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Another Afghan School Poisoned — 160 Girls Hospitalized
An anonymous reader writes "Back in April, we discussed news of an anti-education attack on an Afghani school, which poisoned 150 Afghan schoolgirls. Now, a hospital in the same province has admitted 160 more girls who seem to have suffered a similar attack. 'Their classrooms might have been sprayed with a toxic material before the girls entered, police spokesman Khalilullah Aseer said. He blamed the Taliban. The incident, the second in a week's time, was reported at the Aahan Dara Girls School in Taluqan, the provincial capital. The girls, ages 10 to 20, complained of headaches, dizziness and vomiting before being taken to the hospital, said Hafizullah Safi, director of the provincial health department. More than half of them were discharged within a few hours of receiving treatment, Safi said. The health department collected blood samples and sent them to Kabul for testing.'"
What does this have to do with /.?
This is what happens when too many people believe too literally in 1000 year old witch craft.
And this is exactly where the US could be heading if the current 50% of the population gets any stronger. Rick Santorum was as scary to the US as Hitler was to Germany. If we let nutcases like that become president, which a large number of people supported, this will be common in the US as well.
slashdot troll = you make a compelling argument I do not like the implications of.
Not anti-education.
And that is why there are a bunch of hairy dudes cuddling each other in caves in the mountains instead of being at home cudling with their wives.
Make the schools coeducated. The Taliban will be pissed but hopefully they wouldn't attack boys.
Sahih Bukhari 3:48:826
And this is hardly the instance of this in Islam.
Uh I don't think you get the import. This wasn't an attack against random women, it was an attack against women seeking an education. They are aware that they need women. They would rather those women stay at home and spit out then take care of sons rather than seek to better themselves.
The message is: Women who seek to become educated will be targeted with violence. Remain at home, weak, ignorant, and dependent. Then there will be slightly less^W^W no violence.
The enemies of Democracy are
And this is exactly where the US could be heading if the current 50% of the population gets any stronger. Rick Santorum was as scary to the US as Hitler was to Germany. If we let nutcases like that become president, which a large number of people supported, this will be common in the US as well.
Most Americans do not really believe in religion, and only identify with Christianity because they think they should, and the certainly are not Muslims.
The truth is that while many people are vaguely âoespiritualâ, most people no longer attend church regularly if at all, and only a small percentage of so-called âoeChristiansâ in this country can tell you anything at all about the Bible, old or new.
There are people who bleat about this being a âoeChristian Nationâ, but statistically, factually, it isnâ(TM)t so. I donâ(TM)t think it can even be proven that we are a âoecertainly not a Muslim nationâ, either.
We are mostly agnostic.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
How is one culture supposed to judge another culture? Everything is relative...
Until you actually get told otherwise by your conscience.
Well, from my philosophy courses in college (as financially useless as they may have been) there's actually been a lot of study and attempts to codify what should be regarded as Universal rights. There's no need for us to rely on our "conscious" or someone else's conscious nor should we sit back if we feel that human rights are being abused in another nation that is sovereign. I'm a very liberal open minded person. If you want to worship some stupid magic person in the sky, go to town. If they start to infringe upon others' life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, then we have issues that must be remedied.
Your lax definition of a 'Conscious' be damned, begin the escalation of political pressure then economic pressure then physical pressure.
Sort of on topic, from your signature:
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
The Nazis were stopped because they blatantly violated (nearly) everyone's rules of Universal Human Rights -- so much so that many of their own detested it. And we should not allow something like the Holocaust to happen again. Communism, on the other hand, is a counter case. We went into Vietnam under the laughable pretenses that a Universal Human Right is capitalism in place of communism (with obvious self interests). Believe it or not, communism does not blatantly violate everyone's rules of Universal Human Rights and so we were kind of lacking on the support and moral high ground for that war. If you think communism has been "ended" and that it has been "ended" by war and not inherent corruption that it can't seem to shake -- you and I must be reading different books by very different authors.
To recap, Universal Human Rights transcend your suggestion of relativity. I'm not sure but if you're attempting to make fun of people who tolerate other cultures by saying it's relative, there's no place for that when you're dealing with a child's life and their attempt to be educated.
My work here is dung.
The conclusion jumped to is that this is a Taliban attack. However, this is actually quite a common - though unexplained - phenomenon: Mass Hysteria.
Even a good (large) hospital will have problems dealing with 160 patients admitted simultaneously. Afghanistan's hospitals are hardly stellar (0.4 beds per 1000 people, according to google). It shouldn't be surprising that they don't keep wonderfully accurate records in cases like this.
a fine of example of "blame the tool and not the wielder"
Because of course a small number of evil bastards act with the full support of all of the billions of Muslims in the world. By your logic, guys like Anders Breivik and Scott Roeder act with the full support of all Christians.
I am officially gone from
No, you have your head in the sand. Read the Qu'ran sometime and some of the other Islamic writings. They demand that Muslims emulate Mohammed, and they go into great excited detail about how Mohammed massacred people who mocked him. See for example Sahi Bukhari :Volume 5, Book 59, Number 443 which describes a massacre in great and gory detail.
The "Sahih" in this means that the source and the chain of narration of the Hadith is considered to be trustworthy. Of all Sahih Hadith, al-Bukhari is considered the most trustworthy. This means that to the average Muslim, there can be no doubt that Mohammed said this, and therefore that it must be true.
There is a very small minority of Muslims who reject all Hadith, believing only the Quran is authoritative and that it actually bans following texts such as Hadith. Mainstream Islam considers them to be apostates. Too bad, you remove Hadith, you remove much of the backwards, nasty stuff about the religion.
The Koran, much like the Bible, are full of really good messages. They're also full of a lot of garbage.
Yes, absolutely. However, the garbage in the Quran is unfortunately peddled by a large number of religious authorities. Islam is structured in such a way that an observant Muslim is required to dedicate himself (it's always "him") to religious warfare and must be prepared to commit violence to expand Islam.
You can ask any Islamic scholar about this. They'll either confirm it or dissemble, but the response will be obvious.
Tell me something, between Christianity and Islam, which one of the two has committed nearly 19,000 terrorist attacks since 9/11? I'll give you a hint, it's not Christianity.
To the mods now. Refute the point, and don't be an intellectual coward and moderate something because you don't like it.
Om, nomnomnom...
Typically, i wouldn't bother responding to this, but i'm tired of hearing it.
YOU should actually study the Quran, because it actually says exactly the opposite. It demands that you educate yourself (male and female) and demands that no one be forced to convert because that is not a true conversion. There is no more colonialism in Islam than in Christianity, so just stop. You're not helping educate anyone, you're just spreading more misinformation that furthers the divide of understanding between 3 billion people. Stop it.
No, you have your head in the sand. Although there are more Christians than Muslims, the number of religiously-motivated violent attacks by Muslims today far outweighs religiously-motivated attacks by Christians.
Currently, there are religiously-motivated wars and attacks in Mali, Kenya, Nigeria. There are religiously-motivated bombings, suicide attacks, etc. in Iraq, Pakistan, Indonesia, Phillipines, Thailand. I could probably think of 100 examples in the last year if pressed.
On the Christian side, I can think of Brevik and the Oklahoma CIty bomber and maybe some attacks on abortion providers. Very small-scale indeed compared to Islamic religious violence.
The Quran is full of contradictions. This is so that Muslims can pick and choose what to present to outsiders. (There are similar things in the Bible too, so it's not only Islam that's guilty of this.)
There are at least a hundred Quranic verses extolling violence, not to mention many more Islamic writings. These are not abrogated by the token expressions of peacefulness.
We see the consequences today. If you cannot recognize religiously-motivated violence when it blows up in your face, then I guess you can continue to deny reality.
muslim population is growing. cultures that abuse women have increasing population rate. you'll notice cultures that have more freedom for women have shrinking population. Given a choice and education and opportunity and prosperity, most women have less than 2.1 children
I don't see what your Star Wars analogy has to do with it. Consider:
There are at least a hundred verses in the Quran that call for or justify religious violence. Many other Islamic writings do the same.
There have been tens of thousands of religiously-motivated attacks by Muslims in the last ten years, greatly outnumbering religiously-motivated attacks by any other religious group.
What is it you're failing to grasp?
And when the priests were finally caught and sent to prison?
Was the reaction the same as when we killed Osama?
Did the Catholics decapitate anyone for saying bad things about the priests?
Did the Christians kill people because they caught the people murdering doctors who perform abortions?
No?
Then there is a fucking difference.
People get murdered for daring to draw a picture of Mohammad.
No one got killed for "Art" that was a crucifix in urine.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
MAYBE if you actually read a book you might learn WHY Muslims have such high need of FEMALE doctors. That is because female patients have to be seen by a female doctor or not at all. The statistic sounds so nice but underneath it is a regime of segregated care where QUALITY of care was of no importance whatsoever.
And 60% of doctors also tells you nothing of the total number of doctors available OR that women (childbirth) need doctors a LOT more then men.
Careful with your statistics young one, they can be tricky things and easily be used to fool you.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Really?
Sura 9 of the Koran, the last Sura dictated by the Prophet Mohammed (pbuh, and all that) and hence not subject to revision or qualification by later Suras, seems to call for killing of infidels, in pretty explicit language, repeatedly.
I don't have time to dig out the exact quotes right now. Maybe tonight.
Maybe the problem is people who take religious texts literally and not the tenants of the religion itself.
According to Islam, the Quran is the ultimate authority and must be taken as truth. Other Abrahamic religions have their fundamentalist nutcases, it is true, but they have much less of a problem with people reinterpreting the religious texts than Islam does.
Also, giving any sort of religious text a free pass because it's "not meant to be taken literally" is a dangerous game. It allows religious adherents to present their religion as moderate to outsiders while revealing its true and violent face to insiders. I don't think any religious text, whether it's Islamic, Christian or Jewish, should be viewed as anything other than hateful if it promotes violence, genocide, etc.
My Scotts-Irish mom would teach them how to mash balls and turn men into meek church mice.
Yeah, the Christians only did that whole Inquisition thing, and the Crusades.
Okay, easy enough to counter. Let's go with the convert or die from Islam. Millions dead. Still outnumbers the total of the Inquisition. And the Crusades were a two point counter to the Muslims who'd spend ~200 years pillaging, raping and burning Spain. That wasn't actually what triggered the crusades. What triggered the crusades itself, was the muslims declaring that no christian shall have access to the holy land.
That number is terribly inflated and I could easily come up with the same or even a larger number for crimes committed by Christians.
Really, use your brain
Incorrect, they're all sourced on the website via the media that reports it. Every, single one. Which means that there is a good chance that the number is lower.
and how many people has christianity killed off in the last thousand years?
Still less than Muslims have killed in the last 800 funny enough. And that takes some work. Remember, between the two religions, which one has the mantra of "Convert or die" useful tip, it's not Christianity. And which one has a central theme of "leave and we'll kill you."
Om, nomnomnom...
Which isn't unlike the Bible. But I've never seen anyone here stone their ex for cheating on them. Just like such actions do not happen in most Muslim countries (so, euh, most countries then). This is the action of a very limited group of people. Although I am not a good friend of religions, I nevertheless do not think it is fair to blame a religion for some actions based on a perverted and archaic interpretation of its scriptures by a group of deranged people.
No, you have your head in the sand. Read the Qu'ran sometime and some of the other Islamic writings. They demand that Muslims emulate Mohammed, and they go into great excited detail about how Mohammed massacred people who mocked him.
Mind you, the same is true of the Old Testament and Yahweh.
Mass hysteria is most common in schoolgirls, especially in strict environments. Reports of incidents go back hundreds of years occurring in many countries, 12 schoolgirls in LeRoy New York last December, 85 schoolgirls in a school in Blackburn, England in 1965, 600 schoolgirls in Girls Town school in Mexico in 2006, etc, etc. One clue in Afghanistan is that the teachers don't get sick. There are other forms of mass hysteria, including contagious laughter and dancing, (Eijanaika in Japan)... In Nigeria, Congo, Thailand and Singapore there have been outbreaks of penis theft mass hysteria, where adult men believe they have been robbed of their pride and joy by magic. There are lots of articles about the phenomena and various books... Most striking here is that so many Slashdot readers just swallowed the story without thinking.
If you had drawn a crucifx in urine 500 years ago, you would have been burned alive.