"It's not ahmadinejad who's responsible for Iran's nuclear weapons programme. The man responsible for that can't even pronounce nuclear."
1) Ahmadinejad actually had nothing to do with it, correct. Iran's nuclear weapons program started many years ago under Rafsanjani. You are not being logical. GWB had absolutely nothing to do with Iran's nuclear war program. In fact, he provides discincentive for Iran to continue.
2) Jimmy Carter, who was an actual nuclear engineer, pronounces the word "nuclear" as "nucular". I think that Carter knows more about "nucular" technology than you ever will. Besides, if you are going to add two extra letters onto the end of the word "program", you should not complain about how some pronounce words.
Castro, Pol Pot, and the Iranian president have several "checkmarks", but none have them all. If this is mindless Bush bashing: most don't apply at all to Bush, especially "Hitler was charismatic and had a fervent following amongst his people"
"No he has specifically asked both the US and Germany to relocate israel to their land"
What if the millions of people who live in that country refuse to submit to the ethnic cleaning? Will you shoot them if they do not get into their cattle-cars peacefully?
"The US can easily move it someplace in Nevada and nobody would even notice."
Why not level Tehran and build "The New Israel" there? It seems like the Iranian president is making such a big stink and demanding to move a country against its will. Let him be the one to say the price for his outrageous demands. Or what if the indiginous people of Iran (who are NOT Muslims) decide that he can take his Islamic terrorist dictatorship and move it to Antarctica?
"i think if country A had financed an 8 year blood bath and then taken over canada under a false premise"
The problem with such unrelated analogies that if you can't even get the name of Iraq and Iran straight, then who even knows what you are saying? Do you mean Canada, or did you mean to say China? Does any of it have anything to do with anything?
..."busheviks. you see, this guy is playing to the soviets"
IS playing to the Soviets? IS??? What does Lenin have to do with it?
"hitler headed a vastly superior military force and picked on the militarily weak in his society and the surrounding countries, none of whom was a real threat to hitler."
None of them was any threat to Hitler. That is, if you don't count Britain and the USSR. I guess we can't count those anyway. We're playing your make-believe history. Was Hitler surrounded by such weak countries as Grand Fenwicke, the Shire, Lilliput, and Oz?
"the usa attacks iraq under a false premise"
What false premise is that? Specifically?
"...the soviet union and china....
Again with mentioning a country that does not even EXIST? Tell me, dear AC, I wonder if you have any revelations about the impact of Genghis Khan and his Mongol Hordes on this situation. Do you think Ceasar or Napoleon will send troops to Lebanon?
"the next time a usa speech sounds good, who will listen?"
I bet if you were the speechwriter, and did not know the difference between Iran and Iraq, and constantly spoke of the Soviet Union as a modern global player, it sure would be quite interesting.
"The anti-Semitic and anti-Christian feelings in the Middle East are a somewhat modern phenomena"
Only if you consider something that dates back to 700 AD as being "modern". Muhammad and his followers slaughtered large numbers of Christians and Jews for the crime of being Christians and Jews (to say nothing of what they did to the pagans they conquered). Islamic law mandates punishment and oppression for these "people of the book". Also, there are several more sects of Islam than the three you named.
It does not mandate "tolerance" other than in a begrudging (i.e. intolerant) fashion that includes punishing people for not being Muslims. The Q'uran also includes the demand for "Shariah": a rule of Muslim law over all, in which non-Muslims have to obey Muslim laws, and only Muslims have a say in how things are run. Do you think the Jim Crow South was tolerant of the rights blacks?
"Ayn Rand is to philosophy what Karl Marx is to philosophy, two extremes, both wrong"
True, but Rand and her followers are "mostly harmless". In comparison, Marxism directly influenced and justified the actions of most of the worst killers in human history. There would have been no "Killing Fields" if Pol Pot had read "Fountainhead" instead of "Das Kapital". The extremism of the selfish hermit has much less potential to damage than the extremism of the megalomaniac.
"1) Germans Must Pay, they, and not the Arabs, made the Holocaust"
The Palestinian governing authorities at the time of Hitler strongly supported the Holocaust, even to the point of sending Arabs into Europe to wipe out European Jews. More recently, when Israel was founded, nearby Arab countries forced their Jews to leave (to go to Israel)
" but an atheist from a country in Central Europe"
I won't hold your religious faith against you. They should just leave Israel right where it is. The Arabs and Muslims just have to let go of their age-old hatred of Jewish people. Then there will be no problem. To move Israel would be to institute ethnic cleansing/genocide.
"The British didn't claim _exclusive_ ownership. They added it as "yet another colony" to their Empire."
The 2nd sentence is the more true one, and contradicts the first. The British Empire, like any empire, was not too tolerant toward sharing sovereignty of their colonies.
" In fact, the Ottomans empire's success was that they respected local cultures and integrated local structures into their governance system. And they gave Christians and Jews their "free space" where they could practice their religions."
Only to a slight degree. The Ottomans, while less vicious toward their Jewish subjects than Arabs, did do such things as punish Jews with special taxes (to encourage them to convert and get free of the tax) and in other ways denied them full participation as first-class citizens. The only way to get decent treatment was to convert to Islam.
" Same with the Arabs"
The Arab empire was not known for its respect for local cultures and governance systems. They were horribly brutal and oppressive, and always advanced on a wave of bloodshed, plunder, rape, and the typical crushing of local culture. Just because they were not as bad as Middle Ages Europe does not make them any sort of model of civilized behavior.
"(just look at the situation of religious freedom before and after the Reconquista was finished)."
There was none before and after the hated invaders were tossed out.
"It also does not help to argue against straw-man arguments that I did not make. I did not claim that Jews or Christians have the same rights as Muslims in Iran nor did I state tht they enjoy equal participation in society. I was merely pointing out that there is Jewish community in Iran and that they are free to practice their religion and that is indeed a fact."
The first sentence is contradicted by the second one. If the government punishes you and takes away some of your rights if you practice a certain religion, you aren't very "free" to practice it, are you?
"If you fail to see the difference in degree than I guess I am indeed wasting my breath."
You are indeed wasting your breath if you are trying to claim any sort of fundamental difference between hatred based on the victim's race and hatred based on the victim's religion.
" In a Nazi's mind this person can not be converted to anything to make him "better" and is inborn inferior and only extermination is the cure."
Even this most superficial of differences goes away if the victim says "No, I will NOT convert" and ends up being killed just like the ones being killed for being of the wrong "race".
"Not all evil is created equal. In failing to differentiate you weaken yourself and diminish your chances of fighting it intelligently."
The differences between these type of "evil" are superficial, and the two are exactly equal in their "evilness". I recognize the difference in definitions, but that does not make one any better (less evil) than the other.
"Instead, we should require Israel to renounce ansolutely all racial, religious and ethnic discrimination. This would include giving the Palestinians full citizenship and changing Israel's name to something ethnically neutral (eg. "Mediterrania")."
Other than the name change, that is pretty much what you have. Freedom to worship (or NOT worship at all) is present and protected. Israel is actually one of the few countries that grants full citizenship to its Palestinian citizens. Other countries like Lebanon and Syria imprison them in "refugee camps", even those native-born Syrian/ Lebanese citizens of Palestinian descent.
"Isreal would still exist and no one would be murdered."
Yet, it would be (as it is now) a secular state, one in which Muslims are free to be whatever kind of Muslim they want, or even quit Islam altogether (and the same freedom goes for the other faiths). This sort of religious freedom is anethema to the terrorists. The terrorists come in two overlapping groups: those who believe that Israel should be dominated and run by Arabs, and those who believe that it should be dominated and run by Muslims. The Iranians, who are non-Arabs, are in the latter group. A system that does not have complete Arab ethnic dominion and/or strict rule of Islamic laws as national policy will not appease any of them..
"Of course, Israel wouldn't be on the map anymore and it wouldn't have a Jewish majority."
The majority of the citizens there are Jewish at this time. Maybe things will change at a much later time, but merely changing the name does not change cold hard demographics.
"you may want to take into account that Iran still has a sizable Jewish population that is free to exercise their religion http://www.sephardicstudies.org/iran.html [sephardicstudies.org]."
That is not a "fact". Iran is officially an Islamic state. This means that anyone who does not worship the Muslim god can go to hell. Jews and other non-Muslims are denied equal participation in society. They remain 2nd class citizens unless they convert to Islam.
"The anti-[Semitism] found in the Arab ME does not follow the pattern of a Nazi ideology that was racially motivated"
It merely substitutes rabid hatred based on race with rabid hatred based on religion. It's pretty much the same thing. I substituted "semitism" for "Zionism" in your sentence because it all boils down to hatred of Jews, and was around long before the "Zionist" movement.
"The Qur'an on the other hand recognizes the other theistic religions - Judaism and Christianity - and mandates tolerance towards them."
Like with any religion, there's a difference between the best selectively-culled ideals of "The Book" and what happens in practice. The history of Islam is one of horrific antisemitism. Arabia (Saudi Arabia) once had a sizable Jewish population until Muhammad (the founder of Islam) himself ordered all of them killed off. In keeping with Muslim teachings, being Jewish has pretty much been illegal in Arabia ever since. The "tolerance" for other faiths as per Islam was typically expressed in the destruction or desecration of most Jewish, Christian, etc places of worship once conquered by Muslims, and also in such matters as the fact that Jews had to play a special tax just for being Jewish, under the law of the old Muslim empire.
This is not "tolerance" except in the way that blacks were "tolerated" under Jim Crow and the KKK.
"Antisemitism wasn't a problem at that time in Palestine"
It was a big problem at that time, going all the way back to when the Arabs invaded and conquered the place. There were numerous pograms in the area in the first half of the 20th century.
" simply because there was no single ethnic group that claimed _exclusive_ ownership of the area that is now Israel."
Well, the British claimed ownership. Before them, the Ottomans, and before them the Arab empire.
Why wouldn't he? All they have done is fight back against numerous ongoing genocide attempts.
"You have to remember that we think of Jews in terms of the Nazis and the holocaust. People in the middle east think of them in terms of western crusaders invading the holy land."
The Jew-hating terrorists (Hamas, Hesbollah, Iran, etc) also think of them in terms close to those of Nazis and the holocaust. Their teachings and proclamations are filled with references to the inferiority and moral failings of Jews as a whole (and as individuals), without regard to "Western"-ness. The Palestinian government, as such, was closely allied to actual Nazi Germany during the 1940s.
"Back in the middle ages european crusaders created a Kingdom of Jerusalem. This kingdom was purged from the Islamic world without the use of genocide"
That's because there were only a few for the Muslims to murder. That Kingdom was a colony with a few governors, so to speak. It wasn't an entire nation living there. This is much different from the Israel situation, where they'd have to murder millions of Jews in order to "get rid of" the nation of Israel. The genocide by which the Arab invaders came into possession of Jerusalem in the first place (way before the Crusades) should be mentioned too (as long as you are going back in history)
"He's also said a couple of times that Israel should be "wiped off the map.", which sounds bad, until you read..."
No, it just sounds bad, period. You just can't put a happy face on demand for ethnic cleansing / genocide.
"he wants to wipe the state of Israel off the map, not it's inhabitants"
And when the inhabitants refuse to get into the cattle-cars, never mind that the inhabitants themselves get "wiped out" for standing up for themselves. The same sort of language was used by Serbia in its wars against Kosovo and Bosnia...and plenty of inhabitants were killed there.
"Little did you know that because of the Patriot Act, anybody who visits that site is automatically tagged by an FBI database. They will now begin to track all your phone calls, intercept your emails, and monitor your credit card transactions."
That's cool. I bought a book (using my credit card) from an online bookstore a few weeks ago, and never received the book. I forgot the web site link. Now it's nice to know I call call up the FBI and have them tell me what the site was. I might use it also to find out that phone number I misplaced of that guy who called me about the car. But there should be an easier way to sign up for this convenient service other than clicking on Iranian blog links.
Slashdot Mirror
"It's not ahmadinejad who's responsible for Iran's nuclear weapons programme. The man responsible for that can't even pronounce nuclear."
1) Ahmadinejad actually had nothing to do with it, correct. Iran's nuclear weapons program started many years ago under Rafsanjani. You are not being logical. GWB had absolutely nothing to do with Iran's nuclear war program. In fact, he provides discincentive for Iran to continue.
2) Jimmy Carter, who was an actual nuclear engineer, pronounces the word "nuclear" as "nucular". I think that Carter knows more about "nucular" technology than you ever will. Besides, if you are going to add two extra letters onto the end of the word "program", you should not complain about how some pronounce words.
"Is there is a true religion? All religions are obviously false."
Except for yours, right?
Those two groups are the aggressors: the instigators of the violence.
Castro, Pol Pot, and the Iranian president have several "checkmarks", but none have them all. If this is mindless Bush bashing: most don't apply at all to Bush, especially "Hitler was charismatic and had a fervent following amongst his people"
"No he has specifically asked both the US and Germany to relocate israel to their land"
What if the millions of people who live in that country refuse to submit to the ethnic cleaning? Will you shoot them if they do not get into their cattle-cars peacefully?
"The US can easily move it someplace in Nevada and nobody would even notice."
Why not level Tehran and build "The New Israel" there? It seems like the Iranian president is making such a big stink and demanding to move a country against its will. Let him be the one to say the price for his outrageous demands. Or what if the indiginous people of Iran (who are NOT Muslims) decide that he can take his Islamic terrorist dictatorship and move it to Antarctica?
"i think if country A had financed an 8 year blood bath and then taken over canada under a false premise"
..."busheviks. you see, this guy is playing to the soviets"
The problem with such unrelated analogies that if you can't even get the name of Iraq and Iran straight, then who even knows what you are saying? Do you mean Canada, or did you mean to say China? Does any of it have anything to do with anything?
IS playing to the Soviets? IS??? What does Lenin have to do with it?
"hitler headed a vastly superior military force and picked on the militarily weak in his society and the surrounding countries, none of whom was a real threat to hitler."
None of them was any threat to Hitler. That is, if you don't count Britain and the USSR. I guess we can't count those anyway. We're playing your make-believe history. Was Hitler surrounded by such weak countries as Grand Fenwicke, the Shire, Lilliput, and Oz?
"the usa attacks iraq under a false premise"
What false premise is that? Specifically?
"...the soviet union and china....
Again with mentioning a country that does not even EXIST? Tell me, dear AC, I wonder if you have any revelations about the impact of Genghis Khan and his Mongol Hordes on this situation. Do you think Ceasar or Napoleon will send troops to Lebanon?
"the next time a usa speech sounds good, who will listen?"
I bet if you were the speechwriter, and did not know the difference between Iran and Iraq, and constantly spoke of the Soviet Union as a modern global player, it sure would be quite interesting.
"And the Israel not being where it is, sounds more like "it should be on different (US or German) soil" to me."
The most clear thing is that he wants the Jews under the soil, and soon.
"The anti-Semitic and anti-Christian feelings in the Middle East are a somewhat modern phenomena"
Only if you consider something that dates back to 700 AD as being "modern". Muhammad and his followers slaughtered large numbers of Christians and Jews for the crime of being Christians and Jews (to say nothing of what they did to the pagans they conquered). Islamic law mandates punishment and oppression for these "people of the book". Also, there are several more sects of Islam than the three you named.
It does not mandate "tolerance" other than in a begrudging (i.e. intolerant) fashion that includes punishing people for not being Muslims. The Q'uran also includes the demand for "Shariah": a rule of Muslim law over all, in which non-Muslims have to obey Muslim laws, and only Muslims have a say in how things are run. Do you think the Jim Crow South was tolerant of the rights blacks?
"Ayn Rand is to philosophy what Karl Marx is to philosophy, two extremes, both wrong"
True, but Rand and her followers are "mostly harmless". In comparison, Marxism directly influenced and justified the actions of most of the worst killers in human history. There would have been no "Killing Fields" if Pol Pot had read "Fountainhead" instead of "Das Kapital". The extremism of the selfish hermit has much less potential to damage than the extremism of the megalomaniac.
"1) Germans Must Pay, they, and not the Arabs, made the Holocaust"
The Palestinian governing authorities at the time of Hitler strongly supported the Holocaust, even to the point of sending Arabs into Europe to wipe out European Jews. More recently, when Israel was founded, nearby Arab countries forced their Jews to leave (to go to Israel)
" but an atheist from a country in Central Europe"
I won't hold your religious faith against you. They should just leave Israel right where it is. The Arabs and Muslims just have to let go of their age-old hatred of Jewish people. Then there will be no problem. To move Israel would be to institute ethnic cleansing/genocide.
"The British didn't claim _exclusive_ ownership. They added it as "yet another colony" to their Empire."
The 2nd sentence is the more true one, and contradicts the first. The British Empire, like any empire, was not too tolerant toward sharing sovereignty of their colonies.
" In fact, the Ottomans empire's success was that they respected local cultures and integrated local structures into their governance system. And they gave Christians and Jews their "free space" where they could practice their religions."
Only to a slight degree. The Ottomans, while less vicious toward their Jewish subjects than Arabs, did do such things as punish Jews with special taxes (to encourage them to convert and get free of the tax) and in other ways denied them full participation as first-class citizens. The only way to get decent treatment was to convert to Islam.
" Same with the Arabs"
The Arab empire was not known for its respect for local cultures and governance systems. They were horribly brutal and oppressive, and always advanced on a wave of bloodshed, plunder, rape, and the typical crushing of local culture. Just because they were not as bad as Middle Ages Europe does not make them any sort of model of civilized behavior.
"(just look at the situation of religious freedom before and after the Reconquista was finished)."
There was none before and after the hated invaders were tossed out.
"It also does not help to argue against straw-man arguments that I did not make. I did not claim that Jews or Christians have the same rights as Muslims in Iran nor did I state tht they enjoy equal participation in society. I was merely pointing out that there is Jewish community in Iran and that they are free to practice their religion and that is indeed a fact."
The first sentence is contradicted by the second one. If the government punishes you and takes away some of your rights if you practice a certain religion, you aren't very "free" to practice it, are you?
"If you fail to see the difference in degree than I guess I am indeed wasting my breath."
You are indeed wasting your breath if you are trying to claim any sort of fundamental difference between hatred based on the victim's race and hatred based on the victim's religion.
" In a Nazi's mind this person can not be converted to anything to make him "better" and is inborn inferior and only extermination is the cure."
Even this most superficial of differences goes away if the victim says "No, I will NOT convert" and ends up being killed just like the ones being killed for being of the wrong "race".
"Not all evil is created equal. In failing to differentiate you weaken yourself and diminish your chances of fighting it intelligently."
The differences between these type of "evil" are superficial, and the two are exactly equal in their "evilness". I recognize the difference in definitions, but that does not make one any better (less evil) than the other.
"Instead, we should require Israel to renounce ansolutely all racial, religious and ethnic discrimination. This would include giving the Palestinians full citizenship and changing Israel's name to something ethnically neutral (eg. "Mediterrania")."
Other than the name change, that is pretty much what you have. Freedom to worship (or NOT worship at all) is present and protected. Israel is actually one of the few countries that grants full citizenship to its Palestinian citizens. Other countries like Lebanon and Syria imprison them in "refugee camps", even those native-born Syrian/ Lebanese citizens of Palestinian descent.
"Isreal would still exist and no one would be murdered."
Yet, it would be (as it is now) a secular state, one in which Muslims are free to be whatever kind of Muslim they want, or even quit Islam altogether (and the same freedom goes for the other faiths). This sort of religious freedom is anethema to the terrorists. The terrorists come in two overlapping groups: those who believe that Israel should be dominated and run by Arabs, and those who believe that it should be dominated and run by Muslims. The Iranians, who are non-Arabs, are in the latter group. A system that does not have complete Arab ethnic dominion and/or strict rule of Islamic laws as national policy will not appease any of them..
"Of course, Israel wouldn't be on the map anymore and it wouldn't have a Jewish majority."
The majority of the citizens there are Jewish at this time. Maybe things will change at a much later time, but merely changing the name does not change cold hard demographics.
"you may want to take into account that Iran still has a sizable Jewish population that is free to exercise their religion http://www.sephardicstudies.org/iran.html [sephardicstudies.org]."
That is not a "fact". Iran is officially an Islamic state. This means that anyone who does not worship the Muslim god can go to hell. Jews and other non-Muslims are denied equal participation in society. They remain 2nd class citizens unless they convert to Islam.
"The anti-[Semitism] found in the Arab ME does not follow the pattern of a Nazi ideology that was racially motivated"
It merely substitutes rabid hatred based on race with rabid hatred based on religion. It's pretty much the same thing. I substituted "semitism" for "Zionism" in your sentence because it all boils down to hatred of Jews, and was around long before the "Zionist" movement.
"The Qur'an on the other hand recognizes the other theistic religions - Judaism and Christianity - and mandates tolerance towards them."
Like with any religion, there's a difference between the best selectively-culled ideals of "The Book" and what happens in practice. The history of Islam is one of horrific antisemitism. Arabia (Saudi Arabia) once had a sizable Jewish population until Muhammad (the founder of Islam) himself ordered all of them killed off. In keeping with Muslim teachings, being Jewish has pretty much been illegal in Arabia ever since. The "tolerance" for other faiths as per Islam was typically expressed in the destruction or desecration of most Jewish, Christian, etc places of worship once conquered by Muslims, and also in such matters as the fact that Jews had to play a special tax just for being Jewish, under the law of the old Muslim empire.
This is not "tolerance" except in the way that blacks were "tolerated" under Jim Crow and the KKK.
"Antisemitism wasn't a problem at that time in Palestine"
It was a big problem at that time, going all the way back to when the Arabs invaded and conquered the place. There were numerous pograms in the area in the first half of the 20th century.
" simply because there was no single ethnic group that claimed _exclusive_ ownership of the area that is now Israel."
Well, the British claimed ownership. Before them, the Ottomans, and before them the Arab empire.
Why wouldn't he? All they have done is fight back against numerous ongoing genocide attempts.
"You have to remember that we think of Jews in terms of the Nazis and the holocaust. People in the middle east think of them in terms of western crusaders invading the holy land."
The Jew-hating terrorists (Hamas, Hesbollah, Iran, etc) also think of them in terms close to those of Nazis and the holocaust. Their teachings and proclamations are filled with references to the inferiority and moral failings of Jews as a whole (and as individuals), without regard to "Western"-ness. The Palestinian government, as such, was closely allied to actual Nazi Germany during the 1940s.
"Back in the middle ages european crusaders created a Kingdom of Jerusalem. This kingdom was purged from the Islamic world without the use of genocide"
That's because there were only a few for the Muslims to murder. That Kingdom was a colony with a few governors, so to speak. It wasn't an entire nation living there. This is much different from the Israel situation, where they'd have to murder millions of Jews in order to "get rid of" the nation of Israel. The genocide by which the Arab invaders came into possession of Jerusalem in the first place (way before the Crusades) should be mentioned too (as long as you are going back in history)
"flush particles from belts and dump them "
Isn't the dump supposed to come first?
"It's a good thing that did not happen, but there's still time for Israel's incompetent and murderous military leaders "
That's it. Keep blaming the victims.
"He's also said a couple of times that Israel should be "wiped off the map.", which sounds bad, until you read..."
No, it just sounds bad, period. You just can't put a happy face on demand for ethnic cleansing / genocide.
"he wants to wipe the state of Israel off the map, not it's inhabitants"
And when the inhabitants refuse to get into the cattle-cars, never mind that the inhabitants themselves get "wiped out" for standing up for themselves. The same sort of language was used by Serbia in its wars against Kosovo and Bosnia...and plenty of inhabitants were killed there.
1. Do not eat curry while playing game.
"Did you poison the quadrotriticale?"
"Thursday: Man I love Battlestar Galactica. Double episode tonight!"
This one's pretty popular in Iran after the dubbers made sure to replace the word "Cylon" with the Farsi term for "Jew".
"Little did you know that because of the Patriot Act, anybody who visits that site is automatically tagged by an FBI database. They will now begin to track all your phone calls, intercept your emails, and monitor your credit card transactions."
That's cool. I bought a book (using my credit card) from an online bookstore a few weeks ago, and never received the book. I forgot the web site link. Now it's nice to know I call call up the FBI and have them tell me what the site was. I might use it also to find out that phone number I misplaced of that guy who called me about the car. But there should be an easier way to sign up for this convenient service other than clicking on Iranian blog links.
"given that the Iranian Government actively censors blogs on the Internet."
Nothing to complain about, really. As long as the bloggers don't blog on the 'Net, they are free to blog anywhere they want, right?