to believe anything Hamas promises at this point; we have a lot more evidence of their continued duplicity and bloodthirstiness over time.

Speaking of Chamberlain, he sounded almost like a harsh realist in his assessment of Hitler the first time he met him, as compared to Carter’s continuing tender regard for Hamas:

In spite of the hardness and ruthlessness I thought I saw in [Hitler’s] face, I got the impression that here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word.

At least Chamberlain noticed the look on Hitler’s face in the first of his three meetings with him in Germany, negotiations which culminated in the get-together known as Munich. Prior to his departure for the Munich talks, Chamberlain said:

When I was a little boy, I used to repeat, ‘If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again.’ That’s what I am doing. When I come back I hope I may be able to say, as Hotspur says in Henry IV, ‘Out of this nettle, danger, we plucked this flower, safely.’ “

At this point, Carter outdoes Chamberlain in perseverance, although he lacks his eloquence. In the end, it didn’t take Chamberlain all that long to realize that talks with Hitler were not going to have the desired effect, and that Hitler’s word was worse than meaningless:

Regarding his final impression of Hitler, Chamberlain said: “Hitler is the commonest little swine I have ever encountered.”

Too little, too late. As for Hitler, he had nothing but contempt for Chamberlain from the start:

Our enemies are little worms. I saw them at Munich.

My suspicion is that Hamas would say something very similar about Carter, if they were interested in speaking truth to powerlessness.

But after all these years Carter still believes—oh, how he believes! It’s hard to know exactly what he believes, though—is it the basic goodness and honesty of all humanity? The veracity of Hamas’ leaders themselves? Or is it the silver tongue of Jimmy Carter?

Why am I harping on this? After all, who is Jimmy Carter? Isn’t he just a dotty old man at this point?

He still can do damage. He still has an international reputation as a good guy and ex-President, and gives legitimacy to Hamas in the eyes of the world, affording them propaganda points both in his deeds and in his books.

He also sets an example for his philosophical heir Barack Obama, who appears to have the same misplaced faith in the power of talking to sworn and unrepentant enemies. Obama also has the same strange belief not only in the power of dialogue, but in the extra-special power of dialogue when he himself is one of the players.

Again, Chamberlain comes off ahead, I think. At least he didn’t think he had magical powers, as do Carter and Obama. And he certainly didn’t think so in the face of so much evidence to the contrary.

But his beliefs do sound awfully familiar. Read this still-relevant passage from “Chamberlain’s Perspective Lives On,” a piece written in 1988 by then Undersecretary of the Navy Seth Cropsey that appeared in the Wall Street Journal:

Today, in the U.S., politicians question preparations to deter conflict, including strategic defenses, as if we had not learned
what Chamberlain failed to grasp: Not everyone may share our view of war’s deadly disadvantages—and absent realistic signs of our determination, rulers whose regimes are based on force may view our respect for law, diplomacy and negotiation as a sign of weakness and not of strength.

Chamberlain was fascinated with the personal touch, something shared by many journalists and many politicians. His belief that misunderstanding, not aggression, causes conflict—his second great misjudgment—was reflected in the dogged devotion to the virtues of shuttle summitry and face-to-face assurances of good will and friendship: “The message … from Signor Mussolini was of a friendly character.” “Herr Hitler … said, again very earnestly, that he wanted to be friends.”

Can’t we all just get along? The answer, I’m afraid, is “no.”

Comments

They don’t call him “Dhimmi Carter” for nothing, but perhaps they should call him Neville — 256 Comments

  1. I’ve lived 50 miles or so from Plains Ga my whole life. I’ve yet to go there for fear there must be something in their water that made a Jimmy Carter.

  2. Didnt Carters right hand man write a book where he realized that he was a “useful idiot”?

    http://www.jfednepa.org/mark%20silverberg/jimmycarter.html

    Carter’s reputation was that of melting in the presence of Communist dictators. As the “human rights president,” Carter noted that Yugoslavia’s Marshall Tito was “a man who believed in human rights.” Carter saluted the dictator as “a great and courageous leader” who had led his people and protected their freedom.” He reserved similar remarks for Romania’s (now deposed Communist) dictator Nicholai Ceaucescu.
    In December 1977, Polish Communist boss Edward Giereck was ushered into the Oval Office. According to the White House transcript of the meeting, he told Gierek, “Our concept of human rights is preserved (ie: safe) in Poland. Carter actually “expressed appreciation for Poland’s support for the Helsinki Agreement and its commitment to human rights.” He offered no criticism of the Polish Communist government’s human-rights record – despite the fact that, one month earlier, the Polish secret police had attacked thousands of workers protesting food price increases. Four people were killed in the melee; hundreds of others were arrested and savagely beaten in prison.

    It gets worse. As Jay Nordlinger notes in the National Review Online (October, 2002), “Carter has long enjoyed a reputation as a Middle East sage, owing, of course, to his role in the original Camp David accords. That reputation, however, rests on shaky grounds.” Nordlinger points out that Sadat and Begin had their deal worked out before ever approaching Washington. Why did they contact the White House? Prof. Bernard Lewis of Princeton University put it succinctly: “Well, obviously, they needed someone to pay the bill, and who but the United States could fulfill that function?”

    No one quite realizes just how passionately anti-Israel Carter was. William Safire has reported that Cyrus Vance acknowledged that, if Carter had had a second term, he would have “sold Israel down the river.” In fact, in The Unfinished Presidency, Douglas Brinkley, Carter’s biographer and analyst writes, “There was no world leader Jimmy Carter was more eager to know than Yassir Arafat.” The former president “felt certain affinities with the Palestinian: a tendency toward hyperactivity and a workaholic disposition with unremitting sixteen-hour days, seven days a week, decade after decade.” The brutality, the corruption and the human rights abuses to which Arafat and his PLO subjected the Palestinian people were, at best peripheral, and at worst, the fault of the Israelis.

    on another note (i didnt know where to put this), i found one of the others who were useful idiots, lived the cause, then woke up.

    Freda Utley.. http://www.fredautley.com/

    the reason i bring it up is that she wrote some stuff on the middle east.

    WILL THE MIDDLE EAST GO WEST — 1956–About the Middle East after the Suez war in 1956. Brief history of European imperialism, beginnings of Arab nationalism, British, French, Israeli attack on Egypt, Suez Canal, Palestine, etc. “Her balanced evaluation of today’s problems and tomorrow’s possibilities in the world’s hottest danger zone is likely to prove as true and prophetic as her books on Japan, Russia, China and Germany,”

    so it may be interesting to see what this person thinks about things…

    however, the key story (and others like it) is

    “the dream we lost”
    THE DREAM WE LOST — 1940–The first thorough analysis of Soviet communism by an expert who lived in Moscow during the late 1920’s and 30’s. It was widely read by the (non-Marxist) American intelligentsia and established Freda Utley as one of the nation’s premier experts on communism

    and

    LOST ILLUSION — 1948–About the author’s personal life in Russia during the 1920’s and 30’s.

    reading older histories and such tales is a big eye opener…

    her tale as to her life in dreams we lost is agonizing, in its slow inevitable crawl…

    in WILL THE MIDDLE EAST GO WEST, she makes interesting parallels that link things that today we forget.

    In 1923 Sun Yat Sen turned to Soviet Russia for help in the liberation and unification of China, because the Western Powers and Japan refused to relinquish the imperialist privileges and powers which kept China impotent, divided and desperately poor. Thus he unwittingly opened the door to Communist infiltration, subversion and armed attack which a quarter of a century later delivered China over to Communist slavery and converted her into Moscow’s most subservient and powerful satellite.

    Today, the Arab world in danger of following the same road to perdition. Once again the West is denying the legitimate national aspirations of a people with an ancient civilization — fallen behind in the march of technological, economic and political progress, and humiliated by past or present subjection to alien rule; but proud of their cultural heritage, longing for strength through unity and progress through reform, and seeking to free themselves from their colonial status, or from fear of renewed aggression and subjugation. In the Arab world, as in China three decades ago, the Western Powers have pursued policies calculated to impel the leaders of the people to call upon Moscow to redress the balance in their favor against old and new imperialisms which seek to retain, regain or win privileges and powers.

    Thanks to America’s stand on Suez, the disastrous consequences to the Arabs and to the West of any such reliance on the Soviet Power have been at least temporarily averted. But since France and Israel, and to a lesser extent Britain, are today exerting their powerful influence on American opinion to prevent the United States Administration from pursuing an enlightened policy, the danger is by no means past.

    History never repeats itself so exactly that its lessons are clear for all to read. Each drama in the continuing record of the “crimes, follies and cruelties” of mankind differs slightly, as the scene shifts, new actors play the leading roles, and the sympathies and judgment of the audience respond to personal and national prejudices, passions, interests and experience. Hence the truth of the cynical observation that the only lesson which history teaches is that mankind learns nothing from it.

    Yet there is so close a similarity between the situation in the Arab world today and that of China yesterday that if the West is able to perceive the parallel, we may avoid repeating the errors of judgment and policy which only a few years ago lost almost half a continent to the Communists.

    The tragic drama of modern China was long drawn out, and there were times when, as today in the Middle East, temporary periods of enlightened Western statesmanship promised a happier ending. The prologue to the tragedy, played out from 1920 to 1949, when she finally succumbed to the Communists, was similar to that of the Arab drama we are now witnessing, in which America and Russia are both vying for the role of the deus ex machina.

    veddy interesting…..

  3. I guess I’m kind of confused here. OK, William Lloyd Garrison would never negotiate with “tyrants.” But Winston Churchill, FDR and Charles de Gaulle did negotiate with tyrants. JFK did too, especially at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Some people think they negotiated a way out of World War Three more than once. So, bully for Garrison, but I don’t think his word on the issue settles anything. Sounds pretty stupid, actually, when you consider the likely alternatives to failing to negotiate with an enemy who has a lot of access to firearms and explosives and plenty of friends in the area.

    I also got thrown by the reference to “tyrants.” Isn’t Hamas the democratically elected government of the Palestinians? So who exactly are they “tyrannizing?” The three million Palestinians in the West Bank have been living under military occupation for 40 YEARS, but I don’t think it’s Hamas that’s tyrannizing them, is it? What do you think? Let ’em live under military occupation, contrary to all international law and contrary to probably dozens of UN Resolutions for another 40 years and maybe THEN talk to them? Don’t wanna rush into things, do we?

    Seems like a really crazy world when the democratically elected government of the Palestinian people are “tyrants” and the state which occupies them illegally for 40 years in defiance of international law is unwilling to talk to them on the grounds of “tyranny,” while settlement of immigrants from all over the world continues on the very lands that are supposedly to be “negotiated” if only the occupying forces had “someone” to talk to OTHER THAN the democratically elected government of its victims. Is that nuts or is that nuts?

  4. Chamberlain, at least, made one thing right: after all his hopes failed, he promoted Winston Churchill as Prime Minister and Minister of Defence. I do not expect a like bit of sanity from Jimmy Carter.

  5. The Palestinian Authority needs to be destoryed , not negiotated with.

    Michael: You’re a damn fool. So utterly clueless about the intentions of Hamas, Muslim Brotherhood, Iran etc..

    You dont negotiate with these people. And in any case, they’re not interested in negotiating.. there is nothing they intend to compromise on.. They’re on a religious mandate to destroy Israel and destroy America.

  6. Hamas became the ruler of Gaza not because of election, but as result of military coup. Hitler also was democratically elected, at least soon after he came to power. So we can not call him a tyrant? Have you read Hamas Charter, explicitly expressing genocide against Jews as its ultimate goal? What for negotiate with those who want to murder you? And drop this nonsense about international law. Arabs lost every legal ground for their claim on Gaza and West Bank, rejecting partition plan and starting, instead, a genocidal war. Now, embracing terrorizm, they have no leaders to talk with, and should be punished for this by becaming international pariah, with no rights at all, except for good will of their neigbours.

  7. “Let us never negotiate out of fear but never let us fear to negotiate.”

    Don’t know who said that but it makes a lot of sense. I have a lot of doubts (a) that Hamas is really all that interested in peaceful solutions or (b) that even if they are, that Jimmy Carter is the man who can hammer out the deal. At this point the Israelis have no more trust in the man and he’s no longer the President of the U.S.A. so they don’t HAVE to listen to him. The problem is they want the West Bank and it has to be given up for peace to occur. The Israelis want the West Bank more than they want peace, and anyone who tries to negotiate a “peace agreement” between the two sides will always run aground on this rock.

    However, I don’t see much downside to it. If he fails, he fails and nobody’s any worse off for it than they were before. If the Israelis and their U.S. patrons sabotage Carter’s mission, they’ll always be on the defensive as the saboteurs of the peace that could have been. Whether it could have been or not.

  8. West Bank. Right. By the way, how’s that plan to give Manhattan back to the Indians coming along?

    Can we say “fait accompli?”

  9. To people like Michael, and Jimmy “Dhimmi” Carter, I would suggest that they look up the meaning of two Islamic concepts and get some history behind them. Arafat used both terms liberally in his speeches in Arabic, so that credulous Westerners would not get a clue as to how Arafat was within the Islamic traditions revived by his uncle Amin al Husseini.

    Hudna and

    taqiyya

  10. Isn’t Hamas the democratically elected government of the Palestinians?

    Yes.

    And every time a Hamas member fires a missile into Israel, it is an act of war. Then there was the small matter of the, ummm, liquidation of the Fatah members in Gaza.

    Maybe they plan on writing a book entitled How to make friends and influence people?

  11. Here are the options as I see them:

    – Meet with Hamas and other Palestinian leaders to find some kind of common ground and negotiate a lasting peace.
    – Pretty much let things carry on in the same manner they have for years, act tough, and maybe put some sanctions on them with the hope that they will change their views.
    – Infilitrate their ranks, instigate a coup and set up a dummy government with CIA like propaganda and hope the Arab people in the region see the light and understand everything in a Western way.
    – Go to war with them, kill as many as possible and maybe they will just follow orders.

    Tell me which really has a chance of working?
    Even Cheney has met with the Palstinian leadership – granted not Hamas. But they have won elections there and will probably continue to do so.

  12. The west bank?

    The Israeli’s offered the Palestinians nearly *everything* they asked for in the west bank. And what was the response? The second intifada.

    This war of attrition between Israel and Palestine has been going on for my entire life. My conclusion is that it will not be settled until one of two things happen…

    The Palestinians start loving their own children more than they hate the Jews. Or one side completely wipes out the other.

    I have to come to the defense of Neville Chamberlain. In 1938, England and the rest of Europe were barely 20 years out from WWI – the worst slaughter the world had known up to that point. Nobody – and I mean nobody – except maybe Hitler himself, wanted a repeat of that disaster. And most reasonable people would have done nearly anything to avoid it.

    And Winston Churchill notwithstanding, Chamberlain at least, was acting in a way that the majority of Englishmen wanted him to. Unfortunately, he, along with that majority of his countrymen, was wrong.

    Carter, however, is a rogue. He’s a loose cannon that could probably cause severe damage to our foreign policy. And I believe everything that can be done – within the law – to stop him from butting in where he doesn’t belong, should be done.

  13. And I believe everything that can be done – within the law – to stop him from butting in where he doesn’t belong, should be done.

    So under your proposal a man is not free to go where he pleases on this Earth? He’s not free to meet with anyone he wants to meet for a talk?
    Isn’t that a bit – I don’t know…UnAmerican?

  14. The man is dangerous and meddling with dangerous forces.

    He’s the Unamerican one… he’s the one endangering all of us.

    He should be stopped.

    I would love to live in this fantasy world that Democrats are living in. The most stupid group of people on earth involving themselves with the most irrational and diabolical forces on the planet. It’s lunacy.

  15. From time to time I go back and read the essay, below, by Eric Hoffer — this is one of those times.

    ____________________________
    It bears repeating: Eric Hoffer on Israel

    It was written in 1968, and perhaps you are familiar with it: Eric Hoffer’s piece on what he referred to as the “peculiar” position of Israel.

    Hoffer’s essay is not only still astoundingly pertinent today, but it’s also notable for its brevity and clarity. So I thought it wouldn’t be a bad idea to present it here in its entirety, as food for thought.

    ISRAEL’S PECULIAR POSITION
    By Eric Hoffer (LA Times 5/26/68)

    The Jews are a peculiar people: Things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews.

    Other nations drive out thousands, even millions of people, and there is no refugee problem. Russia did it. Poland and Czechoslovakia did it. Turkey threw out a million Greeks, and Algeria a million Frenchmen. Indonesia threw out heaven knows how many Chinese–and no one says a word about refugees.

    But in the case of Israel, the displaced Arabs have become eternal refugees. Everyone insists that Israel must take back every single Arab. Arnold Toynbee calls the displacement of the Arabs an atrocity greater than any committed by the Nazis. Other nations when victorious on the battlefield dictate peace terms. But when Israel is victorious it must sue for peace. Everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in this world.

    Other nations when they are defeated survive and recover, but should Israel be defeated it would be destroyed. Had Nasser triumphed last June, he would have wiped Israel off the map, and no one would have lifted a finger to save the Jews. No commitment to the Jews by any government, including our own, is worth the paper it is written on. There is a cry of outrage all over the world when people die in Vietnam or when two Negroes are executed in Rhodesia. But when Hitler slaughtered Jews no one remonstrated with him.

    The Swedes, who are ready to break off diplomatic relations with America because of what we do in Vietnam, did not let out a peep when Hitler was slaughtering Jews. They sent Hitler choice iron ore and ball bearings, and serviced his troop trains to Norway.

    The Jews are alone in the world. If Israel survives, it will be solely because of Jewish efforts and Jewish resources.

    Yet at this moment Israel is our only reliable and unconditional ally. We can rely more on Israel than Israel can rely on us. And one has only to imagine what would have happened last summer had the Arabs and their Russian backers won the war to realize how vital the survival of Israel is to America and the West in general. I have a premonition that will not leave me; as it goes with Israel, so will it go with all of us. Should Israel perish, the holocaust will be upon us.

    [Via Pajamas Media.]

    [ADDENDUM: Change “the Arabs and their Russian backers” in Hoffer’s essay to “the Arabs and Iranians and their (fill in the blanks) backers.”]

    Eric Hoffer was a Non-Jewish American longshoreman turned into a social philosopher. He was born in 1902 and died in 1983, after writing columns for newspapers, nine books and winning the Presidential Medal of Freedom. His first book, The True Believer, published in 1951, was widely recognized as a classic.

  16. People fail to appreciate that Neville Chamberlain’s England was re-arming frantically in the late 1930s and knew that they needed time – – at least until 1940 or 41, when they and their French allies would achieve weapons parity with Germany and its allies. England desperately needed time because they had foolishly allowed the Germans to open an armaments gap (which did not develop on Chamberlain’s watch) and Chamberlain was pushing rearmament as fast as possible, so I personally think Neville got a bad rap and all comparisons between then and now are just totally irrelevant.

    I think, unfortunately, that when it comes to a peaceful negotiated settlement, that train has now left the station. The Jews had a real possibility for a negotiated settlement of the land claims after 1967, but they blew it when they opened the Occupied Territories up for Jewish settlement, in direct contravention of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibiting settlement by an occupying power of lands taken by force of arms. From then until now, they claimed to anyone stupid enough to believe them that they were willing to exchange land for peace (which they probably were, as long as that land was not the West Bank) while all the time the ongoing settlement of the land they were supposedly willing to exchange for peace proceeded as fast as they could make it happen.

    From time to time, Zionists will claim that the Arabs were offered “90%” or some similar portion of “all their demands,” which they stubbornly rejected, thus bringing down on their own heads all of the suffering and misery subsequently inflicted upon them by the IDF and the settlers. Well, that may be – – or not – – but I have never seen an official map or any written offer showing exactly WHAT the Jews’ best offer was. So we have a claim which is impossible to verify, and (I understand) for very good reason from the Israeli and American viewpoints, because the “90%” was clearly unacceptable. Apparently the “90%” was “honeycombed” with enclaves for Jewish settlements and militarized connecting roads between settlements, all under Jewish control, all cutting the “Palestinian Homeland” up into dozens of non-contiguous blocs like no other nation on earth. Has anyone ever seen a map anywhere of this supposedly “fabulous” offer that the Palestinians had the gall to reject?

  17. Calling Carter “Neville” would be unfair…to Chamberlain, that is.

    Despite his misjudgments, Neville Chamberlain signficantly built up Britain’s defenses, especially the RAF. He also, in the end, declared war on Nazi Germany.

    Not a great or even a good leader, but not in the same class of degeneracy with Carter.

  18. I also wanted to correct Sergey’s statement that Hamas became the leader of the Palestinian people due to a military coup and not an election. That is just plain wrong. Hamas candidates won a majority in the 2006 Palestinian Parliamentary elections, which most if not all observers concluded were fair and representative.

    Similarly Sergey’s statement about Hitler winning power in an election. In the run-up to the election, hundreds of anti-fascist organizers were murdered by Nazis and in the weeks immediately before the election, murders at the rate of several per week were going on. Virtually no Nazi assassins were ever prosecuted by the Republican police or the German state police for any of these crimes. Even so, Hitler did not win a majority government, and in fact the Communists had gained seats over the Nazis since the immediately preceding election. It was only after the Reichstag fire, when the Nazis were arbitrarily put in control of the Interior Ministry (including the police) by the President, that hundreds more anti-fascists and communist leaders were hunted down, tortured and murdered. During that time, the German police were ordered by the interior ministry not to intervene if Nazi SS or SA troopers were beating or murdering anyone, and to render assistance to them on request. After his enemies were physically eliminated, Hitler felt safe enough to call a new election and finally “won” his majority.

    The hypocrisy of the U.S.A. in calling for “elections” and “democracy” as the key to Middle Eastern problems, and then doing all that it can to sabotage the first democratically elected government of the Palestinian people is mind-boggling. Elections, sure, just so long as “we” can control the result. More cynical than that it does not get.

  19. No one has answered my question.
    What can be done to fix the problems of the Middle East? If it is wrong to meet Hamas and talk then what should be done?

  20. Matt, you already laid out a series of solutions, in order of increasing likelihood of long-term success.

  21. The fundamental problem with Carter is that he’s not authorized to speak for the U.S. government, having neither been elected to appropriate office nor appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate.

    In other words, he’s now just another putz, and is in violation of Federal law in purporting to conduct foreign policy without such authorization.

    That’s the problem.

  22. Actually, I think negotiation could solve our problems in the Middle East.

    I think the U.S. ought to propose a comprehensive international conference to settle all the outstanding grievances. Invite the leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Palestinian Authority, President Assad of Syria, President Ahmedinejad of Iran, Moqtada al-Sadr from Iraq, a number of key religious leaders, and sit them all around a big table with Jimmy Carter at the head.

    Then weld the doors and windows shut.

  23. Put it this way: would you want Pat Buchanan speaking for us?

    No? Neither would I (see, we agree!). I view Carter as every bit as deranged as Pat Buchanan.

  25. What can be done to fix the problems of the Middle East? If it is wrong to meet Hamas and talk then what should be done?

    This seems to be a common rhetorical trick of Leftists in recent years.

    It’s nothing more than preemptive surrender.

    Evidently Matt feels that HAMAS is too formidible of a foe to confront and defeat. Why even contemplating destroying them sends dispair into his soul.

    This feeling of helplessness is exactly the sort of mental warfare that Islam specializes in. “There are so many of us.. you have no chance to stand up against us”

    Screw that. These people want to destroy us. Do you get it or not?

  26. I made this comment on a different thread on this blog yesterday but I’ll repeat it.. it’s my general framework for defending ourselves against Islam’s 3rd Global Jihad (the war we’re currently in):

    Islam is a political-military ideology wrapped up in the trappings of a religion.

    The first thing I would do is propose a Constitutional Amendment with an expiration date that authorizes the Government to have near unlimited power to fight against Political and Military Islam within our borders with strong criminal liablity for Cabinet-level officials or higher for any abuse of this power in their departments.

    Next, we stop all flows of money and technology to nations whose laws are based on Islam.

    Ban all Muslim immigration to the US.

    Expel all Muslim non-citizens

    Monitor every islamic structure (Mosque , community center)

    Then tell the Muslim world that if we get attacked in a significant way by any terrorist group or a State due to religiously motivated reasons , we will nuke every Muslim country’s major ciites.

    You do realize we’re in a war right? Either we die or they do. Or they could see the errors of their ways as their lands are cut off from the modern world and call off Jihad.

    Of course none of this will ever happen.

    We are committing suicide.

    Our society’s social contract is essentially based on the Golden Rule. Islam has no such concept as the Golden Rule.. Islam is Submission. Submission is unacceptable in the United States.

    Since Islam exists outside the boundaries of our culture we need to realize that are killing us with our own knife. They know our cultural weak points and are taking advantage of them.

    We need to turn the tables.

  27. Vince P
    You’re world view isn’t even in the realm of reasonable or smart. It can’t be taken seriously. In fact, I think your proposal is irresponsible and incredibly dangerous.
    But thanks for at least answering the question.

  28. Matt:

    My worldview is one of clarity and realism.

    How do you propose to keep America protected from the 3rd Global Jihad?

  29. Matt,

    I have a more (ahem) nuanced take on Vince’s suggestion. I wouldn’t support it as a plan of action, but as a proposed potential plan of action under discussion, i.e., a ploy, it has merit.

    Right now both Islam (fulminant and benign) has nothing to lose by pushing us, and certain bedwetters (not looking in any particular direction, Matt – kidding) constantly assure them of that. Both groups need to believe that they have skin in the game, that if they push too hard, something bad – very bad – is going to happen to them. (I’d leave unspecified what that might be; personally, I like the idea of dropping pig crap on Mecca and Medina /g).

    We need their abu-Matts to bleat about how irresponsible and incredibly dangerous it is to provoke us. Then – and only then – is there any point to negotiation.

    And, of course, we have to be prepared to make good on the implicit threat, if absolutely necessary.

    So, paradoxically, the harder-nosed someone appears, the less likely violence becomes, because he has street cred, while conversely the more earnest, sensitive, hand-wringing (dare I say, “liberal”?) one is, the more likely violence becomes – because the other side will not take that person seriously until he does something. People don’t mess with a Mr. T-type, who looks tough, and capable of doing anything; Woody Allen would have to actually shoot somebody before he’d be taken seriously.

  31. Actually, I think the case for negotiations (though not necessarily led by Carter) is made admirably in these posts. There is an enormous amount of ignorance on display, particularly as to what the Arabs “really want” and of course all of it is negative, unsavoury and destructive in the extreme. To listen to these “experts,” one would have to think that no living Arab or Muslim has ever had a single constructive, positive or even harmless thought in his or her entire life. More than anything else, it reminds me of the kind of anti-Semitic propaganda that the Nazis used to spread about the Jews.

    The real benefit of a conference with Ahmadinejad, Nasrallah, Assad, el Sadr and all the other “bad boys” of the region is this: that for the first time, Americans will have the opportunity to hear from the Muslims themselves what their real concerns are, what their real objectives are, what they want to see happen in their region and what they don’t.

    Since none of the posters here are capable of reading Arabic or Farsi (myself included) we are confined to a carefully selected reading of Arab “thought,” usually put together by “scholars” or “media watch” organizations with very strong ties to the State of Israel. Needless to say, the representative samplings are very strongly weighted in favour of the craziest and most violent speakers, no matter how obscure or unimportant they may actually be. Ancient religious texts are carefully picked over for the most insane anti-Semitic ravings that can be found – – something like trying to produce some insight into “the Protestant mind” by gleaning quotes from Martin Luther’s “The Jews and Their Lies” or the Henry Ford editions of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” However there are always plenty of “useful idiots” willing to mindlessly absorb the Zionist propaganda that they are fed and dutifully regurgitate its portrait of the Arab as murderer, as psychopath, as chronic underachiever, as “Islamofascist” etc.

    There are obviously serious misunderstandings of the Arabs, their goals and even their recent history, almost all of them being created and circulated by people strongly sympathetic to the State of Israel. Strangely enough, the Israelis themselves are not as deluded by this crap as the Americans seem to be, perhaps because they actually may know some Arabs well enough to have interacted with them, even as jailer and prisoner.

    A conference at which all players participate and are allowed to speak for themselves (and this includes, of course, the elected representatives of the Palestinians speaking for the Palestinians) may at least clear the air for some Americans and get them to see the Arabs and Muslims as they really are, and not as cartoonish stick figures cut to serve the interests of Likud Party apparatchiks and their powerful American patrons.

    There is so much misunderstanding that a face-to-face meeting seems to be the ideal way to clear things up.

  32. Michael: Since you are very informed on this issue can you tell us how the Koran is organized. Please be honorable and don’t go look it up if you dont know. If you dont know just say so.

  33. More than just dangerous your plans are not realistic because they would never happen.
    No politician in his/her right mind would propose anything like this. Being tough only goes so far.
    The proposal in my view is bonkers.
    Why?
    For starters because this is exactly what many terrorists want us to do. They want us to be so pissed off at the small percentage of Muslims that are terrorists that we would risk killing the larger percentage that aren’t. Why? Because they could recruit terrorists for at least the next 100 years. You think it is serious now? You think they would be afraid of us? Ha. Many of them have nothing left to lose. You start dropping nukes you have no idea what a gift that would be to Al Queda. It’s not like Japan during World War II. It is a very different mindset that bombs will not alter in the way you would want. You’re also dealing with multiple countries and various strands of the Muslim religion all of which would turn against America in ugly ways.
    And btw if this war is so serious why do we not have a draft to relieve the soldiers we have there now? Why are we not implementing – not only your plan – but one that includes a bigger military presence? Why is there not economic sacrifice to fight the enemy? Why do most Americans want us home from Iraq?
    Clearly Americans don’t think this war is that important.

  34. The Koran I read (which is the Penguin edition) is organized in chapters arranged in order of length, the first chapter being the shortest. In the beginning the chapters are very poetic and powerful, with incredible imagery, often drawn from the desert. It soon gets very boring and repetitive though. I never finished it.

  35. I’m not super-knowledgeable about the Middle East but there are some great sources of information available, one being “If Americans Knew” at http://www.ifamericansknew.org/ for news which the U.S. media won’t print, although European and other media have no problem printing it, and another being Juan Cole’s blog http://www.juancole.com. Juan Cole is a professor of Middle Eastern studies at Univ. of Michigan.

    I certainly don’t want to give the impression that the Arabs are the good guys and the Jews are the bad guys. There’s plenty of blame to go around for everyone. It’s a very complex situation. I personally think that the present generation of leadership on both sides is simply incapable of making peace. The only hope is for totally new blood, today’s 20-year-olds maybe 25 years down the road. I hope I’m wrong but I feel that the problem will only be solved by violence and in a way that is definitely not good for the Jews. The conflict is self-feeding in that every victim breeds a little cloud of avengers, so there is a sort of force multiplier projected in the future when all the bills come due.

  37. Matt: So under your proposal a man is not free to go where he pleases on this Earth? He’s not free to meet with anyone he wants to meet for a talk?

    He sure is, but that doesn’t allow him to negotiate or discuss issues pertaining to American state, and then solicit to volunteer to bring it up with us like a middle man that serves two masters. he is interfereing with affairs of state, and giving excuses so no one hollars loud enough about it.

    Next time you sit to buy a house, or something big, let me know. I will then exercise my free ability to meet with the others in your meeting and discuss whatever I want with them.

    Would you say that would have no effect, a little effect, a lot of effect, or an unquantifiable amount since it puts everyone off base?

    Occam’s Beard,
    Nice take. great explanation.

    =============================

    Here is the problem as I have seen it. we have taken our own rhetoric farther than it was meant to go.

    The founding fathers would not have a problem with free men, but also would have the clarity to eject the seditious, and for those wishing to change us to another political system, their acts are seditious. The US was never meant to evolve to a different base of state.

    At some point we arrived at some inane application that played with the spirit of the law, through the interpretations of the letter of the law. We lost our spirit and all we have left is word games.

    Given that we have too many people who let radicals get someplace, radicalism has been a VERY productive way to elbow your way into the modern state, and take a legitimate seat at the table.

    Sein Fein did pretty good eventually, no?
    Rote Zora and their comrades did good, no?
    Hammas, ended up where?

    If I had the time I could list many more…

    We have let this be a fast track to political position. We don’t negotiate with terrorists, we put them in state.

    The west has lost its values, and spirit. It no longer can say that America is not for everyone. Yes Matt, America is not for everyone. Under the rights of self preservation and self determination, she can eject people who are not healthy to her and who intend to change her from what she is into something else. Doing that harms her.

    There is a difference between USE, and ABUSE.
    We have allowed the ABUSE of things for a long time.

    Sedition is not a right.

    Sedition is not the same as protest.

    America was not intended to be freedom without responsibility, or judgment, or to harm.

    If it finds an alien ideology harmful, it does have the right and power to eject it.

    It probably won’t do anything like that till some event that removes ambiguity slams her so that her people will no longer tolerate that kind of behavior and teachings in their midst.

    Maybe war backing up Columbia, in which the opponents have a hard link again to that favored provocateur and party animal of the last century. Or maybe backing up Israel against three or four states?

    It may come after Iran closes the land transport path for mischief, and things finally settle down when things cant be maintained.

    Since the beasties eat their own, its only a matter of time till brand X and Brand Y go at it, and things get a bit more real.

    Its also only a matter of time till urban guerrillas start there games in large US cities.
    MS13 has more than 20,000 members in the US and they send tribute back.
    And the neat and peachy keen thing is that many are and have joined our military to get training in tactics, and weapons. http://usmilitary.about.com/od/justicelawlegislation/a/gangs.htm

    The report, Gang Activity in the U.S. Armed Forces Increasing, dated January 12, states that members of nearly every major street gang have been identified on both domestic and international military installations. Members of nearly every major street gang, including the Bloods, Crips, Black Disciples, Gangster Disciples, Hells Angels, Latin Kings, The 18th Street Gang, Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), Mexican Mafia, Nortenos, Surenos, Vice Lords, and various white supremacist groups, have been documented on military installations. Although most prevalent in the Army, the Army Reserves, and the National Guard, gang activity is pervasive throughout all branches of the military and across most ranks, but is most common among the junior enlisted ranks, according to the report.

  38. VinceP,

    Good question for Michael. We await his answer.

    I knew that when neo-neocon posted a thread like this it would, as I’ve seen happen on other weblogs, bring out the Jew-haters, anti-Israelists, and conspiracy theorists.

    Michael seems to think that we have no right to read the Qur’an if we don’t know Arabic or Farsi. Reliable translations exist in other languages. By the way, Michael, the Qur’an is written in Classical Arabic, a language that is no longer spoken anywhere. Muslims may be taught to recite it, but most Muslims do not know Arabic, let alone Classical Arabic. The only way they know what’s in it is when their clerics, scholars and imams let them know. We kafirs are, by Sharia Law, not permitted to study it or know what’s in it. Furthermore, Muslim apologists and propagandists will try to impugn our arguments by telling us that our English translations of the Qur’an are unreliable (they are not).

    I would like to toss this question into the ring for everyone to consider. If large numbers of Arabs decided to leave territory inside and adjacent to Israel’s 1948 borders, on the encouragement and warnings from the Arab nations that if they did not leave they would be slain with the Jews, and they were not allowed to return, the traditional logic of war would seem to obtain, would it not? I mean, they bet on the Ummah and expected the Jews to be wiped out. But, it didn’t work out that way. Israel survived and won that war. To the victors belong the spoils. Same for the 1967 Six-Day War. Same for the October 1973 Yom Kippur War. Three times the Arabs tried to wipe them out and three times the Jews came away victorious, and with more territory added.

    What is the logic by which the traditional rule of “to the victory belongs the spoils” somehow does not apply to the Jews?

    I can assure you that if Israel had lost any of those wars Israel would have been wiped out. Murder on a massive scale would have ensued. And by the laws of war no one would have gone to the U.N., the World Court, or the European Community and tried to prosecute Syria, Egypt, and Jordan.

    Given that by both the Islamic injunction to wage jihad and even injunctions in the Qur’an to kill the Jews, why should we expect mercy from the Arabs?

    There are always double standards applied to the Jews.

    Finally, as I’ve been following this discussion there is a strange air of unreality of perceptions on the part of some here.

  39. Americans will have the opportunity to hear from the Muslims themselves what their real concerns are, what their real objectives are, what they want to see happen in their region and what they don’t.

    And what if the worthies you’ve assiduously assembled inform you that their real objectives are to kill people just like you, that what they want to see happen is that you become Muslim, and that what they don’t want to see is you alive and non-Muslim? (Because that’s exactly what some of them have said, and I think prudence demands that we take their pronouncements at face value.)

    What then, my friend? Not every human dispute is ripe for resolution in the court of reason.

  40. First of all, I’m Michael, not John. The Penguin edition does go shortest first and I believe the intro said that that was the traditional format. I can tell you quite honestly if it had gone longest first, I would never have gone more than a couple of pages. The deeper you get into it the more boring it becomes.

  41. Land for peace has not worked and not one phase of it has brought peace and security for Israel. Israel remains a non-recognized state by Muslim countries (except for Turkey).

    The Arab nations have decided that the Palis are good canon fodder to keep on Israel’s borders as constant and boiling guerrilla fighters to enervate, terrorize, and weaken Israel.

    There is not going to be a negotiated settlement because this is jihad and only hudna is permitted, for no longer than ten years.

    Anwar Sadat was slain because he broke Islamic law on this score. His treaty with Israel was the primary reason the Muslim Brotherhood had him killed. He entered into a permanent treaty with an infidel, which is a serious offense. It rendered him an apostate and we know what the penalty for apostasy in Islam is.

  42. No politician in his/her right mind would propose anything like this. Being tough only goes so far.
    The proposal in my view is bonkers.

    You don’t get it. Sounding bonkers is exactly the idea.

    The politician in charge can present himself as restraining, with great difficulty and faltering grip, the lunatics who want to vaporize the problem, i.e., our Muslim friends, and thereby solve the problem permanently. That’s when we’ll make progress in negotiations, and not before.

  43. Occam’s Beard – you may well be right. I think if the alternative is certain death and mayhem, you are obligated at least to TRY to resolve things peacefully, but there is no guarantee of success. Not to try would be criminal.

    I even agree that one reason why the effort might fail is the pig-headedness of the Muslim reps (no religious disrespect intended.) But I think you should also be aware that another likely reason for failure is the Israelis’ fundamental reluctance to sacrifice the West Bank (“Judaea and Samaria”) due to sincere conviction and/or the power of the fanatical settler bloc.

    We can’t know the end result – – but what can you lose by trying?

  44. Thanks, Michael. You’re coming around. Look at your last post – “no religious disrespect intended.” Stop pussyfooting around. Go ahead and deliver some religouis disrespect. It’s a free country – for now, at least. “Artists” can produce the “Piss Christ,” and we can all agree that Mohammed was a schizophrenic pedophile who founded a brutal, backward death cult that has held the non-Jewish Semitic peoples back since the eighth century. Some won’t like it, but that’s their problem, and it’s the truth.

    We DEMAND the right to live by what we think is right. Period. The Muslims can live as they want, but if they a problem with our living as we think is right, then let’s settle this by force of arms. Now, before they get nuclear weapons.

    One thing I’ve learned over the years: people problems, left to fester, only get worse. Never better. Deal with them asap.

  45. So Naive.

    Iran uses “talks” to give false hope to gullible Westerners and to buy themselves time as they continue on with their nuclear program.

    Thus you lose a lot by talking to people who ultimately want to destroy you.

    Don’t believe me. Hear it straight from the horse’s mouth:

    http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/805.htm

    Chief Iranian Negotiator on the Nuclear Issue Hosein Musavian: The Negotiations with Europe Bought Us Time to Complete the Esfahan UCF Project and the Work on the Centrifuges in Natanz

    Are you really this blind and stupid?

  46. Hamas are a bunch of terrorists and Jimmy Carter is a meddling egomaniac who can only do harm.

    As for Israel illegally taking someone else’s land, that is just absurd, it really is. If the Arabs wanted peace with Israel they could have had it years ago. If they put anywhere near the time and energy into improving the lives of the Palestinians as they have into using them as an excuse to kill Jews…we would all be better off.

    The Palestinian culture is dysfunctional.

  47. Michael Taylor,

    If you think the West Bank is the problem and that the Jewish settlements there are the irritant in the oyster’s environment, then it’s obvious you don’t know the rules of war: to the victor goes the spoils.

    What Israel won fairly in war in 1948, 1967, and 1973 they have the right to dispose of it as they wish. The Arabs lost those wars. If it had been the reverse I cannot fathom the Left in this country as I know it (and I used to be a part of it many years ago) arguing that the Arabs should have to give back to the Jews what they took from them in war.

    The logic of craven appeasement is the only explanation for this obtuse grasp of the reality. Jimmah Carter is trapped within his own egotism, his craven appeasement-orientation, and his well known Jew hatred. When I was a Leftist most other Leftists I knew were, to varying degrees of subtlety, Jew haters and anti-Israel. And that was back in the late seventies and early eighties. It’s a LOT worse now. I tended to feel very alone in defending Jews and Israel back then. Nowadays, a Leftist who defends Israel is likely to be treated like a Leftist who left and went over to the Republicans: like a traitor.

    Again, for those who failed to get the memo: Not one instance of attempting to trade land for peace and security has yielded anything for Israel. And it will never be a fair trade because the Arabs are just as committed to the destruction of the Zionist entity as they ever were.

    Many Leftists DO hear the rhetoric from the Muslims, but they choose to ignore it because it just is so discordant with their alternate reality.

  48. And btw, Hamas did win an election and from what I have seen the Palestinians might be regretting that. But the point is that Hamas does not want to negotiate. They want to push Israel into the sea.

  49. “… due to sincere conviction and/or the power of the fanatical settler bloc…”; “… but what can you lose by trying?”

    The moslem-nazis figure they have time and numbers on their side, in addition to effective control of 20% or more of the entire surface of the earth, and the greatest energy fortune in recorded human history. With all of that their world achievements in the last several hundred years amount for the most part to initiating and consumating several failed wars with Israel, and one (so far) with America, as well as building cities and some energy processing facilities mostly by contracting to the Europeans and the West. It’s the long slow squeeze of a boa like hydra… Ever notice the “smile” on the face of the friendly moderates? They may not want to become shaheeds, but they’re very confident about the ultimate outcome of events.

    What can you lose by trying? Oh, 250 million people in the most painful kind of way… That’s an incredibly stupid question, when time is of the essence, and the answer is so painfully obvious. The “fanatical settler bloc”? Sorrry bozo, this is a tiny group of holdouts who refuse to give up their rightful place on a piece of geography, based on several thousand years of history, and incidentally as the foundation ultimately of Christianity… Otherwise, you might well be on your hands and knees five times a day, and your daughter and your wife would have had their clitorectomies…. Go to the web site for the Jewish Community of Hebron, search the site and the history, and if you can’t come up with a better take on those people, then you are stupid or dishonest, which is it? The moslems started the nazi agenda 1400 years ago, allied faithfully with the WWII Axis, but when the Germans, Japanese, and other world fascists abandoned their quest from WWII, the arab moslem bloc kept right on truckin… We can’t know the end result? Are you kidding, 9-11, 4000 fatalities in Iraq, a considerable fortune, and the degradation of all our lives at airport lines, ad-infinitum are the end result of endless negotiations, just since the dabacle in Iran when the dhimocrat “ass”Carter capitulated to Khomenei… Hindsight is 20-20; Obviously, taking care of business with Iran and Iraq back then would have been much cheaper than the price we’re paying now, and the price we may pay if the Mahdi’s get their nukes. Get your head out of your butt, read Atlas Shrugs, my other favorite blog besides this…

  50. This is from a HAMAS sermon last week. These are the people our Leftists here want to “negiotate” with. negiotate what? These people need to be destroyed:

    A sermon last Friday by a prominent Muslim cleric and Hamas member of the Palestinian parliament openly declared that “the capital of the Catholics, or the Crusader capital,” would soon be conquered by Islam.

    The fiery sermon, delivered by Yunis al-Astal and aired on Hamas’ Al-Aqsa TV, predicted that Rome would become “an advanced post for the Islamic conquests, which will spread though Europe in its entirety, and then will turn to the two Americas, even Eastern Europe.”

    “Allah has chosen you for Himself and for His religion,” al-Astal preached, “so that you will serve as the engine pulling this nation to the phase of succession, security and consolidation of power, and even to conquests through da’wa and military conquests of the capitals of the entire world.

    “Very soon, Allah willing, Rome will be conquered, just like Constantinople was, as was prophesized by our prophet Muhammad,” he added.

    Al-Astal last June preached how it was the duty of Palestinian women to martyr themselves by becoming homicide bombers.

    “The most exalted form of jihad is fighting for the sake of Allah, which means sacrificing one’s soul by fighting the enemies head-on, even if it leads to martyrdom,” he said in a June 23, 2007 interview.

    “When jihad becomes an individual duty, it applies to women too, because women do not differ from men when it comes to individual duties,” he said, calling Jews “the brothers of apes and pigs” who should “taste the bitterness of death.”

    Friday’s rant repeated that theme: “Today, Rome is the capital of the Catholics, or the Crusader capital, which has declared its hostility to Islam, and has planted the brothers of apes and pigs in Palestine in order to prevent the reawakening of Islam.

    “I believe that our children, or our grandchildren, will inherit our jihad and our sacrifices, and, Allah willing, the commanders of the conquest will come from among them.

    “Today, we instill these good tidings in their souls — and by means of the mosques and the Koran books, and the history of our Prophets, his companions, and the great leaders, we prepare them for the mission of saving humanity from the hellfire at whose brink they stand.”

  51. What does it say about Carter, that he is willing to talk with the bigoted terrorist thugs of Hamas, but he refused to debate Alan Dershowitz at Brandeis?

    Perhaps: ” I will talk only with enemies of freedom.”
    Perhaps: ” I will talk with those who wish the destruction of Israel, but not with someone who wishes the preservation of Israel.”

  52. I wish it were possible in the case of Carter to adhere to the old rule and simply “follow the money”.

    It undoubtedly applies to WJ Clinton, too, at least to the Marc Rich pardon. How much will a billionaire pay for a full pardon and retention of all his ill-gotten gains? 50 mill (

  55. Jimmy Carter’s think tank in Atlanta is Saudi funded. When the Dhimmi himself published his controversial book a couple of years ago at least a few members of the Board of Directors quit in protest.

    Carter clearly is suffering delusions of grandeur, since he really does think he has the magic touch when it comes to diplomacy. I believe that he really believes his own bullshit. He thinks he can go to the Paleosimian leadership and obtain some kind of promise or at least a list of things that are negotiable, and then go to the Israeli leadership and plunk it down on the table for them to act on. But I think the Jewish leadership is finally catching on to that act. Long experience of broken promises by the Palis is finally having the rational effect on them.

  56. What a load of crap – – I can’t even figure out where to start, so anywhere will do, I guess.

    “To the victor belong the spoils” is no more a rule of international law than “an eye for an eye” is a rule of criminal law. The Fourth Geneva Convention, which is binding international law, Article 49 clearly states that it is ILLEGAL for a state to settle its own citizens on territory captured in war. This is a legally binding treaty ratified by Israel, the U.S.A. and most of the other countries on this planet.

    Another crazy Arab (er, make that “prominent Muslim cleric”) makes a speech and because he’s a Hamas Member of Parliament, suddenly he’s invested with the authority to speak for the Palestinian people – – NOT!! Who gives a damn what this nut claims? Pat Robertson is a “prominent Protestant cleric” and does he represent American Protestants in his screwball ravings? When I advocate talking to the Palestinians, that does NOT mean talk to the craziest amongst them, it means talk to their leaders – – their prime ministers, their foreign ministers. He’s not one of their leaders – – why are HIS speeches translated and floated out over the web? Do your own homework – – where did you find the quote, whose website is it and what’s their connection to the State of Israel? WHO BENEFITS from this particular speech being translated and posted, rather than some eloquent plea for peace from an Arab mother who just lost her daughter to Israeli tank-fire?

    Perfected Democrat (nice name by the way) you’re in a class by yourself when it comes to fanatical bullshit, shrieking hysteria over non-existent threats, misrepresentations of history and general craziness, but I’ll try to address at least SOME of your concerns – – Muslim-Nazi is a new term of racist vilification for me, but I’ll assume it’s the same idea as the more popular “Islamofascist”; I think over-use of the word “Nazi” devalues the evil inherent in the concept of Naziism and makes Nazis more acceptable to the general public. If everybody’s a Nazi, how bad can the Nazis really be? I’d reserve use of words like “Nazi” for REAL Nazis, and not apply it freely to anyone having a beef, particularly a well-justified beef, with the State of Israel.

    Since the Iranians are some years away from producing even ONE functional nuclear weapon while Israel presently has hundreds of them and the U.S.A. thousands, I’d say your concern over losing “250 million people” if we stop to negotiate with them for a few months is the intellectual equivalent of the hysterical shrieking of teenage girls encountering mice in the shower. Get a grip, man. Let’s talk about these issues rationally, from the perspective of people living in the real world.

    I wasn’t really impressed with your shallow grasp of the history of the Arabs, their lack of accomplishment, etc. over the years – – very little of your analysis seemed devoted to foreign aggression and exploitation as a contributing factor to their alleged failure, after all they were attacked by Crusaders, incorporated into the Persian, Turkish, British and French Empires at various points in their history, and generally ripped off and exploited by stronger forces of much more populous and industrialized nations including recently the U.S.A. You seem to be using their past victimization as some kind of excuse to further victimize them in the present, and that ain’t right.

    “Ever notice the smile . . . ?” Oh, I’m not even going to go there. That one was beyond silly. WAAAY beyond.

    The fanatical settler bloc is the reason I’m not on my knees facing Mecca five times a day and my female relatives don’t have clitorectomies? And MY name is Bozo? I don’t really know what it is that you’re smoking, my friend, but I’m not about to send those bigoted murderous fanatics a thank-you note anytime soon. And their so-called “rightful place” based on “thousands of years” of history is a total crock. The Iroquois Nation has a much better claim on my house and yard, and they’re not getting that either.

    “The Muslims started the nazi agenda 1400 years ago?” Tell ya what – – when ya find a Muslim Auschwitz and a Muslim Treblinka with crematoria and gas chambers, let me know. When ya find a set of Muslim Nuremburg laws blocking the Jews from the liberal professions, from teaching, from racial intermarriage, etc. let me know. When ya find Muslims burning “Jewish and degenerate” literature in public bonfires, let me know. When ya find one instance of Muslims killing Jews in the quantities of the Spanish Inquisition, the Ukrainian Peasant Revolt, the Eastern European pogroms or the Holocaust, let me know. Until then, maybe you should just stop embarrassing yourself with such ignorant crap.

    9-11, the U.S. casualties in Iraq, etc. are consequences of attempting to negotiate with the Muslims? You are not misinformed, you are just plain nuts. 9-11 was NOT the result of a failed negotiation, 4,000 U.S. dead in Iraq are the direct result of a pack of lies coming from George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Tony Blair and their agents and flunkies. Your take on these disasters resulting from a failed negotiation or series of negotiations is unbelievable.

    Your analysis of Iran is totally bullshit. The crisis – – which in the first place was ultimately due to the CIA overthrowing the democratically elected Mossadegh government in the 1950s to punish it for expropriating the assets of the Anglo-Persian Oil Co. (now BP or British Petroleum) began when Carter, on the ass KISSINGER’S advice, AGAINST the protests of Ayatollah Khomeini, allowed the deposed Shah of Iran into the U.S.A. for cancer treatments on “humanitarian” grounds. Carter caved in to Kissinger, not to Khomeini. Every detail of that story that you could possibly get wrong, you got wrong.

    The Iranians’ nukes won’t make a God-damned bit of difference to the U.S.A., which could answer any strike with a devastating counterstrike, delivered from ships, subs, ICBMs or planes. There is no way in the world any of those nukes would be fired at the U.S.

  57. Whoa, Michael, chill.

    The Iranians’ nukes won’t make a God-damned bit of difference to the U.S.A., which could answer any strike with a devastating counterstrike, delivered from ships, subs, ICBMs or planes. There is no way in the world any of those nukes would be fired at the U.S.

    No way…if the people on the other side are rational actors, view death as an undesirable outcome, believe that a nuclear bomb exploded in the U.S. would necessarily be attributed to them, and are convinced that we would override our liberals and retaliate.

    If.

  58. Beard – – there is no realistic chance that Iran’s nukes will be controlled or fired by irrational actors. If they’re capable of engineering nukes, they’re capable of engineering fail-safe systems and safeguards. Contrary to what Americans might think, the Iranians are just as intelligent and rational as anyone else, they come from an ancient civilization and they don’t want to die any more than anyone else does. The military is NOT under the operational control of the ayatollahs. Neither are science or energy.

    I believe that any nuke can be identified, even by the signatures they leave after successfully exploding.

    Your liberals were never able to stop you from attacking countries that didnt’ even attack you, how could they stop you from attacking one that did?

  59. MT,

    1. Arab Expansion: Arabs conquered much of what had been the Eastern Roman Empire, Spain, Sicily, even reaching the Indus valley, by 750 AD. If the Battle of Tours had been lost, Christianity would likely be a minority religion. The Arabs sacked Rome in the 840s. Arab attacks on Europe were constant, with the Turks to follow. The first Crusade was as much a response to all this as to the slaughter of approximately 100 pilgrims in the Holy Land and the onerous tax the Muslim leader, forget his name, imposed on the pilgrims. The Arabs, like all warlike people concerned with treasure and having a universalist religion, have done there misdeeds also.

    2. Holocaust: Approximately 100,000 Bosnians and Albanians, the number may be twice that, served in the SS and were instrumental in the round up of Slavic Jews for the concentration camps. They were all Muslims. I haven’t seen numbers on how many they sent to the death camps, but it was likely considerable. There are some recorded instances prior to the Crusades of Muslims slaughtering Jews, likely for the same reason the Romans hated the Jews: they just don’t know their place. As an aside, Muslims spent most of their slaughter quota on poly-theists and Buddhists. And let’s not mention the slave trade, the Atlantic slave trade was much the smaller of the two. Saudi Arabia finally “banned” slavery in 1962.

    3. Spanish Inquisition: Given that there is no real number on the death toll from that 360 year reign of terror, it varies from 4000 to 50 million (wacked), there is no way to compare.

    4. Racism: Please, please don’t call hatred of a religion “racism”. The term is so abused now that its near meaningless, like Nazi. Universalist religions can’t be considered a “race”. As for obscure Islamic clerics being quoted, I’m sorry, but I’ve seen quotes from major clerics, Sunni (Saudi) and Shia (Iranian) that are quite vile.

    5. “pack of lies coming from George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Tony Blair and their agents”: Also from the French and Germans. For example, Der Spiegel recently ran an article regarding Curveball and the German contribution to the WMD bad intelligence. Also, Saddam himself admitted that he purposely misled to keep alive the belief that he had WMD still as a counterpose to Iran. He never thought the USA, et al, would act.

    6. Hitler: Well, here your dead on. Hindenberg was a very tired, old man in 1933 (Shirer) and made one of the worst blunders in history. OK, Petain and Maginot are right in there too. If its Friday, it’s Belgium.

    7. Nukes: I never trust the rationallity of any oligarchy, theocracy, or dictatorship, especially one that used about 40,000 children to clear minefields. Nukes do leave a signature, but I can’t remember the isotopes/impurties that are markers. Iranian nukes would be aimed at Europe not the USA. At least the French think so.

  60. Carter’s plan is more sublime than you give him credit for. He intends to help Hamas perform “dry runs” against the Secret Service detail he’ll be dragging along with him on the trip. They’ll learn how the Service operates, with inside information provided by Carter himself, and possibly even find ways to penetrate the US President’s last line of defense.

    He hoped he could convince the Shin Bet to come along too, so Hamas could experiment with ways to penetrate their security as well. Olmert, to his credit, saw right through the ruse, and publicly announced that Carter would have to rely on his own security, if he persisted in his meeting with Hamas.

    Now all we can hope for is that some overly enthusiastic Hamas experimenter fails to resist the temptation to turn the dry run into a live one…

  61. Michael, you’ve succeeded, deliberately I’m sure, in missing entirely the historical basis, context and intent of my comments… Start at the beginning, mass murder as a program for domination, 1400 years ago, don’t spin it or gloss over sweeps of history for convenience. There are thousands and thousands of pages of well founded background, the historical record is there, the truth must hurt…

  62. By the way, Michael, the Qur’an is written in Classical Arabic, a language that is no longer spoken anywhere. Muslims may be taught to recite it, but most Muslims do not know Arabic, let alone Classical Arabic. The only way they know what’s in it is when their clerics,

    What laughable statement.

    FredHjr from,were you got this untruthful info?

    Most Arab countries teaching Arabic language (Classic Arabic not local spoken accent) further more all the writing in Arabic almost in classic Arabic and grammar.

    All newspaper books and TV radio is almost written and spoken in classical Arabic

    Coming here for faking the facts.

    BTW, Farsi. not like Arabic and the Koran translated to many language include Farsi.
    Looks FredHjr dont know the difference between Arabic and Farsi?

    FredHjr Go and get a life man.

    Michael Taylor, Arabic my mother language

  63. “Elections” in Gaza were held in just the same atmosphere of mutial hatred and violence between rival gangs of terrorists, as elections in Weimar Germany, with exclusion of everybody else except two groups of terrorists, officially recognized as such by most democratic govenments. To ascribe any legitimacy to such elections is absurd. The very idea to held such election under pression of US is a grave mistake of Bush administration.
    There are near 6000 languages on Earth, but only 150 nations. This means that only one in 35 existing ethnicities has capability to build a state: this a elite club, not everybody right. This “right” is also completely utopian, because it is impossible to divide land to 6000 continuous ethnic enclaves. And so-called Palestinians are not even ethnicity: they are indistinguishable from other Arabs by language, culture or religion.
    So the only possible solution is not 6000 national states, but much less number of multy-ethnic empires, with borders defined by overarching cultures, not ethnicities.

  64. MT claims the Iranian govt is rational. Oh what a hoot and a holler.

    MT thinks that Iran is deterred by MAD. Oh what a hoot and a holler.

    MT shows the real “racism”. He dismisses the Twelver Shia Cleric’s stated intention. They are not worthy of being taken at their word. He thinks that their nearly 1000 year wait for the return of the 12 Imam is just some cosume they wear for the EPCOT center.

    I ran across these 4 quotes over the past four years:

    commandant of Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, Major General Yahya Rahim Safavi, said on state television, “The final goal of the [1979] revolution is to create global Islamic rule and a regime of law to be led by the Imam Mahdi”. “God willing, the 21st century will see the defeat of the U.S. and the Zionists, and the victory of freedom-seeking nations of the world”.

    Commandant of Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, Major General Yahya Rahim Safavi, said on state television. “God willing, the 21st century will see the defeat of the U.S. and the Zionists, and the victory of freedom-seeking nations of the world. The final goal of the [1979] revolution is to create global Islamic rule and a regime of law to be led by the Imam Mahdi”.

    The [Iranians] President’s chief strategist, Hassan Abbassi, has come up with a war plan based on the premise that “Britain is the mother of all evils” — the evils being America, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, the Gulf states and even Canada, all of whom are the malign progeny of the British Empire. “We have a strategy drawn up for the destruction of Anglo-Saxon civilization,” says Mr Abbassi. “There are 29 sensitive sites in the U.S. and in the West. We have already spied on these sites and we know how we are going to attack them… Once we have defeated the Anglo-Saxons the rest will run for cover.”

    The IRGC chief warned that Iran was seeing through “critical days” and “fate-determining years”. He described the purpose of Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution as the “Salvation of Muslims” from the hands of the “oppressive U.S. and Israel”.

    ===

    If Iran’s intention is to destroy Israel dont think for a second that they dont also intend to destroy us.

    Israel is the Little Satan.. how much more motivated do you think they are to destroy us, the Great Satan. They are just as motivated to remove from us our ability to project our power and policy so that they can advance their Caliphate dreams.

    They already have stated that based on their reading of history that the United States has no will to fight a real war. That the Leftists in this country are so unwillign to risk or sacrfice anythign that if Iran pushes us hard enough or hurts us bad enough that the Left will succede in causing us to withdraw and effectively end our Superpower ablity.

    Iran has the will to procede wiht their agenda , they have concluded we have absolutely no will to stop them.

    The idiots on here like MT are exactly the sorts of people Iran is counting on.

    This is why I said before I think the Democrats will eventualy perceptate the need for the military to remove from power lest the country gets annihilated from thier irresponsiblity and cravenness.

  65. Hamas, Muslim Brotherhood, Iran etc…..You dont negotiate with these people.

    Vince P working hard to make the case of Iran looks rial enamy.

    For some hidden reasons he ignoring that US negotiate with Iranians!! although Iranians call America the Great Satan while US call them Axis of Evil?

    Its very clear here Vince P mangling and mixing things to darken the picture more to make the redaer to believe in his hypocrisy.

    For more details of secret Iran US talk google to find and these are few of them.

    The most interesting one that Israelis buying their oil from Iran through Swiss companies although Israelis publicly band any relation with Iranians and all you know the big noise made by Israelis about Iranian ahmadinejad said on Israel.

    Iran and U.S. said to have been holding secret talks for 5 years
    By Haaretz Staff

    Talking with the Enemy

    Report: Israel Is Secretly Importing Iranian Oil

    An Israeli energy newsletter has revealed Israel is secretly buying oil from Iran despite an official boycott. The newsletter EnergiaNews reports Israeli companies get around the boycott by having the oil delivered to European ports, where it is then bought by Israelis. The oil is then imported into Israel by the Eilat-Ashkelon Pipeline Company, which keeps its oil sources secret

    If you’ve ever wondered about the definition of hypocrisy you’ll find the answer right here.

    B>Israel’s Tehran connection

  66. As history unambiguously shows, any Western “peace initiative” in Arab-Israely conflict never leads to more peace and ALWAYS leads to more violence, providing terrorists with new incentives to wreak havoc and so stimulate West to apply new pressures to Israel. So the best course for everybody sincerely interested to reduce violence in ME is NOT to launch any peace initiative, but, instead, clearly declare unconditional support of Israel and give Israel free hand to retaliate. Only this policy can rein in terrorists and bear hope for Arabs in disputed lands to come up with new leaders untainted by association with terrorists.

  67. The stupidty of Israeli or American government has nothing to do with my opinion.

    Calling me a hypocrite is absurd.

  68. They playing their games in ME together:

    The 1979 Iranian Revolution failed to win converts in the Arab world. But in the wake of two US-led invasions, Tehran is taking advantage of regional instability and a Shiite revival to push its nuclear and other ambitions. And that is the brick wall blocking Washington’s drive for democracy in the Middle East. Since the invasion of Iraq, the Sunni autocrats in Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia have put out dire warnings about Iran gaining influence in the region through the Shiite ascendancy in Iraq.

    So they pay lip-service to Washington’s calls for democracy and respect for human rights, hoping that the US will leave them in power, because democracy means empowering Shiites – which, in turn, means a more powerful Iran.

    Better the dictators you know, is their advice to Bush.

    Shiite militants not Israel’s only problem

  69. I think we can better understand the Arab Worlds opinion of us if we consider our own opinion about chickens.

    Now there are a few among us who are vehemently opposed to our consumption of chickens. They will even point out how cruel we are with our warehousing and slaughter system that leads to the chickens demise.

    But the fact is, the overwhelming majority of us like eating chickens more than we are concerned for the chickens well being. Its ingrained in our culture and chopping off chicken heads ain’t gonna end in any of our lifetimes.

    I submit our demise has been ingrained in Islamic cultures for centuries. They are just now getting around to aquiring the technology to kill us much more efficiently than even we can kill chickens.

  70. “Truth”

    You are a rascal. I do indeed know the difference between Classical Arabic and Farsi, even though I do not speak them. I roomed with an Irania Shia during the last two years when I was an undergraduate.

    I have not lied about anything regarding Islam and the Middle East. Ask VinceP. He’ll back me up. You are upset about what I’ve written because it’s an uncomfortable truth. I’ve seen the likes of you elsewhere: Muslims who are trolling the web for discussions about Islam and when you find them your job is to interject your taqiyya for the sake of sabotaging them and attempting to kick sand in the eyes of the kafir.

    You’re just doing your part for Allah, fighting the jihad in the way you know how.

  71. And “Truth” YOU are the one who needs to “get a life.” I invite you to abandon Islam, convert to Christianity, and repent of your jihad ways. I already have a fine life, thank you.

    I think the Pope is doing the right thing asking us to pray for the conversion and repentance of the Muslims and their shaheeds. And so, I will include you in my prayers.

  72. “But in the wake of two US-led invasions, Tehran is taking advantage of regional instability and a Shiite revival to push its nuclear and other ambitions.”

    When did the US invade Tehran? You’d think it would be on the news, or something.

    Or are you referring to the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan? Funny how willing you are to treat the entire Middle East as one monolithic bloc when it comes to your grievances, but not when it comes to your responsibilities.

  73. “All newspaper books and TV radio is almost written and spoken in classical Arabic”

    LOL. Yes, my newspapers are almost written in Shakespearean English too. In fact, all English speakers almost speak in Shakespearean English. Some of us almost speak in Chaucerian English too.

    MT, notice that “If Americans Knew” carefully avoids revealing who is responsible for the site. I’ve known about the site for something like 2 years and it hasn’t changed much. The statistics page is accurate, again proving the old adage that one can lie with statistics. The Arabs of Palestine have had a homeland since the beginning of this mess, it’s called Jordan, but were denied by their fellow Arabs. The Hashemite King killed about 10,000 of them when they got uppity. And by the way, Obama was a LEGISLATOR when Rezco helped him buy a house. Obama has been a LEGISLATOR since the late 90s. Bugs Bunny had a phrase for you.

  74. Wonderful Michael Taylor:

    “The Iroquois Nation has a much better claim on my house and yard, and they’re not getting that either.”

    Thereby totally PROVING that he agrees with Israel’s right to the West Bank and the insanity of “negotiating” with anybody.

    What a maroon.

  75. Truth,

    Just in case you missed my point, Shakespearean English, which is considered to be in the period of Early Modern English, which means we can read it but it is difficult. Chaucerian English is in the Middle English period and requires translation to really understand it. Beowulf comes from Old English, which is essentially a different language.

    I realize Arabic is fairly fossilized compared to English, a very dynamic language, but not that fossilized.

  77. A few Ahmadinejad quotes

    “They have invented a myth that Jews were massacred and place this above God, religions and the prophets.”

    We ask the West to remove what they created sixty years ago and if they do not listen to our recommendations, then the Palestinian nation and other nations will eventually do this for them.”

    Anybody who recognizes Israel will burn in the fire of the Islamic nation’s fury.”

    “Remove Israel before it is too late and save yourself from the fury of regional nations.”

    “The skirmishes in the occupied land are part of a war of destiny. The outcome of hundreds of years of war will be defined in Palestinian land. As the Imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map.”

    “If the West does not support Israel, this regime will be toppled. As it has lost its raison d’ tre, Israel will be annihilated.”

    “Israel is a tyrannical regime that will one day will be destroyed.”

    “Israel is a rotten, dried tree that will be annihilated in one storm.”

    “[There is] no significant need for the United States.”

    “Could [9/11] be planned and executed without coordination with intelligence and security services – or their extensive infiltration? Of course this is just an educated guess. Why have the various aspects of the attacks been kept secret? Why are we not told who botched their responsibilities? And, why aren’t those responsible and the guilty parties identified and put on trial?”

    “We increasingly see that people around the world are flocking towards a main focal point – that is the Almighty God. My question for you is, ‘Do you not want to join them?'”

    “Those who insulted the prophet should know that you cannot obscure the sun with a handful of dust. The dust will just get back and blind your own eyes.”

    And my personal favorite:

    “Iranians possess delicate characteristics. They introduce their merits, which are extremely attractive to whole the world.”

    I believe we were discussing rational actors…

  78. To Ariel – I would definitely call Nazi anti-Semitism racism. There is nothing religious about it. The proof of that is that even Jews who converted to Christianity were not spared. If you read Mein Kampf, which I have (total pile of garbage and bullshit) you will see Hitler’s racial theories set out very clearly: the Jews are an inferior race of sub-human vermin whose greed and lust drive them to seek the downfall of the pure and virtuous Aryans (Germans, Scandinavians, English,) who are all that stand in the way of Jewish world domination. They (Jews) believe in nothing but their own right to dominate the world, using “Bolshevism” in the East and “capitalism” in the West to achieve their nefarious ends. He felt that their religion, while weak, contemptible and pathetic, was not reason enough to exterminate them, but that a racial battle was underway in which either the “Jewish race” or the “Aryan race” would emerge victorious or die. England and America, once Aryan nations themselves, had been corrupted and ruined by “the Jews,” so it was up to Germany to carry on the battle on behalf of all Aryans everywhere. If it weren’t for the tragic consequences, the whole thing would have been hilarious. At one point he explains how Jews in the fashion injury have perverted and debased true German culture – – German men had traditionally worn leather shorts, but because Jewish male legs were allegedly scrawny, twisted and knock-kneed, the Jewish-controlled industry decreed that all German men would abandon shorts in public in favour of long trousers, so that Jews would not be naturally disadvantaged in seducing Aryan women. Almost all of Hitler’s examples of so-called Jewish “inferiority” were based on alleged or imaginary “racial characteristics” that would be transmitted genetically from parent to child regardless of religion.

  79. In fairness, Michael, Judaism is a special case. As a non-proselytizing religion, religion and ethnicity/race coincide, which is why certain genetic diseases (e.g., Tay-Sachs syndrome) are found among Jews.

    By contrast, Islam, Catholicism, and Protestanism are all proselytizing religions, and consequently their adherents differ in ethnicity (and therefore do not share common genetic diseases).

    So it is appropriate to refer to anti-Semitism directed at Jews as racist, it is not appropriate to characterize criticism of Muslims as such, because Muslims comprise any number of races.

  80. Occam’s Beard,

    Exactly. And the reason I used “universalist” to describe the other religions. I don’t know if Hinduism is universalist, but Buddhism certainly is.

    The words Nazi and racist are words to be used very carefully, if at all.

  81. Ariel, you clearly showedthe lack of understanding and same, ingronrance, blindfull and deafness about Arabic.

    Compaire Arabic to English is much diffrent, if you need to tarslate your old written book books with english Arab need not to traslated anay old book and an example Koran is 1400 old most littrest Arab read Kora without need for traslation also same as old poet so on.

    Yes ther are diffrent spoken accent in Arab world but when its come to written book letters and all other spoken and written oulet they do speek sameArabic.

    Fredjr, I do pray for you also, but not to convert you to Islam, this matter is your choice to do, but to gain wisdom and to grownup when you telling things here and there.

  82. roomed with an Irania Shia during the last two years

    This not first time you bring this, It’s so bazaar to some one keep introduce himself as well know of Islam from roomed mates! arguing others about Islam.

    Wonder two years from now we will get ME/Iran specialists here called Mr. Fredjr putting same crap here.

    Further more Iranians, with due respect of them they had a lot of problems with their deformed version Islam as Mullahs tolerated religion for their personal necessities.

  83. I wanted to address some of the reasoning which has been brought to bear on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, particularly the fanciful and bizarre arguments of Sergey, Vince P. and others.

    I’m a pretty practical guy. If I see that Mr. A. has seduced Mrs. B., done serious some serious vandalism to Mr. B.’s car and set fire to Mr. B.’s home and then I later see Mr. B. come over and punch Mr. A. in the nose, I would probably figure that the punch in the nose was payback for the seduced wife, the vandalized car and the burned-down house. But then I guess I’m not as smart as some of the posters here.

    Some of the posters I’ve been reading here would probably want to undertake a 1,400-year search to see how B’s ancestors felt about THEIR neighbours 1,400 years ago. Some of them would probably want to know what B’s pastor has been thinking about Mr. A. for the past 25 years. Some of them would painstakingly analyze every quote they could find from B’s craziest friends and relatives. Some would want to start examining the deeds and the legal title to A’s and B’s homes for the past 2,000 years. And some would probably construct error-filled treatises of legal reasoning analyzing when one has the “right” to walk over into a neighbour’s home and punch his lights out. Whatever these posters do, and however they do it, I have no doubt that as a result of their “investigations” it will turn out that the only things we can know for sure are that A’s punch in the nose had no relationship whatsoever to his seduction of B’s wife, his vandalizing of B’s car or his torching of B’s home. That’s just how these guys operate.

    We have a small area, the West Bank, containing 3,000,000 people living under military occupation for 40 years. Their land is expropriated from them for roads, settlements and parks, their children are beaten or killed by soldiers or settlers, their homes and orchards are bulldozed and they can’t drive to the next down to visit a friend or relative or hospital or clinic without being forced out of their cars at checkpoints, body-searched, forced to wait under a hot sun or a downpour. They can’t get permits to renovate or expand their homes or dig a new well when the old one runs dry, but they can watch as hundreds of new homes go up all the time to accommodate newcomers who just a week or two back hopped off the plane from Brooklyn or Johannesburg or Paris or Auckland.

    They’re mad. Homicidally mad. They’ll kill, bomb, burn and destroy. But they’re not mad at the occupation. They’re not mad because their land was stolen. They’re not mad because their children were killed. No, to find the source of their anger, look to their 1400-year-old religious books. Look to their culture, anger is ingrained. Look to their history they were offered this and they rejected that. They never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. They say one thing in English and the opposite thing in Arabic. They’ve accomplished nothing. They stone adulterers. They want to convert us to Islam. They want to kill us all. They believe in clitorectomies. Their religion was founded by a pervert. They only translate 40 books a year. They’re stupid. They’re ugly.

    Anything and everything EXCEPT the key facts that the Jews stole their land and have put them under a military occupation for the past 40 YEARS with no end in sight, and they and a lot of other Muslims are starting to get a little pissed off about it and fight back.

    I know what the Palestinians are mad about. The whole world (except the U.S.A.) knows what the Palestinians are mad about. The Israelis themselves (when they’re not writing BS propaganda for foreign consumption) know what the Palestinians are mad about. Didn’t have to read Bernard Lewis or Barry Rubin or David Horowitz or Palestinian Media Watch or any other Jewish “expert” on the “Arab mind” to figure this one out, either.

    But you guys go on deluding yourselves, ignoring the obvious, spinning ever wilder and more irrelevant theories out of ludicrous “histories,” misunderstood or totally erroneous versions of World War Two vintage, Koranic transcripts, ravings of lunatics about as representative of the average Arab as Jeremiah Wright or Louis Farrakhan or Pat Robertson or Rev. Hagee or good old Bob Jones is of the average American.

    It’s a long, hard process but little by little, the American people are slowly learning the truth about the Middle East. Things ARE starting to change, little by little. A new day may well be dawning.

  84. Probably not too many people reading this this far down, but:

    Carter has been trying eternally to recapture the peak of his life when he brought Israel and Egypt to a peace accord.

    He’s gotten ever more desperate since, and become one of the classic “useful idiots” as a result. The real world will not miss him.

  85. Truth,

    So, absolutely nothing has changed in Arabic for 1400 years except some pronunciation shifts? No vocabulary shifts whatsoever. No cultural change whatsoever, as that would impact the meaning of words also. I could go on but….

    Horseshit.

  86. Michael, I think we also need to look at the intermediate range, between 40 years ago and 1400 years ago, to understand Arab resentment.

    I hadn’t known this before, but I recently read (I’ve forgotten in which book) that Arabs had long considered Jews pretty much the Southerners used to consider blacks: constitutively inferior, born to ground under foot, craven for accepting it, in what was taken as mute agreement to the natural order of things.

    Then Israel was carved out of what the Arabs considered their turf, and worse yet, on this barren and rocky desert utterly lacking in resources the Jews built a thriving modern society in a generation. Meanwhile, the Arabs hadn’t done squat in a millennium, despite during the last century having a fortune dropping in their laps from oil.

    To be shown up so badly aggrieved a shame culture to lash out at those who must have held them back: the Jews, of course, the Americans, the Europeans, somebody. It’s not that their religion is holding them back, or that their culture is backward, it must be someone else’s fault. After all, they’d been following Allah’s prescription; they should be on top of the world. That they clearly weren’t, and were humiliated in every comparison (or fight) with Israel and the West, galls them, fuels their rage, and directs it outwardly, toward others, rather than accepting the truth: their religion and culture are the problem, and need to go.

  87. > Anything and everything EXCEPT the key facts that the Jews stole their land

    Ah, me. You almost sounded rational at the start.

    1) The **UN** ‘stole their land’, if anyone did.
    2) The land was stolen from the Jews 2000 years ago. That they finally got it back after years of suffering, including enduring the Holocaust, is just too bad, innit?
    3) There’s a time after which it’s pointless and stupid to continue fighting. This is a part of civilization — you don’t kill someone for what someone’s great-great-grandfather did to your great-great-grandfather. This path leads only to more hatred, more violence, more bloodshed.
    4) Israel has yielded up the entire Gaza strip area for Palestinians to create a homeland on. The Palestinians continue to spurn every effort to ameliorate the resentments that might be argued on the part of the Palestinians, and groups like Hamas and Fatah have spit in their face every time.

    > No, to find the source of their anger, look to their 1400-year-old religious books.

    When a people is consumed by nothing but hatred, when they are obsessed with the destruction of their enemy to the point where they would rather die than live side-by-side peaceably, then that people has adopted a sick, cancerous role in society. It cannot, and will not, be a productive, healthy social group until it lets go of its hatreds and accepts things as they are and goes forward with life. This is as true of nations and peoples as it is with individuals.

    Islam, at its heart, has a powerful seed of hatred and fire, borne of the harsh physical meleau that spawned it. Not every adherent of Islam is hateful and arrogant, but vast swaths of them certainly are, and the core of the Wahabbist sub-religion, like the inflaming rhetoric of Jeremiah Wright, is a pernicious, all-consuming evil that feeds on anger and resentment and primitive reptile urges which are anathema to civilization as a whole.

    Sorry, Mr. Taylor, you are an idiot to attempt to pin the problems of the Middle East on Israel. It is the adherents of Islam who have been at the core of most of the strife from Tunis to Singapore, from Byzantium to modern times. One fight is an event. Hundreds of fights are a pattern. Get a clue.

  88. Btw, much the same dynamic is at work in France vis a vis the U.S. Think they laugh off those jokes about French military prowess? Think again. They are deeply humiliated that we had to rescue them – twice – and that we largely ignore them (as they see it) now. That’s what drives French anti-Americanism, from de Gaulle to the present day. They’re playing Fredo to our Michael Corleone, and it drives them wild.

  89. If a people democratically elect a government whose policy it is to attack one of our main allies – then yes, it should be our policy to undermine the will of that people and do everything we can to prevent that government to exercise its prerogatives. Why is that so difficult to understand?

    I’d also question whether Hamas was really legitimately elected. If the Democrats or Republicans had armed wings that didn’t hesitate to use force against you and your fellow citizens, would you feel you really had a choice?

    If Hamas wants to be legitimate, they must disarm, stop intimidating other Palestinians, and stop attacking Israel. Those are the preconditions for peace.

    And no bullshit about Israel’s attacks on Palestinians. Anyone with an ounce of honesty knows that the Israelis only attack in response to Palestinian outrages. That’s not propaganda – that’s fact.

  90. > Iranians possess delicate characteristics. They introduce their merits, which are extremely attractive to whole the world.

    Yeah, that’s why they want nukes, to introduce their merits to the whole wide world… yah…

    Yu Vill Tek Vat Ve Hav Und Yu Vill Like It!!

    (snicker)

    .

  91. OK, Occam’s Beard, so
    1. Arabs regarded Jews like Southerners regarded blacks;
    2. The Jews turned a “rocky desert” into a modern society and thereby
    3. Embarrassed the Arabs by their brilliance.

    Now let’s look at some guy, some goat-herder or olive grower or barber in the West Bank who’s lived without rights, without votes, under a military occupation of some 40 years — – that’s right, he’s living there one day milking his goats or whatever and an army marches in and for 40 years he sees homes and crops (his own or his neighbours’ or family’s) bulldozed, children killed by soldiers or settlers, land expropriated for Jewish settlers, etc., checkpoints established on roads that he used to use freely every day – – does that play ANY role in the hatred he feels, or is all of it due to “embarrassment” at the brilliant achievements of the Jews?

  92. >

    Well, half-fact anyway. The other half is that the Palestinians never attack the Israelis except to avenge some previous Israeli atrocity.

    It’s called the endless cycle of violence and counter-violence, or just for short the endless cycle. It’s your basic alternative to negotiations.

    There’s also some element of proportionality. The Arabs kidnap three Jewish soldiers and the Jews kill a thousand Lebanese? No. It’s like you slap my face and so I murder you and your whole family and burn down your house too. I wouldn’t expect to get off on a self-defence plea. I’d probably be lucky to escape the death penalty.

  93. The very fact that this guy is a goat herder is part of what I’m getting at, isn’t it?

    It’s 60 years now, but it wasn’t 60 years ago. The Arabs could have learned a lot from the Zionists, and built their own prosperity. Then that guy wouldn’t be a goat herder any more. Arabs and the Jews are, after all, both Semites, and have a lot in common. But first they would have to curtail the influence of Islam on their culture and government (since Islam is both a religion and a political philosophy), swallow some pride, pull up their socks, and get cracking.

    Instead, they took the easy way out, and squawked about the other. Call it the Jeremiah Wright option.

    To take a broader view, by nurturing grievances, whom have the Arabs hurt more, the Israelis – or themselves?

  94. OBloodyHell,

    The “Jews stole their land” gives you a major clue here to how he thinks. And no I don’t mean antisemitism, but the blinders version of reality.

    If the partition had been followed, this would have been over 60 years ago. Jordan would be the homeland of the Arabs of Palestine, which is why it exists in the first place.

    I’ve never done the numbers exactly, but I know that at least 600,000 Jews from Arab lands moved, most if not all forced, to Israel in the late 40s. I guess they’re interlopers too and should go back to….Europe?

    Cultures are not genetically fixed, they are social constructs that can change. As long as they “love death more than you love life” they will remain trapped in their anger and their hate.

  95. Damn – – happened again. This time I re-typed Bugs’ paragraph instead of cutting and pasting before responding, and I re-typed this: “And no bullshit about Israel’s attacks on Palestinians. Anyone with an ounce of honesty knows that the Israelis only attack in response to Palestinian outrages. That’s not propaganda – – that’s fact.”

    Then I replied. But the reply came out without the quotation I was replying to. Sorry – – I think I know where I screwed up this time – – I must have deleted the re-typed quote and left in the cut-and-pasted one.

  97. What nonsense.
    Ahmenidjad’s spiritual mentor is so nuts the original Khomenei exiled him to Qom permanently.
    He preaches the thread of Islam that says if one third of Earth’s population dies in war, one third is perishing of starvation and disease, the cries of pain will induce Allah to send the twelfth imam to lead the final battle.
    He’s working on it.
    Iranian leaders have said that destroying Israel is worth ten or twenty million dead Iranians. They probably don’t intend to be among them–which makes it easier, I imagine–but they talk suspiciously easily about dying for the cause.
    So what kind of deterrence are we talking about.
    “Don’t throw me in that briarpatch?”

    See Wretchard’s three conjectures.

  98. “Horseshit.”Ariel

    You see how cleiar you stupidty.

    We talking about Arabic language not culture or a development of society, you proven been deaf and blind miserably

  99. I believe that any nuke can be identified, even by the signatures they leave after successfully exploding.

    Nukes do leave a signature, but I can’t remember the isotopes/impurities that are markers. Iranian nukes would be aimed at Europe not the USA. At least the French think so.

    Like many of the commentor’s political conclusions the above technical assertion is wrong. There are no identifiable “signatures” after the detonation of a nuclear device. The detonators of a nuclear device or even a so-called ‘dirty bomb’ cannot be “identified” from anything that remains after the detonation.

    I’m also struck by the commentor’s evident willingness to have the Europeans nuked. Apparently to his way of thinking America need not be worried in the event of such an occurrence – it would only be Europeans after all.

    Once enough Islamic states become nuclear it would be impossible to identify who the exact culprit might be who might have caused a device to detonate in Israel or America. Likewise other wholesale methods of murder such as chemical or biological weapons. Chamberlain can be forgiven because the Nazis of Chamberlain’s time never had such destructive weapons at their disposal.

    And if a device is detonated in Israel or America what might happen? Any US President could not merely wait for the next explosion; an action would have to be taken. But what action would the President choose?

    What would be known for sure is that mere terrorist groups would not possess the resources to manufacture the ingredients for such devices. Some nation, either by design or carelessness, would have to have necessarily provided the means for the terrorists to carry out the act. If the first target was Israel is there any doubt that America would follow? Carelessness with materials could not be excused – not when the possible death of millions of more Americans are held in the balance.

    Only the highest placed American leaders have any idea what actions would follow such a nuclear detonation but I will speculate that several Islamic states might be reduced to radioactive rubble. I’m reminded of ‘Big Daddy’ Lipscomb’s method on chasing down runners: “I just wrap my arms around the whole backfield and peel ’em one by one until I get to the ball carrier. Him I keep.”

    Only the capabilities of a couple of America’s nuclear submarines would be required. An ally such as Pakistan might be spared but perhaps not. An unaware and complacent American public is one thing – a deeply wounded and frightened America is quite another.

    So progressives on foreign policy would do well to consider what the end result of their policies of appeasement might be if a number of hostile Islamic states were to become nuclear – perhaps a conflagration on an order that the world has never seen.

  100. Michael,

    The Hizb’allah fighers in Lebanon did more than abduct and kill three Israeli soldiers. They had been firing rockets into Northern Israel before the August invasion. Pardon me if I am not tenderly distressed about the enemy killed in Lebanon. Also, if civilians are killed when they are forced to be or volunteer to be human shields – the Western understanding of the ethics of war places the blame entirely and squarely on the ones using them as human shields.

    This is all just a continuation of an atmosphere of debate in the U.S. and in Europe whereby the Jews are held to double standards and their enemies who have sworn to wipe them out are the beneficiaries of our solicitude.

    I doesn’t work with me, sorry. When my fellow-traveling acquaintances and friends during the late seventies and into the mid-eighties before I left the Left would excoriate me for defending Israel, I budged not a whit and conceded nothing to them. I’m not about to change. I know the history of the conflict. I know the theological mission of Islam against the Jews – and it began in the very futuristic butchery by Muhammad against the Jews of the Banu-Qurayza. Like the Einsatzgruppen in Russia, Muhammad had the Jewish men and boys did a long trench for 900 or so bodies. Then he and his lieutenants went down the line lopping off heads.

    Israel has been very restrained and takes great pains to try to avoid unnecessary collateral deaths, to the point where they invest in technology that allows them to “see” through walls in order to determine who has a rifle or a bomb and who doesn’t.

  101. To Matt, Michael, & Artfldgr:

    I don’t know the reasons each of you has come to your opinions that you’ve expressed, but you all miss THE ESSENTIAL THING! That is the Muslim lack of tolerance and respect for the way other people want to live! That includes us (for that matter, the entire Western world) as well as other Muslims of other sects (Sunni, Shiite, etc.). They have no compunction re: killing others who do not believe as they do. This is an incredibly difficult concept to grasp for those of us in the Western world, and especially here in the U.S., who have been raised from an early age to accept and promote tolerance. It is key to the make-up of our United States – THE melting pot.
    The view on the other side (Muslim Extremist view; I should distinguish the Extremists from those Muslims who supposedly worship with a peaceful, caring philosophy (altho’ one can wonder why there have been virtually NO MUSLIMS who have decried the violence of Extremists, or condemned it).

  102. Richard Aubrey,

    Keep your words for yourself, the facts are clear there US /Iran/Israel have their hidden links.

    Ali Khaminie himself said in public after invasion of Iraq that Iran helped US to in Afghanistan and Iraq.

    More over US and Israel have help lunatic Khomeini with “Iran Contra” deals, more now Iranians in Iraq “Quads force” they are on the ground with their midwives proxy Da’awa and Bader Hakim rabbles obey the Axis of Evil in Qum, give me a brake for the carp of old symphony of word that you listed.

    The point here with the topic is the objection talking to Hamas while on going US talk with Iranians?

    Why secretly these going on stories between them, while you and others trying hard to sale Iran as terrorist/enemy all these words and labels?

    While accusing Hamas allied with Iran how come US talking with Iranian, then why the opposition talking with Hamas?

    What the difference here and under what morality this cab be?

  103. They have no compunction re: killing others who do not believe as they do.

    Did tehy killed you if you visit now Islamic world?

    Did they killing those hundred thousandth US solders on the ground in very religious “Shikes and socities”! in the gulf?

    Are they killing those western Civilians in Jordan or Gulf countries who working thier and have offices and properties thier?

    Do you now Livini Israeli Foreign minister in conference about Democracy and Peace!! in Qator? did those Mislims rush to kill her?

    Why these lies man?

  104. For people who think that the 1,400 year old book, the Koran, is not a powerful force in the Arab war against Israel, then just check out this video..

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8uOa2e5Ygk

    Then I ask you… how can you dismiss them? Are they not humans worthy to be taken seriously when they express their motivation and core beliefs?

  105. Michael Taylor
    But they’re not mad at the occupation. They’re not mad because their land was stolen.
    Before and during the Six Day War, Israel told King Hussein that as long as he didn’t attack, Israel would not attack the West Bank. To show solidarity with Egypt, Hussein launched some bombs or rockets. We know the results.

    Most of the Sephardic Jews who ended up in Israel left all their possessions in the Arab lands where they came from. They were not compensated for their houses.

  106. Oops! Must have hit button before finishing-

    At any rate, what I was about to say was that the people who want to kill us — and somehow, you must get it straight: they do want to kill us — have been raised from unbelievably early ages to think of hatred and the willingness to fight to the death, or even sacrifice oneself in the name of religion as noble. There truly is no REASON compelling this hatred. It is not because the Israelis return rocket fire or react militarily in response to aggressive acts of war, let alone the threat of complete destruction. (this, of course, re: the Palestinians). Re: Muslims in general, specifically those who join Jihad, they are as clueless re: tolerance as we are when it comes to baseless hatred — of a magnitude that is incomprehensible to most of the Western World who act based on reason and rational thinking.
    For Muslim leaders, meetings are play-acting on the world stage. They have become savvy enough to figure out that if they adopt the appearance of a willingless to negotiate. But look at history — Every single time there has been an organized meeting for negotiation, it is the Arabs who walk away without offering up ANY concessions. It is just sham behavior.

    Also, guys (or gal) — get yourself a good map of the Middle East. Then take a look at the relative size of the Arab countries, and the size of Israel. Israel is miniscule in comparison. And even though the Jews trace their homeland to Palestine (they happen to be true Palestinians) they have been regularly attacked simply for existing. That’s it! Just for being. (Jews have been persecuted throughout history — they have essentially been the kid in the playground that all the bullies choose to pick on. The “thug” mentality, simply amplifies this; i.e. by banding together (in the name of religion — from which Jihad is supposedly derived), you have people who would think and act as a group in ways in which they might not act individually.
    Still, the bottom line is that talk and negotiation cannot achieve anything when one of the two parties does not think and act in a rational manner, nor do they have any comprehension of toleration, empathy of respect for human life.

    One last thing: Much earlier, someone wrote that there cannot be peace until the Arabs LOVE their children MORE than they hate the Jews/Israel. That’s very true, but I actually wanted to credit those words to the original speaker: Golda Meir, the late Prime Minister of Israel; one who had vision toward the future, but also the ability to access the broad scope of hatred that surrounded her tiny country.

  107. grackle:

    Finally! Someone who thinks like I do.

    I find people who blithly speak of “Oh well they know we can destroy if they nuke us. so no big problem” to be insane.

    Frankly I really dont care if we retaliate or not after a nuclear bomb goes off here.. If a bomb goes off here, then that’s it, our way of life is changed forever. People will not want to live in any city for fear of being next.

    Plus I think it underestimates the amibition of our enemies to think they’ll just use ONE bomb on us. No I dont think they’re so lacking in imigantion. If they’re going to use the ultimate weapon on us that assures their own destruction (or maybe not if the Left is in control, they’ll probably say we deserved it), that they’re going to ensure that we get maximum pain upfront … end us as a player in thier part of the world.

    The Iranian regime must be destroyed and if that requires us nuking them preemptively, so be it.

  108. The Iranian regime must be destroyed and if that requires us nuking them preemptively, so be it.

    I put my $1000 on the table if that happen sooner or later

  109. I have to say I don’t quite get the MAD argument either. “They don’t want to commit suicide.” They don’t? Do they wear bomb vests as a fashion statement? Do they fly airplanes into buildings on a lark?

    Looks to me like some of them are perfectly happy to commit suicide. Now we’re just figuring out whether those who will control the nukes (and, please, Iran is so developing nukes) are numbered among them.

  110. “For all these reasons, Modern Standard Arabic is generally treated as separate language in non-Arab sources. Arab sources generally tend to concentrate their attention in the superficial similarities (such as morphology, syntax, phonotactics, lexicon, word-formation) and to ignore the differences, and so show a culturally-biased tendency to regard MSA and Classical Arabic as different registers of one and the same language.”

    Truth, enjoy.

  111. Tried posting this last night- I’ll try again in sections and see if it works:

    “Apparently the “90%” was “honeycombed” with enclaves for Jewish settlements and militarized connecting roads between settlements, all under Jewish control, all cutting the “Palestinian Homeland” up into dozens of non-contiguous blocs like no other nation on earth.”

    Key word- WAS. For a while now, all the Jews have left Gaza, it is Judenfrei. What more could Hamas want? Apparently, it’s not about Jews in Gaza, eh?

    “why are HIS speeches translated and floated out over the web? Do your own homework – – where did you find the quote, whose website is it and what’s their connection to the State of Israel? WHO BENEFITS from this particular speech being translated and posted, rather than some eloquent plea for peace from an Arab mother who just lost her daughter to Israeli tank-fire?”

    Well, MEMRI has been translating stuff, but it sounds like them you wouldn’t trust, though you do trust Hamas… Curious.

    Perhaps it’s that even heads of state (Ahmadinejad) and major clerics make these kinds of statements with some regularity, though you’d never know if your main source of info is Juan Cole. Heck, Hamas has children’s shows (Martyr street, or something like that) that extol the virtues of martyrdom operations and killing all Jews, and even the American President. Lovely. Farfur the Mouse, Nahul the Bee, and now Assud the Rabbit. Heroes for Allah all. But, no, of course there is really much more talk or peace and reconciliation if you’d just look for it…
    O.K., please, show me the links to the “eloquent plea for peace from an Arab mother who just lost her daughter to Israeli tank-fire”. Show me a few. It’s going to take a long time to get even to 1% of the racist, genocidal, declarations of theocracy that come out of the Muslim world regularly. That you are unaware of this only speaks to your insulation from reality.

    “Since the Iranians are some years away from producing even ONE functional nuclear weapon”

    Oh, I’m glad you’ve straightened that out. I thought they had just opened up a long range missile launch facility or something. Also something about more centrifuges. Well, thanks for clearing that up, I’m so relieved. (NOT!)
    If only I could let you gamble with only your life, I would.

  112. What is the psychiatric term that describes the situation where a violent, out-of-control psychopath wreaks violence on everyone around them and complains that they’re all out to get him?

    Reading some of these posts about the evil Muslims is hilarious. Every act of violence they ever committed in the past 1400 years is carefully dredged up – – 700 Jews killed here in a ditch (during a war with Mohammed’s forces, after they turned on him; as if the Old Testament doesn’t record dozens of similar massacres by the Jews of THEIR enemies.)

    Then as further proof of their “violence” (the actual examples weren’t really all that impressive and in fact pale into insignificance when compared to the violence of Christian Europe against EVERYONE – – Muslims, Jews, themselves, the Indian Indians, the North American Indians, the South American Indians, etc.) we are treated to the best substitute for real violence that there is: VIOLENT WORDS. Wow, these guys are masters of violent words, and big talking too – -an assortment of Muslims speak of conquering Rome, avenging this avenging that, dominating the world.

    Their clergy are waiting for a world-wide apocalypse so that the 12th Imam can return. Funny, ours are waiting for the End Times and their own Apocalypse, so that the Antichrist and then Jesus can return.

    Anyway, after the penny-ante, kid-stuff violence of the historical Muslims and the crazy talking violence of today’s Muslims, we are asked, “How can we negotiate with these guys, isn’t it obvious they want to kill us all?”

    NO, it isn’t obvious. In terms of actual violence inflicted on their secular or religious enemies, they are really pikers and amateurs when compared to Europeans. They haven’t spilled even a tiny fraction of the innocent blood spilled by European Christians, and not only that but their crazy violent talk isn’t even as horrific as some of the stuff our own generals (“Bomb them back into the Stone Age”) and others, (“Turn the whole country into a parking lot”) including internet posters, have come up with.

    I don’t know, in the end you come up with a bunch of angry, frustrated and ripped-off people no crazier or more violent than Europeans or Americans, who we are told want to kill us, want to conquer us, want to convert us. Well, it’s nice to know that we have “experts” here who can read the minds of the Muslims and tell us what they want to do to us. But, uh, reality check: WHOSE TROOPS are invading whose countries? Are the evil aggressive violent Arabs invading America and Israel or are Israel and America invading and occupying them? Who overthrows whose governments? Did the CIA overthrow the government of Iran or did the Iranians overthrow the U.S. government?

    The arguments I hear about ARAB “violence” and “aggression” are like that old vaudeville skit where the cheating husband caught in the act asks his outraged wife, “Who ya gonna believe, me or your lyin’ eyes?” All the violence and aggression that we actually SEE in the real world are U.S. and Israeli violence and aggression against the Arabs and Persians and Afghans, but all the violence we HEAR about is theirs – – what they did in 747 AD (I’m not kidding, 747 AD!!) what was WRITTEN in the Koran, what was SAID by Ahmadinejad or some other nut-job. This propaganda version of reality is just totally surreal.

  113. “I wasn’t really impressed with your shallow grasp of the history of the Arabs, their lack of accomplishment, etc. over the years – – very little of your analysis seemed devoted to foreign aggression and exploitation as a contributing factor to their alleged failure, after all they were attacked by Crusaders…”

    Uhh, that after they were attacked by crusaders bit is important- the crusades were mainly organized to push the Muslims back from their conquest of two thirds of the Christian world. But I guess that fact is unimportant. Saying I’m un“impressed with your shallow grasp of the history of the Arabs” would be a monumental understatement.

    “when ya find a Muslim Auschwitz and a Muslim Treblinka with crematoria and gas chambers, let me know.”

    They just didn’t have the technology yet.

    “When ya find a set of Muslim Nuremburg laws blocking the Jews from the liberal professions, from teaching, from racial intermarriage, etc. let me know.”

    Uhh, the Koran, the hadiths, islamic law scholarship.
    Here is a nice paper detailing all the lovely rules of life as a Dhimmi. I bet you aren’t even familiar with the term. Nor Dar-al-Islam or Dar-al-Harb.

  114. “When ya find Muslims burning “Jewish and degenerate” literature in public bonfires, let me know.”

    How about the destruction of Hindu temples (for a little diversity)? Of course, the blowing up of the Buddahs in Bamiyan, Afghanistan.
    I think that’s roughly equivalent. Of course, there is also the desecration of the Church of the Nativity. And I could go on with the Ottoman Turks treatment of Christian churches when they conquered christian territory…
    Not that you’d care.

  115. I believe that perhaps most Americans are not going to realize just how deadly earnest jihad is until we get hit again – and hit very hard. I’m resigned to it and fully expect that scenario to eventually play out. A very sizeable minority of Americans believe that there is not even a war going on that Islam declared against the West. They think Bush made it all up – a neocon plot to infuse fear and insecurity into national politics so that the Republicans can maximize their only strength against the DhimmiCrats’ weakness: national security.

  116. “When ya find one instance of Muslims killing Jews in the quantities of the Spanish Inquisition, the Ukrainian Peasant Revolt, the Eastern European pogroms or the Holocaust, let me know.”

    Well, the Holocaust pushes it over the top, because the Nazis had modern technology and Teutonic efficiency. The Muslims had neither. Not to mention that there just had not been enough Jews in distinct areas for that to happen. They were just forced to live as Dhimmi in Muslim lands.

  117. Well, my thanks to Douglas for the paper on dhimmitude. You’re right, I did not know what it meant. To tell you the truth, it was not very different from the European restrictions and ghettoization of the Jews except there was a lot less violence – – and the deportation or expulsion of Jews in time of war reminded me of the Canadian and American treatment of Japanese-Canadians and Japanese-Americans during the last war. Riots and killings of the Jews seemed to be on a small level compared to what the Jews suffered in Europe. Unlike the Nuremburg laws, there was NO attempt to bar the Jews from the liberal professions or from public service. There was no confiscation of all Jewish businesses.

    I have seen these lame-ass attempts to compare Muslims with Nazis and they are pure bullshit. Zionist propaganda plain and simple. Muslims aren’t even as bad as the Europeans were, let alone the Nazis.

  118. MT,

    You keep switching back and forth between Muslim and Arab. Stick to one or the other. If you want to speak of Muslim then the violence continues, every bit as much as the European until the late 1600’s to early 1700’s when the Islamic empire was simply becoming too technologically backward to continue versus the Europeans. Do 60-90 million Hindus count for anything?

  119. cSimon,
    I have never said I didn’t believe that the radical portion was out to eradicate the west. I just also like to point out the different political systems that backed them up and emboldened them and made them. While they were on their own in the long past, from Hitler onward, they have been assisted, cajoled, manipulated, teased, and promised. Another political system had also sworn to end the west too, though no one takes that one seriously either. They have been practicing ignoring that one for a long time, and now there is a new kid on the block (to them), they ignore it too.

    America is a problem for most authoritarian and totalitarian states. Its not half the problem it used to be, but nothing moves as fast as such people want it to. As Ronald Reagan said in his speech against socialist medicine, that without the US, there is no place to run to.

    The US has remarkable mobility. Most people move out of the lowest class within 10 years (see Oh no! Some folks are getting wealthier too fast! In The San Francisco Chronicle)

    “Income mobility of individuals was considerable in the U.S. economy during the 1996 through 2005 period with roughly half of taxpayers who began in the bottom quintile moving up to a higher income group within 10 years.”

    This makes them look bad. As was said in a prior post, such success makes them look bad, they don’t know how to compete (or don’t want to given they think they are being clever cheating — or any number of reasons we could state and others we don’t know). So, for whatever reason, they can’t be as successful, so they have to mythologize oppression. This formulae works with radical Islam, feminists, minorities, etc…

    Since radicalism has found a warn friendly home in all the western cultures, given its success, as I pointed out, the violence is not denounced as it should be.

    I pretty much understand that the heads of each of the man fronts have a good idea of what they would like to do. the Islamics having more abilities than others to do things, but no less harmful, in fact in many ways less harmful.

    I can draw a distinction between the nice Muslims and the not nice ones. Just as I know that there are lots of Catholics that use birth control, have had abortions, committed adultery, have not attuned in 20 years and still call themselves catholic.

    Do not think that I think muslims are that loose in their faith, they are not. however I am surrounded by an awful lot where I live, some of them having been famously arrested. I see many levels of veil and covering in my neighborhood. From simple cloth over and around the neck, to black top pieces with black gloves, to full burkas once in a while. And this is ny city.

    Many of them hate the people around them. they will freely say so openly and talk. Others really have nothing to do with that, even if their religion says so.

    In the jewish faith you have your fundamentalist groups like the lubavitch Hasidim, and you have every other level up and down the ladder to those who barely claim being jewish by birth (and some that hate their own as well).

    I agree that for the radicals and those following that level of things, they are really serious. Just as the other fronts are serious as well, and we ignore them too.

    All of them are termites. Of a sort

    and occams beard,
    your right. but the leaders are not suicidal, the main population is not suicidal. however, they are patsies, being helped along to believe they are stronger than they are because of that help. (though its not that great of help).

    they are not happy with the slow movement of things, and to speed it along progressives need war. war allows state intrusion, state control, state regimentation. it accelerates the process without letting people realize a reset has been made.

    under the new idea of war, its war on all levels in all ways with the idea of hiding who is the wizard behind the cloth pulling the levers. use of third parties (islamics), accidents (lead on toys), internet (cable cutting, cyber attacks), information blindness (sattelite gps vulnerable), financial.

    i did a quick tally, and was able to figure that the combined forces in the street gangs in the US exceed the number of military forces we have. that the immigrant march, had how many people in how many cities coordinated? on what day was it?

    i dont think nuclear is on the table till after the urban situation is allowed to flower. in that way, a single event that didnt do much damage would topple the last bit.

    there is a heck of a lot that can happen between now and then… not the least of which is that there is not universal consensus to let things get that far.

  120. “these lame-ass attempts to compare Muslims with Nazis and they are pure bullshit”

    There I agree with you, with one qualification, the really radical Jihadists. And no, I am not saying they are the same as the Nazis. And I am also not saying that much of the Arab world, in contrast to the Muslim world, isn’t anti-Jew. It is. The radical Jihadist agenda is different from the Nazi, but the results would be similar.

    The dhimmi system is slow strangulation, the radicals would like to see it back in full force. Slavery is an abomination, at which the Arab beats the European, and the radicals would like that back. The killing of polytheists (who do not convert, or does revert apply to polytheists also?) and apostates, the radicals would like to see that back. The Caliphate and its eventual success in conquering the world to make Islam supreme, they would like to see that happen. And they would erase all traces of previous civilizations as they went.

  121. As soon as I read the phrase “Zionist propaganda” I know I’m in the presence of a certain predisposition, whose attendant observations, opinions, and conclusions I discount to zero.

  122. Here are some interesting factoids your typical ignorant Leftist probably doesn’t know:

    More people are killed by Islamists each year than in all 350 years of the Spanish Inquisition combined

    Islamic terrorists murder more people every day than the Ku Klux Klan has in the last 50 years

    More civilians were killed by Muslim extremists in two hours on September 11th than in the 36 years of sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland

    19 Muslim hijackers killed more innocents in two hours on September 11th than the number of American criminals executed in the last 65 years

    Since 9/11, Muslims have carried out 10,913 deadly terror attacks.

    For the Week of 5 Apr – 11 April:
    Jihad Attacks: 47
    Deaths: 191
    Injured: 313

    For all of March:
    Attacks: 167
    Countries: 14
    Deaths: 847
    Injured: 1712

    I plotted Jihad attacks that occured from 2003-Jan 2007.

    You can find a picture here

    http://home.comcast.net/~vincep312/globalattacks.jpg

  123. “As soon as I read the phrase “Zionist propaganda””

    I am purposely ignoring that portion of his mindset. It is not a clear indication of anti-Jew, but it is of anti-Israel. Which is why he so vehemently won’t see the other side.

  124. “these lame-ass attempts to compare Muslims with Nazis and they are pure bullshit”

    The truth hurts huh?

    Muslims and NAZIs were bussom buddies.

  125. “As soon as I read the phrase “Zionist propaganda” . . . I [discount the whole thing] to zero”

    Yeah, I know. Because there’s no such thing, right?

  127. “Muslims and Nazis were bosom buddies.”

    Some Muslims, yes.

    Shocked, huh?

    Nazis and Ukrainians were bosom buddies too. So were Nazis and Croatians. Nazis and Slovaks. Nazis and Hungarians. Nazis and Romanians. Nazis and Americans. (That’s right – – Americans. Like Henry Ford. Like Charles A. Lindbergh and his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh.)

    Nazis had lots of friends. Some of their friends did a lot more for them than the Muslims ever did. But the Muslims, despite the pea-sized contribution they were able to make to the Cause, sure come in for a lot more heat for it than all the others combined. Wonder how THAT happened?

  128. It wouldn’t take a high level of technology to destroy an industrialized nation’s economy. One EMT weapon, if it were loaded with enough fissionable material could do it.

    If I were a terrorist with friendly contacts with a nuclearized hostile Islamic state and were able to obtain the necessary material I would fire one missile a few miles off the East coast of the US. A normal looking freighter vessel could easily be rigged to do it. The US missile defense system is designed to intercept missiles coming in on a high arc from across an ocean or the poles, not a single missile aimed straight up off the US coast.

    It would be relatively simple and low-tech, not requiring a complex missile delivery system to pull off. The missile could be set to detonate at, say, 200 miles up, no need to ‘aim.’ The EMT effect would cover a circle of area hundreds of miles inside the US. All electrical activity within that area would cease to function. No phones, vehicles, television, computers or radios would operate, their electrical insides fried by the EMT effect. Refrigerated food would rot in the warehouse, potable water out of the tap would be nonexistent.

    The level of loss of life would be unimaginable – not from the explosion, which would take only a relatively few lives near the detonation. Your only hope under such a scenario would be to gather as much bottled water and canned goods as possible and try to walk out. Good luck, since the police and military would be beside the point and probably hard pressed merely to survive. It would be every man, woman and child fending for themselves. One can easily envision marauding bands of murdering looters.

    No nation, certainly not the US, has any agency or combination of agencies, that could deal with a catastrophe of this size. The US economy, two thirds of which is tied to consumer goods, would no doubt be dealt a fatal blow. Currency across the US could become useless. Bankruptcy actions would be unnecessary – a quaint memory, as would the stock market. It would make the Great Depression look like a picnic.

    I do not know what a US President would do under this circumstance but if I were President and it happened certain nations in the Middle East would become little more than goat pastures for the next fifty to a hundred years. Damascus, Tehran, Palestine and other terrorist centers would become radioactive rubble, as would Mecca and Medina. I would assume that the Saudis and other oil producing nations would ‘see the light’ and pump oil as if their lives depended on it – as it surely would since energy would be at a premium and I would be in no mood to ‘appease.’

    The enemy at this very moment is gaining the capacity do these and other catastrophic deeds. They make no secret of their intentions and yearn for martyrdom as a reward for their perfidy. Every day we continue a reactive appeasement type of foreign policy brings such an event closer to reality.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_pulse#Modern_scenarios

  129. Excuse the error – only after I posted did I notice that I keyed EMT instead of EMP.

  130. If “the enemy” is gaining the capacity to make an EMT weapon (which would make them a lot smarter than I think they are – – their last big operational success seemed to depend on box-cutters) then one has to wonder at the wisdom of provoking them by killing hundreds of thousands of them, invading and occupying their lands, enabling Israel to maintain its 40-year-old occupation and land-grab against them, etc. Is all this really worth the payback you seem convinced is in the works?

  132. Nazis and Ukrainians were bosom buddies too. So were Nazis and Croatians. Nazis and

    MT: Wow. thanks Captain Obvious

  134. I can, using the facts of history, successfully defend Israel’s right to exist against all comers. When I was a Marxist back in the late seventies I was defending Israel against fellow Leftists and beating them with the facts. They only have “feelings” of compassion for the poor Palis whose lands were “stolen” by the Jews. But the facts of history put the lie to that distorting piece of dizinformatzia, compliments of the Muslim Brotherhood, Arafat, the KGB, and a craven coterie of appeasing, revisionist European politicians.

    Fact: Prior to 1948 and going back to the late 1800’s the Jewish settlements were paid for in cash to absentee Turkomen landlords or to local sheiks.

    Fact: In the 1890’s Arabs were conducting razias against the Jewish settlements.

    Fact: Prior to and during WWII the Muslim Brotherhood targeted the fledgling Jewish settlements for destruction. Hajj Amin al Husseini, close ally of Adolf Hitler, constantly lobbied the German Reich to reinforce the Afrika Corps to get beyond Egypt and help to wipe out the Jewish settlements.

    Fact: Hajj Amin al Husseini lobbied Hitler to cut off all possibility of Jews from escaping Europe to get to the Jewish settlements.

    Fact: Even before the U.N. declared the formation and independence of the Jewish State the Arab nations were anticipating this event and were preparing for all-out war against Israel.

    Fact: Before this all-out attack, the Arab nations passed word to Arabs living within and around the Jewish state to get out of Dodge. If they hung around they would be presumed to be sympathetic to the Jews and therefore apostates from Islam. The penalty would be certain death. If, however, they left they were promised a lot of land when the victorious Arabs armies wiped the Jews out. But the tenacious Jews beat the odds and defeated the Arabs. In the process they added land to eliminate vulnerable corridors. Land taken fairly in war. If the Jews lost and were wiped out, no one would have contested the Arabs’ right to take it all.

    Fact: Again, in 1967, the Arabs were massing for attack against Israel. With certain attack imminent, the Israelis launched devastating pre-emptive attacks and drove the Arab armies away. They added more land and what they added were strategic positions that made their nation defensible against further attack.

    Fact: October 1973 Yom Kippur War. Arab armies launch a surprise attack against Israel, gaining the upper hand early on in the war. Israel recovers, counterattacks, and drives out the Arab armies and secures their 1967 borders.

    Israel has every right to keep whatever it gained from war. The fact that it has succumbed to pressure from the U.S. and Europe to begin the Chinese water torture of the program of “peace process” and “land for peace” achieved nothing for Israel except further predations, terror, and attack. Israeli governments which have displayed weakness have invited more Islamic terror and war.

    Israel has the longest claim to that land, which it holds as derived from a covenant with God. It is the one place in this world where Jews can make a stand, if they have the courage to do so. As a Christian, I accept the Jewish claim to that land, despite the Ummah’s claims to it. The Muslims seized that land in the mid 7th century – only a few decades after the death of the Prophet. Jerusalem and the Temple Mount are desecrated by this demonic cult of Allah.

    Leftists do not recognize the religious claim of Judaism to that land because they reject the God of the Bible. I know this, having once been a Leftist who had to defend his faith against the snobbery and condescending attitudes of fellow Marxists. They don’t know the history of Israel, not its importance to humanity and all of civilization. Everything we are right now is owed to that great Graeco-Roman-Jewish-Christian civilization. And I mean everything of real value. The Left wants to destroy it and replace it with the post-modern fantasy of the Sorelian permutation of Marxist thought. Militarily and politically weak, these Sorelian/Gramscian Marxists have made common cause with the Ummah, because Islam has the muscularity and boldness of jihad to confront the West.

    Israel is an outpost of the West that the Left wants the Ummah to destroy. Do not let all the various Leftist arguments kick sand in your eyes. Making common cause with al Banna, Qutb, al Husseini, Arafat, Hizb’allah, bin Laden, and the rest of that rabble should be evidence of their craven immorality and intellectual dishonesty.

    I know these people like the back of my hand. And I despise them.

  135. Excellent Fred.

    You share my insight… Hatred of Israel is a manifestation of hatred of the God of the Bible.

    That is why America and Israel are both hated by the same enemies.

  136. “But the Muslims, despite the pea-sized contribution they were able to make to the Cause, sure come in for a lot more heat for it than all the others combined. Wonder how THAT happened?”

    Perhaps because they clung so tightly and enthusiastically to fascist politics?

  137. Here’s more info on Iran. Stupid Leftists think these people want to talk.

    Sec of Defense Robert Gates:
    “Everywhere you turn, it is the policy of Iran to foment instability and chaos, no matter the strategic value or cost in the blood of innocents – Christians, Jews and Muslims alike. . . . There can be little doubt that their destabilizing foreign policies are a threat to the interests of the United States, to the interests of every country in the Middle East, and to the interests of all countries within the range of the ballistic missiles Iran is developing.”

    – Iran is clearly doing all it can to prevent peace between Palestinians and Israel. And in rearming Hamas, it is doing so with substantially stronger rockets that can reach further into Israel, virtually insuring that Israel will have to take extreme measures to stop the daily attacks.

    – Iran’s meddling in Lebanon has created a situation where both the Shia population and the country as a whole are dominated by Hezbollah, an army beholden to Iran and that takes its orders from Iran’s Mullahs. Indeed, Hezbollah is now demanding veto power over acts of the Lebanese government. In the wake of the 2006 war with Israel, Iran is arming Hezbollah with much stronger rockets that can reach vitrutally all of Israel, thus insuring that the next war with Hezbollah will also be far more bloody for all of Lebanon.

    – Iran has occupied several islands belonging to the UAE. Iran has supported attempted an coup in Bahrain and, recently, a coup in Azerbaijan. Iran has also occupied a significant part of Iraqi territory immediately after Saddam’s fall — some 1800 square-kilometers of the Zaynalkosh salient.

    – Iran is arming and training the military in the Sudan — the folks conducting the genocide in Darfur.

    – According to General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker, Iran is now the single greatest threat to stability in Iraq. Iran is attempting to “Lebanize” Iraq, using “special groups” culled from Sadr’s Mahdi Army to create a Hezbollah type of militia that will keep Iraq’s central government weak and extend Iranian influence over Iraq’s Shia majority. Indeed, Iran’s campaign to create a satellite state of Iraq was clear from the very start of the U.S. invasion in March, 2003. Their “special groups” are responsible for the deaths of nearly 200 American soldiers and the wounding and maiming of hundreds of others.

    – Iran’s drive towards a nuclear weapon is significantly destabilizing the Middle East and has already initiated what promises to be a nightmare of nuclear proliferation. “Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, the UAE, Yemen, Morocco, Libya, Jordan and Egypt have indicated an interest in developing nuclear programs, with Israeli officials saying that if these countries did not want the programs now for nuclear capabilities, they wanted the technology in place to keep “other options open” if Iran developed a bomb.” According to a recent study initiated by Senator Lugar, “the future Middle East landscape may include a number of nuclear-armed or nuclear weapons-capable states vying for influence in a notoriously unstable region.”

    – And then of course is the threat that a nuclear armed Iran intrinsically poses. According to Bernard Lewis, the West’s premier Orientalist, Iran’s theocracy operates outside the constraints of Western logic. The concept of Mutually Assured Destruction (MADD) that worked against the Soviet Union and with other nuclear armed nations is not assured of working with a theocracy whose messianic rulers welcome the carnage that will presage the coming of the hidden Imam. And to add to that is the threat that Iran could well provide nuclear materials to terrorist groups in order to conduct attacks, such as dirty bombs, that could not necessarily be traced back to Iran. Such a scenario would be completely in keeping with the historical activities of Iran’s theocracy.

    http://wolfhowling.blogspot.com/2008/04/next-moves-in-bloody-chess-match-with.html

  138. FredHjr, one thing I’d like to add to your list: In the 1700’s and 1800’s, European travellers in the Middle East reported routine KKK-style oppression and intimidation of non-Muslims.

  139. “perhaps they should call him Neville”

    How about “Vidkun Quisling”?

    Considering the malice he has exhibited toward Israel and the friendliness toward our enemies, “Neville” implies far too much integrity and basic human decency.

  140. MT,

    Regarding Zionist propaganda, I believe they are reacting to your post of April 14th, 2008 at 7:50 pm, where it could easily be inferred that you believe anything said about Arabs or Muslims with which you disagree is Zionist propaganda. And that all organizations that say anything bad about them is an arm of Israel. That could be seen as the dishonest technique of dismissal without proof. Not to mention the old “jewish conspiracy” meme.

    Of course there is Zionist propaganda, just as there is substantial proof of Palestinian Propaganda. Photoshop gets a hell of a workout in Gaza. Not to mention the disreputable method of putting women and children in harms way in order to score propaganda points with the Left, as witnessed in Lebanon.

    An Arab diplomat, I believe he was a diplomat though he may have been in some other official capacity, recently said that they lie their asses off and he was, frankly, tired of the hypocrisy. Anyone else remember this and have the link for Michael? Just in case he missed it.

  141. I’m a proud Christian Zionist.

    Oh is your bible tell you kill all those Muslims?
    Is your religion tell you hate those Muslims?

    Professor Richard Falk, the UN investigator, insists that Israeli actions in Gaza are like those of the Hitler regime in Nazi occupied Europe

    Let’s make those Arab/Muslim hater crying
    Glamour in Iraq

  142. Just to refresh our memories..
    By JOE BOB BRIGGS NEW YORK, Nov. 11 (UPI) —

    Every decade or so, we should remind ourselves of who the Iraqis are:
    1. Twelve-thousand years ago, they invented irrigated farming. They got to be so good at it that, today; they can still produce all the food they need even when “sanctions” are imposed.
    2. They invented writing.
    3. They figured out how to tell time.

    4. They founded modern mathematics.

    5. In the Code of Hammurabi, they invented the first legal system that protects the weak, the widow and the orphan.
    6. Five-thousand years ago, they had philosophers who attempted to list every known thing in the world.

    7. They were using Pythagoras’ theorem 1,700 years before Pythagoras.
    8. They invented artificial building materials, some kind of pre-fab-crete stuff used to construct high-rise towers.

    9. Ur, in southeast Iraq, is assumed to be the place we’re all descended from.

    10. They were the first people to build cities and live in them.

    11. For thousands of years, they wrote the greatest poetry, history and “sagas” in the world.
    12. Because they were great horse breeders, they invented the cavalry in war.
    13. The Iraq Museum in Baghdad contains some of the most outstanding stone, metal and clay sculptures and inscriptions created in the history of the world. Some of them are more than 7,000 years old. .

    14. The first school for astronomers was established by Iraqis. This is how the “wise men” got to be so wise. They knew how to follow the star.
    15. Beginning around 800 A.D., the Iraqis founded universities that imported teachers from throughout the civilized world to teach medicine, mathematics, philosophy, theology, literature and poetry.

    16. for the first 1,200 years of its existence, Baghdad was regarded as one of the most refined, civilized and festive cities in the world.

    17. Abraham, the father of Israel, was from Iraq.

    18. Abraham, the father of Islam, was from Iraq.

    19. Abraham, the father and “model” of Christian faith, was from Iraq.

    20. Iraq is the second largest reserve of oil.

    21. Before 1980, Iraq has the largest number of date palm trees in the world.

    22. Iraqi wheat, rice, and meat are considered from the finest types in the world.

    23. Iraq, has the biggest soft water/population ratio in the world, seven rivers.

    24. Iraqis, once had the highest percent of highly educated people.
    25. Iraq, is one of the world’s richest territories in historical sites and holy shrines.

  144. The 2nd Holocaust draws nearer:

    Iran: Seven historic synagogues in Tehran destroyed
    ADNKronos

    Tehran, 15 April (AKI) – Seven ancient synagogues in the Iranian
    capital, Tehran, have been destroyed by local authorities.

    The synagogues were in the Oudlajan suburb of Tehran, where many
    Iranian Jews used to live.

    “These buildings, which were part of our
    cultural, artistic and architectural heritage were burnt to the ground,” said
    Ahmad Mohit Tabatabaii, the director of the International Council of Museums’
    (ICOM) office in Tehran.

    “With the excuse of renovating this ancient quarter, they are erasing a
    part of our history,” said Tabatabaii.

    He called for the government to intervene to stop the work commissioned
    by the local authorities.

    A group of residents of Oudjalan have also sent a letter to the mayor
    of Tehran asking him to suspend the renovation work being carried out in the
    suburb.

  145. “they can still produce all the food they need even when “sanctions” are imposed”

    And I thought all those children starved because of the sanctions. Glad you put the lie to all that. And aren’t past glories wonderful?

    Centuries from now, I’m sure someone will be talking about how the USA of North America had at one time 50 of the 100 greatest universities of the entire world, half in the top 50. And more Naval might than the next 17 nations. And some of the largest and greatest museums. And a city that was the center of commerce and finance. Etc., etc., etc.

    Unfortunately, it won’t mean crap, except tp those that need revel in past glories.

  146. Ariel: I agree with you.

    And the reason for the fall will be these self-defeating, cowardly, spineless, Godless Leftists.

  147. If “the enemy” is gaining the capacity to make an EMT weapon (which would make them a lot smarter than I think they are – – their last big operational success seemed to depend on box-cutters) then one has to wonder at the wisdom of provoking them by killing hundreds of thousands of them, invading and occupying their lands, enabling Israel to maintain its 40-year-old occupation and land-grab against them, etc. Is all this really worth the payback you seem convinced is in the works?

    Underestimating the enemy is one of the historical hallmarks of failed civilizations. Iran has recently bragged about purchasing thousands of additional nuclear centrifuges but the commentor can’t get past “box-cutters.” If box-cutters were the only worry our concern would be minimal.

    Furthermore, the enemy is very skilled in strategy, tactics and international negotiations – much better at it than their Western counterparts – outmaneuvering the West at almost every juncture.

    But the commentor reveals one of the contradictions of progressive thought. On the one hand until recently many anti-war types were touting the enemy in Iraq and indeed terrorists in general as invincible, much as the Vietcong were described during the Vietnam War. They tend to romanticize their heroes.

    On the other hand if the subject is the potential lethality of the enemy they switch tactics and characterize the enemy as almost harmless. Yes, and not very smart – yet with mere box-cutters they murdered thousands – innocents all, including a sizable amount of children who had the bad luck to be in the World Trade Center at the time.

    To these folks it is always America that is to blame. We are forever “provoking them” it seems. It is interesting to note that even the commentor, who apologizes for the terrorists and tries to justify their murder, thinks of the enemy as a monumental, all-encompassed enemy.

    We’ve never invaded Iran but since the US is occupying Iraq, Iran is thought of as provoked, as is of course ALL the Islamic world. What do the two nations, Iran and Iraq, have in common? Or Iran and Palestine? Or Iran and Afghanistan? Why should Iran be provoked by Israel – a nation that has many miles between it and Iran, a nation that has never performed a “land-grab” of an inch of Iranian soil and is unlikely to do so in the future?

    It is a holy religious war that is being waged against the West by various Islamic nations using surrogate terrorist groups. All the murder is committed in the name of Allah. They do it with almost total impunity and will continue to do so as long as we let them.

  148. And I thought all those children starved because of the sanctions. Glad you put the lie to all that.

    Looks you forgot that both Sanction by corrupted UN staff and tyrant regime share the guilt of killing 500,000 Iraqi baby, due to our “Blind and Deaf” Aril short of medicines, hospitals equipments and lack of food due to lack of resources and machinery.

    Howe’s that our stupid guy?

    Instated goes with you lies more.

    Compare the sanction with what Katrina did in your home land what make those saviours angry with Bush administrations and the lack of response to the disaster there.

    Its not last One Week, or one Month but the consequences in powerful state like US will tell imagine if that disaster lasting 13 years how may American will die?

  149. And I reject your stupid questions as they are based on false premises.
    Oh yah did you try to shutout then.

    What all you writing for so long all is not killing slaughtering Muslims and Arab all this carp and when to come to your religion no answers.

    You know you really have no religion more that Zionist/ Nazi ideology in your sick head

  152. Truth,

    The point is I would have redacted that regarding the ability to feed the populace during the Sanctions, as it was patently false. I’m fully aware of the Oil for Food Scandal, and I believe Saddam was still building palaces while children starved. I fully blame both, and do not accept that it “was the fault of the US and British that children starved”. The whole point of the program was so that people would not starve or suffer from lack of medicine.

    But hey, you were so damn stupid as to post it that I couldn’t avoid some sarcasm. Or to damn stupid to understand that that was what it was.

    Oh, and ignorant boy, you obviously do not know how our system works here regarding Katrina and natural disasters. The Governor of Louisiana has to formally request Federal help, which she failed to do for days. And Nagel, the Mayor of New Orleans, did not act either. The Federal government cannot just barge in and take over, and in fact FEMA is a coordinating agency, not a force of rescue workers. Unfortunately, the rest of your writing was unintelligible so no comment there.
    A lesson in English as a second language, stupid means incapable of learning, ignorant means lacking knowledge, the two are not synonymous except to the stupid or ignorant. You do rather well with your English, given that it is a second language for you, except for the occasional lapse into unintelligible. So I know you’re not stupid.

    “Still there are 20,000 Jews in Iran”
    However, leaving yourself open is stupid. There were 85,000 Jews in Iran in 1978, so in just 30 years, or a little over one generation, the Jewish population reduced by 75%. Must be the water.

  153. Ah, proofreading. “Or you were too damn stupid to understand that that was what it was.” Thinking ahead to Katrina and the 20,000 Jews got in the way. Sorry to deny “Truth” too easy an opening. You could criticize my punctuation, though, as it is atrocious.

  154. In all these whining about “land grab” and “occupation” one thing is utterly ignored: Arabs in disputed lands in the last 400 years always lived under occupation – Osman Turks, British, then Egyptan and Jordan, and, at last, Israeli. But when they were offered to have a state of their own by UN, they rejected it. And when after Six day war in peace negotiation with Egypt and Jordan Israel again offered these countries to take responsibility on these territories, they again rejected it. So Israeli occupation of the territories was not their choice, it was a neccessity. In legal terms, this is no man land: previous state holders had withdraw their claims on it.
    As about private holders, their property rights are respected under Israel law, but their property rights are valid only to privately owned swats of land, not to territories as such, which still are no-man-land, and they are open to settlement. In most cases this lands are desert, which settlers turn into cultivated, orable land. No private rights on land are violated by this. If some privately owned Arab land is needed for infrastructure development, the owners got a compensation.
    So the conflict is not really about land as such, but about political aspirations of Arabs, which has no foundation in international law, are bogus and should be ignored.

  155. To add onto what Segery just said, The war against Israel is many things. There are many Arab justifications for it.

    These two are the root core of the conflict:

    1 – Islamic imperitive to subjugate or annihilate the Jews

    2 – Islamic imperitive to never allow any Kufr to reclaim any land that has fallen under the occupation of the Dar Al Islam

    In the 1930s through 1960s there was a strong current of Pan-Arab Nationalism, this movement was the result of the Western influence on Arab thought, so we can add:

    3 – Palestinian nationalism

    However, I view 3 as convenient pretext for those who are in reality governed by motivations 1 and 2.

    The PLO passes itself of as Reason 3. However I honesty believe that they are operating under a heavily-secularized mutant of Reason 2.

    The PLO was created before the 67 war. So their reason for being had nothing to do with the ‘occupation’ of Judea, Samaria and Gaza and everythign to do with the basic existance of Israel.. as it does to this day.

    HAMAS is definately a Reason 1 group.

    It should be noted that Judea, Samaria and Gaza were considered to be parts of Jordan and Egypt.

    You didn’t see any wars of attrition between the Arabs who were ‘occupied’ and their occupiers.

    What you did see continiously between 48 and 67 was Arab incursions into Israel.

    This means that the notion that occupation in and of itself is the incubator of the type of extreme terrorism the vile Palestinians are known is false. There was no violence of any significance directed toward Egypt or Jordan for the purpose of freeing Judea Samaria or Gaza.

    And also the Arabs who fled from Israel in 48 have been confined to camps in the Arab countries they fled to and are still in camps.

    This is basically a life-long occupation and imprisonment.. why hasn’t there been any Terrorism for liberation directed against the Arab states that run such camps?

    Sometime yesterday someone asked why there havent been any mass killings of Jews done by Muslims in the same numbers of mass killings of Jews done in Europe.

    Well I asked an expert this question last night and this is the answer I got. I cant reveal who the expert is because I have not asked him if I can pass his name along.

    I asked:

    “Do you know if there’s any chart or listing of historical mass killings of Jews by Muslims?”

    And the answer:

    “No….and the massive numbers killed by the garden variety jihad campaigns that swept across Africa, Asia, and Europe have never been tallied either because the devastation wrought by them destroyed all records

    One modest example: Caesarea in historical Palestine–the Muslim historian Baladhuri records ~ 50,000 Jews and Samaritans lived there before the Muslim conquest in 638; afterwards, all traces of them disappear

    Maimonides, based exclusively on the Muslim sourrces, claims Mo alone was responsible for ~ 24,000 Jewish deaths during his conquest of Arabia
    “

  156. To grackle, who thinks “We’ve never invaded Iran,” a little history lesson. When the democratically elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh, Prime Minister of Iran, nationalized the assets of the Anglo-Persian Oil Co. in the 1950’s, the CIA organized a coup d’etat that overthrew the people’s government and installed the Shah of Iran. The Shah and his secret police, the SAVAK, whose torture chambers were among the most feared in the world, instituted a reign of terror against any and all opponents that lasted until he was overthrown by the Islamic Revolution.

    I pause to ask grackle when was the last time a U.S. government was overthrown by Iran? Who was the last U.S. citizen to be tortured to death by the secret police of a puppet American government installed over the U.S. by Iran?

    Furthermore, the U.S., through its then bosom buddy, Saddam Hussein, made war on Iran for (I believe) eight years, raining rockets and missiles onto Teheran, killing hundreds of thousands of Iranians, some by poison gas. Although, for good reason, the American media like to, uh, UNDEREMPHASIZE the support given by America to Saddam in his war on Iran, you can be sure the Iranians, particularly the victims of the war and their surviving next of kin, do not just forget about America’s role in all this, and know who they have to thank, in part, for their losses.

    So, Grackle, there are other ways to provoke an entire population without invading them. Iran has been directly provoked on more than one occasion by the U.S., in addition to the covert operations currently proceeding on Iranian soil by U.S. agents and possibly even U.S. forces.

    It also seems that as Muslims they are further provoked by the support that the U.S. gives to the Israeli occupation of the 3,000,000 West Bank Arabs, soon to “celebrate” it 41st anniversary in defiance of all international law (no, sorry, “to the victor belong the spoils” is NOT international law, and even Israel and the U.S.A. have signed a binding treaty, the Fourth Geneva Convention, that says it is not) and dozens of UN Resolutions. That support is enormous and the general consensus seems to be that without it, Israel could not continue the occupation, and would be forced to concede to those Palestinians their full human rights.

    Now back to my original question – – if “the enemy” is developing such terrible weapons of EMP or EMT or whatever you want to call them, just how smart is it to provoke them, to refuse to talk to them, to support their enemies in their ongoing oppression of their friends the Palestinians?

  157. And a question for those of the “the Arabs” rejected the UN partition plan, “the Arabs” walked off the land in 1948 and similar pathetic nonsense: What would you and your family do if a battle were shaping up and your home was gonna be right in the middle of it? Get the hell out, I would expect.

    It’s hilarious how this very simple and practical expedient, something that 99% of the human race would do if it happened to them, is turned around by Zionist propagandists and used as the indefensible principle that no refugee who abandons his home in fear of his or her life has a right to return, ever.

    Does that sound right to any of you? (I’m not addressing this question to the committed proponents of the Zionist propaganda line, to them ANYTHING sounds right if it lets Israel keep its ill-gotten gains.) It would be wrong even if the Jews had done nothing to provoke the exodus, but in fact, they DID – – they massacred hundreds of civilians in the undefended Arab village of Deir Yassin (go on, look it up.)

    After the Deir Yassin massacre (NEVER mentioned in any Zionist account of the founding of the State of Israel, hence never mentioned in any American mainstream media) the Palestinians began to stream out of their homes to safer places of refuge. But the Israelis know all about Deir Yassin, even if the Americans don’t. Some 20 years later, when the Israeli Knesset (Parliament) was considering pensions for the Israelis who had fought in their War of Independence, not as members of the IDF but as members of paramilitary forces like the Irgun and the Stern Gang, there was a very strenuously debated motion initiated by opposition members to deny pensions to the paramilitaries who had participated in the Deir Yassin massacre. (Israeli opposition parties, unlike the Democrats, actually possess a conscience.) The motion was defeated, of course, and the war criminals got their pensions, as war criminals always will, whether their crimes were committed in Occupied Europe, Palestine, Viet Nam or Iraq.

    Anyone interested in this subject (those who reflexly spout the Zionist line have long since stopped reading this, I assume) can also read the memoirs of Yigal Alon, a former Israeli general, who describes how HIS forces rounded up 70,000 Arabs at gunpoint and trucked them from their homes, dumping them at the Israeli side of the Jordan River in the middle of nowhere, as HIS contribution to the ethnic cleansing of Israel. Presumably there were others as well, but unlike Alon, they chose NOT to publish their memoirs, or if they did, chose not to mention that little aspect of their accomplishments.

    All this so the next time you encounter the line “But – – but they left VOLUNTARILY”

  158. Ever notice how the only people who complain about the CIA coup are Leftist. Even the Iranians dont complain about it.

    MT: Its obvious you dont take these people seriously. You dont take their religion seriously, you dont take their words seriously.

    Why is that? Is it because they’re in some shithole on the other side of earth? Is it because they believe in Allah and therefore must be stupid?

    You’re a complete bigot. You devalue them as thinking people. You assign to them motivations that they clearly state are not their motivations. You do not accept the notion that they are working on their own agenda , an agenda which is not a function of what we do. You act as if they only thing they do are those things which we cause them to do, as if they’re circus animals.

    Mindless fool.

  159. posted inadvertently and inexplicably before I had finished the last sentence – – which was:

    All this so the next time you encounter the line, “But – – but they left VOLUNTARILY,” you will recognize it for the bullshit it really is.

  160. Mindless fool replies to Vince P – –

    I’m sorry you are so ignorant of cultural traditions.

    I bet when you heard (if you heard) the phrase “I expect that England will muddle through,” you showed your “respect” for the English people by taking their words literally, i.e. that England had no plan at all for winning the war, didn’t know what they were doing, were stumbling around blindly, but just trusted to providence that somehow things would turn out all right and they’d be spared a German victory.

    Americans in the same position (all allies defeated, the enemy in possession of all its original objectives, no help in sight from anyone) probably would have said, “We’ll hang tough,” or “We’ll kick their ass,” but that was not the English way.

    “We’ll muddle through” MEANT, in effect, “We’ll kick their ass,” but it was the English way of saying it.

    Guys like you are totally insensitive to cultural nuance. Because your culture values frank speaking, “straight talk,” etc., you assume EVERY culture will express itself the same way, YOUR way. But that’s just dumb. Typically American. If you admired a Mexican’s neck-tie and he said, “It’s yours,” you’d probably take the guy at his word and rip it right off his neck.

    The Persians are a culture that is probably about three thousand years old. They are as it happens a very poetic people – – the only country in the world to celebrate a National Poetry Day as an official holiday. Yes, even under the Islamic Republic that tradition continues. Their poets are among the greatest in the world, but only one of them – – Omar Khayyam, author of The Rubaiyat – – was lucky enough to have found an English translator, whose translation was equal in quality to the original, so the others are relatively unknown.

    Persian modes of expression are flowery, poetic, exaggerated and understood as such. One of them could tell you that you were the greatest man he’d ever met and that he was unworthy to shine your shoes, but he’d really be saying the Persian equivalent of “Nice to meet you.”

    So, no, I don’t think I come from a one-size-fits-all culture and I don’t take everything they say literally, and I don’t think they express anger, shock and outrage the same way that you would express anger, shock and outrage — and NONE of that means that I disrespect them in any way, just that I am a little bit smarter than you will ever be and I know a lot more.

  161. “just that I am a little bit smarter than you will ever be and I know a lot more.”

    Ah, the modesty of the Left. Such a joy to see…a world full of MT’s and BHO’s awaits.

    Maroons all.

  162. “these lame-ass attempts to compare Muslims with Nazis and they are pure bullshit”

    care to see hitler and the mufti having a sit down?

    http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/images/muft_arab_i_hitler.jpg

    and from “the atlantic”

    Radical egalitarianism? How could that explain the bizarre convergence of postmodern Marxists with anti-modern mullahs, who are anything but egalitarian? An underappreciated book by the late Aaron Wildavsky offers an answer.

    Wildavsky taught at the University of California at Berkeley for thirty years, until his death, in 1993. He was one of the great political scientists of his generation. I was lucky to know him, and not a day passes when I don’t miss his wisdom. That wisdom, infused with an incandescent passion, shines from a collection of essays titled The Rise of Radical Egalitarianism (1991).

    Wildavsky wrote at the time when “political correctness” had only just burst into full flower on university campuses, and he wondered what lay behind it. He concluded that its many impulses–the impulse to regard all whites as oppressors and all minority members as victims, the impulse to see America as incorrigibly racist and classist and unfair, the impulse to impose admissions and hiring quotas and then lie about them, the impulse to politicize all academic disciplines, the impulse to snuff out dissent–were all aspects of a single controlling imperative. “That common factor,” he contended, “is egalitarianism–the belief in the moral virtue of diminishing differences among people of varying incomes, genders, races, sexual preferences, and (especially) power.”

    Wildavsky got it right. Whereas not long ago the American left was multivalent, valuing freedom, for instance, no less than equality, it now values just one thing. That is what makes radical egalitarianism radical. Even “diversity” has come to mean centrally administered sameness, with portions allotted not to persons but to five or so standardized categories of person. The postmodern left has become as fixated on its one value as the anti-modern mullahs are on theirs.

    Were he alive, Wildavsky would have no trouble understanding why two such seemingly opposed groups might join forces against the modern West. In an essay titled “Who Wants What and Why? A Cultural Theory” he sorted political and cultural preferences into three broad categories. Individualistic cultures, he wrote, believe that all is right with the world when people are mainly self-regulating, with decisions made by bidding and bargaining, so that the need for centralized authority is reduced. Hierarchic cultures believe that all is right when each is in his proper place, with particular people or groups making sacrifices for the good of the whole. Egalitarian cultures believe that all is right when everybody’s status is the same.

    The relevance of Wildavsky’s categories today is immediately evident. The American mainstream is predominantly individualistic. Postmodern leftists, in contrast, are radical-egalitarian to the core. With Marxism in ruins, they can offer no viable social system that will reliably produce equal outcomes; yet so fiercely do they burn with egalitarian zeal that they insist more stridently than ever on the unfairness and wickedness of capitalism and materialism. Thus their new turn toward nihilism–toward ideology and action that always protest but never propose, toward suggestions, as in Seattle, in the form of rocks hurled through plate-glass windows.

    If the enemy of your enemy is your friend, then it is not so surprising that postmodern Marxists should make common cause with radical mullahs. Islamic fundamentalism is hierarchism incarnate: the world will be a just place when Islamic law is the only law, with Muslims ruling infidels, men ruling women, and God ruling man. Although the radical-Islamic and radical-egalitarian senses of justice could hardly be more different, they are less opposites than counterparts in opposition to the dominance of individualism. If they differ as to ends, they share a sense of grievance at having been humiliated by history and a desire to torment what they see as the smug societies of the West.

    The Marxists and the mullahs are natural enemies, as Stalin and Hitler were, and their alliance, such as it is, will prove equally fleeting. But their convergence is as revelatory in today’s context as the Hitler-Stalin pact was in 1939, and for much the same reason: it brings two usually opposing pole stars into temporary conjunction, and reminds the rest of us where we stand.

  164. Artfldgr – – “Care to see a picture of Hitler and the Mufti sitting down?”

    No, but thanks anyway. The Zionist propaganda mill has done its best to ensure that every man, woman and child on this planet will see this picture as often as possible, from the time they got their hands on it, probably within days or weeks of its being taken. A lot more than anyone will ever see pictures of Deir Yassin or other Israeli war crimes and atrocities.

    Care to see a picture of Henry Ford and Hitler? Charles A. Lindbergh and Hitler? The Duke and Duchess of Windsor and Hitler? No? Didn’t think so.

  165. During Israeli war of independence several hundred Jews (nobody knows how many, estimates go from 600000 to 1.5 mln) were expelled from Arab countries as well. So there was a population swap, from Jewish side irreversable. Everybody knows that return of decendants of displaced Arabs, whose number now is several times larger than number of original refuges, will be the the end of Jewish state, so this is obviously unacceptable and used only as pretext to destroy Israel.
    The fable of Dar Yasin massacre conveniently omits an important fact: the village was above the only road that can be used to supply Jews under blocade in Jerusalem, and all adult population of the village used to umbush Jewish resistance using the road. Under this condition, a punitive expedition has a clear strategic goal and was completely justified.

  166. Uh, I guess someone has to explain to me how the “clear strategic goal” was accomplished by throwing the women, children and elderly of Deir Yassin (there were no males of fighting age among the victims) into a well and finishing them off with hand grenades. More ludicrous bullshit than this I have yet to hear. It didn’t even occur to the members of the Israeli opposition to make this ludicrous argument (they at least had some residual sense of shame) yet somehow Sergey has belatedly acquired all this knowledge. I bet the Jewish victims of Babi Yar were near a road too – – were THEY ambushing German convoys? Musta bin. My Lai, too. Hey, this really works.

    Congratulations, Sergey – – for finding a new way of justifying massacres of civilians: Find the Road!!! My utmost contempt, not for the murderers, but for those who seek to minimize or deny their crimes. Far as I’m concerned, you are in the same category of Holocaust deniers. No worse, no better.

  167. Another myth (or lie) of the Zionist foundation fable – – that hundreds of thousands of Jews were “expelled” from Arab lands. From every Arab country, some Jews came. In every Arab country, some Jews stayed. NOBODY was “expelled.” Not a single Arab nation (to my knowledge) ever legally expelled the Jews.

    Many Jews freely chose to move to a modern, Westernized, progressive state, which at the time enjoyed the full backing of the U.S.S.R. and the Soviet bloc and was founded (and armed!) by Socialists. It promised a much better future than any Arab country could ever deliver. A smart move, in my respectful opinion.

  169. The use of the phrase “Zionist propaganda mill” is vituperative nonsense. There is such a thing as objectively, factually correct history, and the kind of people who sling the “Zionist propaganda history” epithet pretty much shoot themselves in the foot.

    The Far Left and the Far Right prove that the use of the linear spectrum as a tool of categorization must bend to the better analysis of Jonah Goldberg. Pat Buchanan, meet Noam Chomsky.

  170. Michael Taylor:

    I speak as a mathematician manque…

    The Arabs did NOT, repeat NOT, originate modern mathematics. Parts of algebra, maybe…

    HOWEVER, a majority of their algebraic writings were transmissions of knowledge from Hindu mathematics, especially of the “Concept of Zero” and what we call today the Null Set.

    The mathematics tradition of Indian is much more important than the relatively smaller Arabic tradition.

    Trust me, pal…this I know.

  171. truth,
    many of those firsts are false… lies.

    just as the recent one in which the american indians spoke arabic..

    The text says Arab Muslim explorers were here in America before Columbus, and married Algonquin Indians. These early marriages produced descendents who, by the 17th century, became Algonquin chiefs, like “Abdul-Rahim and Abdallah Ibn Malik.” The Washington Times notes there is no evidence to validate the story.

    there is so much now known to be false and much of it turns out to be just fluffing and justification…

    its purpose is “we gave this to them, and look how they treat us”.

    and you select bob briggs… a comedy writer and cultural hack?

    your list is a bunch of lies and half truths twisted..

    as an example..

    1 – botanical, genetic and archeological evidence suggesting that the cradle of agriculture lay within a small region of the Fertile Crescent (in what is now southeastern Turkey/ northern Syria) and began in the 7th millennium B.C.

    NOT IRAQ…

    meanwhile if you know your hsitory and peoples movements and such, you might not connect people who live in lands in one era and another era…

    many of the discoveries you claim, never made it out to the world… they were forgotten and discovered elswhere.

    also, the point of the whole stream though is false. the world does not owe anything to them. they gave up all that stuff and all that progress when they went to islam!!!!!!!!!!

    so what if they came up with some math, knew proportions (but not the same as theorems), could read the sun in an oblisk…

    they did nothing with them.. it took the greeks, then romans, and actually later the christian protestants whith their honesty, and hard work ethos, to actully take early principals and create the huge amount of knowlege we have.

    may i also point out that most of your assertions kind of halt about the time of the religious cahnge?

    since all these origins, what have they done?

    who came up with classival philosophy?

    hamurabi may have written codes, but islamics dont follow that as they ahve code depending on your beleifs, and hamurabi was notable becasue the code was applied to ALL, not because it protected the weak… duh

    mohamedians kind of threw that away… which is why their laws say its ok to gang rape a girl that isnt wearing a veil… now thats protecting the weak.

    the laws the world follows actually come more from the greeks, romans, and would you believe VIKINGS? the jury of peers, and so forth..

    the major difference is that christianity and judaism have made the world a much better place to live in… and islam has been pretty stagnant since they beame islam.

  172. Care to see a picture of Henry Ford and Hitler? Charles A. Lindbergh and Hitler? The Duke and Duchess of Windsor and Hitler? No? Didn’t think so.

    Yes!!!!!!!!!!

    You see, Americans don’t particularly like ford… oh the elites do, but anyone who was against individualism the way he was, and said “I want to own nothing and control everything” wasn’t a nice guy. His ford foundation became the largest communist organization on the planet (outside of russia).

    You are missing the point here… which is that this blog is not made of leftists, and leftists wouldn’t want to see their progressive and pragmatic heroes in their true colors.

    I on the other hand, can point out a lot more of them to you, and the fact that we don’t like them that much either.

  173. “Truth hurts, eh, “maroon?”’

    I am bathed in the reflected glow of your vast intellect.

    If you weren’t so representative of a large set of humanity, your ludicrousness would be humorous. Instead, I fear it is a harbinger of the death of the West. You have no CLUE as to what you’re talking about. Your “arguments” have been refuted time and again, and yet you still cannot get beyond your insane prejudice and misinformation.

    You and your comrades will be the first to go if the world you wish for so fervently actually comes about. You’ll be shuffled off to your beheading wondering all the while how it could have turned out so differently from what you had imagined.

  174. Menahem Begin gave the following account:
    ‘Apart from the military aspect, there is a moral aspect to the story of Dir Yassin. At that village, whose name was publicized throughout the world, both sides suffered heavy casualties. We had four killed and nearly forty wounded. The number of casualties was nearly forty percent of the total number of the attackers. The Arab troops suffered casualties nearly three times as heavy. The fighting was thus very severe. Yet the hostile propaganda, disseminated throughout the world, deliberately ignored the fact that the civilian population of Dir Yassin was actually given a warning by us before the battle began. One of our tenders carrying a loud speaker was stationed at the entrance to the village and it exhorted in Arabic all women, children and aged to leave their houses and to take shelter on the slopes of the hill. By giving this humane warning our fighters threw away the element of complete surprise, and thus increased their own risk in the ensuing battle. A substantial number of the inhabitants obeyed the warning and they were unhurt. A few did not leave their stone houses – perhaps because of the confusion. The fire of the enemy was murderous – to which the number of our casualties bears eloquent testimony. Our men were compelled to fight for every house; to overcome the enemy they used large numbers of hand grenades. And the civilians who had disregarded our warnings suffered inevitable casualties.
    Arab propaganda heavily distorted facts: there were no trowing womens and children into wells, no rapes, no widely advertised atrocites. Even Arab survivals state this. Both parties were interested in exagerrations: Jews to motivate Arabs to flee, Arab to induce Arab contries to intervene. (This was an episode of civil war, before Arab invasion.)

  175. Speech from the floor by Michael Darby at a debate “Islam is incompatible with democracy”, conducted by the St James Ethics Centre at Angel Place, Sydney on Tuesday 15 April 2008. The following text is not warranted as a verbatim report, but is a recollection of impromptu remarks.

    Mr Chairman

    My name is Michael Darby. I represent the Australian Christian Nation Association, ACNA. I do not know whether Islam is incompatible with democracy. It depends on how one defines democracy. One could make an argument for Nazism and Communism being compatible with democracy on the basis that Hitler and Castro enjoyed majority support. If the test of compatibility with democracy is majority support within a nation, then the answer in respect of Islam may be affirmative.

    What I do know is that Islam, in theory and in practice, has powerful elements which are consistently hostile to freedom of choice and personal liberty, especially for women. That is the challenge for all who cleave to the Muslim faith, and I pray that they will make the necessary changes.

    Principal speakers in the debate:

    For the Affirmative: Dr Daniel Pipes, Paul Sheehan, Tanveer Ahmed

    For the Negative: Amina Rasul, Samina Yasmeen, Waleed Aly

    The Debate was chaired by Dr Simon Longstaff. A full house of 1,200 persons attended. Speakers from the floor were each allowed a maximum of one minute. The motion was carried by 52% to 48%. SMH Reports of 16 April 2008

    http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/islam-passes-the-democratic-test-

    http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/fiery-topic-to-kick-off-debate-series/2008/04/09/1207420485897.html

  176. “In every Arab country, some Jews stayed. NOBODY was “expelled.” Not a single Arab nation (to my knowledge) ever legally expelled the Jews.”
    The same is true for Arabs in disputed territories. Nobody was legally expelled. Some fled, some stayed. Exactly because of this we are discussing this now. If Arabs WERE expelled, we would not have a “Palestinian problem” now.

  177. I’m absolutely amazed at how MT has no idea about the picture of the Mufti and Hitler.. must never have seen it even in passing.

    And when given a chance to learn about it, he says no.

    MT has NO FCKING IDEA that the Mufti basically became a NAZI. That he spent WW-II either in Berlin or in the Balkins creating two divisions of the SS comprised only of Muslims.

    That the Mufti convinced Germany to start the actual mass killing of Jews. He also convinced many of the occupied countries to send their Jews to Germany so they could be killed rather than just expell them.

    And much much much more. That after WWII The Mufti fled Berlin to Egypt where he was like a virus transmitting the vile super extreme Jew hatred virus from Germany back to the Middle East and the Muslim Brotherhood.

    MT: you’re a god-damn joke.. how dare you fail from your duty as a person with so much comfort and wealth to learn this critical information

    Just like stumbley said, there are too many of you fcking scum know-nothing Jews haters.

  178. http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=2EE6A220-579D-49A3-B3FA-658B39F4BE13

    Hitler’s Mufti, Not Hitler’s Pope

    Precisely at the moment when Pope Pius XII and the Catholic Church in Rome (and throughout Europe) was saving thousands of Jewish lives, Hitler had a cleric broadcasting from Berlin who called for the extermination of the Jews.

    He was Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the viciously anti-Semitic Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who resided in Berlin as a welcome guest and ally of the Nazis throughout the years of the Holocaust.

    It is possible to trace modern Islamic anti-Semitism back along a number of different historical and intellectual threads, but, no matter which one you choose, they all seem to pass, at one point or another, through the hands of Hajj Amin al-Husseini–Hitler’s Mufti.

  179. [The original paragraph was hitting the blog filter, so i had to paraphrase this paragraph]
    In 1933 the Mufti appealed to Nazi Germany to form an alliance. If Germany helped the Arabs in the Mandate kill all the Jews, the Mufti would organize a worldwide Jihad in alliance with Germany against the UK and Jews. Germany ignored him until 1938.

    Several of the Arab political parties founded during the 1930s were modeled after the Nazi party, including the Syrian Popular Party and the Young Egypt Society, which were explicitly anti-Semitic in their ideology and programs. The leader of Syria’s Socialist Nationalist Party, Anton Sa’ada, imagined himself an Arab Hitler and placed a swastika on his party’s banner.

    Though he was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, al-Husseini moved his base of operations (and pro-Nazi propaganda) to Lebanon in 1938, to Iraq in 1939 (where he helped establish the strongly pro-German Rashid Ali al-Gaylani as prime minister), and then to Berlin in 1941.

    Adolf Eichmann’s deputy Dieter Wisliceny testified at the Nuremberg Trials that Hajj Amin al-Husseini “was one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and had been a collaborator and adviser of Eichmann and Himmler in the execution of this plan. He was one of Eichmann’s best friends and had constantly incited him to accelerate the extermination measures.” At Auschwitz, al-Husseini reportedly “admonished the guards running the gas chambers to work more diligently.”

    After the defeat of the Axis powers, Hajj Amin al-Husseini escaped indictment as a war criminal at Nuremberg by fleeing to Egypt, where he received political asylum and where he met the young Yasser Arafat, his distant cousin, who became a devoted protégé–to the point that the PLO recruited former Nazis as terrorist instructors. Up until the time of his death, Arafat continued to pay homage to the Grand Mufti as his hero and mentor.

    This unholy legacy continues. Hajj Amin al-Husseini has inspired two generations of radical Islamic leaders to carry on Hitler’s war against the Jews, which is why today, as was true 60 years ago, it is not the Catholic Church that is the great threat to the survival of the Jewish people; it is Islamofascism.

  180. And how many of you folks know the reason why Iran changed its name from Persia?

    In 1933, the Jew hating NAZI party ruled Germany. The party claimed the mantle of the Aryan race.

    Well the Persians also consider themselves to be Aryans. Persia was very much enamored by NAZI Germany and so to make themselves be more favored by Hitler, they changed the name of their nation from Persia to Iran which literally means Aryan.

    Many of the clerics in Iran were convinced that Hitler was the Mahdi.

    ======

    So there you have it… not only were the Sunni Muslims throwing themselves at the feet of Hitler, so were the Shiias. The evil force at the core of NAZIism (which borrowed a lot from Islam) was passed from Germany to all the Muslim world.

  181. Hitler’s Pope

    they eventually traced the origin of the false myth that the pope was with hitler against the jews. the source, a german play. this is in addition to the information you provided… which went over lots of other stuff, and i thank you for adding it since my posts are way too long. (sigh).

  182. nice commentary vince…

    and russia continued where hitler left off…

    much of what passes for “Islamic fundamentalism,” “Pan-Islam,” “Islamic nationalism,” and “Pan-Arabism” is, in reality, Moscow-directed and Soviet-controlled, with Iran serving as the principal change agent. In his 1984 book New Lies for Old, and his 1995 book The Perestroika Deception, Golitsyn revealed the Soviet plan for using and co-opting Islam. In The Perestroika Deception, he wrote that the upgraded Soviet strategy in the Commonwealth of Independent States “involves the use of the new ‘independent’ [but Soviet-controlled] Muslim states in the CIS to establish and develop economic and political cooperation with the fundamentalists in Iran and elsewhere in the Muslim world.” Explained Golitsyn, “A primary objective of the strategy here is to achieve a partnership with the fundamentalists in Iran and Algeria and to replace the present American-oriented rulers of Saudi Arabia with fundamentalists.”

    it all depends on whether you want to include in your history the machinations of the socialists…

    from another

    Iran’s revival of the Economic Cooperation Council (ECO) is a vital part of this Moscow-directed strategy. The new ECO, launched in Teheran in 1992, includes Iran, Pakistan, Turkey, and CIS states Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan, and Tajikistan. “Thus, while Pakistan is supposed, according to conventional analysis, to be in ‘China’s camp,'” writes Story in the June 1998 Arab-Asian Affairs, “here we find it incorporated willingly within a transnational regional economic grouping of which Iran, extensively controlled by Moscow, has seized the leadership.” This has resulted in “the establishment of a Muslim bloc to Russia’s south with the appearance of geopolitical ‘autonomy’ but in practice controlled by Moscow.”

    The “fundamentalist” terror states and terrorist organizations are dependent upon Moscow and Beijing not only for weapons, but for much additional technology and technical support. The so-called Sino-Soviet experts who continue to insist that the “Cold War is over” have no excuse for their blindness, writes Story. “The evidence is now so overwhelming and blatant that the Communist strategists are still carrying out a strategy for global control – which includes international terrorism as a vital component,” that only those who are totally dishonest or have a vested interest in their own ignorance can refuse to see.

    to read
    The CIA’s Intervention in Afghanistan
    Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski,
    President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser

    is an interesting document…

    however, it leaves out the stuff from the other side… that would then shift the blame back over.

    the tactics that sergey implied earlier that i answered to were used in afghanistan. they created an opposition side to them… let that side attack their own people… then gathered the underground to them, where they were mostly destroyed and the new fighters replacing them, while the original story acceeds blame to the US.

    In his book New Lies For Old, Golitsyn made 148 what are termed “falsifiable predictions.” This means his 148 predictions, published in 1984, could later be statistically measured as having turned out either “True” or “False.”
    Author Mark Riebling, in 1994, calculated the astonishing result: By 1993, at least 139 of Golitsyn’s predictions had been verified. This is an accuracy of 94 percent.

    they have played a game of making him real, making him fake, makhing him a nothing, etc.

    however, despite such, his statements and predictions stand in stark contrast to tin hatters. and his predictiosn are much higher than the agencies he embarrased…

    for instance, new lies for old. published in 1984, years after he defected, but he indicated that russia would pretend to fall and the berlin wall would probably come down.

    he predicted that the european parliment would become a socialist parliment, a european union… (of which one should check the history of the eu constitution, i had already been writen nearly 10 years prior, and the affiliation of the author, sigh)

    This information was supported by publications claiming that Mikhail Gorbachev justified his new policies as a necessary step to “hug Europe to death” and “evict the United States from Europe.” [8] Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky also supported this information:

    “In 1992 I had unprecedented access to Politburo and Central Committee secret documents which have been classified, and still are even now, for 30 years. These documents show very clearly that the whole idea of turning the European common market into a federal state was agreed between the left-wing parties of Europe and Moscow as a joint project which Gorbachev in 1988-89 called our “common European home.” (interview by The Brussels Journal, February 23, 2006).

    ===============

    According to Russian political scientist Yevgenia Albats, Golitsyn’s book New Lies for Old claimed that “as early as 1959, the KGB was working up a perestroika-type plot to manipulate foreign public opinion on a global scale. The plan was in a way inspired by the teachings of the sixth-century B.C. Chinese theoretician and military commander Sun Tsu, who said, I will force the enemy to take our strength for weakness, and our weakness for strength, and thus will turn his strength into weakness” Albats argued that the KGB was the major beneficiary of political changes in Russia, and perhaps indeed directed Gorbachev. According to her, “one thing is certain: perestroika opened the way for the KGB to advance toward the very heart of power [in Russia]”

    with comrad J out (i havent read it yet), things get more interesting.

  183. It can begin with confessing “past sins” to a group. Besides making the subject thereby blackmailable, all former notions are swept from the mind, in the “forgiveness” phase. Onto this tabula rasa (blank slate) are put “slides”: so-called “politically correct” ideas.

    100 years of psychology, and not all of it applied for human health…

  184. [if you go to the article in the link, dont look at the picture, you might want to remember her differently]

    French former film star Brigitte Bardot went on trial on Tuesday for insulting Muslims, the fifth time she has faced the charge of “inciting racial hatred” over her controversial remarks about Islam and its followers. Prosecutors asked that the Paris court hand the 73-year-old former sex symbol a two-month suspended prison sentence and fine her 15,000 euros ($23,760) for saying the Muslim community was “destroying our country and imposing its acts”.

    Since retiring from the film industry in the 1970s, Bardot has become a prominent animal rights activist but she has also courted controversy by denouncing Muslim traditions and immigration from predominantly Muslim countries. She has been fined four times for inciting racial hatred since 1997, at first 1,500 euros and most recently 5,000. Prosecutor Anne de Fontette told the court she was seeking a tougher sentence than usual, adding: “I am a little tired of prosecuting Mrs Bardot.” Bardot did not attend the trial because she said she was physically unable to. The verdict is expected in several weeks.

    French anti-racist groups complained last year about comments Bardot made about the Muslim feast of Eid al-Adha in a letter to President Nicolas Sarkozy that was later published by her foundation. Muslims traditionally mark Eid al-Adha by slaughtering a sheep or another animal to commemorate the prophet Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son on God’s orders.

    France is home to 5 million Muslims, Europe’s largest Muslim community, making up 8 percent of France’s population. “I am fed up with being under the thumb of this population which is destroying us, destroying our country and imposing its acts,” the star of ‘And God created woman’ and ‘Contempt’ said. Bardot has previously said France is being invaded by sheep-slaughtering Muslims and published a book attacking gays, immigrants and the unemployed, in which she also lamented the “Islamisation of France”.

    http://www.reuters.com/article/entertainmentNews/idUSL1584799120080415?feedType=RSS&feedName=entertainmentNews&rpc=22&sp=true

  185. “The massacre at Deir Yassin was widely publicized by the terrorists and the numerous heaped corpses displayed to the media. In Jaffe, which was at the time 98 percent Arab, as well as in other Arab communities, speaker trucks drove through the streets warning the population to flee and threatening another Deir Yassin. Begin said at the time, “We created terror among the Arabs and all the villages around. In one blow, we changed the strategic situation.””

    Michael, you’re a waste of time. I’ve known about Deir Yassin since I read about the founding of Israel when I was a teenager.

    The Warsaw Bloc was the major supplier of arms to Saddam, and Germany sold them many of the chemical precursors. We jumped in when the war started, and yeah, we wanted Khomeini gone.
    Check the Swedish Peace Institute for arms sales.

    Jesus your world in conspiratorial nightmare. You hate more than any of the guys here, because its down to your metaphoric soul. You’ve built a wall of “unassailable truths” that you can’t let go of no matter what.

    Have a good life, if it’s possible for you.

  187. Gorbachev was promoted by Yuri Andropov, the Head of KGB. There was a long, entranchent animosity between KGB and Communist Party. They were rivals in power struggle. KGB did everything to undermine the Party, expose its leaders in public as senile idiots (what they really were) and get upper hand. Yes, in many aspects, perestroika was a KGB project, even KGB conspiracy. Arafat also was a KGB stooge, he was choosen by Andropov to spearhead his grand strategy of destabilisation, applied to West and to oil-rich ME. I have seen so-called “perestroika’s organizers” in High Party School, even before the compaign was officially declared, in the last year of Chernenko rule. I was (unwillingly) recruited to the cause and knew its secret springs.

  188. Neo,

    So, Deir Yassin was possibly a fabrication of details like Jenin? I wish I could find again the link to the Arab that said they lie constantly and he was tired of it. Seems to fit in well here.

    A motif that I have found with Muslim commenters on various blogs is that at no time in their history have they done anything truly wrong. Their sword was always compassionate and merciful. Only the West, or China, or India; and it has victimized them over and over again. They “forget” what their Islamic Empire did to others.

    This may just be the public face, but it is a sorry one.

  189. Hit the button too soon.

    Landes is a wonderful resource, both the Second Draft with its essays and deconstruction of Pallywood, and the blog Augean Stables.

    Of course, he really is just an Islamophobe who hates all Muslims because he criticizes them, which is an insult, and insults are assaults on Islam. Thus Islam must defend itself against Landes. (I drew this from an Imam that actually believes this logic.)

  190. What a learning experience this has been!

    From Fredjr, I learn that the use of the phrase “Zionist propaganda mill” is “vituperative nonsense.” Gee, thanks, Fred. I had it figured out that the State of Israel had some pretty powerful PR machine going for it, but I guess THAT was pretty wacky, huh. What could I ever have been thinking? Glad you were able to straighten me out there.

    From Good Ole Charlie, I get an unsolicited lecture on the mathematical accomplishments and non-accomplishments of the Arabs, upon which I had never expressed any opinion either way. Last I ever had my attention drawn to the matter, I was reading a book by a fella named Danziger called “Number: the Language of Science,” but damned if I can recall much of it now. Maybe Charlie had me confused with another poster.

    From stumbley, I get a heads-up about my imminent head-off at the hands of the usual suspects, who for some unimaginable reason are plotting vast acts of horrific violence against a West which has done nothing at all to them except invade their countries, steal their lands, kill their families, torture their children and overthrow their governments. Crazy world, huh, stumb? Oh, yeah, I also learned that (although stumbley isn’t able to refute even one of them with anything but pure bullshit) my arguments have been “refuted time and again.” In your dreams, stumbley, in your dreams.

    From the Dodger, I get to see Menachem Begin’s description of the “Battle” of Deir Yassin. For the uninitiated, Begin was a key member of the Irgun, which, together with another terrorist group, the Stern Gang, perpetrated the massacre at Deir Yassin. He’s about as likely to give an unbiased, accurate report of that massacre as a member of the S.S. Nachtigal Division would of the Babi Yar massacre. It did kind of remind me of Lt. Calley’s account of the “Battle of My Lai.” Calley would never speak of the My Lai massacre without calling it the “Battle” of My Lai – – as if the gunning down of hundreds of unarmed women, children, babies and old people in a ditch were some kind of “battle.” Begin, too, refers to the massacre as a “battle” and, thoughtfully, even provides us with an Israeli “casualty count” – – 4 killed. Who knew? Maybe four of them stuck their heads over the lip of the well to view the damage, when an unexploded grenade went off. Anything’s possible. But thanks, Dodger, it was truly gripping fiction.

    And from Vince P., I learn that the extermination of the Jews was the Mufti’s idea, not Hitler’s. Of course, it HAD to be, I should have figured this out years ago. When did Hitler ever say he wanted to hurt the Jews? God damn that Mufti. Too bad no one on the Nuremburg War Crimes Tribunal ever heard about this. They coulda hanged him with the same rope they had for Goering after Goering committed suicide. Damn! The knot was already tied, too.

  191. “vast acts of horrific violence against a West which has done nothing at all to them except invade their countries, steal their lands, kill their families, torture their children and overthrow their governments.”

    Yep, pretty much describes Islam in a nutshell. The one that nut, Michael Taylor lives in.

  192. “vast acts of horrific violence against a West which has done nothing at all to them; invade their countries, steal their lands, kill their families, torture their children and overthrow their governments.”

    Yep, pretty much describes Islam in a nutshell. The one that nut, Michael Taylor lives in.

    That’s the way it was supposed to read…

  193. Ariel sez: “A motif that I have found with Muslim commenters on various blogs is that at no time in their history have they done anything truly wrong. Their sword was always compassionate and merciful.”

    Kinda like this comment I saw once from a Crusader historian: “Our men did nothing evil to their women [i.e., didn’t rape them] but only pierced their bellies with their lances.”

    Brilliant, huh? But really, who goes around beating their breasts and bemoaning all the evil they have wrought in the world? The Arabs? the U.S.A.? the British? the Chinese? I think first, they have to be REALLY defeated. Beaten into the ground. Totally wrecked. Then you get to hear all the True Confessions, the sobbing self-recriminations, the begging for forgiveness, Willy Brandt on his knees at the Warsaw Ghetto, etc. Although it doesn’t seem to last too long, does it? I see the Japs are already starting to get impatient with the whole charade, enough is enough, they’re saying, take that shit out of our textbooks, it’s unpatriotic, didn’t we suffer enough at Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Ah, geeze, it’s enough to make one lose one’s faith in humanity. I know where yer comin’ from.

  194. You know, Mikey, one begins to wonder…what part of “Palestine” do you inhabit? Or are the “Palestinians” only the cause du jour of your righteous anger?

    Because you know, there are a whole host of other folks that are suffering today…one thinks of Christians and the “wrong kind” of Muslims in Darfur, for instance… or Filipino Christians being massacred in Mindanao.

    Just asking. What a tool.

  196. Vince, he’s not American. My guess is either UK, Australia or NZ, based on spelling, but he could be Canadian. In any event, he’s been properly indoctrinated. Because, as you know, no group on Earth has suffered like the Palis. And after them, the downtrodden and misunderstood Muslims, who just want to live in peace with the rest of us, except we keep torturing their children. Why only last week, I had an urchin that kept whining about waterboarding…it was all I could do to avoid taking the bamboo shoots from under its fingernails…

  197. My apologies to Mike T…wrong attribution.

    I was referring to a claim – #4 – of “Truth” on 4/15/08 at 9:43pm.

    And I am sure of my accuracy…re: Hindu vs Arabs.

    The other false claims have been dealt with by others.

    What sayeth “Truth”?

    I have spoken.

  198. I have done a quick survey of the sites provided by neo-neo, and of http://www.deiryassin.org/op0005.html (“refuting the deniers,”) and I think at this point, I’d have to say it’s a draw.

    Interestingly all sides agree that the initial civilian body count was practically doubled, not by the Arabs, but by the Jews, with the expressed purpose of terrorizing the Arabs into fleeing. (Incidentally reviewing the sites leads to the interesting tid-bit that the well-publicized stories of Arab radio broadcasts urging the Palestinians to flee their homes were just more Zionist lies; even the former chief historian of the IDF now concedes that these stories were pure fabrications – – he was forced into this admission by a researcher who was able to locate in the British Museum transcripts of all Arab radio broadcasts of the time, NONE of which urged the Arabs to flee – – on the contrary they were urged to stay, but news of the Deir Yassin massacre and a healthy sense of self-preservation would seem to dictate flight.)

    The pro-massacre theory is just that a mass killing with associated atrocities was committed to panic the Arabs into vacating their lands; the anti-massacre theory is that the civilians who were killed were just caught in the cross-fire and that Jews in the government’s intelligence services spread the news of the fake massacre (a) to panic the Arabs into leaving and/or (b) to discredit the paramilitary forces which represented some of the opposition parties threatening the government of the day (the Ben-Gurion government.) Politics as usual, in other words, which can get pretty vicious, no-holds-barred.

    To the extent that any of the theories rely on evidence from participants or members of the terrorist groups involved, I’d say a very high degree of skepticism would have to be in order.

  199. Vince, he’s not American. My guess is either UK, Australia or NZ, based on spelling, but he could be Canadian. In any event, he’s been properly indoctrinated

    Nothing does indoctrination better than a university.

  200. Because you know, there are a whole host of other folks that are suffering today…one thinks of Christians and the “wrong kind” of Muslims in Darfur, for instance… or Filipino Christians being massacred in Mindanao.

    Stumblebum sez: “Because . . . there are a whole host of other folks that are suffering today . . Christians and the “wrong kind” of Muslims in Darfur . . . Filipino Christians . . . in Mindanao”

    Gee, that’s terrible. Is the U.S. government paying somebody $3 billion a year to subject THEM to a military occupation too?

    There’s a lot of oppression in the world, isn’t there? Some of it COMMITTED by the U.S.A. (Iraq, Afghanistan,) some of it PAID FOR by the U.S.A., (Palestine, Egypt, Jordan) and some of it having nothing to do with the U.S.A. (Yes, Virginia, there ARE other bad guys in the world.)

    Not sure that I get your point, stumb. Are you upset that the U.S.A. and its little buddy Israel don’t have a monopoly on ALL the torture and murder in the world and have to let others horn in on their action? Or do you feel that whatever is currently going down in Darfur and Mindanao kinda lets the U.S. and Israel off the hook? Curious minds need to know.

    Just to clear the air a little here, I think it’s probably beneficial to remember, in case any of you actually think from time to time of the American people and THEIR interests, that while U.S. support of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, and the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan are costing the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars a year and thousands of ruined lives, not to mention the inevitable pay-back that must ultimately descend upon them, the fate of the poor buggers in Mindanao and Darfur is not really likely to generate much in the way of consequences for anybody but the victims themselves. That’s because those are problems that the U.S.A. is not contributing anything to.

  202. “really, who goes around beating their breasts and bemoaning all the evil they have wrought in the world?”

    LOL. Have you been to a bookstore in the last 30 years? Nearly every society in the West does. The Japanese have been in denial for 60 years, hell they won’t even acknowledge the “Pleasure Girls” or Nanking.

    And, yes, after awhile people will want to take off the hairshirt and leave the Order of the Flagellants.

    Now “Hiroshima and Nagasaki” does bug me. Given everything that went on in WWII, what the Japanese did throughout Asia, what the Marines saw on Saipan and Okinawa when Japanese women threw themselves and their children off of cliffs, when the cost of invading Kyushu was estimated to be 5,000,000 Japanese and a 1,000,000 Allies (the cost was wrong, the Japanese knew of the plans and were preparing), the dropping of the bombs was a good decision. It is now believed that the Japanese were only days from having their own working bomb.

    I had two best friends in High School, the one I went to Judo with had trained at the Kodokan in Japan. His father had dropped bombs on Tokyo in WWII and his mother was born and raised in Nagasaki. I ate at their house occasionally, his mother considered me very polite and responsible and thus welcome at her table. I made the blunder of asking her about Nagasaki during one dinner and obviously caused her great pain, she told me only that “we were all being trained to die. It is a good thing the war ended.”

    One thing Judo and Aikido teach is balance. You should study them.

  203. Iraqi Author ‘Aref ‘Alwan: The Jews Have an Historic Right to Palestine

    The link has a lot more text and commentary.

    http://www.memri.org/bin/latestnews.cgi?ID=SD189708

    In an article posted December 7, 2007, on the leftist website http://www.ahewar.org, [1] ‘Aref ‘Alwan, an Iraqi author and playwright who resides in London and is the author of 12 novels, [2] states that the Jews have an historic right to Palestine because their presence there preceded the Arab conquest and has continued to this day.

    In the article, titled “Do the Jews Have Any Less Right to Palestine than the Arabs?” ‘Alwan called on the Arab world to acknowledge the Jews’ right to Palestine, because justice demanded it and also because doing so would end the violence and the killing of Arabs, as well as intra-Arab strife. He added that such a move would also open up new avenues for the Arab world that would be more consistent with the values and needs of modern society.

    ‘Alwan writes that the Arab League is to blame for the refusal to recognize the 1947 U.N. partition plan, for starting a war to prevent its implementation, and for the results of that war, which the Arabs call the Nakba (disaster). He points an accusing finger at the Arab regimes, the Arab League, and the educated circles in the Arab world, saying that they had all used the term “nakba” to direct popular consciousness toward a cultural tradition that neither accepts the other side nor recognizes its rights – thereby promoting bigotry, violence and extremism. He also claims that there have been attempts to rewrite Palestinian history, in order to deny any connection between it and the Jewish people.

    ‘Alwan contends that the “Nakba mentality” among Arabs has boomeranged, giving rise to tyrannical rulers, extremist clerics, and religious zealots of every description. In his view, the Arab world will never shed the stigma of terrorism in the West unless it abandons this concept and all that it entails.

    To boost his claim that the Jews have an historic right to Palestine, ‘Alwan provides an overview of Jewish history in the land of Israel. He questions the validity of the Islamic traditions underpinning the Arab claim to Palestine, Jerusalem, and the TempleMount, and presents evidence that religions that preceded Islam had conducted rituals on the TempleMount.

    As an example of the traditional Arab mentality that does not accept the other or recognize his rights, ‘Alwan discusses the Arabs’ abuse of the Kurds in Iraq and of the Christians in Egypt and Lebanon.

  204. “the fate of the poor buggers in Mindanao and Darfur is not really likely to generate much in the way of consequences for anybody but the victims themselves.”

    Pretty much why you don’t give a rat’s a** for them, then, right? Bleeding heart for the Palis, but f**k all for the rest of the world. MT, you are a piece of….work.

  205. The piece of work is YOU, stumbo. Faking concern for the victims you have absolutely ZERO responsibility for creating, while making excuses for the victims that you or your country (or countries) DO bear responsibility for. Can you spell D-I-S-T-R-A-C-T-I-O-N? You and your phony crocodile tears fool absolutely nobody. I won’t even say “Nice try.”

  206. Re, “The Jews Have an Historic Right to Palestine” – – BFD. Nobody here says they don’t. At issue is not the right of the Jews to a homeland in Palestine, but the fate of the 3,000,000 Arabs living under permanent military occupation for 41 years on the West Bank and the almost total denial of their basic human rights by the Israeli occupation army.

  207. Ariel if you ever saw the documentary on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, you would have a BIG problem with the concept. Or the animated Japanese film, “Grave of the Fireflies.”

    I am saying this as someone who believed all his life that they “had it coming.” But when you see what “it” really was, you gotta stop and think. I don’t know how anyone could knowingly do that to other human beings. I’m ashamed that I ever supported it.

    Our friends’ nephew died after three months in a Japanese POW camp at the age of 19, nobody knows how. He was in perfect health when he went in. I know a hardened combat veteran who liberated a POW camp on mainland Japan, and it’s the only thing I ever saw him cry about. But those bombs didn’t fall on war criminals, they fell on a civilian population, on schoolgirls, on mothers and wives.

    Just as an aside, we have Japanese neighbours who we like very much, but there is nothing – – and I mean NOTHING – – that would ever induce me to discuss the War with any of them. It just doesn’t seem like a good idea. Any more than it would be to ask a German what his father did in the War. Sometimes you gotta just let the past be the past and move on forward.

  209. “Sometimes you gotta just let the past be the past and move on forward.”

    Yeah, like “stealing” the Arabs’ lands. What part of “Palestine” did you say you were from? And your rapt concern for the Japanese (you called them “Japs” earlier, didn’t you–a bit crass for someone who’s so concerned now, neh?) seems to echo a bit of the “crocodile tears” you ascribe to me.

    You don’t fool anyone but yourself.

  210. You’re a sick man, stumbo – – an anti-Arab racist and bigot, but just so we’re clear on one thing: my neighbours and friends are Japanese, as are the innocent victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The guards who killed our friends’ nephew are Japs. The perpetrators of the Rape of Nanking are Japs. Now please go all politically correct on me and tell me I don’t have the right . . . That ought to be funny.

  211. Exactly, but I didn’t ever think the Japanese had it coming, ever. I like the Japanese, here or there, from the girls I knew in Junior and High School, to the guys I ran with. I grew up in very mixed neighborhoods. I like the culture, the attention to detail and ritual, even the Budo. But I hate the Militarists and what they did to Japan with a passion that I feel even as I write this. It makes my teeth clench.

    I don’t think Truman believed the Japanese had it coming, either. It was done to stop the war quickly before the planned invasion in November 45. More lives, by an order of magnitude, were saved by that decision than lost. Imagine a world if Operation Olympus had taken place, 5,000,000 Japanese men, women, and children dead, possibly even more. Imagine the Japanese having those bombs, and they were close. Olympus and a Japanese A-bomb are much more horrifying to me.

    I read Hersey’s book when I was a teenager, saw the shadows on the walks, the skin falling from living people, etc. But I have also seen the sickening and horrific pictures of the dead and living of the Tokyo Firestorms, and the bloody streams in Nanking, and the bodies piled high at the camps. It was a horrible war, all of it. The Nazi’s needed to go, forever, as did the Japanese militarists.

    All the bombs of WWII, on both sides, fell on the military and civilian alike. It was total war. Destroy their infrastructure, destroy their means to make war, destroy them.

    I was stupid enough as a teenager to ask the question of her. Her answer though was telling “we were all being trained to die”.

    The lesson learned is that these bombs must never be used again, nor the technique of the Firestorms. If you haven’t read about the Firestorms, or seen pictures of what it did to Tokyo, seek it out. It is every bit as horrifying as Little Boy and Fat Man. Chemical energy, or atomic energy, the flesh burns the same. In a sense, the Firestorms were worse, the victims died more slowly.

    As an aside, I have read that had the Allies lost in Europe, had Germany pushed them back, these bombs would have been used against Germany.

    The Allies were not going to lose.

  212. I’d already encountered, in one form or another, most of the arguments in neo-neo’s links. One of my uncles was already on the way to the Pacific when the bomb dropped, cousins of my dad were already in the Pacific and I had more uncles in Europe who could have been transferred as well. Nobody in our family questioned the rightness of the decision to drop The Bomb.

    I have to say, though, all of that logic just seemed beside the point when I saw the documentary, in black and white, on the horrors of The Bomb. I couldn’t think. I just knew there had to be a better way. I don’t know what it is even now. But what happened just should not have happened.

    I don’t know what the real reasons were for not avoiding the use of the bomb. I read somewhere that Truman wanted to knock out the Japs without having to draw on Russian manpower for the invasion ahead. That he wanted to show Stalin not to f**k with the U.S.A. in Europe despite his (Stalin’s) superior land forces. I know that because of the barbarous atrocities committed by the Japs during and even before the War started (in China, before Pearl Harbor) that they had just about used up any sympathy that anyone might ever have had for them as human beings. And I know that their suicidal defence tactics raised the human cost of an invasion to astronomical levels.

    I’m still left with the feeling that there was another way this could have ended, that the bomb did not have to be dropped, but on the other hand, I’ll never know for sure. I’m glad all my family got back home in one piece. Whatever the rights and wrongs of it, I think we all have to ensure that it never happens again. It’s really too bad that the UN, which was founded in the hopes of sparing mankind from the scourge of war, has been so disrespected by the very nation that took the leading role in its founding.

  213. My post applied to MT of April 16th, 2008 at 6:23 pm and was not a comment on anything after. I’m not interested in being drawn in again on the other.

    Neo, these are both great observations on your part:

    1. on people wishing to keep their “hands clean”:”To a person with such a mindset, nothing could ever have justified being the agent of the suffering Hershey described, not even the prevention of far greater suffering.” and

    2. on those who can’t see it for what it was: “But critics who are bound and determined to portray the West as evil, marauding, bloodthirsty– whatever the dreadful adjective de jour might be–are bound and determined to either avoid all context, or to change the true context and replace it with fanciful myth.”

    I wasn’t aware of this: “One of Japan’s highest wartime officials, Kido Koichi, later testified that in his view the August surrender prevented 20 million Japanese casualties.” But it would follow, given how the Militarists were preparing for invasion.

  214. Michael, there wasn’t another way. Any other way would have killed more. We weren’t trying to show the Soviets anything, we were doing nothing but ending the war quickly before it got worse. Much, much worse.

    The Militarists had used up any sympathy one might have for another human being. They were the worst racist bastards this planet has seen in a long time. May we never see them again.

    Don’t let your revulsion cloud your understanding of the context.

  215. To grackle, who thinks “We’ve never invaded Iran,” a little history lesson.

    Oh, but I know the US has never invaded Iran. But being an avid reader of history I welcome a lesson on my favorite subject.

    When the democratically elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh, Prime Minister of Iran, nationalized the assets of the Anglo-Persian Oil Co. in the 1950’s, the CIA organized a coup d’etat that overthrew the people’s government and installed the Shah of Iran.

    The seizing of oil companies jointly owned by the nation of Iran and British corporations was an issue the Iranians had with the British – not America. America has never wanted to own oil companies in Iran – all we’ve ever wanted to do was buy oil on the open market – not own the companies that drill and pump it in Iran. That said, I can understand why a few British stockholders were a little miffed after their legally owned assets were seized. I guess they didn’t do much business with Iran after that.

    Mossadegh, a communist, was merely a member of the Iranian government who was engineering a real coup against the Shah. The CIA could hardly ‘install’ a Shah who was already the ruler of Iran. What the CIA did was help prevent the communist takeover of a friendly country – which was their job, after all.

    The world had already witnessed the communist takeover and subjugation of the peoples of several Eastern European countries right after WW2 and someone in the US administration of that time must have realized the need to give help to those who might be trying to prevent similar Communist mischief in the Middle East, bless their farsighted heart.

    A coup, properly defined, can only be effected on the heads of state, not a mere member of a government. It’s an ‘upward’ action, not a ‘downward’ type of deed. Imagine Bush engineering a ‘coup’ against Pelosi to realize the ridiculousness of such language.

    The Shah and his secret police, the SAVAK, whose torture chambers were among the most feared in the world, instituted a reign of terror against any and all opponents that lasted until he was overthrown by the Islamic Revolution.

    I’m sure the Shah took steps to protect his office and station – it would be foolish not to do so. As for his secret police, such groups are the normal situation for much of the world’s governments even today – especially in the Middle East. To single the Shah out because he had secret police is a bit like singling out a Chevrolet because it has a steering wheel. On the fear of their “torture chambers,” these too are quite common under the euphemism of ‘interrogation rooms.’ The Shah’s were no different than others in the region at that time. Time has only slightly improved the situation. If you really want to frighten a captured al Qaeda agent fool him into thinking he’s going to be interrogated by Jordanians.

    I pause to ask grackle when was the last time a U.S. government was overthrown by Iran? Who was the last U.S. citizen to be tortured to death by the secret police of a puppet American government installed over the U.S. by Iran?

    I’ve pretty much addressed the above by my preceding paragraphs, but to reiterate: The US has never overthrown any rulers of Iran, although I would be very much in favor of such an action today. The US had no “puppet government” in Iran. What the US had was a ruler who was an ally who was threatened by an impending communist takeover from lower elements in his government.

    Furthermore, the U.S., through its then bosom buddy, Saddam Hussein, made war on Iran for (I believe) eight years, raining rockets and missiles onto Teheran, killing hundreds of thousands of Iranians, some by poison gas. Although, for good reason, the American media like to, uh, UNDEREMPHASIZE the support given by America to Saddam in his war on Iran, you can be sure the Iranians, particularly the victims of the war and their surviving next of kin, do not just forget about America’s role in all this, and know who they have to thank, in part, for their losses.

    It’s quite true that the US backed Saddam in the Iran/Iraq war. No one has ever made a secret of that. I don’t see how the Iranians could have expected the US not to. After all, not long before that war Iran had overrun the American embassy and held the US embassy employees hostage for 444 days, an act of war itself.

    Perhaps if Bush had been our President in those days instead of the feckless, terrorist-loving Jimmy Carter the US would have responded in kind. It’s really too bad that the worst the US could do to Iran was to give some help to someone else making war on the Iranians. But one could hardly characterize Saddam as a “bosom buddy” of the US. We had to depose him, remember? Not something you do to a “bosom buddy,” eh?

    So, Grackle, there are other ways to provoke an entire population without invading them. Iran has been directly provoked on more than one occasion by the U.S., in addition to the covert operations currently proceeding on Iranian soil by U.S. agents and possibly even U.S. forces.

    I sincerely hope the US have agents in Iran doing as much as they can to make trouble for the mullahs. Alas, I fear the present day CIA has an agenda of their own and seems to be incompetent these days, except perhaps for some information gathering. It’s an agency that could not even put a spy in al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Yet a young fellow with an upper middle-class background from the suburbs of California managed to easily join them.

    No, I wouldn’t be betting that the US has any covert agents in Iran – they don’t seem to do that anymore. Leaking classified materials to the liberal press seems to be more their style. The implication by the commentor of “U.S. forces” in Iran is good for a laugh, nothing more.

    It also seems that as Muslims they are further provoked by the support that the U.S. gives to the Israeli occupation of the 3,000,000 West Bank Arabs, soon to “celebrate” it 41st anniversary in defiance of all international law (no, sorry, “to the victor belong the spoils” is NOT international law, and even Israel and the U.S.A. have signed a binding treaty, the Fourth Geneva Convention, that says it is not) and dozens of UN Resolutions. That support is enormous and the general consensus seems to be that without it, Israel could not continue the occupation, and would be forced to concede to those Palestinians their full human rights.

    I’m sure that Muslims are provoked by the US and many other entities as well. All one has to do is publish some cartoons, make a movie or stick up for yourself to do that. They are so easily provoked it seems. So supporting an ally whom they don’t approve of must send them into a frothing at the mouth rage and their heads must explode from the pressure.

    I hate to let the commentor know, he has so much enjoyment writing about it, but there really is no such thing as “international law.” International law is simply a concept and not even a realistic concept. For instance, who enforces “international law?” Realistically speaking, if you have no enforcement you have no law. It’s mainly a thing that progressives and anti-war types prattle about to justify their muddled history and foreign policy disagreements with the US. I have only laughter in response to the commentor’s reliance on “UN Resolutions,” an organization below our contempt.

    I’m puzzled by the part of my lesson concerning the Fourth Geneva Convention. I just looked it up and can find nothing in it concerning what the commentor speaks about. It seems to have nothing to do with post-war territorial issues.

    Now back to my original question – – if “the enemy” is developing such terrible weapons of EMP or EMT or whatever you want to call them, just how smart is it to provoke them, to refuse to talk to them, to support their enemies in their ongoing oppression of their friends the Palestinians?

    The problem here is that the US could hardly fail to provoke the enemy. We would have to cease to exist to do that. By their own words they want only our subjugation or our death – they allow no middle ground. Trying to appease them seems to be a waste of time and energy – only encouraging further nasty behavior. One might as well die fighting. And I don’t say the enemy is developing an EMP weapon – I only relate what I would do if I were them and had their ruthless nature and dire motivations

  216. grackle, unless you have a shareholder’s and creditors list of the Anglo-Persian Oil Co. (now BP) you don’t really know whose toes Mossadegh was stepping on when he nationalized its assets.

    Most of the rest of your post is nit-picking sophistry – – whether a coup d’etat can be mounted against a Prime Minister rather than a head of state, how the Shah could be “installed” as ruler by the CIA when legally he was altready the ruler.

    In the context of the original discussion, why the Iranians hate America, the fact is that they had democratically elected a leader and a government and saw their choice nullified by a military coup organized by the U.S.A. and a new government, nominally under the Shah, imposed on them, which was subservient to its British and U.S. puppeteers rather than to the needs of the Iranian people as determined by the Iranian people.

    Your contention that the SAVAK was par for the course in the region just is not true. It was the worst of the worst, on a par with Saddam Hussein’s mukhabarat. More importantly, the Iranians under Mossadegh did not have to fear any kind of torture or terror from their own government, so the change was obviously detrimental and seen as such, particularly by the influential Tudeh (Communist) Party, many of whose members were tortured and killed by the Shah. The surviving Tudeh members and the survivors of the deceased Tudeh members are influential and numerous – – some of them have switched allegiance to the Islamic Revolution and are not going to forget what the Americans have done to their comrades and their families.

    It was good to know that there is no such thing as international law. Most law schools in the U.S.A., the U.K., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, China, Japan, India, etc. all spend considerable sums of money teaching international law. I’m sure they could benefit greatly from your wisdom if you could see fit to inform them that they are blowing vast amounts of money and time, their own and their students’, on something that does not exist. Your question “Who is going to enforce it?” is of such monumental stupidity that it’s not even worth an answer, I’m sure Google can help you but I’m not going to waste my time.

    Equally crazy is your assertion that the U.S. could only fail to provoke them by ceasing to exist. I never realized we had such a drama queen in our midst. I think you could remove a lot of provocation merely by cutting off Israel from all financial and even military aid unless it evacuates the entire West Bank, settlements and all, within three months of yesterday. You could also agree to withdraw all troops from Iraq and Afghanistan during the same time frame and pay reparations to Iraq for the damge to life and property occasioned by your unprovoked aggression. Otherwise it’s really hard to take your last paragraph seriously. Hard to take any of the post seriously, in fact. Most of it is just a denial of the obvious based on the most childish reasoning I’ve seen in quite a while.

  217. Sorry MT, Sergey gave the account of Yassin by Begin.

    So it wasn’t my fiction… and in case you didn’t know, the people responsible for the massacre were brought to trial and prosecuted. Unlike many other armies of socialist persuasion, the incident was not the policy of the American military.

    As for the battle or massacre at yassin, I cant speak for it as I don’t know enough about it. I DO know about lots of the state games, but few of them had to actually do with battles directly. They more had to do with things like training, supplies, maneuvering, posturing, manipulation, dissimulation, among other things.

    And you bring up the Crusades? What were the Crusades in response to? The Seljuk Turks did what? did they take Anatolia? Did the Eastern Orthodox Byzantine Empire request help from people expanding into their territory?

    the most devastating long term consequence of the crusades, according to historian Peter Mansfield, was the creation of an Islamic mentality that sought a retreat into isolation. He says “Assaulted from all quarters, the Muslim world turned in on itself. It became oversensitive [and] defensive… attitudes that grew steadily worse as world-wide evolution, a process from which the Muslim world felt excluded, continued.”[42].

    “Prior to the growth of Arab nationalism in the 20th century, the Crusades were virtually unknown in the Islamic world” – Maalouf, Amin. Crusades Through Arab Eyes.

    Anyway… your bringing up incidents from 1090 or so

    and you bring up Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

    So lame… both examples the first crusade and Japan, ended up in response to the actions of the ones that got hurt. Japan would never have been bombed ever if they didn’t start a war to try to hold onto the crap they were pulling in the pacific and china. They really weren’t to friendly to the Muslims of Indonesia, or don’t they count in your book?

    Here you can read how they turned the Taiwanese women into sex slaves
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4342797.stm

    oh.. and my favorite, you bring up mai lai, then you bring up Hiroshima..
    but what about the Nanking massacre?

    Mai lai was how many? 300? Nanking? 300,000 and another half million in the surrounding area…

    Since your so fond of quotes

    There probably is no crime that has not been committed in this city today. Thirty girls were taken from the language school last night, and today I have heard scores of heartbreaking stories of girls who were taken from their homes last night–one of the girls was but 12 years old… Tonight a truck passed in which there were eight or ten girls, and as it passed they called out “Jiu ming! Jiu ming!”–save our lives.
    –Minnie Vautrin’s diary, 16 December 1937

    The slaughter of civilians is appalling. I could go on for pages telling of cases of rape and brutality almost beyond belief. Two bayoneted corpses are the only survivors of seven street cleaners who were sitting in their headquarters when Japanese soldiers came in without warning or reason and killed five of their number and wounded the two that found their way to the hospital

    Robert Wilson in another letter to his family: They [Japanese soldiers] bayoneted one little boy, killing him, and I spent an hour and a half this morning patching up another little boy of eight who had five bayonet wounds including one that penetrated his stomach, a portion of omentum was outside the abdomen

    How many of them were court marshaled or prosecuted? None.

    Oh.. but it didn’t stop… cause in WWII, as I mentioned above… they went after the indonesians, and the philipines, and more

    In an interview with Associated Press Television, Salinog of the Philippines talked about seeing Japanese soldiers decapitate her father with a sword as he struggled to keep them from abducting her.
    “I could bear all the suffering they inflicted on me, but the killing of my father changed my whole life,” she said. “I am alone.”
    Salinog was one of 80 former sex slaves from the Philippines who lost a court case last week in which they demanded $9 million and an apology from the Japanese government for their suffering.
    …
    So how do you figure your accounting? The accounting of the numbers tortured, raped, and killed in the years tallied in the MILLIONS… and you ignore that and go after the country that stopped them after they attacked them.

    Your one wackaloon…

  218. Hey, Dodger, you are wasting your time if you are trying to convince ME how bad the Japs were. I know all about those bastards. I really can’t understand where you got the idea that I gave them a pass on ANY of their crimes, that is just nuts.

    I’d be very, very surprised, however, if any of those Japanese war criminals were among the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My brain told me the bastards deserved it, but when I saw the documentary, my eyes told me this was something that should never, ever happen to anyone, and if it happened, as it obviously did, then we all have to make God-damned sure that it will never happen again. There isn’t enough logic in the world to tell me that Hiroshima was OK.

  220. MT: You are an excellent example of the liberal tendency to elevate feelings above thought. This is not a good way to operate in the world of power and politics.

    And would you have preferred for 20 million Japanese to have died in the invasion, as well as millions of our troops?

  221. Mt: It’s really too bad that the UN, which was founded in the hopes of sparing mankind from the scourge of war, has been so disrespected by the very nation that took the leading role in its founding.

    Well, I guess he doesn’t know the history of the UN either, Alger Hiss, and all the games. How the Russians said that the UN was their main way to pass operatives and such during the cold war. Nice choice of saviors.

  222. grackle, unless you have a shareholder’s and creditors list of the Anglo-Persian Oil Co. (now BP) you don’t really know whose toes Mossadegh was stepping on when he nationalized its assets.

    There is no mystery about the fact that the Anglo-Persian Oil Co. was jointly owned by the Iranian government and British entities. The Iranian share of the company was already “nationalized,” and the British could have cared less about the Iranian share of the company. But the fact is that nothing the British did or did not do in this period has anything to do with Iranian hatred of the US. It’s a British-Iranian issue, not an Iranian-US issue.

    Most of the rest of your post is nit-picking sophistry – – whether a coup d’etat can be mounted against a Prime Minister rather than a head of state, how the Shah could be “installed” as ruler by the CIA when legally he was already the ruler.
    In the context of the original discussion, why the Iranians hate America, the fact is that they had democratically elected a leader and a government and saw their choice nullified by a military coup organized by the U.S.A. and a new government, nominally under the Shah, imposed on them, which was subservient to its British and U.S. puppeteers rather than to the needs of the Iranian people as determined by the Iranian people.

    The commentor again has some facts wrong and offers false interpretation of those that are correct. The CIA did not “install” the Shah as asserted by the commentor. The Shah had been ruler for a number of years before any of these events occurred. The CIA cannot “install” a ruler already in power, surely even the commentor can know that. Certainly the CIA was around to lend a helping hand in nullifying the communist Mossadegh’s impending takeover of the Shah’s government: I do not dispute that; I applaud it. An ally, the Shah, requested America’s help to prevent a communist takeover of his friendly government and America gave it. Thank Providence that the CIA used to be somewhat competent and agenda-free otherwise the Russians might own the Middle East lock, stock and barrel as they did Eastern Europe for so many years.

    Your contention that the SAVAK was par for the course in the region just is not true. It was the worst of the worst, on a par with Saddam Hussein’s mukhabarat. More importantly, the Iranians under Mossadegh did not have to fear any kind of torture or terror from their own government, so the change was obviously detrimental and seen as such, particularly by the influential Tudeh (Communist) Party, many of whose members were tortured and killed by the Shah. The surviving Tudeh members and the survivors of the deceased Tudeh members are influential and numerous – – some of them have switched allegiance to the Islamic Revolution and are not going to forget what the Americans have done to their comrades and their families.

    The commentor’s contention that SAVAK was some kind of really, really bad secret police compared to the just merely bad secret police in other Middle Eastern nations of that time seems to be splitting hairs. They all had secret police, they all had torture as an interrogation method but the anti-war pro-Iranian template demands that the commentor paint the Shah’s regime as much more cruel than his counterparts in other Middle Eastern countries. And I’m accused of “sophistry?” Surely it isn’t “nit-picking” to insist on facts in debate and draw a logical picture instead of acquiescing to blame-America-first blather?

    It was good to know that there is no such thing as international law. Most law schools in the U.S.A., the U.K., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, China, Japan, India, etc. all spend considerable sums of money teaching international law. I’m sure they could benefit greatly from your wisdom if you could see fit to inform them that they are blowing vast amounts of money and time, their own and their students’, on something that does not exist. Your question “Who is going to enforce it?” is of such monumental stupidity that it’s not even worth an answer, I’m sure Google can help you but I’m not going to waste my time.

    I never claimed international law isn’t a subject taught in institutions of higher learning all over the world. Indeed, there are a number of futile, worthless, leftist-politics riddled courses being taught in many educational institutions. There are many ways in this world to waste money and time.

    The enemy never pays any attention to international law unless it suits their purposes in propaganda – then they give it lip service – nothing more. Without enforcement so-called ‘international law’ is simply a way for leftists to masturbate verbally.

    Equally crazy is your assertion that the U.S. could only fail to provoke them by ceasing to exist. I never realized we had such a drama queen in our midst. I think you could remove a lot of provocation merely by cutting off Israel from all financial and even military aid unless it evacuates the entire West Bank, settlements and all, within three months of yesterday.

    Oh, I’m sure we could make the enemy temporarily happy by abandoning an ally. But then would come another demand, then another. They are only contented when the West is suffering some sort of set-back or defeat. They only like us when a foot is on our neck. Ultimately only our death or our subjugation will suffice.

    You could also agree to withdraw all troops from Iraq and Afghanistan during the same time frame and pay reparations to Iraq for the damage to life and property occasioned by your unprovoked aggression. Otherwise it’s really hard to take your last paragraph seriously. Hard to take any of the post seriously, in fact. Most of it is just a denial of the obvious based on the most childish reasoning I’ve seen in quite a while.

    We shouldn’t withdraw from Afghanistan because we don’t want the Taliban to harbor more schemers like OBL. Besides, military bases in a couple of well-situated friendly Middle Eastern nations(both with democratically elected governments by the way, the only Islamic nations other than Turkey with real democracies), is just what the doctor ordered to keep a close eye on those pesky Iranians and Syrians. Besides, the governments of both countries have requested the continued presence of US forces and we can’t disappoint allies who are depending on us, now can we?

    I think we are already doing enough to get Iraq back on its feet. Iraq is certainly not due any “reparations” from the US. Victors demand reparation, not the defeated. The deposing of Saddam was anything but unprovoked. He had thirteen long years to live up to his agreements after his first defeat but never came through on a single item. There’s a limit to patience and Saddam found it. Lastly, I have no need for the commentor to take anything I say “seriously.” I am not trying to convince him of anything – my writing is for readers who are not yet addled by anti-US sentiment, readers who can think for themselves instead of kow-towing to every leftist version of recent history.

    On the subject of Saddam not provoking the US the commentor needs to watch some videos of prominent current anti-war types. It’s a lot of fun to hear and see what Albright, Clinton, Edwards and others said about Saddam before the Bush won the Presidency. Just click on the link below:

    http://www.freedomagenda.com/iraq/wmd_quotes.html

  223. I’m sorry, grackle, but it’s a complete waste of time going through your qubbling and nit-picking. My last post dealt with pretty much all the points you raise and I’m not going to go through them again in any detail.

    It seems to me that you missed some of my points (for example whose toes were stepped on when the Anglo-Persian Oil Co. was nationalized) and others you might have gotten but just chose to ignore, raising your initial points again as if I had never responded.

    I say there are many Iranians from all walks of life who hate America with good reason because in response to the nationalization of the Anglo-Persian Oil Co., the CIA (probably in cahoots with the U.K., but who cares?) overthrew the democratically elected Mossadegh government and installed a puppet government headed nominally by the Shah, who ruled as a dictator with the SAVAK to support his regime by terror and torture.

    You say this did not happen, the SAVAK was not so bad, etc.

    I am afraid we are just going to have to agree to disagree.

  224. Calling Stern (Lehi) and Begin (Irgun) terrorists is disingenious. So their political enemies called them (Brits and Ben-Gurion). Actually, they were followers of Revisionist Zionism by Vladimir (Zeev) Zhabotinsky, opposing secularist, Socialist and pro-Stalinist credo of mainstream Zionists (Mapai party of Ben-Gurion). They were religious, pro-Western, at some point anti-British and were copying guerilla tactic of Arabs: ambushes, diversions, retaliation when provoked. They were just as “terroristic” as French Resistance and Russian partisans.
    At first Arab riots in Palestine in 1920, 1921, 1936 and later mainstream Zionists try to cooperate with British authorities and restricted themselves to passive defence. Etzel leaders understood that this does not work: the struggle was unwinnable if all strategic initiative was conceded to Arab gangs. So they form paramilitary units making retaliative attacks on Arab gangs. When Brits began prosecute, and in some cases, execute Jewish fighters, they turn against Brits too. This was their War of Independence, inspired by example of American Revolution.
    This divide of Israel society is actual up to present. Begin’s followers started Likud party, which has also religious wing, and settlers movement, while lefties prolong a socialist, anti-religious tradition of Mapai, and their stupid reflex of bending to European opinion and seeking “peace” with intransingent enemy.

  225. neo-neo, thanks for the material on the Iranian Revolution, of which I had time only to read the last item.

    The story of the disputed drowning is of little significance. Any society, even a democracy, has rumors, conspiracy theories and multiple versions, some more sinister than others, of public events. You posted the story of one such rumor, nothing more, nothing less.

    I am a former long-time member of Amnesty International, and I can tell you that in the days of SAVAK and Saddam Hussein, it was pretty much of a tie as to which of the two security forces, SAVAK or the Iraqi mukhabarat, was the world’s most horrific as to the tortures that they inflicted. Of course, the Syrians were running a close third at the time.

    It’s also true that the Revolutionary Guards were just as brutal as the SAVAK in their everyday tortures (falanga, toenail extraction, cigarette burns, hat-pins, etc.) but the SAVAK were far more imaginative in ways that were truly horrible to contemplate. SAVAK was also more responsive to public pressure from the West – – for example, the leaders of the Communist Party, condemned to death under the Shah, were spared and given life sentences due to an international letter-writing campaign and representations by some prominent world leaders, but after the Islamic Revolution, they were executed by the Revolutionary Guards. The Islamic Revolution also initiated persecution of the Ba’hai religion, during which many young Ba’hai girls were imprisoned, tortured and raped by their guards and then executed.

    In general, torture was a feature of BOTH the Shah’s regime and the Iranian Revolution, but I think from an Iranian point of view, both the SAVAK and the Revolutionary Guards were the result of U.S. meddling in their country’s internal affairs, the former a direct result, the latter an indirect result, but these plagues did not afflict them under the Mossadegh regime and they would definitely consider themselves much worse off due to America.

    I also comment on those who base their views on what they hear from Iranians they may know: the Iranians you are likely to know are refugees from the Islamic Revolution; very very few would be refugees from the Shah. Under the Shah a whole class of middlemen and brokers became wealthy and they had to flee the country when the regime fell. They are fairly modern and Westernized, so they will tend to think well of the Shah and loathe the Islamic Revolution. They are NOT representative of the Iranian people, but they probably do represent the secular bourgeoisie.

  226. I also got a bit of a laugh at Sergey’s claim that it’s “disingenuous” to label the Jewish underground groups Lehi (the Stern Gang) and the Irgun Zvi Leumi as “terrorists,” because they were guerrilla groups.

    These groups captured AND EXECUTED British soldiers who were guilty of nothing more than trying to keep the peace between two warring groups under the terms of their Mandate. They couldn’t wait till the Mandate expired in 1948 and they could finally get the hell out and leave the mess to the natives who made it. Sergey seems to think it’s OK to execute captured British soldiers because the Brits prosecuted and executed the terrorists. That’s hilarious. The British did not execute anyone without first putting him on trial for a capital offence, conducting a fair trial and reaching a just verdict. At that point the captured terrorist was sentenced, and, if the sentence was death, excuted in due course. Irgun and the Stern Gang, on the other hand, kidnapped British soldiers at random and executed them without any kind of trial merely as payback for the British executions.

  227. Oh shut up already. Like Iran needs you to defend them.

    In case you haven’t caught on , they want to destroy us , not because of your obsession over savik, but because we’re a strong country on earth that does not submit to Allah.

    The Khomenists dont give a crap about the irrelevent nonsense you’re spewing.

    I asked you before, and you have yet to answer (or I missed it). Where do you live?

  228. neo-neo sez: “MT, you are an excellent example of the liberal tendency to elevate feelings above thought. This is not a good way to operate in the world of power and politics.”

    On the contrary, N-N, it’s the ONLY way to operate. If you can’t feel the pain of the other guy, you will inflict as much pain as you can on him, and then there will be a blowback. The self-defeating tactics of the Jews and the Americans are the best example of this that I can think of.

    Israel has made the Palestinians suffer for 41 years, but it has not crushed them. On the contrary, they have gained in strength and allies. The Jews have now been forced out of South Lebanon, then out of Gaza and next will come the West Bank.

    The U.S. has been fucking over the people of the Middle East in various ways since the end of WWII, and now they are faced with near-universal hatred, an insurgency that won’t die in Iraq and a deepening quagmire in Afghanistan. The anger and hatred engendered against America as a result of its indifference to the pain of its victims is now forcing them into a $3 trillion war AND hundreds of billions more in “Homeland Security,” all totally avoidable had they recognized the humanity and entitlement to respect and dignity of their Middle Eastern victims and treated them more in accordance with the Golden Rule than with the lex talionis.

    Of course you have to consider that while America is blowing trillions and losing the goodwill of the rest of the world, its commercial rivals are unencumbered by any of the baggage of America – – they are rolling in money, able to educate their kids, keep their population healthy, happy and well-housed and enjoy the respect and goodwill of the rest of the world. Are you surprised that the euro has climbed way past the dollar? That your economy is now running on Chinese money and it’s only a matter of time before investors start losing confidence and pulling out?

    You did not feel the pain that you were causing and now your victims are learning how to fight back and it’s costing you big-time. How smart was that?

    N/N also asks – – “and would you prefer for 20 million Japanese to have died in the invasion as well as millions of our own troops?”

    Sorry but I just don’t buy that the only alternative to Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be the death of 20 million Japs and millions of our own. The fact is that both alternatives are unacceptable. One of the reasons there is so much shit in the world, so many things happening that shouldn’t be happening, is that people are just too damn intellectually lazy to continue to search for alternative solutions when they think they have one solution already in hand.

    Somebody is just going to have to say NO! No to Fat Man and Little Boy and NO to the 20 million dead Japs. It’s just become too damn easy to push buttons and “solve” problems. But the problems are solved at the expense of enormous human suffering (OK, so it’s not us.) But a painless solution that inflicts pain on somebody on the other side of the world is not painless.

  229. The same is true for French Resistance and Russian partisans. They see situation as a war, and act accordingly. Every enemy solger was a fair game. Guerilla fighters could not afford luxury to play justice: they make war. Brits only make appeareances of due process, and often execute Jews for the crime of defending themselves.
    Terrorism is defined as deliberately targeting civilian non-combatants, so this is a war crime. “Stern gang” never did this. Guerilla warfare is a war, not a war crime. And I believe that without this clandestine resistance Brits hardly get out of Palestine so quickly and would not choose to cede power to Ben-Gurion group as more palatable for them.

  230. MT: If the both existing alternatives are unacceptable to you, this means only that the reality is unacceptable. So you cling to fantasy Neverland, where you need not to make hard decisions. Every comfortably rich liberal can afford to live in this non-existent universe. But serious people can not. They, alas, must make the least bad choises among many horrible.

  231. Well put Sergey, on the shallow nature of self-righteous indignation; From “The U.S. has been fucking over the people of the Middle East in various ways since the end of WWII…”, to the heroic, “Somebody is just going to have to say NO! No to Fat Man and Little Boy…”; How did it escape me that it’s so obviously simple; That the arabs and moslems apparently have no significant culpability or responsibility in their own pathetic circumstances, and were it not for the presence of America and the Jews defending their own interests in the middle east, there would (apparently) be no problems there? You’re such a clown Bozo, much like the Joker, it must be quite intoxicating for you to get the attention you’re getting here, must bring a big broad smile of self-satisfaction to your face… But as Sergey says, “… serious people can not. they, alas, must make the least bad choices…” in the real world… So, pick you up on another of Neo’s threads… Perhaps you could lecture us about global warming, that should be good for another laugh…

  232. Sergey, in addition to their murders of captive British soldiers, itself a despicable crime – – all soldiers have a responsibility to their prisoners and certainly no right to murder them – – the Irgun and/or Stern Gang (I can’t keep their crimes straight anymore) committed other acts of terrorism, such as blowing up the King David Hotel with the loss of almost 100 lives. They may or may not have committed a massacre at Deir Yassin, as it seems the evidence is not conclusive, but they’ve committed enough other crimes to warrant the death penalty.

    I like what you said about having to make hard choices between the bad and the worse and in general I agree with it but there are some choices where the bad is so bad that it is unacceptable. I believe in such cases the urgency of events can often force a solution that might not be apparent to a bunch of armchair generals leisurely debating the problem 60-plus years later, but the key to it all is that somebody just has to say NO. Long and short of it is, I am NOT convinced that a determined effort was made in this case to explore all possible alternatives.

  233. Oh, yeah, one other thing – – the Brits got out of Palestine exactly as prescribed in their Mandate. Not one second sooner, not one second later. They had no reason to be in Palestine apart from the performance of their duties under the Mandate, nothing to gain from it and they were happy to go. It is absurd to claim that they were forced out early by Jewish terrorist gangs.

  234. I don’t buy this distinction that Sergey and Perfected Democrat are selling, the one between “serious people” and “clowns.” When you think about it, “serious people” means somebody who can push the button and blow away 100,000 or 200,000 and “clowns” are the ones who can’t. In their fucked-up definitions.

    “Serious people” basically is a pattern for a typical conservative, a selfish prick who doesn’t give a shit about the harm he does to others, and the “clowns” are the ones who really see – – and more importantly, FEEL – – the human dimensions of their actions. It behooves politicians, for example, to sell themselves as “serious people,” because “serious” somehow gets translated into “strong.” They are “strong” because they can bring pain to so many people, always with the justification that “something worse” will happen if they don’t.

    Ever notice? Ever notice how the “something worse” is always some bullshit loony-toons scenario of catastrophe – – we had to invade Iraq because if we didn’t, we’d be open to nuclear blackmail from Saddam. We had to drop the bomb because otherwise 20 million Japs woulda died. What are the REAL odds of Saddam blackmailing or attacking the world’s mightiest nuclear power with nukes? What are the REAL odds that if the bomb wasn’t dropped the only alternative anyone could have come up with was a frontal assault on Japan costing the lives of 20 million Japs and 5 million Americans? Granted, something higher than zero – – but not by much.

    But “serious people” don’t want to take those odds. Better to drop the bomb now. Better to invade now. You know, it looks to me like both the “clowns” and the “serious people” are driven by irrational forces – – the “clowns” by love, the “serious people” by fear. And if anyone wants my opinion as to why the world today is so fucked up, I’d say it’s because we’ve been led around for too long by “serious people,” who it turns out, aren’t “serious” at all, only fakes. People whose fear leads them from one disaster to another, from Viet Nam (“If we don’t fight ’em here, we’ll have to fight ’em in California” – – yeah right!!) to Iraq (“Omigod, he’s got nukes, he’s got nukes!!)

    So to all you “serious people” out there, this “clown” says, put a sock in it. Nobody’s scared and nobody needs YOU to keep the dark away.

  235. I’m sorry, grackle, but it’s a complete waste of time going through your quibbling and nit-picking. My last post dealt with pretty much all the points you raise and I’m not going to go through them again in any detail. It seems to me that you missed some of my points (for example whose toes were stepped on when the Anglo-Persian Oil Co. was nationalized) and others you might have gotten but just chose to ignore, raising your initial points again as if I had never responded.

    I have made it quite clear that British stockholders lost out when Iran seized the British share of the Anglo-Persian Oil Co. If the commentor has contrary thoughts he should openly express them instead of these oblique references to “toes.” As for other points I “might have gotten but just chose to ignore” if the commentor will list them I will attempt a reply.

    Also, the Iranian share of the company was already nationalized and had been from the start yet the commentor insists on referring to the “nationalization” of the company. It’s what you do when you are wrong – deny, deny, deny.

    Even though the subject of my original post was Iranian hatred of the US and Israel, not British – Iranian relations I feel compelled to set the record straight when the commentor spews his false history.

    I say there are many Iranians from all walks of life who hate America with good reason because in response to the nationalization of the Anglo-Persian Oil Co., the CIA (probably in cahoots with the U.K., but who cares?) overthrew the democratically elected Mossadegh government and installed a puppet government headed nominally by the Shah, who ruled as a dictator with the SAVAK to support his regime by terror and torture.

    Here we see the possible origins of the commentor’s historical misconceptions. He’s apparently had conversations with disgruntled Iranians who have fed him their cracked version of events. By the way, the Shah was a monarch, not a dictator – there is quite a difference but such distinctions matter not if you are determined to rail against historical fact.

    Note the fervid insistence that the Shah was “installed” by the CIA when the fact is that the Shah had already been ruling for a goodly number of years before the CIA was ever on the scene. Once these terrorist-apologizers get hold of a misconception they never let go whether it’s true or not.

    You say this did not happen, the SAVAK was not so bad, etc.

    I never glossed over the fact of the Iranian secret police – merely pointed out that all the Middle Eastern nations of that day also had them and most still have them. For instance, present day Iran has a secret police and to say the least they are not gentle in their methods. Click on the link below to read about one of their episodes. But the lefty template demands that the Iran of the Shah’s era be held up as exceptionally cruel, thus the commentor’s pathetic assertion that Iran was different from other Middle Eastern nations in this respect.

    I am afraid we are just going to have to agree to disagree.

    Indeed we will.

    http://www.iranfocus.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=1771

  236. Fear? Make it responsibility. Some things simply should not be given a chance to happen (like nukes in hands of mad mullas or insane Suddam). Remember, every government is responsible only for security of its own citizen, not for well-being or even life of anybody else, if this contradicts its primal obligation. By the nature of militarist, totalitarian regimes it is impossible reliably estimate their WMD potential before occupation. Japans could have make a bomb of their own, and Truman could not know this for sure. He simply had no right to take a risk.
    See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_David_Hotel_bombing
    You find here a lot of facts contradicting your assertions:
    1) Bombing was a decisive factor for British autorities not to prolong mandate.
    2) This operation was not an Irgun initiative. They obeyed orders from Hagana leadership.
    3) All who could be harmed by explosion were warned to evacuate at 30 min before explosion, including Arab servants, French consulate and journalists. Brits simply ignored the warning, saying “We do not accept orders from the Jews”.
    4) Irgun made everything possible to avoid causalities. The goal was demonstrate capabilities, not to harm anybody.

  238. False statement my ass. You’d better learn to read. I stated specifically it was Irgun AND/OR the Stern Gang, which means one, or the other, or both, that blew up the King David Hotel. I can’t keep every single crime the two of them committed straight in terms of who did what, and it doesn’t really make a lot of difference at this point in time.

  239. MT, check your facts. Lehi never captured British soldiers (so could not kill prisoners). They assasinated military and political leaders, for example, Lord Moyn, for his collaboration with Arab gangs and inciting anti-semitism.

  240. Hey, Mikey!

    I get it! I PROMISE to VISUALIZE WORLD PEACE! JUST SAY NO!

    We CAN all GET ALONG! The UN will SAVE THE WORLD!

    Practice RANDOM ACTS OF KINDNESS! WAR IS NOT HEALTHY FOR CHILDREN AND OTHER LIVING THINGS!

    GAIA IS MAD AT US AND WE MUST CHANGE!

    Happy now? (And please note that I never called Arabs “ragheads” or “sand monkeys” or any of the other epithets that “racist bigots” usually spout. I just called you on your evident dislike of Nipponese folks. “Racist” is an easy thing to call somebody, but you have no idea who I like or dislike, or what my feelings are toward other ethnicities. I, on the other hand, don’t use the “some of my best friends are…” argument that you use: “my neighbours and friends are Japanese”…and then you go right back to calling them “Japs”. Nope, no bigotry here, folks, move along…).

    You are, when all is said and done, an intellectually shallow maroon.

  241. Gee I forgot all about this..

    There’s an hour-long weekly radio show called the Middle East Radio Forum. The show’s historian has been talking about the history of Iran , and he’s been on the CIA plot for the past few weeks.

    http://middleeastradioforum.org/programarchives.html

    Here are topics that have an audio download you can listen to free:

    3-16
    Historical Chronology and Analysis #93 -Iran in 1953, Project Ajax, the CIA Coup and his current events analysis

    4-6
    Historical Chronology and Analysis #94 – Iran 1953- seizing victory from the jaws of defeat and his current events analysis.

    It’s a great show, and I recommend you guys listen to it.

    Note they make the older archives unavailable as the weeks go by, I think the first clip will be gone by the end of the week, so listen to it or d/l it as soon as you can.

  243. MT: “Well, my thanks to Douglas for the paper on dhimmitude. You’re right, I did not know what it meant.”

    You’re still here lecturing others on history and their knowledge of the Middle East and what our foreign policy should be, yet – as you’ve already admitted- you didn’t even understand the title of this post?

    Why is anyone even responding to you anymore?

  244. I’m not lecturing anyone on anything, Douglas, I’m sharing what I know and you’re sharing what you know. Obviously I don’t know everything that you know and I’m pretty certain (unless you’re a professor of Middle Eastern history) that you don’t know everything I know.

    You’re an arrogant ass. If you think my not knowing what dhimmitude was disqualifies me from ever expressing any opinion on Middle East politics, that’s hilarious. Why don’t you throw out some other arcana at the group and for every one you catch not knowing, ring a gong and haul the guy off with a hook. BONGGG! Wrong answer. YOU can’t post anymore on this site. Jeeziz, what a schmuck.

    Why is anyone even responding to me anymore? Damned if I know. Maybe they can’t resist bringing light into darkness. Meantime, YOU don’t have to. Give yourself a break. I’ll manage to get over it somehow.

  245. Sergey, I think maybe you should look into some courses on elementary logic. “And/or” in particular seems to be giving you some trouble. As do arguments framed in the alternative.

    I thank you for pointing out some of the things about the Stern Gang that differentiate them from Irgun, but for the purposes of my arguments in the thread, the distinctions between them were not really all that relevant. I’ll still stand by my original statements about the Stern Gang and/or Irgun, because the “and/or” allows for the statement to be correct with or without Stern Gang participation.

  246. MT,

    When I was an undergraduate student (1978-82) at the University of New Hampshire my room mate at our off campus apartment shared with four guys was a devout Iranian Shia. I mean, this guy had a short wave radio and every night he listened to the speeches from Tehran by Khomeini. He was also a vehement Jew hater. I also knew about a dozen other Iranians on campus who were no longer Muslims. They were socialists and Communists who had to flee Iran after the Revolution. They had helped bring Khomeini to power. And after he got power, he turned on the socialists and Communists viciously, killing them and driving them into exile. They were apostates and unbelievers, and as such had no place in the new Islamic Republic.

    They were all very cool towards my room mate, because of his religious affiliation and because the Muslims had persecuted them violently.

    One of my economics professors was a Christian Iranian, and he too was not exactly friendly with my room mate.

    The fact is that the body count from Islamic terror and jihad INSIDE Iran exceeded that of the Shah’s secret police. I’m not excusing what those guys did, don’t get me wrong on that one. However, instead of succumbing to the tu quoque logic, why not take a good gander at the principle of proportionality.

    Iran under the Shah was a country that was Westernizing – something that the Gramscian Brigade here in the West does not at all like. Iran under the rule of the Mullahs is retrograde, terroristic, brutal, and ultimately will start a nuclear war and certainly intends to use its nukes against Israel when it gets them.

    Having identified yourself as a former member of Amnesty International, it sort of politically identifies you. I’m not going to excoriate you for your Leftist leanings, because that’s pretty much a non starter. But for God’s sake man, I left the Left years ago for compelling intellectual and moral reasons. Had I remained a committed Gramscian Marxist, today I would have been hard put to excuse and explain away the current alliance between socialists and Muslims. It would be downright embarrassing. And that is why I burned my bridges and cannot under any circumstances see myself going back.

  247. “my not knowing what dhimmitude was disqualifies me from ever expressing any opinion on Middle East politics”
    Yes, this absolutely disqualifies you. Such fundamental element of Islam theology and social practice can’t be ignored in any discussion on ME. It depicts Islam as a political system of institutionalized discrimination and intolrance and explain root causes of every conflict of Umma with the whole civilized world, and also justifies all forms of resistance to Islamic domination, including terroristic in their nature.

  248. Sergey: Isn’t it amazing how he admits to not knowing about major components of the societal framework of the middle east and yet he sees noproblem with his analysis.

    The arrogance of these ignorant Leftists is astounding to me.

  249. MT, I need not courses in elementary logic. I have graduated Department of Mathematics and Mechanics of Moscow State University, the world leading institution in the field. I even read courses in elementary logic to post-grad philology students. My objections to your statesments about Jewish resistance groups were not about logic. Formally they are correct, but they lump together very different ideological and political positions that need to be analysed separately.
    Both Lehi and Irgun leaders were religious fundamentalists and militant nationalists, but in anything else they differ. Stern formulated, very clearly, what can be called Hebrew variant of Liberation Theology, rich in Marxist ideas of anti-imperialist armed struggle using terror and underground conspirative cells, in quite Bolshevik fashion, in violation of all existing international norms and professing non-cooperation with any state powers.
    Irgun leaders, instead, were recognizing necessity of cooperation with democratic western countries, using world opinion for defending Zionist cause, after starting WWII they demand cease all attacts on British authorities, seeng Britain as an ally against Hitler and his Arab allies. Exactly here the splitting occured. History shown that Irgun was right.
    So, Lehi in modern therminology was ultra-left, while Irgun – far-right. Both were against mainstream Zionists, secular and socialist, but on radically different grounds. This did not exlude their cooperation in existentional war for survival of Jewish state, of course, but ignore these distinctions is, indeed, ignorance, so typical to all liberals in their rants about ME conflict.

  250. To Sergey, Vince P. and Douglas – – I can’t say that at this point I am surprised by your collective ignorance, but that doesn’t mean I will stop trying to help you.

    I actually know quite a bit about dhimmitude – – not because of professional expertise but because it is fairly common knowledge. We had actually learned about the status of non-Muslims and the special provisions made for Christians and Jews back when I was in Sunday school, which is why I am not impressed by anyone’s claim to knowledge of that fact.

    What I happened not to know was the Arabic word dhimmi, which I have no doubt is commonly used in the sacred canon of anti-Arab, anti-Muslim hate literature mostly written by Jewish “experts” on “the Muslim mind,” “the Arab culture,” etc. who with their pet Arab collaborators are very, very popular in the American media these days. They get picked up and quoted all over and I guess it adds a touch of faux scholarship if one can throw the odd Arabic word into the mix. I love it that you can pretend to claim expertise on a subject by knowing what “dhimmi” means when others don’t – – great way of “winning” all your arguments. The childishness of this approach is mind-boggling but hey! whatever drives your engine.

  251. Sergey, I don’t want to disrespect your knowledge of the political differences between the Stern Gang and the Irgun, which I found interesting and in fact I thank you for it.

    My point however, the use of terrorism by Zionists in the establishment of the State of Israel, did not depend on the political differences between the various terrorist groups. Obviously, there had to be some significant differences between Irgun and the Stern Gang or they both would have been one group. What those differences were may be important in the context of a discussion of the political composition of the Zionist underground, but they are totally unimportant in a discussion centering around Arab refugees and the issue of whether they left voluntarily or were pushed out. If the argument is whether or not they were forced out by terrorist violence, it is not of much importance to determine WHICH terrorist group, if any, pushed them out, or even if the groups whose violence pushed them out were terrorists or not. (In the case of the 70,000 Arabs rounded up from their homes and trucked to the Jordan River, this was done by Haganah forces under General Yigal Alon.)

    So, in the context of THIS discussion, it really matters not which particular group or groups contributed to the massacres or other acts of violence or even apparent violence which drove the Arabs off their land, the point I was making was, that by one Jewish group or another, the Arabs WERE terrorized and as a result DID leave their lands under fear of violence.

  252. MT: It’s laughable if you think your education about dhimmitude was sufficient enough even though you never heard the word before. this is what is so typical about Leftist.. they’re so damn lazy.

    You heard christians were second-class citizens in sunday school when you were 10 years ago.. AND THAT’S IT. that’s your whole intellectual exploration on that!.

    thank you for demostrating for real what some people have said about Leftists..and that is they have a mentality stuck in childhood.

  253. “The Jewish exodus from Arab lands refers to the 20th century expulsion or mass departure of Jews, primarily of Sephardi and Mizrahi background, from Arab and Islamic countries. The migration started in the late 19th century, but accelerated after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. According to official Arab statistics, 856,000 Jews left their homes in Arab countries from 1948 until the early 1970s. Some 600,000 resettled in Israel, [1] leaving behind property valued today at more than $300 billion.[2][3] Jewish-owned real-estate left behind in Arab lands has been estimated at 100,000 square kilometers (four times the size of the State of Israel).”
    So Arabs have stolen from Jews four times more land than the whole Israel territory, using terror as a method of expulsion. This simple fact makes all this whinning abot “land grab” ridiculous.

  254. Fredhjr: And after he got power, he turned on the socialists and Communists viciously, killing them and driving them into exile.

    Just to let you know, but maybe you already know, the reason is not that they were communists or unbelievers. Useful idiots always end up being taken down after they put the new regime into place. the new regime that was using them before sees them as traitors. They worked for the demise of their own space because they didn’t like it. Well the new leaders know that they are going to like the new leaders stuff even less than the old way they were too stupid to appreciate.

    Those that would turn on their own people are those that no regime can afford to have.

  255. I have an update to this stuff I said earlier:

    Gee I forgot all about this..

    There’s an hour-long weekly radio show called the Middle East Radio Forum. The show’s historian has been talking about the history of Iran , and he’s been on the CIA plot for the past few weeks.

    http://middleeastradioforum.org/programarchives.html

    Here are topics that have an audio download you can listen to free:

    3-16
    Historical Chronology and Analysis #93 -Iran in 1953, Project Ajax, the CIA Coup and his current events analysis

    4-6
    Historical Chronology and Analysis #94 – Iran 1953- seizing victory from the jaws of defeat and his current events analysis.

    It’s a great show, and I recommend you guys listen to it.

    Note they make the older archives unavailable as the weeks go by, I think the first clip will be gone by the end of the week, so listen to it or d/l it as soon as you can.

    Here’s the update:

    This Sunday, historian Dr. Steve Carol returns to discuss Iran – the significance of Project Ajax for Iran, the US, and the future, and of course his exclusive “Dateline — Middle East” current events analysis. Call in with questions, 602-508-0960 or toll free at 1-888-960-9696. Available in the Phoenix area on 960 am and anywhere on my website, Welcome to MERF where old shows are also available in my archives section. Please spread the word about this important show. Wm Wolf, host Middle East Radio Forum

  256. I have to say, neo-neocon » Blog Archive » They don’t call him “Dhimmi Carter” for nothing, but perhaps they should call him Neville is a honestly nice thoughts. I’d like to offer you my thanks a bunch. Cheers, Fabulous

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