And no, you can't be Christian, and not believe in God. Christ is the son of God.
Can you be christian (uncapitalized on purpose) and not believe in God? I am, ethnically speaking, about as WASP-ey as it gets; the P in WASP stands for Protestant, and I'm, no kidding, a Quaker atheist, in that order. I accept the value of what Christ said, I just absolutely don't believe he was the son of God.
I've met plenty of people who share my point of view, not all of whom were christian-with-a-small-C. Some were muslim-with-a-small-M, and still more were jewish-with-a-small-J.
I'm willing to bet that when we see peace in the middle east, the people responsible will spell their religion without capital letters, rather than be of the "kill you back first" mindset.
Edit: Ninja'd by Meatrace again; you're on the list, dude...
Ooh, I guess I'm an Atheist then...
Peandagast, what were you doing in counter-terrorism? The Powerpoint slides or the coffee??
Hee hee!
Never mind my previous post about tone, Citizen Pendagast.
Roman Catholics believe in creationism, I.e. Adam and Eve, so maybe you need to do some more reading, I grew up Catholic.
Roman Catholics believe in creationism, I.e. Adam and Eve, so maybe you need to do some more reading, I grew up Catholic.
Not after 1992 you didn't because the official word is the roman catholic church accepts Darwinian evolution.
I went to catholic school.
Getting back to the matter at hand...
They're digging up Yassar Arafat to check for Polonium poisoning. If it comes back positive, expect another flare up as Israel will get the blame.
Your link doesn't work for me, Citizen Wolf, but, yeah, this has been going on for at least months.
Yeah, I don't necessarily disagree with any of that, but let's wait and see if he was poisoned.
On that Uri Avnery guy linked up above:
So, according to wikipedia, he met with Arafat in '82 during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, but I don't know in what capacity.
Anyways, I'm assuming it wasn't as an official representative of the state of Israel, because his mother disowned him, writing: "I do not leave a penny to my son Uri, who instead of taking care of me went off to visit that murderer Yasser Arafat."
[Insert Portnoyesque joke about Jewish mothers]
Speaking of up above, Citizen Yakman might have gotten the better of me, but I'm doing my research now for Round Two.
[places Amazon order]
Vive le Galt!
AS far as the terrorist argument goes, I don't think the Palestinian Freedom/get my land back movement is fair to be called terrorist.
There is a fine line between terrorism and guerrilla warfare. The Palestinians and the Israelis fight a civil war on their own ground. Anything they do wrong should be considered war crimes perhaps, but it seems both sides may be guilty of infractions.
Just because one side is smaller and less equipped, and has to resort to guerilla tactics, doesn't make them terrorists.
I see your point, but the distinction is difficult. Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups carry out attacks that target Israeli civilians. They attempt to instil terror and fear in the population to achieve an objective. The Israelis do the same to Gaza (by holding 1.5 million people - most of whom are civilians and not militants - prisoner inside 150 square miles) and also by carrying out attacks that kill civilians, even if they are not intended to do so.
In this sense both sides may be trying to achieve a military and political objective, but do so by causing misery and terror along the way (intended or not).
The Viet Cong fought the same way, But the French and Americans came to them, If there was no army, there would be no fight. Palestine sees it that way, POOF Israel happened to them.
This was a different situation. The French and Americans weren't living in Vietnam alongside the Viet Cong. It was a colonial war that turned into a civil war that turned into a war between the superpowers fought by proxies. Once it became clear they couldn't win, the Americans packed up and went home. That's not an option for either Palestinians or Israelis, as they believe they are already home and other people are squatting there.
Was George Washington a terrorist? The Red Coats seemed to think so. IF the war had been lost, Washington along with all founding fathers and supporters would have been hanged as traitors, conspirators, and demonized as evil men.
As far as I know, no, he wasn't because he didn't go around deliberately slaughtering British loyalists (some of the pro-independence supporters did, however). And yes, the founding fathers did consider it likely that if they lost, they'd be hanged, and some of them even wrestled with their own consciences over betraying their government. Quite a few of the rebel leaders did have serious qualms about becoming 'traitors' to what many of them did in fact see as their lawful king. John Adams was even a bit of an Anglophile and wrestled with this issue before deciding that it was more amoral for Britain to continue exploiting the colonies without any representation.
OTOH, internationally-beloved-peace-leader Nelson Mandela unquestionably qualifies as a (past and reformed) terrorist, because the ANC deliberately targetted and killed civilians as part of their 'sabotage' campaign against white rule in the 1960s.
The 'deliberately killing people not involved by choice in the struggle' seems to from a strong part of the definition of terrorism. In fact, I've seen it argued that if al-Qaeda had limited their 9/11 attack to solely the Pentagon, it could not have been considered a terrorist attack: al-Qaeda had formally declared war upon the United States and the Pentagon (the military HQ of the United States, effectively) would qualify as a legitimate military target in times of war.
Yeah, I'd been meaning to get to Mandela/the ANC's terrorist past, but it slipped by.
The Pentagon would surely qualify as a legitimate military target, but I think slamming civilian airliners into it filled with passengers would qualify as terrorism regardless of who carried it out.
Of course all al-Qaeda (or Taliban or Iraqi insurgent or Hamas or whatever group) attacks are called terrorism even when the target is military.
The attack on the USS Cole was called a terrorist attack, for example.
Strictly speaking, under the US military's own definitions, an attack on a military target in time of war cannot be, by definition, terrorism. The Wikipedia article on the USS Cole bombing in fact goes into this, mentioning the semantic dispute.
The attack could perhaps be called terrorism because it was a suicide bombing (and the enemy demonstrating they have people who believe in the cause so much they will die for it could perhaps be described as an attempt as psychological terror), although this is also disputed: Japanese kamikaze attacks in WWII were not considered terrorist acts. More to the point, whilst al-Qaeda had declared war on the United States, it is still disputed whether a non-national group can actually be 'at war' in a legal sense with a nation.
Methinks that the designation of Al-Qaeda, Hamas, etc, acts as terrorist acts comes partially from the list of designated Terrorist Organizations.
Acts by any of the groups on the list would be classified the same by those that have officially recognised the group as a terrorist group.
Of course, we seem to be treating pretty much any attack on the US military as a crime these days.
Well, except when it comes to the rights of the perpetrators. :P
Maybe it isn't terrorism by definition, but it was treated as such for PR, and I think legal purposes. Of course, we seem to be treating pretty much any attack on the US military as a crime these days.
You've hit the nail on the head. And of course Mark Sweetman is right, al-Qaeda and Hamas are listed as terrorist organisations internationally, so you can see where the descriptor comes from.
[Indiscriminately shoots up the thread]
It's the People's Will! Vive le Galt!
Everyone knows I ain't no lawyer, but I thought it was interesting that the wikipedia article straight out says, like, in the first paragraph, there is no internationally agreed upon legal definition of terrorism.
Even when you look at the list provided by Citizen Sweetman, you'll notice that it's a list of separate countries'sesis listsesis. (Look at Turkey's and China's. Pretty interesting stuff.)
One man's freedom fighter and all that, I guess.
Btw, the Commonwealth Party of Galt (M-L) totally disavows terrorism, although there are plenty of terrorists that we think were pretty cool. We seek to achieve our aims, not through individual acts of heroic, yet futile "propaganda by the deed" and certainly not through criminal acts of indiscriminate violence, but by
International proletarian socialist revolution.
Vive le Galt!
More (semi-)on-topic Art Brut songs.
Man, not a single good politroll post while I was asleep?
Fine.
I missed this UN decision. I was either sleeping or working.
[Scurries off]
EDIT: Noticed the rather gross "comments" posts and added the article from the Jerusalem Post.
"Down with the Regime of the Muslim Brotherhood!"
Amen.
Wow, thanks for that link, interesting reading.
You're welcome.
I haven't been paying attention, but I got the impression from scanning the headlines that it only got bigger in the days after. Judges are striking against the government or something...
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And now the Israeli government has proclaimed the building of more settlements.
I can see how it's difficult to stop the religious wackos when they are backed by the government. How is that in any way a way to reach a peaceful agreement with the Palestinians? No, Israel isn't interested in peace.
It has become the very definition of hypocrisy, doing to others what they have complained about have been done to them in the past.
If you're not actively trying to change that from within, you're complicit in supporting that stance.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure they're building concentration camps and throwing Palestinians in gas chambers, too.
To be fair there has been a couple of relaxations after the truce:
Fisherman are allowed to fish up to 6km from Gaza, rather than the 3km.
Farmers in West Bank can farm to within 100m of the exclusion fence, rather than 300m before.
But they came down hard after Palestine got UN recognition by witholding tax payments as well as the settlement increase.
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Yeah, I'm pretty sure they're building concentration camps and throwing Palestinians in gas chambers, too.
The Palestinian settlements practically ARE concentration camps.
You know they're not allowed to leave, right? They have virtually zero legal rights to anything. They're treated like animals.Your argument seems to be that, since they were once oppressed, they now have cart blanche to brutally oppress someone else. And, hey, we don't like it then clearly we're antisemites.
No. There's no race card here. Israelis don't have special rights. They don't get a free pass. They're a brutally oppressive regime and we should be actively working to overthrow them rather than propping them up.
That you refuse to see, PURELY because of your race, shows nothing other than your moral bankruptcy.
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I'm not even fully Israeli and neither am I technically jewish. Your comparison is disgustingly exaggerated, and you should feel ashamed of yourself. Depriving a people of freedom is bad, that I agree with. But that alone can not under any circumstances be comparable to the horrors of the concentration camps, where people were treated not as animals, but as pests and playthings to be tortured, starved and then murdered in the most inhumane ways. If not that, they ended up as lab rats for insane scientists.
Now how many Palestinians are injected with diseases in hidden Israeli laboratories? Where is the Jewish Mengele?
And unless you ignored all of my earlier posts (I wouldn't be surprised), I did condemn both sides. There should be peace in the area for both.
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Your comparison is disgustingly exaggerated, and you should feel ashamed of yourself.
Unless I'm reading this thread wrong, Citizen Shadow, the comparison was actually brought up by you.
EDIT: Actually:
There are concentration camps and there are death camps. Concentration camps have been used by the British against the Boers, the Spanish against the Cubans, the Americans against the Vietnamese, etc., etc., ad nauseam unfortunately they get used a lot. You don't need a Mengele to have a concentration camp.
Yes, that too. They've been used with depressing frequency in the past century.
I'm not sure I'd totally agree that the Palestinian territories are concentration camps, but I don't think Citizen Meatrace was being disgusting or should be ashamed of himself. For once.
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Arguing "Not as bad" isn't the same as arguing "Not bad".
When a people who know oppression then oppress others less than they were oppressed, that doesn't make it not oppression.
At the end of the day Lebanon and Isreal have a demographic problem with democracy.
There will be more Arabs than Jews if they just let things work themselves out.
The only resolution is the Bulworth approach. If you get this reference, you are now giggling.
Not to beat a dead horse, but
I'm not even fully Israeli and neither am I technically jewish. Your comparison is disgustingly exaggerated, and you should feel ashamed of yourself. Depriving a people of freedom is bad, that I agree with. But that alone can not under any circumstances be comparable to the horrors of the concentration camps, where people were treated not as animals, but as pests and playthings to be tortured, starved and then murdered in the most inhumane ways. If not that, they ended up as lab rats for insane scientists.
Now how many Palestinians are injected with diseases in hidden Israeli laboratories? Where is the Jewish Mengele?
And unless you ignored all of my earlier posts (I wouldn't be surprised), I did condemn both sides. There should be peace in the area for both.
I would just like to also remind you that not only Jews were put in concentration camps during a certain world war. Lots of other nationalities, ethnicities and sexualities were also thrown in there and executed and experimented on too.
As others have already said, in other words, two wrongs don't make a right.