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Iran Reverse Engineers Cobra Attack Helicopter
Hugh Pickens writes "Continuing its tradition of reverse engineering and fabricating its stockpile of 40-year old American weaponry, Iran announced that it is about to unveil its first ever domestically produced Cobra attack choppers. Nearly 50 years after the U.S. introduced the legendary Bell AH-1 Cobra, once the backbone of the U.S. Army's attack helicopter fleet, Iran's locally-grown Cobras will be armed with 'different types of home-made caliber guns, rockets and missiles,' according to Iran's semi-official Fars news agency. 'All the phases of designing and manufacturing of the chopper have been done inside the country and the helicopter enjoys some capabilities which make it preferable to Apache Choppers,' says Brigadier General Kioumars Heidari. Iranian officials stress that Iran's military and arms programs serve defensive purposes and should not be perceived as a threat to any other country, reports the FARS news release. More photos available here."
...came on... make it open source. !!!
Some people have the weirdest fetishes.
I'm curious what their ability is as far as mass production. I'm also curious why they are producing a 40 year old variant instead of targeting a newer one - I suppose it's a lower barrier to entry and probably a lot easier to get pieces for...
I find it interesting that they didn't release any specific armament specs. This may suggest they don't have any arms plants with sufficient production.
, Iran's locally-grown Cobras will be armed with 'different types of home-made caliber guns, rockets and missiles,' according to Iran's semi-official Fars news agency. 'All the phases of designing and manufacturing of the chopper have been done inside the country and the helicopter enjoys some capabilities which make it preferable to Apache Choppers,' says Brigadier General Kioumars Heidari. Iranian officials stress that Iran's military and arms programs serve defensive purposes and should not be perceived as a threat to any other country,
So, basically, you're copying 40 year old tech from your enemies, but because you can't buy the bullets or missiles to shoot, you're going to arm them with whatever you can cobble together. It's like Junkyard Wars, only with dictators instead of teams. Yeah... I can see why they say we shouldn't perceive it as a threat... but it's not because they're dangerous or anything. They'll probably kill more of their pilots in training flights than we would with a bombing run or twenty.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Blast them with patent infringement suits. The mullas are screwed now.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
I can see them off-shoring production to China and getting 100's a month. Their big problem is going to be training pilots fast enough.
As far as the "age" - it was a good design then and is still a good design. Upgrade the weapons to something more modern and they are going to be very dangerous on a battlefield.
We could debate the situation between Israel, palestina, and Iran all we want, but we have no idea what the facts are here. Journalism isn't what it used to be, and every single story about those three are biased beyond all reconing. Not in outright lies, but in leaving out "details" and drawing lots of attention to others.
How can we give judgement if we have no idea of the conditions these people live in?
Give me facts, and I will give you arguments.
One thing we can say for sure is that Nuclear bombs (fission or fusion), will always be beyond a last resort. The backlash of using one is so tremendous, that countries rather go to war in the traditional means (tanks, generals, the occasional trumpeteer) than anything involving massive genocide.
It's the reason people are terrified of terrorists getting nuclear arms. Because they simply don't care about the backlash.
Ahmadinejad is a buffoon, and he's not the person running Iran.Ayatollah Khamenei is the one that could actually order a nuclear attack. Unlike Ahmadinejad, Khamenei doesn't make threats against Israel, and has publicly stated that the use of nuclear weapons is immoral. He will also still be in power long after Ahmadinejad is gone.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Yeah, and so is the "Rescue" label and some other printing on the side of the cockpit. The plate says something like " TOP IMPORTANT REMOVE BEFORE OPERATIONAL FLIGHT."
Why would they do that?
I just figured out that the "more photos" link actually points to a forum thread from 2010.
Would Iran really kill countless innocent Muslim civilians, including women and children?
Yes. You may not be aware of the brutal suppression of the Green Movement.
Any regime that suppresses free speech is an oppressive government.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
If you want to bring them to their knees accidentally loose some F-22s over Iran. If they tried to reverse engineer then deploy them it'd bankrupt the country. Even better yet would be a 30 year old Osprey prototype. The point is we're the only country that spends enough on their military to maintain such cutting edge aircraft. They can mimic 40 year old aircraft but the modern ones are too expensive to build and are drastically more expensive to maintain. It's not just that all they have access to is 40 year old aircraft it's that they were far more practical than modern aircraft. Look at the A-10s they are phasing out. They were wildly successful and the basic technology wasn't all that different than was used in the 50s. The joke is the technology has both gotten so good and so delicate as in the breakdown rate that far more planes are lost due to mechanical failure than enemy gunfire.
In related news, Adobe announced that the Iranian government has purchased several licenses of Photoshop CS6.
You mean despite the fact they have *never* said that, in fact quite the reverse - that the use of nuclear weapons is immoral and against the tenets of Isal?
But don't let mere facts get in the way of your knee jerk predjudices.
No, I don't really believe you would.
I think you'd like to see everyone agree with you that Iran would not kill "countless innocent Muslim civilians" and that we should somehow take comfort in the fact that Ahmadinejad "is no Hitler and no Stalin". I'm sure that late neighboring buffoon, Saddam Hussein, was "no Hitler and no Stalin" but he had no compunctions about killing "countless innocent Muslim civilians". In fact, just about every time I look at the news I see muslims killing "countless innocent Muslim civilians", and more often than not, it's thanks to some "buffoon" who's "no Hitler and no Stalin". So pardon me if your assurances about Ahmadinejad do not really convince.
We have seen this news since about 2002. Every six months or so, a parade of neoconservatives who have failed at foreign policy (Ledeen, Wolfowitz, Bolton, Podhoretz, etc) shows up at the right-wing talk shows with breaking news that Israel is going to launch a strike against Iran "within 60 days". No joke, this is as regular as Autumn follows Summer. If you tune into any of the Salem Radio talkers, Hugh Hewitt, Dennis Prager, Michael Medved, you will hear these predictions at least once a week. The funny thing is that not one of them has ever mentioned their own long string of failed predictions.
I don't know if Israel is going to launch a strike on Iran, and I don't know if Israel wants to launch a strike on Iran, but I know for sure that Israel doesn't want to launch a strike anywhere near as badly as this string of former foreign policy advisers to Republican administrations. And this act has been going on since at least the 1970s.
Oh, and the good news? Mitt Romney has already stated that he's going to hire all these same psychopaths to advise his administration on foreign policy. He's putting the pro-war band back together, and this time with an extra helping of St John's Revelations, LDS-style.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Decades later....doh....
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
That's something many people don't know about. The one place where Nazism, and it's blend of socialism and ethnic genocide is popular, is the middle east. The entire middle east, that is, including Turkey. It is very popular in Iran.
I don't recall there being any backlash when the U.S. used nukes on Japan, they became one of Americas closest allies soon after.
The devestation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki wasn't really much different than the firebombings of Tokyo by the U.S. or Dresden by the British, excepting for radiation sickness and long term cancers, but fire bombing led to burns that were pretty much as bad. The nukes just required fewer air planes to do the damage, but they were still massively expensive to make.
Needless to say a fusion bomb on a large city would be horrific but very few nations have those. A fission bomb would certainly be worse than 9/11 if an Al Qaeda like group managed to set one off in a Western city so its obviously something to be avoided.
But the U.S., Britain and Russia have been killing large numbers of civilians since World War II with little repercussion so I think your statement "will always be beyond a last resort" is a little overly breathless.
@de_machina
To fire the weapons, you must think in American
Ever read about this guy on the bible named Samson?
Based on him, I can assume every Christian country is a super strong whoremonger terrorist.
Yeah, Troll, generalizations are bad for everyone.
Oh, and the good news? Mitt Romney has already stated that he's going to hire all these same psychopaths to advise his administration on foreign policy. He's putting the pro-war band back together, and this time with an extra helping of St John's Revelations, LDS-style.
He's already started it. The entire board of the Foreign Policy Initiative all except for William Kristol himself are part of his foreign policy team.
And the only reason why WK isn't on the team is that it would be too obvious.
There is *nobody* in the Press talking about it. The silence and tacit approval from the Fourth Estate is fucking disgusting.
You know what I see? I see rampant electoral fraud this November geared to get Romney elected and we're all just fucked. The fix is in. The fix was in two years ago. The loony-tunes unelectable candidates were picked by the GOP leadership to ensure that Romney, their patsy, would get the nomination. There is no other logical explanation for the disgusting crew of unlikeable and shit-for-brains candidates like Crazy Bitch, Mr. Hairpiece, Pizza Guy, etc.
Yeah, I know, tighten the tinfoil, bmo, but the more you watch what's going on, the more it seems like tinfoil is required.
And so we head toward Permanent War.
--
BMO
The Cobra is a widely used and available helicopter. The US uses the chassis for forest fighting: they aren't exactly difficult to find or examine closely. They probably could have bought one on the open market (maybe even indirectly from the US itself). Nuclear weapons are slightly harder to find.
However, with that said, the problem with building a nuclear weapon has never been (not for 40-50 years or so) the design. That is actually quite easy, most physics graduates could probably design you one. The basic design of basic nuclear weapons* is pretty simple, once you know what you are doing. You can find sketch-ups on Wikipedia. The problem is getting refined nuclear material that actually works in a nuclear weapon, and more importantly, actually testing the weapon. Easy to do for a helicopter: very difficult for a nuclear weapon.
*NB: thermonuclear weapons are a considerably different, and considerably more difficult, story. But they don't really need those.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
I find it amusing that you think that the Persians living in Iran have any kind of ethnic kinship with Arabs; they are more likely to feel that the very presence of Jews in the Holy Land is an affront to Islam, resent the Arabs for losing Palestine, and see the Palestinians as the physical embodiment of the Arabs dereliction of their religious duty to wipe the Israel off the face of the Earth. I easily see Iran as capable of sending every Palestinian on the earth to paradise as Martyrs in order to destroy Israel.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
You're going to have to tell us what happened to all the christian massacres that easily trumped arabs both numerically and in terms of quality (as in being quite sophisticated about the ways used to kill people). No one was as good at brutally slaughtering people in the name of the God (and his installed representative on earth, the blessed king/tsar/pope/etc) as fellow christians. Hell, the colonialist period and its massacres alone probably killed more people then arabs during entire history of islam. That's not even touching dark ages, which were full of both internal as well as external savagery. Ever wondered why we use arabic numbers? Because when islam was the progressive religion driving greatest scientific minds of its time, christian Europe was hell bent on killing and enslaving as many muslims as possible. Crusading was a great way to earn money, fame and reputation. Read about that stuff sometime.
Islam has a reeeeeeeeeeally long way to go if it actually wants to even compete for #1. Even discounting WW1 and WW2, christians have long held the trophy, and they're not going to be relinquishing it any time soon.
I was alive when US nuked Japan. Parent statement sounds right to me.
I just happened to be reading the U.S. military's strategic bombing report of the atomic bombing of Japan. I also read a recent hospital report on a severe burn victim.
I don't see any difference between being burned to death (or killed when a building collapses) in a nuclear blast or in a conventional firebombing. It's a long painful process in either case. The best you could hope for would be enough morphine to put you out, and they didn't have much morphine after those attacks.
The AC's comment is part of a bad Internet practice of calling everything that you disagree with "inane drivel", as a substitute for thinking about it and making an intelligent comment.
The use of nuclear weapons against Israel presumably has to potentially include Jerusalem as a target. Nuking 'just' one location, such as Tel Aviv, means starting a war of total distruction with the surviving elements of the Israeli military, so it makes no more sense than, say, nukeing just New York and expecting the US to say "Oh, if it's only NY, we won't use nukes back." Ergo, use nukes at all and it's necessary to hit the Jerusalem area to kill Israeli military assets that will otherwise be nukeing you back. That means one of your hypothetical Iranian bombs takes out one of the most major Muslim holy sites (The Dome of the Rock). It also opens the door to retaliation against Islamic sites in general, presumably including even Mecca itself, as a risk. The question becomes, how far would Israel go with a 50% population loss? The real answer is, there's a reasonable likelyhood of a nuclear power using its weapons in response to just fallout from being downwind of a target nation, or similar possible triggers, let alone being faced with genocide and the possible total distruction of their nation. Asking what people would rationally do in such cases is starting from a false assumption that people in such cases remain rational if they started out that way .
So yes, you are drawing a reasonable inference when you question how much Ahmadinejad is like Hitler or Stalin, as one of the major questions is "Is he crazier than either of those two?". Probably not, but he does what the Grand Ayatollahs direct, maybe with some other influences, but just who those might be is terribly unsure from outside Iran. The real question may be how crazy a bunch of mostly 70 yeal old + spiritual leaders are.
However, you should keep in mind that most Iranians are not Arabs, although most are Muslims. Actual Arabs are only about 2% of the Iranian population according to the CIA world factbook. People who even speak fluent Arabic in the region total only about 3%, from the same source. Add to this that the version of Islam endorsed in Iran is Shia, while the majority of Palestinian Islamic practitioners are Sunni, and there are not as many ties between these peoples as most assume. There may well be Iranian hardliners who regard the Sunni as damnable heretics anyway, or, more secularly, strongly resent the occasional Sunni tendency (as seen particularly in Wahhabism, which is a Sunni/Saudi based half religion/half nationalism splinter), to treat all non-arab Muslims as second class Muslims.
Who is John Cabal?
While I see no indication that Nazism is popular in China, at almost every book sale I pass on college campuses, I see Chinese translations of Mein Kampf for sale. I have never seen one sold, nor even seen anyone pick one up, but I don't hang around the sales for a long time, either. One of these days I am going to have to ask what's up with that.
As for the original topic, if you can't reverse engineer 50 year old technology that you have in your physical possession at least to the point of understanding the basic physics well enough to make a reasonable imitation, what a backwards place you have to be. What are they going to copy next, the B-52? Copying an airframe isn't very challenging, particularly when they already own plenty to disassemble, but without modern electronics and modern doctrine training, they might as well be clay pigeons to anyone but their own people.
Looking at the original article (mod me up, I RTFM'd!), though, I am wondering how many of those Cobras were photoshopped in (and why none of them seem to have more than half the rotor with the sky a strange color in the space where the missing blade should be), and why can't I find Jar-Jar Binks... he has to be in there somewhere!
Ahmahdinajad has only titular power.
He's much like the elected mayor of London.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
They are a fine design, presuming Iran has all the parts working right (there's more to making a perfect copy than making it look similar). However they've got nothing on modern choppers. It isn't even so much the actual bits that have to do with flying, but the electronics for communications and attack.
What makes the AH-64D so fearsome is the whole "longbow system". So one helicopter with longbow radar, could even by a Cobra with it, sneaks forward and peaks its radar dome up over the trees or buildings. This gets an accurate map of all the enemy forces, and cross decks it to all the Apaches lying back in waiting. The scout makes itself scarce, and the other pop up and fire off a volley of hellfires from around 5 miles away. These all go for their designated targets, there aren't any unintentional overlaps, and hit.
The system lets a mass targeting like that take place. One platform finds them, the rest blow them up and you don't have any problems of multiple designations where like 4 choppers shoot the same tank or something.
So if Iran has a longbow system ready to go, ok then maybe they have something. Notice the article says nothing about that and they'd probably be bragging on it if they did.
I agree with most of that, but the Mongols had the biggest and most genocides. And while the crusaders and the Spanish were big on killing Arabs, virtually all the enslaving was done by the Moslems.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
The Chinese don't exactly subscribe to Nazism but there was a counter revolution when Mao died and they did swing hard to state Capitalism and something closely resembling Fascism. Its comical for the Chinese to still claim they're Communists when their leadership are increasingly very wealthy and very successful capitalists.
The two regimes in the Middle East that were closely aligned to Fascism recently were the Ba'ath regimes, Saddam's Iraq and Assad's Syria. It is a real stretch to claim Turkey is anywhere close to being in the same class.
If you want to name another regime in the Middle East with issues with ethnic cleansing and far right leaning its probably Israel. Its ironic how similar they've become to their bitterest nemesis.
@de_machina
In terms of what the US has, well have a look at the AH-64D. That's the current unclassified nifty toy, though it has been around for a bit. Particularly look at the longbow package, the thing that makes a D variant what it is. It is a rather big upgrade. Remember that with things like tanks n' choppers n' so on the fundamental design may be kept for many years with various upgrades made to it. The US still uses B-52s but they are far more advanced today, despite being the same airframe.
You could look at it sort of like a computer: Maybe you keep the same case and powersupply, that doesn't mean you don't upgrade the components.
Then of course there's whatever the US has that it wont' tell people about. The Bin Laden raid inadvertently revealed that there is something. The tail of the helicopter that didn't get destroyed was from no known design out there. So the US has a classified helicopter. Big surprise there. Who knows what precisely it is capable of (hence why it would be classified)?
Also don't confuse propaganda with results. Iran says they have a bunch of helicopters. Ok, how well do they work? Where they proof? We know the AH-64Ds the US have work, not only are there plenty of videos of the playing around in training simulations, but they've been used in actual combat. There's no question they do what they say. Iran says they have a domestically produced Cobra. Ok, does it even fly? If it does, is it any good at combat maneuvers? How are its weapons?
If there's no answer to that it could be because they want to keep it secret, but that would be a little silly given the US already knows what the Cobras do. It also could be because the thing doesn't work near as well as it should.
Think about the cheap Chinese knockoff market for devices: You find these things that look nearly or completely the same, but don't work at all as well as the device they copied. One that readily comes to mind are EOTech holographic weapon sights. Real EOTechs cost $400 and up and are combat sights, as in the military actually DOES use them in combat. Very rugged and reliable, they don't lose their zero, are waterproof, and have great optics (the best anti-glare coating I've ever seen).
The Chinese knockoffs? They cost maybe $50-100 in the US, probalby less there. They look like EOTechs, they try to copy as much of the markings as they can and they are physically similar, though built out of different plastic and plastic in some places the EOTechs are metal. However that's where it ends. The optics are garbage, they aren't waterproof, the "nightvision" button doesn't make them work with NV just changes the colour, they lose zero with the recoil from fired shots, and they break down easily.
That they make a copy doesn't mean they make a good copy.
If these people get access to nuclear bombs, a nuclear war will start in a matter of months, how can you possibly interpret their history in any other way ? Iran is a tossup. It's muslim, has a history of aggression, but not nearly as bad as that of the arabs. But frankly, do we really want tossups here ? Besides, Israel is not going to risk it, if Iran goes nuclear Israel has shown in the past that they'll make the first strike.
Luckyo has already commented on your inaccurate assertion that Arabs and/or Arabic Muslims have far more genocide than others. Let me comment on your wildly and provably incorrect assertion that (paraphrasing) "history tells us that nuclear war will start in a matter of months if these people get nuclear weapons".
Now, if I interpret "these people" as Arabic Muslims, then Iranians are generally Persian Muslims (yeah, yeah, there are non-Persian and non-Muslims minorities in Iran, but "Persian" is way more accurate than "Arabic"). So unless (with all due respect) you're a inbred moronic racist who has commented before knowing the facts at hand, then surely that's not what you mean.
Therefore, you surely meant "Muslims" by your phrase "these people". In which case, then Pakistan (also a country with Islam as its state religion and majority Muslims) has had nuclear weapons as well as the means to launch them for about 14 years. Which -- because you probably can't count beyond your fingers/toes -- is 168 months, a tad more what is considered "a few" months in adult English in the civilised world.
I'd also like you to cite evidence that Iran has a history of aggression (Iraq attacked Iran first and Iran merely kicked out a non-democratic puppet dictator in 1979), but given the rest of your post, I reckon it's a tossup whether you're a 7 year old posting on his dad's computer or just a mental patient trying to pass the time away.
The proper way to get yourself in bad with the head of the communist party at a university is to ask if he owns the Audi he drove up in, but the 30 seconds or so of blank stare as he goes through all the possible reasons why you might be asking that question is freaking hilarious.
Actually, it does.
However, in practice there are limitations on free speech which most reasonable (and some unreasonable) people would agree are necessary to a functioning civil society, limitations that prevail even in countries that claim to be committed to freedom of expression.
It's the limitations most people feel are unacceptable that cause the problem. Right here, right now, right in what many of us consider to be "the free world", such unacceptable limitations exist, and many of us are pretty pissed about it.
I don't have any more to add right now.
blog
"It means you are able to criticize the government, and people who want to hear you can find a way to hear you."
Apologies, I'm not following your point. Are you saying Occupy somehow had no right to say the things they were saying?
The occupy movement was criticizing the U.S. government and just trying to be heard. As soon as they started being heard, and they started to cause discomfort to Wall Street and the government, they were systematically crushed in every place they had critical mess, New York, Oakland, UC Davis, Denver, Boston, LA etc.
The Federal government was actively aiding and coordinating the cities as they used riot police to break up the entire movement. How often have you heard anything about it since the last encampments were broken up by riot police.
Iran's supression was somewhat more brutal, but in terms of intent, goals and effect what the U.S. government did to the Occupy movement was exactly the same kind of oppression Iran's government did to the Green movement. The Green movement was actually trying to topple the regime in Iran. Occupy was just saying the current regime in the U.S. sucks (i.e. Wall Street seizing control of our government and using that control to loot America).
@de_machina
They're Iranian Air Force roundels: the outer ring is green instead of the blue used by the Royal Air Force. Although the Iranian Air Force's officer corps was purged after the Islamic revolution, its markings are only slightly modified from those of the old Imperial Iranian Air Force, which dates back to 1920, two decades before the occupation by the British during World War II. So it's not surprising that they were modeled after the British ones--or perhaps the French ones, since the French were actually the first to use the roundel. The French one is almost identical to the British, except that it has red on the outside and blue in the center. Anyway, the three-ring roundel is a very popular insignia for military aircraft, and lots of countries use it.
If they ever try anything like Pearl Harbor again they should be summarily eliminated from existence.
Say the warcrimes in China and Korea that the Japanese committed, but Pearl Harbor...
Apologies, I'm not following your point. Are you saying Occupy somehow had no right to say the things they were saying?
They do have the right to speak. They don't have the right to say it in any way they want, or to become squatters.
Iran's supression was somewhat more brutal,
No, it was significantly more brutal.
The point of free speech (from a government perspective) is that You need freedom of speech to get the message out that a government is bad, and get your ideas out for how to improve it. If people aren't interested in your message, you can't force them to listen to you by blocking bridges and yelling in their faces. The Iranians weren't trying to topple the regime, they were trying to get their votes counted.
And let's face it, the message of OWS was trite. The current US government sucks and banks got a sweet deal they didn't deserve? Everyone knows that. Is it any wonder people get bored of listening to them?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
IIRC, there was a great deal of debate on whether to drop the bomb. It was decided to because of the way the Japanese fought throughout the Pacific, ceding island by island fighting to the last man. So instead of risking 100s of thousand of US troops, they asked Japan to surrender. They refused and it was decided to drop 1 bomb. The US then requested Japan to surrender again. Japan still refused. They dropped #2 and promised more unless there was a surrender. A bit of a bluff since there were only 3 in existence at the time. Japan surrendered. The net effect - probably less Japanese dead, and a whole lot less US dead, and Japan surrendered instead of being wholly defeated and possibly wiped from history. Conventional war was not pretty with the Japanese fight to the last man ethics, it makes for great movies but horrible wars, as all sorts of atrocities start being carried out by the ever more desperate losing side. And Japan was losing, and would lose. There was little doubt as at that time civilians were just considered collateral damage - unfortunate that they were caught between two warring parties even though both sides would claim they tried to avoid hitting civilians but, weapons just weren't that accurate.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
So you are seriously trying to grade how people die with nukes versus a fire storm and you think somehow dying in either one doesn't completely suck? If anything the nuke tends to be somewhat more merciful, at least for all the people near ground zero since the death is instantaneous, slow roasting or searing suffocation in a fire storm has to be one of the more brutal ways to kill someone.
Their are monuments in Tokyo and Dresden too. The Tokyo monument is a statue of a group of children.
The Dresden monument reads,
""How many died? Who knows the number? In your wounds one sees the agony of the nameless ones who burned here in the hellfire made by human hands.""
Once you start killing large numbers of civilians the details of how you go about it don't actually matter.
@de_machina
Sorry, Muslim genocides - starting from the time of Mohammed and going on to this day, far dwarfed anything done by the Mongols, the Crusaders, the Conquestadoras, the Nazis and the Communists - all of them put together. In India alone, some 100 million non-Muslims died at the hands of Muslim conquerors over 700 years (1000AD to 1761AD). The GP AC is correct - overall, some 270 million people people died in the Muslim jihads - and that was before 9/11.
Luckyo is also full of shit regarding 'Arabic numbers'. They were called Hindu numerals, and originated in India. In fact, almost everything the Muslims claim to have invented was already invented elsewhere, like China, India, (pre-Islamic) Persia and Egypt, and so on. The Arab 'contribution' to this was taking some of it and spreading it around. This meme about a golden age of Islamic civilization is a complete myth, and what's more, it flies in the face of the logic of apologists who claim these as being Muslim/Islamic achievements, while claiming that Islam is not a monolyth when it comes to exhibits of their savagery. Never mind that that savagery is common to Arabs, Turks, Farsis and Afghans, and driven by exhortations to jihad in both the Qur'an and Sun'nah.
CIA world factbook
Also known as Facebook? ;)
Actually the speed with which you kill people doesn't matter at all. Slow death in Hitler's concentration camps or Stalin's gulags are, if anything much worse, because they caused massive and prolonged suffering. At least nukes are quick except for the people who get high doses of radiation and burns and aren't killed instantly.
As for the collective guilt of Americans, I am relatively sure its non existent. All the interviews I've seen with the crews who dropped the bombs they were of the opinion the Japanese deserved it, and it was better than the carnage, and mass casualties that would have resulted from an invasion of the main Japanese islands. They'd also been pretty well propagandized in to hating the Japanese at that point. Obviously some American's were torn up over it, Oppenheimer included, but people were torn up by concentration camps, the Bataan death march, Dresden and Tokyo too.
You seem pretty confused about the position I'm advocating. I am not in the least advocating the use of nuclear weapons anywhere. I am just pointing out the hypocrisy of the people who somehow think they are exceptional. I'm mostly pointing out it doesn't matter how you do it, once you start killing civilians, and rationalizing it, you are pretty seriously fucked up and you don't deserve a free pass no matter who you are or how righteous you think you are.
@de_machina
Pearl Habor was no rationale at all for doing anything to Japan. The U.S., Britain and the Dutch had embargoed Japan's oil supplies in July 1941. Japan made it quite clear then that they considered that an act of war since it was going to completely strangle Japan militarily and economically. War was inevitable from that point and FDR and the U.S. military knew it. Japan had no choice but to seize the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) to restore their oil supply, and to do that they had to neutralize the U.S. Pacific fleet.
The specifics of when and where the Japanese would attack might have been a bit of a surprise but the U.S. knew full well it was coming. Its up to the conspiracy theorists to make the claim the U.S. intentionally let the Japanese maul Pearl Harbor because FDR needed a day of "infamy" to goad the American people in to entering World War II, something the very isolationist American people had been loathe to do up to that point. It did a great job of whipping Americans in to a war frenzy, and producing a gusher of volunteers for the military, something that simply wouldn't have happened if FDR had just declared war on Germany and Japan without a provocation.
@de_machina
I agree with most of that, but the Mongols had the biggest and most genocides. And while the crusaders and the Spanish were big on killing Arabs, virtually all the enslaving was done by the Moslems.
Sweden, or rather a part of the Hansa League based in Stockholm and Visby, had a ginormous trade of slaves from non-Christian parts of (what is today) Finland and the Baltics states, during roughly the same time as the Crusades in the Middle East. Small nations was depopulated to fill the need for slaves in pre-feodal and early feodal Europe. All the Christian crusades in the Baltics and Finland was poorly wielded slave hunts; I have hard to belive that the same was not true for at least some of the Crusades in the Middle East, albeit, the Crusading around the Baltic Sea was made by professional soldiers motivated by profits, not by a mix of amateurs with a plethora of motivations like in the Crusades in the Middle East. It was taboo for European Christians to hold other Christians as slaves, hence the huge demand for heathen slaves. Of course, once the slaves discovered that they would be released if they where to be baptised, they promptly converted to Christianity. Then people discoverd loop holes in the Churchs ban on Christians as slaves and the feudal systems was invented (Sweden is the only part of Europe, except for some really small, isolated areas, that haven't had a feudal system), that made almost all people in Europe de-facto slaves.
Ironically, slavery was made illegal in Sweden during heathen times, centuries before the profitable slave trade was initiated. So Sweden, despite being the largest exporter of slaves to continental Europe for a couple of centuries, never had any slave workers, neither heathen nor Christian, within the country borders, while the slave trade made Stockholm grow rich and influential, it would eventually become the capital of Sweden as well as Sweden propers largest and most populated city; that never would have happened without the slave trade.
I think your history teachers have really glossed over the whole slave trade part during colonisation era. It made muslim-done enslaving look like employing unionised people.
Tears of Jihad
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
"They don't have the right to say it in any way they want"
Well yes actually they do. I don't totally disagree that they may not have had the right to "squat" but they were trying very hard to camp in public spaces, and limit traffic disruptions, and I think that is different than intentionally "squatting" on private property.
You might not like it but if you are going to demonstrate and express your displeasure with your government it almost inevitably results in large numbers of people needing to be in the streets or parks near the seats of power which would be New York and Washington. If they have to get "permits" to do that from the very government they are criticizing, then the government just cuts off the permits and the message the government doesn't want anyone to hear disappears. Or you get things like the "free speech zones" of the Bush era, chain link cages that are conveniently placed so no one will see or hear any protestor foolish enough to get shoved in to one.
"the message of OWS was trite. The current US government sucks and banks got a sweet deal they didn't deserve? "
You probably should have listened more instead of being "bored", because the message is quite a bit more sophisticated than that. The message is Wall Street in particular, and also big defense, pharna and fossil fuel companies among others have, for all practical purposes, seized control of the U.S. government, to the detriment of the American people.
They did it by buying Congressmen with chump change in campain contributions, with lobbiest bribes, with big PAC donations for campaign ads and more importantly with revolving doors through which Congressmen, their staffs, generals and bureaucrats get lucrative jobs when they leave public service for favors, and in the other direction where people from Goldman Sachs join government to take over places like the Department of the Treasury and the White House. From there they steer trillions of dollars to bail out their former employers and hand out trillions in gifts to corporate interests off the backs of working Americans who still pay their taxes while most big corporations no longer do thanks to the loopholes they've bought.
You ever wonder why the SEC never prosecutes anyone important on Wall Street, because everyone who works at the SEC wants to work at Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley and get a huge pay increase so they will NEVER do anything but slap their future employers on the wrist. The SEC spent 4 years investigating Lehman Brothers whose malefesance resulted in economic catastrophe, and last week announced no charges would be filed. The investigators will, no doubt, soon get lucrative new jobs on Wall Street.
Some more examples, a 90 billion a year windfall for pharma from Medicare D which was barred from negotiate drug prices. Billy Tauzin rammed through Medicare D and then took a job as a drug company lobbyist. There are massive tax breaks for an oil industry which is making staggering profits. There are hundreds of billions in pork laden contracts to defense and homeland security contractors.
Its called crony capitalism, its a trade mark of banana republics, thats what America has now, and the American people are being royally screwed by it. They have every right, in fact its their duty, to be in the streets of New York and Washington D.C. every week until its stopped and we get our Constitution back.
@de_machina
Most casualties in WWII were Chinese civilians killed by the Japanese which employed all sorts of means to "control" the Chinese population including chemical warfare. They also attacked an US base with a military strike prior to the US declaration of war on Japan. It is not like the Japanese were some sort of warm and fuzzy character from tinseltown.
Indeed. Pakistan is far more of a threat than Iran - they already have nukes, and they have an Islamic insurgency that permeates their army and intelligence service to an extent where they half run the state... and those are the same people who fund Taliban, which is already engaged in direct warfare vs NATO troops.
But, hey, so long as their premier keeps saying that we're friends, that's no big deal, right?
Look! My anti-Muslim views are completely supported by all there anti-Muslim blogs! I MUST be right!
Your link is large on speculation and short on fact. And your use of the pseudonym "dirty bomb" is just inflammatory. You do realize that alpha radiation - which, as stated in the article, is the primary type observed from DU rounds - is basically harmless, right? I remember working in the physics lab and running tests using sources of alpha radiation. We handled them. With our hands. And this was 4 years ago. You need to eat alpha radiation for it to be harmful. No one has ever produced any solid evidence for long term effects of DU munitions use. I especially like that the article cited soldiers claiming it must have been the DU rounds that caused Gulf War Syndrome.
Which numbnuts modded this drivel up?
using depleted uranium munitions is actually a great cost saver for US taxpayers. It's a cheap way to dispose of nuclear waste while irradiating a foreign civilian population
Um. No. DU has all the nice and very slightly radioactive U235 removed. It isn't nuclear waste.
U-238 has a half life of 4.5 billion years. If you ate it, the problems from heavy metal poisioning would be much worse than the radioactivity.
It's not like they're firing shells filled with Cs-137 which is what the parent is blatantly trying to imply.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
This meme about a golden age of Islamic civilization is a complete myth
The Romans of antiquity were similar borrowers. And yet they had a golden age as well. Creating a common culture and political system and a huge trade network has vast value in itself. Among other things, it permits borrowing of technologies and ideas between otherwise disparate groups and creates a mixing pot of such things.
So the very borrowing of stuff which you decry is a huge part of the Muslim contribution to human development in that time.
What really has changed isn't that Muslim society has gotten worse, but that the rest of the world has found something better.
Erm, talk about half the story?
"Pearl Habor was no rationale at all for doing anything to Japan. The U.S., Britain and the Dutch had embargoed Japan's oil supplies in July 1941. Japan made it quite clear then that they considered that an act of war since it was going to completely strangle Japan militarily and economically."
Have you never heard of the rape of nanking? Japan was war mongering well before even the war in Europe had gotten underway, it was an imperialist nation no different to the Western nations you criticise for provoking them, it's whole purpose for war against China starting primarily in 1937 was because it wanted to take it over.
That's why Japan was under embargo - because it had rolled into China, before Hitler had even rolled into Poland.
Christ, I'm probably one of the least pro-American people you'll meet but Pearl Harbour WAS rational for doing something to Japan, because it was a further extension of Japan's military aggression in the Pacific.
They weren't some innocent country who we just embargoed because we thought it'd be a bit of a laugh, we did so because they were a major destabilising force in the region, we attempted political pressure through embargos and it didn't work. From that point on the only option was full out war against Japan - they started the war in the Pacific long before the west really got involved. The West gave them 4 years to give up their imperialist ambitions and during that time they committed countless massacres, mass-rapes, and general destruction of Chinese cities and infrastructure, when they finally hit Pearl Harbour it was no fucking wonder the West decided enough was enough. No rationale? seriously? You think Japan should've just been allowed to go on destroying, raping, and pillaging the whole Pacific, extending it's war it started in 1937?
Excepting for the obvious fact that so far the Tea Party hasn't actually slowed spending or reduced corruption at all. They mostly seem to have just made Congress even more bitterly partisan, disfunctional and deadlocked than it already was and that was a real feat considering it was completely dysfunctional before they got there.
But I am actually as much a fan of the original Tea Party message, and their attempts to cut spending. as I am the OWS's. I think the two movements should acutally unite since they were attacking the same problem from opposite directions, unfortunately the two movements completely hate each other.
The big problem wi the tea party is their movement was co opted by a bunch of horrible, whacked out, politicians like Michelle Bachman, Sarah Palin and Jim DeMint, and by a bunch of people who are obsessed with right wing social issues like abortion and gay marriage instead of the economic issues that matter.
At this point I am willing to wager they are or will be totally co opted in to the standard Republican causes of cutting taxes, especially on the wealthy, gutting social programs and busting unions, while they let the military squader unlimited amounts of money, shield tax subsidies and pork for big corporations, and generally let the deficit spiral out of control. I am actually all for cutting taxes, gutting social programs and busting unions but I want all the pet Republican pork beneficiaries to be gutted too and I doubt the Tea party will actually do it.
@de_machina
Intriguing how the slaves shipped to Europe are completely ignored. Also intriguing how the fact that much of Africa was in fact forcibly converted to Christianity at that point and the fact that you're trying to pretend that current population split on religion and one that existed before the major islamic push in the last two centuries are actually the same.
Citation needed? Where the fuck did you got that numbers?
Like the other AC above mentioned, tu quoque statements don't refute what I said above about Muslims. The Muslim 'achievements' you refer to are all work done by others, and I refuse to let Muslims pretend that they are the ones who brought this to the world - be it the number system (including zero), or trigonometry, algebra, optics, sociology and medicine. Also, the statement about the Arabs, Turks and Afghans being violent nomads before Islam is crap. Turks and Afghans were a part of the Persian empire, which was very civilized, while the eastern Afghans of Gandhara were Buddhists and Hindus. Yeah, the Arabs were nomads, but even they were far more civilized than they became after Mohammed (great example being Mohammed's first wife Khadijah, who was an independent merchant, whereas under Islam, women pretty much lost all their rights), which is a part of why he had few problems taking over. Had he lived today, he'd have been in jail, hunted down as a cult leader.
The Hindu caste system never claimed any lives. What it did was in an era where vocational training was absent, it prescribed that a son follow the trade and practices of his father, and over time, the number of castes - initially 4 - multiplied. Yeah the problem of untouchability was evil, as were restrictions on inter-caste marriages - neither of which is practiced today, and nor are Hindu fundamentalists demanding it back. Another point - the caste laws, bad as it was, was restricted only to Hindus - there were no attempts to put the rest of the world under Manu's smritis.
This is different with shariah, which intends to bring all people - Muslim and non Muslim alike, under Islamic law, where Muslims would be privileged people, and all others would either have to be dhimmis, or second class citizens, and if they refuse both, be killed.
I don't have an agenda. Islam (i.e. the Qur'an and Sun'nah) does, and it has an indeterminate number of Muslims who are committed to carrying it out, no matter what the costs. If its agenda didn't include covering non-Muslims, or trying to convert them so that they can become a supremacist majority, I certainly wouldn't bother.
...except no one pretends that the Romans weren't some of the biggest plagarists of all time. When you are presented with something Roman that is a copy, you are told that it is a copy. No one tries to pretend that the Romans were something they weren't.
There is no nonsensical notion of political correctness that causes people to try and sugar coat them.
If the Islamic nations had a golden age, it was likely DESPITE of Islam in a manner very much like our own experience in the West.
If the Iranians have anything going for them at all, anything that leaves open the possibility they will become a civilized modern nation, it's the fact that they actually have a well establshed national identity separate from their religion.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.