"Those People" that RS7 was talking about are the Islamic fundamentalists ( correct me if I am wrong RS7 ), and yes, they really do hate us.
maybe this, and maybe that, and maybe the evil imperialist israelis got together with George Bush to take over the universe, the people celebrating the attack were just doing it for fun, actually they really like us, blah blah blah. Come on guys, you've got to recognise propaganda when you see it. I could understand an illiterate peasant in Iran believing that crap, but when an intelligent american sees that it should either make him laugh or make him angry. Otherwise it makes him a sucker.
EC, no, these people were not "the French", you know that. They were clearly palestinians. This is documented. And they were not "chanting" ....they were celebrating. Because they are ignorant and uneducated and uncivilized. And you are right about the people rioting after the Rodney King verdict. They were not rioting in support of Rodney King. They were looting and rioting because they were frustrated and felt they were ALL persecuted, and Rodney King was just a symbol of them all. Which of course was an unjustifiable reaction. They used the acquittal of the police who were clearly guilty as an excuse to loot and they went way too far with criminal acts. They not only looted, but they beat innocent motorists. This was a case that had no similarities to the celebrants in the middle east reveling over the deaths of what they thought were Americans. But were actually the deaths of people from 80+ countries that accomplished nothing but adding fuel to the fires of hatred and bigotry. I see no comparison. And I will kick your butt in the football league
my exact thoughts when i read your post. the funny thing about us americans is we think we have a free press. speaking of sucker...
Bryan, you have lost me. What do you mean? Are you agreeing with Dotslash, or disagreeing? I can't decipher what your point is. He was being sarcastic yet you are agreeing with him. Are you agreeing with his entire post, or the part you quoted which seemed out of context with the rest?
again just for the purpose of perspective, and only for that purpose, remember the scenes of Americans celebrating, dancing, etc. in Times Square on VJ-Day, celebrating the nuclear vaporization of 150,000+ Japanese civilians, women, children, elderly... Were they right? were they wrong? was the dancing justified given their pain and the relief from the tragedy of war? were they ignorant or uncivilized? was Truman justified, knowing what he did? does it matter from whose perspective? the American? the Japanese? the politician's? the expectant mother's? just saying that these are both ugly and complex examples of man's inhumanity to man, and sometimes not easily analyzed in black and white terms. (note: I have no idea of the answers to the above )
up unitl 1979? most Inranians were normal educated, capitalist, free loving, civilized, etc. people until a coup of minority religious hardliners took over. So many of those peasants who are there now. are oppressed. but still mostly educated leftovers of a great nation. I became educated on this matter by Iranian friends who fled. Out of respect for these guys, they and most of Iran are not anything comparable to Al qaida, terrorist, desperate angered people. But in the middle East anyone (Typically fanatics (lot's of em) with another agenda) who says "support Palestine, hate America," does draw immediate support from people who don't know any better and anyone who has a heart for the Palestinians. I didn't know much about all this, but these guys love America and all that, so I wouldn't want them to be thrown into the category of "crazy Arabs", but they're from an objective point of view, which reminds me that I'm an admittedly Dumb American.
Christopher Hitchens Macbeth in Mesopotamia ... There are three simultaneous clusters of argument in play. First comes the question of justification. Is Saddam to be removed because he possesses weapons of mass destruction, or because he has used poison gas and chemical weapons in Kurdistan, or because he has had indirect contact with Al Qaeda, or because he poses a menace to his neighbors? Second comes the question of feasibility and, more or less simultaneously, of advisability. Might not a military strike against the Baathists make a bad situation worse, not just in Iraq but in the entire Middle East? Third comes the question of quo warranto: By what right would the United States appoint itself the arbiter of Iraqi and Arab affairs? Even when disentangled, these threads are tenuous, and tenuous in their relationship to one another. Still, a supporter of intervention might argue as follows: The United States, especially after September 11, has a right or even a duty to act pre-emptively against any regime that even looks at it in the wrong way. And its opportunist handwringing "allies" in Europe and the Arab world would be secretly delighted if Washington did what they cannot do for themselves by doing away with Saddam. The Iraqi people might or might not fill the streets with joyous demonstrations at their own deliverance, but they would have been given a chance to have a democratic life, and they would be free from the sanctions and from other obstacles to civilized normality. (As a beautiful but seldom-mentioned side benefit, the influence of the revolting Saudis, in the region and in America, would be correspondingly reduced.) An opponent might argue that the inspections offer a better chance of containing the deadly weaponry, and also of observing the rights of sovereign states. Invasion might cause much death and destruction, and exert a destabilizing effect on the region in general. It might also trigger the use of the very weapons whose removal was its ostensible justification. Moreover, the United States cannot just proclaim itself as the forcible maker and unmaker of Arab governments, and this caution would apply with redoubled force to a President who is simultaneously the patron and armorer of General Sharon. There is an in-between argument, which can be heard among Bush officials in Washington and also among Iraqi and Kurdish exiles and oppositionists. In its Bush version, this argument says you can't announce that you will remove a regime and then not keep your pledge. In its Iraqi dissident form, it says that you can't subject the Iraqi people to the cruelty of sanctions for so long while leaving the despot in place. The first version is grotesque; the second version has some honor to it. (And those who simply call for lifting the sanctions are inviting Saddam Hussein to exact or rather to extract his customary percentage of every import license, and thus acquire the sinews of rearmament.) A dirty secret is involved here. From the US point of view, the present regime in Iraq is nearly ideal. It consists of a strong Sunni Muslim but approximately secular military regime. All it needs is a new head: Saddamism without Saddam. Mesopotamia means "between two rivers," and we are, like Macbeth himself, "in blood stepped in so far that should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o'er." The United States had at least a hand in the coup that brought Saddam to power. It encouraged him in his attack on Iran and in the filthy war that followed. At the very time of his worst conduct in Kurdistan, Washington was his best friend. When he plotted to straighten the Kuwaiti frontier in his favor, he was given the greenest of lights. This is a record of continuing shame. However--and one cannot underscore this enough--these, too, were all interventions in the affairs of Iraq. And if there can be interventions one way, in favor of the regime, there is at least a potential argument that an intervention to cancel such debts would be justifiable. The "peace" forces may riposte that this is illogical and that all interventions are equally obnoxious. However, we have before us the example of liberated Kurdistan. The Kurdish autonomous area in northern Iraq is an unintended consequence of the last bungled Gulf War. In this enclave there are the rudiments of pluralism, civil society and a free press. Some part of what we owe the Kurdish people has been repaid, and as a result of civilian and international pressure rather than any Western grand design. Could the same success be repeated across Iraq, without endangering what has been won? We cannot know for sure, because the Administration refuses to say whether it wants a military junta in Baghdad, a monarchy, a vassal--or even an Iraqi state at all. Given the open rehearsals for invasion, there can be no "security" excuse for this weird silence. Citizens should be demanding that our rulers publish a clear statement both of war aims and political objectives. The long-suffering inhabitants of Iraq deserve to hear and debate this, and we have not just a right but a duty to do so as well. ------ http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020819&s=hitchens
IT was a joke; as in the French hate us also; pretty much everyone does. Anyways ...I must admit u have a solid team...