Under the shadow of the Iraq war, Israel practices asassination....

America, your version, love it or leave it, eh?

The Pilgrims didn't want to leave England, they just wanted freedom, and didn't have the freedom to try and change it.

 

Under the shadows. Ha!

Now the attack of Israelis and clamor agaist US aid for them is done "under the shadow" of outrage at Israeli occupation. And people like ART are suggesting a political validiity and moral strength for the likes of Hamas, a current pet project of Al Queda. bin Laden is getting to out our weak appeasement minded brethren. "Just offer up the Jews (and the Americans) as the sacrificial lambs and we'll leave you alone". But do ART and co. think if we throw them the Israeli bone, their hunger will be sated.

Do we all forget the years of lobbing shells and missiles into Israel from the Golan Heights and the West Bank? Do we forget that these territories were siezed after a suprise multi nation Arab attack in 1967, that was repelled? The Arabs might want to pick up the pieces, since they caused the mess. 180,000,000 Arabs and they couldn't mop up 3,000,000 Jews.

I like ART's dismissal of the Japanese comparison. The only difference is that the Japansese sensibly surrendered unconditionally, and the Arabs vowed a thousand year war. The fourth Riech?

 

Absurd. Jews believe that everyone who lives a righteous life, Jewish or not, can go to heaven. They do not preach to kill the "nonbelievers." Christians are the same way (except certain denominations who believe that nobody but them can go to heaven, but at least they try to resolve this through preaching and gifts, not murder). And we are talking about the present, of course, not many centuries ago, when some in power perverted or ignored the Christian tenets. Whether the call to kill infidels and destroy moderate Muslim regimes to create fundamentalist ones is a perversion of the religion or not, I do not know. But I do know that it is common teaching in much of the Islamic world to kill or move out non-believers and set up religious governments, and there is much sympathy by many masses for those who pursue these goals. So no, if the roles were reversed, we'd still be civilized!

 

Every religion has its own belief systems, and they all think they are right, and all have killed in the name of their religion.

I don't need to be a Christian, Jew, Druid, Buddhist to know that someone hates me for their belief systems.

Christianity has a history of killing those who did not accept their belief systems too.

In order to make this a non faith based issue, you have to put your own personal faith aside first.

 

Religious extremism is political ideology disguised. Don't kid yourself. Bin Laden is a megalomoniacal power hunter, not an apostle of Mohammed.

 

You just ignored the point I made. That Christianity and Judaism were not CREATED to be intolerant, and Christianity today is very TOLERANT. The world strives to be civilized today, except for many Islamic countries. The history, particularly the very old and bad history, is just that for a reason, and the black eyes in Christianity were perversions of the teachings. Whether the current acts of fundamentalists in Islam are perversions, I don't know, but they are modern and their support is widespread!

 

I don't personally think anyone who advocates killing is an apostle of Mohamed, nor Jesus, nor Buddha, etc.

That is why I prefer to take religion out of the issue, and just deal with criminals on the level of common law and common sense, not on the basis of religious principles.

War on religious principles is a war of self righteousness.

 

While supplies last!

 

Not sure if that's true in the case of Mohamed, at least not from my history class on Islam, nor by the excerpts I've seen and the comments of many educated people who've read the Koran. However, I don't pretend to be any expert on Mohamed. But regardless, that is what is being taught and preached now, and it has a lot of sympathy from the masses. That is the problem!!

 

Released: November 20, 2001

Who Is the More Dangerous Enemy? The Terrorists—Or Our College Professors?

By Edwin A. Locke

America, it is said, is faced with a new kind of war—a type of war that we have never faced in our history—a war of terror in which the enemy is hidden and faceless. This is true—but not in the way that the media and our leaders have indicated.

Consider these facts. We have chosen to fight only one country, Afghanistan, despite the fact that many different countries, including Iran and Iraq, have supported terrorism, and Bin Laden, for years. We have declared that we will not deliberately hit civilian targets, thus openly inviting the Taliban to hide its soldiers and weapons in civilian locations. We constantly apologize for civilian injuries. We drop food that undoubtedly is consumed by Taliban soldiers. We constantly re-assure the Muslim world that we have no wish to harm them, even though most of these countries wish nothing more than to destroy us totally. We even ask these countries to be part of our coalition against terrorism. (Are we hoping that they will declare war on themselves?) We announce that we want the Taliban "moderates" (who presumably are slightly less bloodthirsty than the "extremists") to be part of any future Afghan government.

What kind of a war is this? Would any Western leader during World War II have dreamed of avoiding all civilian targets, dropping food to the Nazis, and offering them a share in the future government of Germany?

Yes, this is a new kind of war—not a total war, but a war combining bombs with compassion—sort of like combining imprisonment with a health spa. We are afraid to declare an actual, full-scale war, because the real hidden and faceless enemy we are confronted with is: moral self-doubt. We are afraid of people not liking us; we are afraid of hurting too many people; we are afraid of the prospect of destroying the Taliban totally. We are afraid, because we are not certain we are right.

What happened in the 60 years since World War II? Our leading citizens went to college. Before that war most leading intellectuals were Communists, but that "ideal" eventually faded, as its disastrous consequences became evident. Left-wing idealism was gradually supplanted in the last half of the past century by skepticism. The new assault was not specifically directed against capitalism and freedom but against the foundations on which they rested: reason and moral certainty. Above all, the skeptics hated reason—reason that made possible the triumph of the Enlightenment and the West's emergence from the religiously dominated Dark Ages. The skeptics did not seek to supplant reason with religious dogma; rather they argued that reason was "limited," that it could not really know truth. They asserted that reason had nothing to say about moral values, that moral judgments were just a reflection of the society one happens to come from and were only an expression of a subjective, personal preference.

Read the comments of the leading "post-modernist," University of Illinois professor Stanley Fish. He asserts, in reference to the World Trade Center bombing, that: "there can be no independent standard for determining which of many rival interpretations of an event is the true one." Universal absolutes, he says, are "empty rhetoric." We cannot, he says, call the terrorists, either "evil" or "irrational." We can only say, in effect: I see that you want to kill us all but, speaking from my own point of view, I would really prefer that you didn't! Professors like Dr. Fish have infected several generations with a bacterium far more virulent than anthrax: the plague of moral relativism. According to these post-modernists, the United States, the first country founded on the principle of individual rights, the country of reason, freedom and the pursuit of happiness, is objectively no better than any primitive dictatorship; we just happen to like our system better.

Could any man or any nation fight a successful war if they accepted such a premise? In this respect the terrorists have an advantage over us. Although they are evil and irrational, they feel no doubts at all about the rightness of their cause—the cause of spreading death and destruction. Our superior weapons will do us no good if we do not possess the moral certainty that we, as Americans, stand objectively for the good—good because we are pro-life on this earth, pro-man and pro-happiness. A hand-wringing, self-doubting superpower is no match for dedicated primitives anxious to die for their cause. We have an absolute right to defend ourselves using every weapon at our disposal until the enemy is totally defeated. The struggle is not between opponents who happen to have different personal preferences; the struggle is between the morality of life and the morality of death.

Our most worrisome enemy is not Osama bin Laden and his cohorts—rather, it is the corrupt little college professors who have striven relentlessly to destroy their students' confidence in their power to think and to make moral judgments. If we reject the mind-killing professors, we will have no trouble defeating the man-killing terrorists.

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Edwin A. Locke, Ph.D., is a senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute in Marina del Rey, Calif.

http://www.aynrand.org/medialink/