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Israel, Palestine Wage Web War
An anonymous reader writes "A war has erupted on the Internet between Israel and Palestine, alongside the war being fought on the ground in Gaza. A new report claims that a group called the 'DNS Team' has defaced an Israeli Website, with anti-Israel graphical images — one in a series of instances of 'e-vandalism.' This sort of e-vandalism, says the author, is not only an inconvenience for Webmasters, but many of the images contain malware links and 'redirects or Flash links to Jihadist forums or blogs.' However, while the Jihadist forums are registered in Saudi Arabia, they are hosted by companies like Layered Tech and SoftLayer in Plano, Texas. On the Israeli side, 'A fascinating approach over the last few days is being made by an Israeli Website, "Help Israel Win," which provides a download so your PC can become part of a worldwide pro-Israeli botnet. So far 7,786 have joined, already a fairly powerful global computing force...'"
In before shitstorm.
This is a natural extension of war now-a-days. This is akin to saying, "Soldiers Now Using Bullets in War".
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
Lets have a little bit of perspective and not put some web sites being trashed in the same category as bombs and missiles flying around. The world could do with a little less drama and over statements. Honestly, its OK, you are still important.
The EULAs require participants of the botnets that lose virtual battles to report to suicide booths.
Too bad there's not two bot nets battling where you can watch the statistics. Sort of like live CNN war footage for the command line crowd.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
You've never installed a Windows-based operating system on one of your machines??
yea, if I'm going to waste my CPU cycles to donate to an online war, it will be something useful, like a war between Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie.
I wish all wars were web wars. The papers today said the Isralies killed dozens in a UN school, and that nowhere in Gaza was safe.
Go, web warriers! Go away, bullet and rocket warriors. He who lives by the RPG dies by the RPG.
Free Martian Whores!
It could be construed through participation in the botnet, since you are directly aiding in an armed conflict between two foreign powers, that you are in fact becoming an enemy combatant, esp if you look back on the old (now defunct) NSA munitions definitions of software. This happens all the time, but could cause you some difficulties if you need to make an insurance claim on system damage - some insurance companies might consider counter-attacks that damage your files/servers/etc to be acts of war, and outside your policy. Granted this would all have to be tested in court, but particpating in a war as a private citizen is generally discouraged, if not illegal in many cases.
meh
IMO, it's interesting to note the difference between the two. Israel seems to always have its military act together, beginning with the war it fought right after it got its land [back].
On one side, we have what was termed "e-vandalism." On the other side, we have a very planned strategy to do something, although I don't know what yet.
Just an interesting look into the different ... tactics, if you will.
Disclaimer for contextual reading of this comment: I am pro-Israel, anti-terrorism, and I really do think Israel wants peace and Hamas wants no-live-Jew-on-face-of-earth. This is not an anti-Jew post.
theres also GIYUS (im not gonna link) they have 40,000 members regularly trolling on large forums and newspapers such as Guardian regarding any topic about Israel/Palestine
this been going on for long time
This makes me think of the old Star Trek episode - A Taste of Armageddon, where no actual fighting takes place but a computer determines the casualties on each side and then those number of people on each side have to enter a machine to be killed.
The Palestinian hackers blew themselves up after they hacked in to the Israeli website. Old habits die hard...
I'm a Jew and definite supporter of Israel, but some of your points are frighteningly mistaken.
"The cancer that is Islam"? Come on. Every religion has it's share of crazy fundamentalist quacks reading too much into parts of their holy literature - currently, the fundamentalists of Islam just happen to be a little more numerous and (considerably) more vocal than those of the other major religions. Look back in time - at one point, Christians had a little thing called the Crusades. Hindus in India have been known to form mobs and beat and kill their Muslim neighbors. As for Jews...well, some might even consider the current crisis an example of fundamentalism, though I vehemently do not.
Which leads me the next point: the fallacy that Jews somehow "don't really care that much about religion". What? Sure, they may not go out and scream "TO THE GLORY OF YWHW" before blowing themselves up in a crowded mosque, but that doesn't mean they don't have an incredible fundamentalist and mainstream religious fervor. Watch people rock back and forth in tears and prayer in front of the Wailing Wall and then tell me Jews in Israel "don't really care that much about religion."
"Haven't done shit since 1000 B.C. when they gave up the last of their rational humanistic thought. Sit on patches of oil and get fat." Oy vey. For one, there are Muslims outside the Arab world. For another, back to point one: stop generalizing. Just because a religion has a few (or even a lot) of nutjobs, doesn't mean that the religion itself is to blame.
The rest of your flamebait suffers the same problem. You say Muslims are savages. It would be more accurate to say some some Muslims are savages. It would be more accurate still to say some people are savages.
Such hatred! Gees, no wonder people are dying right and left
Jews: Isreal has the most gender-neutral society in the entire world.
Rank bullshit. perhaps the most gender-neutral in the middle east, I don't think anyone would argue with that, but I think you'll find most European nations (and nations who were settled by Europeans) to be far more gender neutral. In the US, the third in the Presidential sucession is a woman, speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.
IslamoSavages
Flamebait. Grow up, boy.
Jews: Have the right to a homeland
So do the Palestinians.
IslamoSavages: Wish to indoctrinate the world into the cancer known as Islam.
And Bhuddists sish to indoctrinate the world to Bhuddism and Christians (I'm one) want everyone to accept Christ as savior. Your point?
Jews: Act only in self-defense, strike from afar only at those whose fingers are on the trigger or detonator. Collateral damage is accidental.
Israel shells near UN school, killing at least 30
Savages, you say? Seventy dead innocents to kill two soldiers? That's barbaric. Israel should be ashamed of itself, if I was an Israli I'd be at the wailing wall in sackcloth and ashes begging God's forgiveness.
Jews: Don't really care that much about religion.
I see you've not met many Jews. The ones I know are very religious.
Jews: Leading contributors to cutting-edge science and technology.
Gates, Jobs, Torvalds, all Jews? Where do you come up with all this rank bullshit?
Damn it's hard to keep from responding to these damned trolls.
Free Martian Whores!
It should be noted that local Israeli media is strongly recommending to stay away from this website and not to download the software it is offering, citing reasons of the illegality of the action and the obvious possibility of your PC being hijacked for other purposes.
Sorry, I couldn't find a link in English.
http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-3650277,00.html
To be fair, considering what the Jewish people have gone through in the last few thousand years, I'd wager the siege mentality predates the state of Israel.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
There is no winning this war. As much as I support Israel and their right to exist without rockets being fired on them left and right they are the bad guys in this case. They usually are these days if you look at the body count. The Hamas was provoked into breaking the ceasefire. The IDF sent a special forces unit into Gaza to break up a tunnel for smuggeling. They could have done that on the Isrealy side.
But elections are coming up and Baraks popularity (Ehud Barak is a former PM, currently heads the defense department and masterminded the war) has surged. The whole thing could easily backfire as we have seen with the war in Lebanon and the political end of Peres.
The blockade of Gaza for such a long time should be considered an act of war. The whole Gaza strip is practically a prison. And Egypt is not helping either.
Back to the web: The occupation of former Jordanian areas (where the Palestinians now live) is being used by all the nationalistic arab governments of the region to divert public interest away from their corrupt regimes. So there is always a lot of propaganda going on. And that propaganda has moved to the web. There are a lot of very ugly anti Israel webpages out there. With tons of very ugly lies.
It's not like the terrorists themselves dont care about civilians and hide in the most populated areas while launching their rockets at Israel... Oh wait.
This is one of the things that puzzles me. All of the battles launched by the Arabs began with, "We will be victorious and wipe Israel from the map, God willing." And yet they were unsuccessful in 1948 and 1973, and caught off-guard in 1967 when Israel attacked prior to a likely attack by the forces from three Arab nations. Hezbollah and Hamas repeatedly cite their mere survival as God showing them favor (despite the kill ratio of 50:1 or more enjoyed by the Israelis).
I understand the idea that they may perceive these as challenges from God to be overcome, but at some point, someone has to be thinking that maybe these are messages from God telling them that they're not going to win.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
A fatwa has been issued, calling for the immediate murder of "Anonymous coward."
3. e-vandalism maybe morph into e-vangelism...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
$ traceroute help-israel-win.org
help-israel-win.org: Name or service not known
but ..
$ whois help-israel-win.org
.. SNIP ..
Domain ID:D154969835-LROR
Domain Name:HELP-ISRAEL-WIN.ORG
Created On:25-Dec-2008 15:18:36 UTC
Last Updated On:06-Jan-2009 18:14:34 UTC
Expiration Date:25-Dec-2009 15:18:36 UTC
Sponsoring Registrar:Register.com Inc. (R71-LROR)
Name Server:DNS211.A.REGISTER.COM
Name Server:DNS124.B.REGISTER.COM
Name Server:DNS044.C.REGISTER.COM
Name Server:DNS010.D.REGISTER.COM
and :
$ traceroute DNS211.A.REGISTER.COM ..
traceroute to DNS211.A.REGISTER.COM (216.21.231.211), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
.. SNIP
11 border1.pc1-bbnet1.nyj001.pnap.net (216.52.95.9) 120.914 ms 122.024 ms 124.956 ms
Maybe someone more knowledgeable in this sort of thing can clear this up ?
1) Start monetized blogs.
2) Copypasta some anti-Israel content.
3) Refer your blogs to giyus.org for listing on Megaphone.
4) Enjoy 15,000+ page impressions per day.
"There is nothing nice about Steve Jobs and nothing evil about Bill Gates." - Chuck Peddle
The Help Israel Win site is down. But Google's cache of the site is available, so that seems to be the site mentioned.
From the cached page, this sounds like just another attempt to install malware. "How can you help? You download and install the file from our site. The file is harmless to your computer and could be immediately removed. There is no need for identification of any kind - anonymity guaranteed!" There's no indication of who's behind this, and the only contact point is a GMail address.
The domain is registered anonymously through some Register.com front organization in Portugal. It's currently not resolving at all. DNS is on a Register.com server.
Probably had nothing to do with Israel at all.
I wished this sort of crap would stop.
I'll be the first to say that I dislike the entire notion of the US supporting Israel. Israel never needed to be created and certainly doesn't need the U.S.'s help to exist -- if it should exist, it would exist under its own power. But with all that said, it doesn't mean "I hate Jews."
I know a lot of Jewish people and every single one of them have one thing in common -- they are not all the same!! Some think supporting Israel is important, some do not. Some will have a ham sandwich for lunch with you and some will not. Your own cultural and/or ethnic identity, whatever is may be, is not of "one mind" so why does anyone else expect this to be true of Jews? The same goes for anyone who thinks the people of the U.S. are just like Bush?
I say down with Judaism. I also say down with Christianity, Islam and every religion -- especially those that believe in invisible beings that created us and tell us how to live our lives. The evidence for Zeus is every bit as valid as the evidence for "God." Why do people have to believe in stupid stuff like that anyway?
There will always be reasons and excuses for one person to want to kill another. We don't need religion for that. But when religion becomes involved as a motivating factor, suddenly the problem becomes a LOT bigger, bloodier and more dangerous. So down with all of it I say... or... let them all kill themselves and leave us out of it.
Think of Gaza as basically the South Philly of the Near East. It is a tiny place, densely populated. By provoking a retaliatory attack on their own tiny, densely populated city, the Arabs sealed the fate of innocent civilians. There is no way to wage war in this area without hitting civilian targets. It's not as if there is some big "military/political" sector separate from some "civilian" sector. If you expect Israel to be nicer / more careful after this most recent provocation by the Arabs and the Hamas leadership, you are not paying attention. Israel is saying the line has been drawn and crossed, and they aren't going to back down.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Joke's on them. Allah is Jewish.
6. End up on the no-fly list
Why can't all fpga/microcontroller manufacturers just release free optimizing compilers???
# rm -rf /
Unfortunately, you can't just say 'Down with religion!' because religion has taken up residence in a very vital human activity; culture and community. People will fight to the death to keep their tribes.
In my own experience, this has been demonstrated to me time and again (though I don't know that I understand the reasons - just that they must exist); that nearly every Jew I've met is strongly in favor of the Jewish state. Maybe there is something to that.
All that said, Israel should stop killing recklessly. 550 Palestinian deaths to 5 Israeli deaths is so lopsided that it has to be stopped. The solution to the situation is actually pretty simple; it's money. Once the non-country of Palestine isn't made up of mostly the desperate poor, with a few warlords manipulating them, then you'll see peace. Alas, no one is likely to pony up.
[Ego]out
That's so cool, where do I sign up to turn my computer into a zombie controlled by a shady Command Central? Does that cost anything or is it free?
We don't need religion for that. But when religion becomes involved as a motivating factor, suddenly the problem becomes a LOT bigger, bloodier and more dangerous. So down with all of it I say... or... let them all kill themselves and leave us out of it.
Right because Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot didn't really kill all that many people compared to say the Spanish Inquisition.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
for those interested, the YWHW was intended to reference the name God gives himself when speaking to Moses... it should read, YHWH (yod he waw he)- unless his transliteration is seeing H's as waw's/vav's (w and v roughly interchangeable here). the name YHWH comes from a root for the verb "to be" and basically means "the one who exists"
I'm a Muslim and my lunch break is almost over so I can't really write as long of a post as I wanted.
I agree that this war needs to stop, Palestinians and Israelies need to sit down and freaking figure out how to not kill 600+ people over a weekend.
The solutions presented by both sides so far are ridiculous:
a) Throw them in the sea (Palestinian solution)
b) Exterminate them (Israeli solution)
Both sides are idiots, hard headed and are in serious need for an adult conversation.
As a side note to the GP regarding extremist Muslims (or as I like to call them douche bags), if they read Quran they'll stop this my god is bigger than your god bull, here's a quote:
Al Baqara (002.136)
Say (O Muslims): We believe in Allah and that which is revealed unto us and that which was revealed unto Abraham, and Ishmael, and Isaac, and Jacob, and the tribes, and that which Moses and Jesus received, and that which the prophets received from their Lord. We make no distinction between any of them, and unto Him we have surrendered.
P.S.: It's refreshing to see a post like yours on Slashdot :)
If you can't mod them join them.
It's a sort of a seti-at-home kind of thing when you look at it that way...
You mean someone's trying to find out if there's intelligent life in the Middle East?
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Uh, they posted video of mortars being fired from that school last week. Was it currently being used? We have no way of knowing, but that's how all intelligence works.
Point being the elected government of Gaza was using a UN non-military building as a base of operations to launch attacks on a civilian populace.
According to the Israelis what happened was small arms fire coming from the direction of the UN school which in their opinion made it worth firing at. In short, according to the latest news reports, it appears that two Hamas fighters are dead at the cost of some 30+ kids and their care takers being killed as well. The sad thing is that many lives could probably have been saved over the last few days if the Israelis hadn't embargoed all sorts of medical equipment which has been piling up at the border for months. If Israel shot it self in the foot with the invasion and bombardment of Lebanon back in 2006 it is now shooting it self in both feet with this latest raid on Gaza. It is an awsome manifestation of the unshakeable US/Israeli belief that conflicts like this one are best resolved with the lavish over use of firepower but in the long run it won't do anything to end Hamas' resistance efforts. Even if Hamas is "cynically using civilians as a human shield" like the Israelis are claiming it still won't help Israel's cause very much in the long run. All the world will remember is the dead kids. I am no friend of Hamas but no matter how hard you try you won't succeed in making the sheer galactic stupidity of what Israel is currently doing in Gaza sound like a good idea.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Dont forget the botnet could be used as a social engineering tool and send out phishing email to everybody @yourmilitary.mil.fu . Get all these people to click on a phising webpage hosted somewhere on your botnet. Hit the right personnel and you could land yourself some valuable information.
Not likely. If the IT infrastructure in other countries is anything like the U.S. military's, then computers that can send and receive Internet e-mail are most assuredly NOT connected to any sensitive networks. Military and civilian personnel working for the DOD and the various branches of the armed services have completely separate machine -- usually even located in different rooms.
Even if both machines are on a given individual's desk, the one with the Internet connection will either have all physical drives removed or secured by a locking device. This includes USB ports, firewire ports, etc. Procedures for getting software or data from the Internet onto a secured military network involve jumping through many, many hoops, usually including approval and clearance from appropriate personnel.
My blog
Allah is Jewish.
Actually, Jews, Christians, Muslims, and Mormons, all worship the same God, they just disagree on who was the last prophet.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
Wait...
You claim you can find an insurance policy that cover your files or server so completely that they would need to invoke the "act of war" clause to deny you coverage for damages caused by hackers ?
I'm curious to see who would actually offer that kind of coverage.
I mean, coverage against flood or fire I can believe, but coverage against hacked password,software security holes and DDoS ???
Atheism is not an idealism. It is the absense of religious ideology and more specifically, the absense of belief in things like gods and fairies.
Interestingly enough, I (a "lapsed" Catholic) had a friendly discussion with one of my Jewish friends back in early September, and he mentioned that you don't need to actually believe in God to be a Jew. He said he didn't, but still considered himself Jewish. Surprised the crap out of me. I always thought that Judaism was a "religion", but apparently it is more of a shared culture than anything else. He was saying that many of his friends, and even his friends' parents do all of the rituals, keep kosher, etc. but are either agnostics or atheists. There's apparently provision in the Torah for people who are "doubters" (I forget the exact terminology he used). This is different from Catholicism, being Muslim, or Protestantism, where the "believing" part is a prerequisite.
So far the UN reports that the civilian casualty rate (the percentage of casualties who were civilians) is 25%. That means a 75% military rate. Unfortunately, that rate is far better than almost any modern war.
If you're going to lump all the non-religious movements together, then you should do the same with the groups acting in support of some religious cause. Looking at it from that perspective, atheism per se has led to far less violence than religion.
Otherwise, if you want to classify the groups based on their actual motivation, then you should only count those who were killed in the name of atheism, or because of their non-atheistic beliefs. Political and social movements that just happen to have atheistic leaders should be grouped separately based on their goals. Again, the movements supporting specific religious beliefs and personality cults tend to dominate when it comes to violence, compared those populated by freethinkers.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Muslims worship a God which is not triune. Therefore, the Muslim God cannot be the Christian God.
From your response I can tell you are a Southern Baptist who has been exposed to "The Mormon Question" or know someone who has. It saddens me to see you so naively misled. Using the doctrine of the Trinity as a bright-line distinction between Mormons and Christians (or Muslims and Christians in this case) might be the kind of comforting safety blanked that lets you rest easy, but sadly it has no basis in fact.
The fact is that there's no such thing as the Trinity in the Bible.
"The formal doctrine of the trinity as it was defined by the great church councils of the fourth and fifth centuries is not to be found in the New Testament." - Harper's Bible Dictionary (Protestant Source)
"The formulation of 'one God in three Persons' was not solidly established, certainly not fully assimilated into Christian life and its profession of faith, prior to the end of the 4th century... Among Apostolic Fathers, there had been nothing even remotely approaching such a mentality or perspective." - New Catholic Encyclopedia (Catholic Source)
The Bible's teaching on God's nature is ambiguous. Sure, Christ says he's "one with the Father", but then he also prays that his disciples will be one in the same sense of the word, which seriously jeopardizes subsequent metaphysical gymnastics required to invent the "one in three, three in one" formulation. At best the Bible is compatible with the Trinity, but it most certainly doesn't require it or preach it.
Oops.
The Southern Baptist Convention has creationism. On Slashdot, we have porn.
Wrong. That's like saying not collecting stamps is a hobby.
Damn it; damn it; damn it: We have words; can't we please use them correctly?
Atheism is the belief that there is no god. That's what the goddamn word means. Agnosticism is the belief that one has no knowledge of God or his/her/its existence. Look at the damn word roots.
By definition, atheists are not agnostic, because they do claim knowledge: They assert that God does not exist. So the set of atheists and the set of agnostics are disjoint. They are also of course both disjoint from the set of theists.
OK? That's how it works. Atheists believe that the statement "God does not exist" is true; theists believe that the statement "God exists" is true. The end.
(Don't be offended: Calling atheism a belief in no way belittles it, and as a statement by itself is not equivalent to calling atheism "another religion." Beliefs in nonexistence can be quite justified. In math, we have theorems dedicated to showing nonexistence. And in real life, the belief that, say, purple unicorns do not exist is probably correct! But it's still a belief. That's what the words mean.)
If "theism" is a belief in a god or gods, then what is "atheism"? When something is asymmetrical, it is without symmetry. If something is amoral, it is without morals -- which is, please note, different than being immoral. The prefix "a-" simply means "without, or lacking". Ergo, in its simplest form, atheism is "without a belief in a god or gods".
It's certainly true that some atheists take a more positive view and assert that a god or gods cannot or do not exist. But at its root, atheism does not require this assertion -- simply not having a belief is sufficient to be classified as atheist.
This gets twisted around a lot in theological arguments; the atheist will sit back and sneer that the theist is the one making the assertion ("A god exists.") and is therefore carrying the burden of proof. The theist will counter that the atheist is also making an assertion ("A god does not exist.") and is thus just as burdened to prove his claim as the theist.
The reason theists like this argument so much is because they realise that they carry some burden of proof, because they acknowledge they are making an assertion about the nature of reality. Yet they also find it difficult to present any objective evidence to back their claim. This puts the atheist at an advantage, until the theist uses the above argument. Suddenly the atheist is faced with an impossible situation -- how do you prove something doesn't exist, especially when the something in question is a god?
No matter what the atheist says, the theist can claim that the god somehow manipulated the observation or outcome. And thus, the theist has now placed himself on superior ground in the debate, for while the theist may be able to dredge up a few interesting things the atheist can't explain, there is nothing the atheist can say which cannot immediately be explained away by the theist as some whim of the deity.
It is disingenuous at best and intellectually dishonest at worst to consider both of these stances equal in terms of burden of proof. There are people who genuinely believe that Reptilians from other planets walk among us and have infiltrated the highest levels of our governments. Should you encounter such a person, I suggest you don't engage them in dialogue, but if you did, you might ask what their proof is. Would you feel it fair if the Reptile Believer countered that you should have to prove there aren't Reptilians? Do you consider yourself some sort of active disbeliever in Reptilians, or just someone without even a passing interest on the topic?
I'm not trying to say which side is correct here, as both can make compelling arguments, but clouding the issue with incorrect definitions does nothing to advance the debate.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
Hamas spends five years launching rockets at schools and residential areas and not one word from anyone. Israel decides it has had enough and acts to stop the cowardly fucks and people complain about how mean Israel is and how it is hurting the Palestinians.
If Hamas had not fired rockets into Israel again, after taking a six month break to build more and better rockets, then none of this would have happened.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Disbelief in God is easily supported. The atheist should simply reply with "I have no sensory, analytical, logical, epistemic, or other evidence that God does exist. In addition, all arguments for His (Her/It/Whatever) existence have been proven false time and time again, while arguments against His existence have, many times, proven quite strong. Until you provide an argument for His existence that has merit, the disexistence of God remains the most likely choice to me."
Precisely. GP post is an absolute load of nonsense, and of course fails to cite any sources for his/her diatribe.
Well, it's not *absolute* nonsense, there is a valid point being made even if it goes to far in actually blaming atheism. And he shouldn't really have to cite sources for the deaths caused by Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc.
The majority of "atheist"-caused deaths which are presumably being referred to were motivated by a desire to obtain and maintain political and social control, not to 'eradicate religion' because of its ideological conflict with atheism. The fact that the perpetrators were from ideologies which were also atheistic does not mean that any of those deaths are attributable to atheism.
The majority of all deaths ever were motivated by a desire for power, control, land, resources. Philosophy, religious or political, is used as a justification or a method to gain the support of the people being sent to war. I mean you don't think the Crusades were really about Christianity, even though that's what the Kings told the knights and the footmen? Was the Inquisition really about weeding out heresy, or was it about wielding terror as a method of social control?
All those leaders I mentioned self-identified as atheists, and persecuted the religious, and slew millions in the names of their political philosophies. We are all wise enough to realize that this truly was in name only, and that their true motivations were to acquire and hold power.
Yet not in the cases where the leaders self-identified as religious?
That's the valid point being made. Religion doesn't cause war any more than non-religion does. Lust for power causes war, and that's a trait that is not unique to any philosophy. As proven by the fact that the many of the largest body counts of the last century, the largest body counts of human history, belonged to those of non-religious philosophies. And it wasn't their philosophy that was the problem!
The enemies of Democracy are
Jews are hated because they can have money.
Pretty much every single religion has prohibitions against making large amounts of money, and very strong inducements towards charity. Christianity espouses poverty, while charity is one of the Pillars of Islam.
It all started very early in the whole hatred of Jews story? Basically, whenever someone needed money, they would go to a Jewish person with money and take out a loan, usually for a business. When that business started making a profit, the Jew would ask for payment.
That's usually when the borrower "finds religion", accuses the Jew of something horrible and gets all their newfound friends to run the Jew out of town on a rail. After all, "everyone knows" that the Jews killed Jesus, right?
So, just as with every other religious pissing contest in the history of the human race, it all comes down to money.
Jew can have it; Christians can't, Moslems have to give it away and they both hate the Jews because of it.
Oh yeah...and unlike Christianity and Islam, Judaism doesn't have any foolishness about "Turning the other cheek", so when you piss them off, they beat the living !@^# out of you. That tends to piss off Christians and Moslems too.
[End Of Line]
We all worship the God of Abraham. Jesus said to worship this God. It's the same God even if there are disagreements about Him.
Oh and the last Christian prophet was of course John the Baptist. ;)
The enemies of Democracy are
Any religion which rejects Jesus as God is automatically incompatible with Christianity.
If you'd said that in the first place I wouldn't have argued the point. That's just true from definition. But you brought up the Trinity. That's a different matter entirely, because the location of the Trinity within Christian orthodoxy is a controversial topic.
Whether or not you are aware of it, this identical argument (that any one who rejects the Trinity isn't really worshiping the same God as the true Christians) is a lynch-pin in the Baptists explaining why Mormons are an evil devil cult rather than a different branch of Christianity.
The Southern Baptist Convention has creationism. On Slashdot, we have porn.
I agree that this war needs to stop, Palestinians and Israelies need to sit down and freaking figure out how to not kill 600+ people over a weekend.
That's not the problem. The majorities on both sides are willing to negotiate. They are just not able to keep the lid on their respective radical factions.
We have ours in the USA as well. And we can't control them either.
Have gnu, will travel.
no, you can't argue like that. knowing what the words in ancient greek mean does not allow you to dogmatically impose this meaning on modern english.
There is plenty of unsused space in Russia, enough to comfortably accomodate every Jew in the World. In fact we already have an autonomous republic set-up specially for Jews. Welcome to Birobidzhan!
US-UK-Israel: The real Axis of Evil
Except it is much more complicated than you portray. Look both words up in wikipedia.
You are portraying "strong atheism" and "weak agnosticism". Sorry, but the words have come a long way from their greek and french roots.