The French victorious

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Hey Sprintman,
The tired old comparison of the Crusades to modern murderous Islamics, is a rather poor one. Does your obvious hatred for Judeo-Christian culture stem from the idea that you would prefer to live under an Islamic regime? You may want to take note and re-think that because just north of Australia lies one of the largest strongholds of Islamic terror, besides the middle east.
 
basils,

You too have me all wrong. I don't feel bad to be an American. I feel quite blessed. And as far as "defending" Islam...can you see one thing that I have said that is untrue ..or that you can discount from any authoritative source? ..or is it pure conjecture and blind dogma (as in myth)?

I have no great love for Muslims or Islam. I'm as Christain as any human (mortal paternaty) can be. I merely "reflect" the blind bigotry that others spew. I give the mirror image.

I mean if you had said "Darn Jews rule the world!!!" ...I would try and communicate my POV on how I think your assumptions or assertions were wrong. That is what I'm hearing here. Blind ...blank check bigotry. It has most of its substance in myth and conjecture ..and the rest is just plain made up.

Many of what people here term "Islamic" has actually been "Arab life as usual". Before OBL ..you never heard the term "Islamic terrorists" ...you heard "Arab terrorist and..Arab extremist" .

No doubt about it ...crazy Arabs have been crazy Arabs for a long time in our known history. When the Iran Islamic revolt occured ...we still viewed them as crazy Arabs. We never heard of Islam or "Muslims" ...we only knew them as crazy camel jockeys.

That hasn't changed ONE BIT. They're still the smackeda$$, cracked brained, lame, crazy camel jockeys who can't figure their way out of a simple maze without grabbing an AK-47 or an RPG and blowing something up. This jerks/thugs/fools have NOTHING TO DO WITH ISLAMIC FAITH and have everything to do with being desparate people who don't have any legit method for problem resolution.

All your airplane hijackings and other acts of terrorism were (typically) conducted as a protest by the PLO and other organizations (of smackeda$$ Arabs) in protest of Israel.

No, my friends. If you research it ..the term "Islamic extremism" linked with terrorsim didn't come on the scene until after the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. We, via Saudi Arabia, funded the establishment of madrasas on the Pakistani/Afghan border. These Islamic religous schools were prime recruiting and training sites for the ranks of OBL. The ample amount of refugees there were prime breeding grounds for Islamic extremism. Many of them formed the Taliban ..others found new conflicts to fight. Yes, folks ..our own CIA put OBL on the map and when the Russians called it quits ....these "rebels without a cause" ...went and found a new one.

Now very few of you will believe this ..but none of you can discount it as myth. Yes, folks, one of our own chickens has come home to roost. A doomsday machine that has decided to bite the hand that once fed it and gave it life.


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And while I'm at it, your remark that I must be "very young" to have the opinion that I do, is very insulting.

I'm sorry if you feel that way? If you are unaware of the women's sufferage and equal rights movement ...you would have to be under 30 years of age and a somewhat lacking in your knowledge of our history. Women were second class citizens in this nation for most of its history. Your not believing it doesn't make it not so. This doesn't mean that women were "abused" as a social norm. Just that they were pigeon holed in to certain roles that were somewhat confining. Teaching and being a librarian were about the only two outlets for women of intelligence when I was growing up. Right now ..we're enduring a "backlash" effect where our society attempts to "make up" for what it perceives as past injustices. One such myth is the "glass ceiling" that makes CEO's mostly male. The truth in the matter is that men made up the massive majority of business graduates and post graduates for decades (maybe a century even) and women made up a very small (fractional) percentage. Hence to "earn" any CEO position upon "rank" ..they would have to statistically fall into the .000001% upper classperson in intelligence/performance to EVER get the BIG SEAT. This "earned" position is not enough to reflect population norms ...hence the myth of discrimination is materialized.

So ..if you see a Muslim society that doesn't quite fit your idea of how women are to be treated ..I wouldn't cry foul all that quickly.

In all matters, before you critique someone elses (dirty) laundry, you should be rather sure that your own is not soiled. Not everyone adopts our ideas of social equality as we do. We don't simply follow whatever social revelation that the French puke out every few years, do we? Do we feel that it's o'kay to fornicate in the streets and parade around as we please (a rhetorical statement)??

The really odd thing that I realize here and on the other message boards that I frequent (who happen to have "Muslim" members)that "they" are just like many here. Their "truth" is just as cast in stone. Their assumptions are just as flawed. Their media just as bias in their favor. They are just as intolerant of alternative points of view. They too have their Pat Robersons who convince them that we are the great Satan.


This is the message that I'm trying to depict here ..that is, "How do you think you would sound if you were on the "other side". Most of us have no idea of how we are perceived. I give you that opportunity from my experience with being perceived by those "others". This is what I hear, and what I've got to argue with, when I confront "them". These are their answers to MY challenges. Your frustration is mine ...or rather was mine.


That is, I'm merely giving you a view that you may have not been aware of ..or have never considered. If that makes me something "bad" ..well then so be it. I'm not here to change anyone ..but I'm not hear to promote myth and bigotry either.

That would be unAmerican
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Gary,
I don't believe in myths nor am I a bigot. Your opinions are just that.... OPINIONS. You seem to think that, you subscribe to this portion of the board, in order to "teach" us something. What makes you feel that you can tell people that they are not thinking in your ideals of correctness? As far as I can tell you must think very highly of yourself. My points that you attempted to overly explain as being basically "wrong", are no more wrong nor right than your own.
Why is it that the arrogant often accuse others of the same? What, in my posts, would suggest that I am ignorant of the history of the womens movement? You are the one making blanket statements, catagorizing me and others as somehow inferior in our ability to understand the complexities of human behavior and history. Like I said before, you sir, are a reletivist, no matter how you cloak it.
 
"Ghost Wars" consistently gets good reviews as a comprehensive account of the US role in developing a competent, radical Muslim fighting force, to a large degree the same one that we're fighting now. These guys were our good buddies not too long ago, to the point that Reagan declared March 10, 1982 as Afghanistan Day in order to honor the freedom fighters.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17114

At least some of the facts are simple enough. During the 1980s, the CIA paid hundreds of millions of dollars in covert aid to the Afghan Mujahideen, an Islamist force that opposed the Soviet domination of Afghanistan and was also backed by Saudi Arabia and the Pakistani Interservices Intelligence (ISI). Following the initial success of the anti-Soviet campaign, CIA director William Casey persuaded the Reagan administration in 1985 to increase this support dramatically. The CIA particularly encouraged the recruitment of radical Islamist fighters— many of whom were linked to the Muslim Brotherhood—believing them to be more dedicated to the defeat of the Soviet occupying forces than secular or royalist Afghani groups. As Coll writes, the United States adopted a policy that

looked forward to a new era of direct infusions of advanced US military technology into Afghanistan, intensified training of Islamist guerrillas in explosives and sabotage techniques, and targeted attacks on Soviet military officers designed to demoralize the Soviet high command. Among other consequences these changes pushed the CIA, along with its clients in the Afghan resistance and in Pakistani intelligence, closer to the gray fields of assassination and terrorism.

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When the US walked away from Afghanistan in 1989, it left behind a seasoned group of jihadists, whose brand of radical Islam had found an enormously rich supporter in Osama bin Laden. The son of a Saudi billionaire, bin Laden had joined the jihad shortly after the Soviet invasion, using his financial resources to build military facilities and training camps for volunteer fighters. Bin Laden first began to turn his radical energies against the United States in 1990, when the Saudi royal family agreed to invite American troops to be stationed in Saudi Arabia as part of its alliance against Iraq. Coll quotes Prince Turki, the Saudi intelligence chief, suggesting that this was the moment when bin Laden's extremism and hatred for American infidels began to assert itself: "He changed from a calm, peaceful, and gentle man interested in helping Muslims into a person who believed that he would be able to amass and command an army...."

After the Soviet Union withdrew its troops from that country, so did the CIA—not just from Afghanistan, but from virtually all of South and Central Asia, a region that had less and less importance for the post–cold war foreign policy of the two Clinton administrations. In 1996 the CIA was taken completely by surprise when the ragtag Taliban captured Kabul and put the famous Tajik-speaking resistance commander Ahmed Shah Massoud to flight. In 1998, the CIA failed to predict that India would explode a nuclear device or that Pakistan would launch a military offensive in the Kargil district of Indian Kashmir the following year. And these are just some of the more publicly known failures of the agency that Coll has pointed out.

Coll writes that although the CIA had passed, through Pakistan, billions of dollars in military aid to the Afghan Mujahideen, it was not much interested in who was getting the weapons, nor was it concerned with what a post-Soviet Afghanistan would look like. In choosing the leaders and organization that would get arms and money, the CIA was dependent on the ISI and the Saudi Arabia General Intelligence Department (GID). Coll writes of the period, "There was no American policy on Afghan politics at the time, only the de facto promotion of Pakistani goals as carried out by Pakistani intelligence." Huge deliveries of arms and money intended for the Mujahideen passed first through the hands of the ISI, which predictably took a considerable cut for itself before allowing deliveries to the Mujahideen groups they had selected.
 
quote:

Originally posted by sprintman:
Gary - The vast majority of people here are fantastic. Unfortunately we have attracted a sprinkling of idiots lately. Just ignore them.

It would seem that the one judging another as an IDIOT because of a differing opinion must consider THEMSELVES as being unlearned and intolerant of opposing views.
 
Whoa!!! Whoa!!!!

The mods have been most gracious in letting us explore this topic. Let's not spoil the "liberty" granted us by abusing it. (THANK YOU!!)


(visions of Rodney King, "Why can't we just all get along?")

No offense intended by me (although I do obviously fail in this regard in some people's eyes).
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Remember Maxwells 4th theory of thermal dynamics:

Anything left to itself ..will decay.
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MG reread my post and the definitely idiotic response.. Talking about the murderous Crusades means I want to be under a Muslim regime? Thats the strangest analogy I've read on BITOG yet and that's saying something.
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Just to make a statement about the original topic....I'm a little tired of all the French bashing. When there was no America they provided us with arms, a navy, and oh yeah the Statue of Liberty. So maybe we can go back to calling freedom fries French fries and stop calling them wussies. Just my $.02
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We are too arrogant. Yes, our country and lifestyle are great, but so what? That doesn't mean we should impose it on everyone else, or disparage those who don't toe our line and worship at the altar of the glory that is us....
 
You're pretty naive.
The main reason for the crusades was an excuse for people to rape, burn, kill, and pillage, and be automatically forgiven for it. Sound familiar?
It was far more about power and greed than about anything else.
 
MarkC,
You poor man. Carrying around so much hatred must be tough. And to think it all stems from the rewritten history of liberal revisionists!
Sad, my friend.
 
I don't carry around any hatred at all...except for ignorance. What makes you so sure that your view of history is any more accurate as mine? Are you omniscient?
You seem to be the one hating. Liberals, Muslims, who else?
 
Mark,
Yes, I do hate what was done on 9/11 in the name of Allah. The Islamic world was slow and non-commital in it's so called "denouncing" of what happened. Like I said before, at the same time thousands of Muslims celebrated WORLDWIDE!! This was not a "fringe" element as some foolish apologists have suggested.
The excuse you pose for the Crusades is silly and juvenile. To base a conflict of such historical significance on nothing more than to "rape, burn, kill and pillage" is to ignore facts of history.
Enjoy the election and remember that my vote for Bush will cancel out yours for Kerry. Lol.
 
Well basil (Ron),

Do you denounce the land grabbing of Israel into Palestinian territories? No? Then why should Ahab the A-rab go out of his way to make you feel good in the aftermath of 911?
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(prediction: question will not be answered ..but attack upon the messenger will comence
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Basil, you obviously realize that say, just because it was 'Christians' who sacked Constantinople, capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, on their way to Palestine, or who captured and sold into slavery thopusands of children, doesn't mean that all Christians supported them or would condone their actions.
Neither does it mean all Muslims are terrorists, or want to destroy the American way of life. many of them may well want to see the end of us in their business, but that's another story.
 
basils said "Yes, I do hate what was done on 9/11 in the name of Allah. The Islamic world was slow and non-commital in it's so called "denouncing" of what happened. Like I said before, at the same time thousands of Muslims celebrated WORLDWIDE!! This was not a "fringe" element as some foolish apologists have suggested."

It's not much different than the reaction by more than a few thousand in this country to the Oklahoma City bombing, where there were people saying that it was beautiful among other things.

In addition, although many in this thread are suggesting that Muslims are the incarnation of evil itself, this country sure liked them when we essentially paid them to kill Russians by the score. If the Muslims are evil incarnate and we paid them to do our killing, what are we ? Are we pure and holy with no blood on our hands ? I think it's obvious that the problem crosses religious lines, that we're as responsible as anyone for the current situation, and that we'll only miss the opportunity to address the problem if we start down a path of reigious intolerance and racism.
 
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