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A Gaming War Between Islam and the West?
The Washington Post has up an article looking at a burgeoning venue for political expression: gaming. Between 'The Quest for Bush', Counter-Strike mods, and more serious titles with a political slant, the political arena is quickly claiming gamers for their own. It's not just politics either; there are some excellent titles being released that attempt some truly insightful social commentary. From the article: "'UnderAsh,' released by Afkar Media in 2002, views the first intifada from the eyes of Ahmad, a Palestinian teenager resisting the Israeli occupation. Last year a sequel was released. A teaser to 'UnderSiege,' which tells the stories of five Palestinian families during the second intifada, shows a Palestinian teenager being shot on the street; an Israeli soldier appears to pound him with a concrete block seconds later. 'Our games are not propaganda,' Kasmiya says. 'Our games are a reflection of our history -- past or present. The fact is, most movies, most TV shows, most video games put Muslims in a bad light, so we have to try to tell our side of the story.'" Commentary from GamePolitics is also available.
Just in case the article writer (and the media) hadn't noticed, there are plenty of Muslims in the west too. Come to that most of the East is full of Chinese people, who on the whole are about as Muslim as a a beer flavour sausage wrapped in bacon.
Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
The problem is that the Palestinians don't accept that. They have been offered their own state and a place at the table of nations time and time again, and have always rejected it because the Palestinian political parties (and all too many everyday Palestinians) openly call for the destruction of Israel.
Just because the facts seem to get ignored on both sides of this issue:
A brief history of the area now known as Israel...
The Cannanites were there first and were defeated by the Israelites
The Israelites were defeated by the Babylonian empire
The Persian empire under Cyrus the Great(which by the way was not Muslim) then defeated the Babylonians
Alexandet the Great and the Greek army then took the land from the Persians
The Greeks then gave Israel back to the Israelites
The Romans then conquered Israel
The Byzantines are given Israel when the Roman Empire is divided
The Arabs of Arabia drive out the Byzantines
The Turks then ruled on behalf of the Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad
The European Crusaders then took the land from the Turks
The Ayyubi dynasty took the land from the Europeans
The Mamluks who by the way dont exist anymore had it until the Ottoman Turks took it
The British took it from the Turks and had Soverinty over it until the League of Nations established Israel.
So if you want to be specific there was never a sovereign Palestinian nation, and if the argument is based on some random usurper then the land that is currently Israel should belong to Turkey.
Oh come now, arguing that it was "just a territory" is to argue semantics in lieu of the point.
These people organized themselves into a loose governmental structure long before the British got involved. They had names for their towns, for their roads. They thrived--please don't try to morally justify expelling them based on their lack of flag.
You can point to how the area has been passed around like a hooker at the Republican National Convention, but that doesn't extinguish the right the Palestinians had to the land, and more importantly to their culture and way of life--both of which have been dramatically changed now that the last three generations of Palestinians have grown up in refugee camps in Israel, Lebanon, and other places. In the camps, they are afforded no political rights (can't become citizens, can't own land, etc.) and very few human rights. It's an untenable situation, and one that the U.N., the U.S., and Israel must answer for.
I guess you haven't studied the history of Islam or the Arab world. You might start with the Wikipedia history of anti-semitism. You might then check out the website of Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and Africa. Here is piece by a contemorary Muslim bigot that cites the Qur'an and the attitude of Mohammed himself.
You might start with the Wikipedia history of anti-semitism.
On that page I see three or four references to muslim rulers imposing special sanctions on jews. I see about 10x that number of references to christians persecuting jews and often in far worse ways. If you belive that is sufficient proof that muslim's have "rabid hatred of Jewish people goes back to before Israel" then you must see christain society as 10x worse. I do not see christain society as expectionally anti-semitic. The linked wikipedia article titled "Islam and Anti-semitism" is disputed and thus not even a respectable source even by wikipedia standards, so I didn't see the point in reading something biased enough to trip over even wikipedia's low standards.
You might then check out the website of Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and Africa.
On inspection this site seems to be an advocacy site and thus clearly not a respectable source.
Here is piece by a contemorary Muslim bigot that cites the Qur'an and the attitude of Mohammed himself.
I think you understand that a bigot's viewpoints on history are going to be self-serving and not particularly representative. That's the equivalent of citing Matthew Hale's intrepretaion of the christain bible as proof that christains have a rabid hatred of jewish people.
Surely you must have some rational and unbiased sources for the facts about the muslim religion. Why are you trying to distract me with irrational and slanted sources?
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Israel is one country. Europe is a few countries.
Not only that, but Israel is 1/3 smaller than Belgium (only the European countries of Slovenia, Liechtenstein and the Vatican are smaller) and only slightly larger in population than each of the 3 scandinavian countries.
Also, there are 332Mn people living in the Muslim Middle East + Egypt. That is 46x larger than the population of Israel.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
You should have added a link to the Middle East Media Research Institute so people could watch the videos or read the transcripts of the fine material broadcast in various Middle Eastern countries, like Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, etc.:
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
I don't think you have any idea where Israel came from.
The entire region belonged to the Ottoman Empire up until it fell apart in the 1920s, at which time the Empire handed the area over to the British to keep the entire region from decending into chaos. Palestine became a British mandate until the 40s.
With Palestine under British control, European Jews started to emigrate back to the region, eventually leading Britian to regulate immigration to prevent regional destabilization. After WWII, international opinion heavily favored allowing the Jews to return to what they saw as their homeland, and Britian dropped the restrictions.
Also post-WWII, Britian announced that it wanted to withdraw from Palestine, and so handed the problem off to the newly-formed UN before pulling out for good.
And how were the Palestinians displaced? In 1948 the surrounding nations told everyone in the region that they were going to push the Jews into the sea, and that any Muslims caught with them would be treated as Jews. So naturally, they fled, only to find that the neighboring countries didn't want them and the Jews, having won the war, decided to keep their land.
Excuse me
n g-based-on-some-dieties-word)
A) A person can be anti-isreal (or dare I say, anti-zionist) without being anti-semitic (i happen to be anti-any-movement-that-claims-the-right-to-anythi
B) Even for a jew hater, anti-semetic is the wrong term as alot of jews arn't semitic anymore, and on top of that, arabs and armenians are indeed semitic (yes, I know this is a semantics argument)
C) Believing a different story of events does not equal hating a people. Reasonable people can disagree on detail and usually both sides of most arguments tend to be wrong in some sense. I have no doubt that both the holocaust rememberers inflate the figures to make it seem worst (or selectivly ignore the other groups who were victems) just as frequently as the deniers conflate the figures to make it seem less bad.
If you really want to help your cause, maybe you should try answering points with facts and trying to engage in useful debate, rather than just attaching a slur (yes anti-semite is as much a slur as kike) to a person and berating them for it.
Just a thought.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"