Prez Obama on Al-Arabiya TV 1st

[HenryReardon]

I'm sure people used to say the same of white Americans.

That's not even remotely analagous.

 

[EwanSF]

Christian fundamentalists... yeah right. they hardly exist. milosevic wasn't one, by the way. northern island? hardly.

they hate us. they want to kill us. and we offer them love and hugs. uh huh, that's gonna go over well.

obama will lead us to destruction. but you know what? i dont care. its meant to be. there, my username fits me now?

Oh aye, they hardly exist. Your country is infested with them. And so fuckin' what if old Slobodan wasn't a fundamentalist? Or the IRA or UVF for that matter. Murder was commited en masse in the name of religion, the assertion that that particular brand of religion was the true one.

I have to ask again, who is this "they" you and that other well of gibberish keep reffering to? You talk about muslims as if they were some vast, collective, hive mind, bent on the destruction of the west. Extremists are the minority, despite what that anne coulter clone says about them all being extremists by default. It just shows degree of ingrained bigotry and paranoia on both of you. I'd hazard a guess that if this were thirty years ago, you'd be bleeting about a jewish conspiricy, as opposed to a muslim one. Always has to be an enemy.

I'm sure people used to say the same of white Americans.

Anyone that is a religious fundamentalist is by deffinition, static in thier beliefs, regardless of what the religion is, so aye, there are quite a lot of americans that fit that peg, not just white ones.

 

[EwanSF]

Fair point. And the bible was used a moral support mechanism for it as well.

 

[youngnihilist]

The "christian fundamentalists" in the US dont' deny people rights or kill them..

"They", refers to the governments. The governemtns have policies. probably a lot of people in teh contry don't like it. but its still official policy. just like when you european lefties hate the americans so mjcuh, you always say ALL americans are like that...

 

[Kulindahr]

That's the older peoples' legacy of being afraid of people and sowing some other website.

Hopefully, in the near future we can make amends and start talking to Cuba and other groups that were never hostile to us.

Cuba was never hostile to us?




Look around this board, LL -- arguably a majority of the people who are "being afraid of people and sowing some other website" are in the youngest portion of the population.

Where did you get this weird view of reality, anyway? How many "older people" do you actually know -- as opposed to the ones you've encountered and aleady run through your stereotyper?

 

[Kulindahr]

first, there is no "extremism" if what Muslims do to spread Islam is basic Islamic teachings: further Islam, through deceit, war, killing/genocides.
that's what my point was: Islam spreads through war, deceit, killing/genocides.

Hold that first thought.
You're correct; most of the spread of Islam has been by "the sword".

It only takes a few to cause political strife and change.

Now you've agreed that there is extremism -- found in those "few" you point out.

Apparently so, and Obama and you leftists liberals will find out when you realize that defending Islamists/Islam will only bite you in the ass in the end.

You're entertaining.
This happens every now and then when someone new comes around, so sure of himself, and doesn't bother to actually read what people say, but instead just reacts according to preset patterns that don't admit the world is anything but a fairy-tale black-v-white.
Do you read anything in this forum besides what you yourself write? I mean read, not just zip your eyes across the words. Do you remember anything at all about what you read?

See, the reason you're entertaining is that I know you've taken part in threads where you cheered my position, for which position I was being called a fascist and right-winger and all that.
But since you seem to not apply that cognitive faculty we call "memory"... how is it that you call someone who just last week was defending the IDF's use of force in the recent Gaza mess as justified a "leftist liberal"?

Do some reading before you jump to shallow "conclusions" about people. Read around now, and see why you're so entertaining.

Kulindahr, please accept this fact: it's not my "reading comprehension that's the "problem", it is your logic that is the problem.

No, your reading comprehension sucks -- as you prove again here:

Ah, so loving myself will solve the problem.....ah, I get it! NOT!
what an idiotic response!

That's an excellent demonstration of the phenomenon of recognizing words but failing to put them together to get meaning. You take two words I used, link them with something you're fixated on, and get.... well, nothing that has anything to dowith what I said.

so, 9/11 was justified in your eyes.
more Hate america First.

F for reading comprehension.
A+ for seeing what you "read" through a fliter -- a shallow, fallacious one at that.
Please, show me one thing where I said 9/11 was "justified".

You've got such a fixation on hating America....

Uh, then what should we make of these 1300 year old teachings in islam, yes 1300 years BEFORE Nazi'ism?:

I know your verses; no need to trot them out.
Trotting them out like that shows you're not paying attention to history. Those verses were there for those 1300 years, but in most of the Muslim world, for most of that time, the only one to play terrorist against the Jews was Mohammed himself; Jews and Muslims and CHristians lived together peacefully under Muslim rule (albeit only Muslims being first-class citizens).

So what we "make of" those verses is that there's something else present in Islam than just them.

It's time for YOU to get YOUR facts straight.

Anti Semitism is a cornerstone of Islam, for 1300 years, LONG BEFORE NAZI'ISM ARRIVED.

I have my facts straight -- a lot more facts than you're even paying attention to.
If "Anti Semitism is a cornerstone of Islam", please explain how during the "Golden Age" of Islam, Jews and Christians living in Muslim lands were... well, how it is that they were living in Muslim lands -- and not just living, but being respected members of society. Explain how it is that arguably the greatest blossoming of scholarship in a single place since ancient Greece occurred under Muslim rulers who invited Jewish and Christian scholars to work and study alongside Muslim scholars as colleagues?

in fact, it could be considered that Muslims engaged in the first Jewish Holocaust as they SLAUGHTERED and expelled Jews from Arabia because of Muhammad's desire to destroy Jews. In once instance alone Muhammad oversaw the killing of 900 Jews, the Jews of Banu (tribe) Qurayza, who had surrendered to him peacefully and unconditionally but he had 900 of them slaughtered/beheaded. and thrown into a trench the jews dug for themselves.

Hardly the first -- look at Rome, and Babylon, as two examples.
But you're making the same error fundamentalist Christians do: they act as though there's no history between the New Testament and them. Yes, if you cut out like a millennium and a half of history, and past Mohammed with some of the bloodthirsty Muslim rulers and then skip to the anti-Jewish movement after WW II, Islam looks like a solid stream of violence, from Mohammed's terrorist tactics to those of Hamas.

It might even be argued that Mohammed provided the inspiration for the Nazis in their disposal of certain enemies, save for the fact that having your "enemies" dig the trenches they'll be buried in has amused certain warped minds throughout history -- Assyrians, Chinese, Japanese, even U.S. cavalry troops have done it.

After I discovered your inaccurate and untruthful assumption that islamic anti semitism stemmed from Nazi'ism, I realized who and what I was dealing with.
I've shattered your untruthful assumption and choose not to address the rest of your nonsense since I've completely discredited your point of view WITH PROOF OF ISLAMIC TEACHINGS THEMSELVES.

See, here's where your problem is: I didn't say what you're claiming. I said that the modern Islamic extremist movement and its hatred of Jews sprouted from Nazi influence -- and all you have to do to grasp that is read about the Nazis' "Arab Brigade". You're only getting your conclusion from your own preconceptions, which are very linear and simplistic and exclusive. Since you find legitimately anti-Jewish verses in the Koran, you presume there aren't any other influences, trends, or causes you need to look at, but worse, you assume they don't exist.

So you haven't discredited anything but a tin man in your own imagination. I don't say a "straw man", because you didn't set it up just so you could knock it down; it's a tin man because it's hollow and you stuff everything you encounter into it, so you only have to fight the tin man and not the reality.

Here's a touch of reality: more than once in history, Jews fled to Muslim lands for refuge and safety.
That hardly fits with your theme of hate of Jews being a core value of Islam. Indeed, even Tamerlane (Tamur), whose troops herded Jews in battle areas into synagogues and burned them, treated the Jews within his lands with not merely tolerance but respect.
There are two items of extreme importance about Islam hiding in there; I'll comment on one of them (the other has been noted various times in this forum):

Islam is not inherently violent, but inherently schizophrenic. There is in it a theme of hatred and violence against Jews, as the verses you list indicate. There is also in it -- go to the religion forum and you can find threads where others have listed verses and precedent -- great tolerance and respect for Jews. That schizophrenic nature is more dangerous, at the last, than any pure hatred.

Muslims who hold to the verses you've listed (and others) give us extremism. That trend was present in the Muslim world before the Nazis came along, but they took it up and focused it -- indeed, that trend was why the Nazis associated themselves with non-Aryans at all, in the Arab Brigade. Those verses are why the Nazis found Muslims useful to their schemes, and why the Nazi virulence against Jews sparked something that hadn't been present, i.e. the modern movement against Jews in the Muslim world.

But Muslims who hold to the verses where Jews are to be treated with respect give us an entirely different kind of Islam, one without a lot of visibility since they just live in peace.

What Islam as a whole needs to do is get off the literalist pedestal (fat chance) and resolve this issue. Christians, at least, have the example and words of Jesus to tell them that hatred and violence against others aren't part of God's scheme these days; Muslims have the problem that Mohammed spoke out of both sides of his mouth, and both sets of pronouncements are there in stark contradiction.

"Who and what" you're "dealing with" is someone who's read one heck of a lot more of history than you apparently have, and paid attention. "Who and what" you're dealing with here is someone who has pondered the available information and accepted reality, and works with that.

So don't be so ready to just pop people into pigeonholes based on your tidy but erroneous categories. It leads you to ridiculous places.

And before you are so quick to judge what Obama is doing, read up on the history of the entire Arab world, with special attention to how the colonial powers and the U.S. treated them in the late nineteenth and most of the twentieth century; get at least a fair grasp of some of the basic principles in Sun Tzu and Machiavelli, and preferably from Clausewitz as well. Ponder the principles of judo. Absorb a little about realpolitik, with attention to Kissinger and others and U.S. dealings with the Muslim world. You'll come to see there there is a possible depth of strategy to what Obama is doing, even one that a neoconservative could embrace (whether that's what he's actually up to will take years to discover).

 

[Kulindahr]

Progression isn't possible for the Islamic purists.

I'm sure people used to say the same of white Americans.

True, but white Americans had a paradigm available for progression. The Islamic extremists, who in order to hold their position blind themselves to much of what their Prophet said and did, arguably have none.
White Americans also had in hand a book with a resolution to the schizophrenia which bests Islam, with mercy and benevolence on the one hand and deep hatred and deceit on the other. Muslims have no such book; the schizophrenia is a deep part of the Koran and of Mohammed himself.

If there's to be a resolution, Muslims must forge it. I think Obama is prodding to get them off their communal asses and do so.

 

[Kulindahr]

I have to ask again, who is this "they" you and that other well of gibberish keep reffering to? You talk about muslims as if they were some vast, collective, hive mind, bent on the destruction of the west. Extremists are the minority, despite what that anne coulter clone says about them all being extremists by default. It just shows degree of ingrained bigotry and paranoia on both of you.

I don't know about "bigotry". Simple-mindedness, yes; it makes a nice refuge from having to consider the actual complexities of the issues in Islam.

Listing a string of verses that show hatred of Jews is legitimate... unless that's all you list. That's what's taught in the madrashas, which is why we have this problem -- if those Muslims ran real schools, like the ones that flourished in Spain under Muslim rule, we wouldn't see this streaming to terrorist training camps.

 

[Kulindahr]

The "christian fundamentalists" in the US dont' deny people rights or kill them..

No, but they try, and they're just drooling to take over and do it on a massive scale.

As I've noted before, I've sat and talked with right-wing 'Christians', and they are scary people. Many are seriously working to have an America where if someone discovered you were gay, they could gather a crowd and stone you on the spot.

The takeover of the Republican Party was just one step.

 

[EwanSF]

The "christian fundamentalists" in the US dont' deny people rights or kill them..

Proposition 8 and dead abortion doctors. 'Nuff said.

 

[Kulindahr]

Proposition 8 and dead abortion doctors. 'Nuff said.

Point to Ewan.

 

[youngnihilist]

Maybe like, what, 3 abortion doctors have been killed ever?

OK on prop 8, though I might add that secular african americans were just as much a factor as the mormons. But I'll take Christian conservatives who deny marriage to us then Islamic fundamentalists who would kill homosexuals on the spot.

Most christian conservatives are pretty neutral on homosexuality. Their attitude is keep it in your own bedroom and I don't care. What they don't want is homosexualiy taught in schools, in public, etc. Don't ge tme wrong - I think they're intolerant too.

But it sure beats Muslim nations who wouldn't even want homosexuality behind closed doors. And these are OFFICIAL STATE LAWS. In the US, we supposedly had a conservative republican rule for six years 2000-2006 nonstop, with Bush and congress. did we see any laws really hurting homosexuals?

As for the magnitude of 0's victory, it was much much smaller than Nixon in 72 or Reagan in 84, even Bush in 88. And Bush in 88 lost 4 years later. yes, it was a decisive victory, but far from a true landslide. and landslides can be reversed very very quickly. as we saw in 1974 and 1986 (congressional elections after nixon and regan's landslide)

 

[naked gent]

Remember,,right after the election? When it was clear that the Republicans lost everything..Their loss meant that America didn't really reject them.No,we're really a ''center right" country..Whatever the hell that means..

Kenny I'm also amused by the fact that no matter what happens republicans continually repeat that we're a center right country. While in power they began a federal role in local schools and expanded Medicare but ya know we're a center right country.

When the economy crashed a conservative republican president couldn't hand out money fast enough but yet we're still a center right country.

Privatizing Social Security went nowhere yet still we're a center right country.

With the exception of taxes on what issue are we center right?

I've said it before and I'll say it again the truth is that we exist at the right end of a very liberal universe.

 

[Kulindahr]

OK on prop 8, though I might add that secular african americans were just as much a factor as the mormons. But I'll take Christian conservatives who deny marriage to us then Islamic fundamentalists who would kill homosexuals on the spot.

I'd say that "secular African Americans" is a set with a membership that's too small to be significant.

 

[EwanSF]

I don't know about "bigotry". Simple-mindedness, yes; it makes a nice refuge from having to consider the actual complexities of the issues in Islam.

Listing a string of verses that show hatred of Jews is legitimate... unless that's all you list. That's what's taught in the madrashas, which is why we have this problem -- if those Muslims ran real schools, like the ones that flourished in Spain under Muslim rule, we wouldn't see this streaming to terrorist training camps.

Fair point man. But it's what drives this simple-mindedness that worries me. The actual motives. As I said, the need for an enemy, coupled with eutopian idealism is the driving force behind a lot of right-wing philosophies. Don't really want to reffer to nazi Germany, but it's the best example.

This blinkered view that at a drop of a hat, all muslims will rise up and take over the world is utter horseshit and very dangerous, as it seems to imply that muslims will only understand military force, not diplomacy. It is, as I said before, ideological chauvanism.

 

[jktoooo]

Hold that first thought.
You're correct; most of the spread of Islam has been by "the sword".




Now you've agreed that there is extremism -- found in those "few" you point out.



You're entertaining.
This happens every now and then when someone new comes around, so sure of himself, and doesn't bother to actually read what people say, but instead just reacts according to preset patterns that don't admit the world is anything but a fairy-tale black-v-white.
Do you read anything in this forum besides what you yourself write? I mean read, not just zip your eyes across the words. Do you remember anything at all about what you read?

See, the reason you're entertaining is that I know you've taken part in threads where you cheered my position, for which position I was being called a fascist and right-winger and all that.
But since you seem to not apply that cognitive faculty we call "memory"... how is it that you call someone who just last week was defending the IDF's use of force in the recent Gaza mess as justified a "leftist liberal"?

Do some reading before you jump to shallow "conclusions" about people. Read around now, and see why you're so entertaining.



No, your reading comprehension sucks -- as you prove again here:



That's an excellent demonstration of the phenomenon of recognizing words but failing to put them together to get meaning. You take two words I used, link them with something you're fixated on, and get.... well, nothing that has anything to dowith what I said.



F for reading comprehension.
A+ for seeing what you "read" through a fliter -- a shallow, fallacious one at that.
Please, show me one thing where I said 9/11 was "justified".

You've got such a fixation on hating America....




I know your verses; no need to trot them out.
Trotting them out like that shows you're not paying attention to history. Those verses were there for those 1300 years, but in most of the Muslim world, for most of that time, the only one to play terrorist against the Jews was Mohammed himself; Jews and Muslims and CHristians lived together peacefully under Muslim rule (albeit only Muslims being first-class citizens).

So what we "make of" those verses is that there's something else present in Islam than just them.



I have my facts straight -- a lot more facts than you're even paying attention to.
If "Anti Semitism is a cornerstone of Islam", please explain how during the "Golden Age" of Islam, Jews and Christians living in Muslim lands were... well, how it is that they were living in Muslim lands -- and not just living, but being respected members of society. Explain how it is that arguably the greatest blossoming of scholarship in a single place since ancient Greece occurred under Muslim rulers who invited Jewish and Christian scholars to work and study alongside Muslim scholars as colleagues?



Hardly the first -- look at Rome, and Babylon, as two examples.
But you're making the same error fundamentalist Christians do: they act as though there's no history between the New Testament and them. Yes, if you cut out like a millennium and a half of history, and past Mohammed with some of the bloodthirsty Muslim rulers and then skip to the anti-Jewish movement after WW II, Islam looks like a solid stream of violence, from Mohammed's terrorist tactics to those of Hamas.

It might even be argued that Mohammed provided the inspiration for the Nazis in their disposal of certain enemies, save for the fact that having your "enemies" dig the trenches they'll be buried in has amused certain warped minds throughout history -- Assyrians, Chinese, Japanese, even U.S. cavalry troops have done it.



See, here's where your problem is: I didn't say what you're claiming. I said that the modern Islamic extremist movement and its hatred of Jews sprouted from Nazi influence -- and all you have to do to grasp that is read about the Nazis' "Arab Brigade". You're only getting your conclusion from your own preconceptions, which are very linear and simplistic and exclusive. Since you find legitimately anti-Jewish verses in the Koran, you presume there aren't any other influences, trends, or causes you need to look at, but worse, you assume they don't exist.

So you haven't discredited anything but a tin man in your own imagination. I don't say a "straw man", because you didn't set it up just so you could knock it down; it's a tin man because it's hollow and you stuff everything you encounter into it, so you only have to fight the tin man and not the reality.

Here's a touch of reality: more than once in history, Jews fled to Muslim lands for refuge and safety.
That hardly fits with your theme of hate of Jews being a core value of Islam. Indeed, even Tamerlane (Tamur), whose troops herded Jews in battle areas into synagogues and burned them, treated the Jews within his lands with not merely tolerance but respect.
There are two items of extreme importance about Islam hiding in there; I'll comment on one of them (the other has been noted various times in this forum):

Islam is not inherently violent, but inherently schizophrenic. There is in it a theme of hatred and violence against Jews, as the verses you list indicate. There is also in it -- go to the religion forum and you can find threads where others have listed verses and precedent -- great tolerance and respect for Jews. That schizophrenic nature is more dangerous, at the last, than any pure hatred.

Muslims who hold to the verses you've listed (and others) give us extremism. That trend was present in the Muslim world before the Nazis came along, but they took it up and focused it -- indeed, that trend was why the Nazis associated themselves with non-Aryans at all, in the Arab Brigade. Those verses are why the Nazis found Muslims useful to their schemes, and why the Nazi virulence against Jews sparked something that hadn't been present, i.e. the modern movement against Jews in the Muslim world.

But Muslims who hold to the verses where Jews are to be treated with respect give us an entirely different kind of Islam, one without a lot of visibility since they just live in peace.

What Islam as a whole needs to do is get off the literalist pedestal (fat chance) and resolve this issue. Christians, at least, have the example and words of Jesus to tell them that hatred and violence against others aren't part of God's scheme these days; Muslims have the problem that Mohammed spoke out of both sides of his mouth, and both sets of pronouncements are there in stark contradiction.

"Who and what" you're "dealing with" is someone who's read one heck of a lot more of history than you apparently have, and paid attention. "Who and what" you're dealing with here is someone who has pondered the available information and accepted reality, and works with that.

So don't be so ready to just pop people into pigeonholes based on your tidy but erroneous categories. It leads you to ridiculous places.

And before you are so quick to judge what Obama is doing, read up on the history of the entire Arab world, with special attention to how the colonial powers and the U.S. treated them in the late nineteenth and most of the twentieth century; get at least a fair grasp of some of the basic principles in Sun Tzu and Machiavelli, and preferably from Clausewitz as well. Ponder the principles of judo. Absorb a little about realpolitik, with attention to Kissinger and others and U.S. dealings with the Muslim world. You'll come to see there there is a possible depth of strategy to what Obama is doing, even one that a neoconservative could embrace (whether that's what he's actually up to will take years to discover).

OMG Khulindar, you are soooooooooo much work!

You say alot of things but most of it is nothing.

How do you get by everyday?

When I get time later I'll try to sift through this [probably MOSTLY Nonsense] stuff.

geez!

 

[jktoooo]

Fair point man. But it's what drives this simple-mindedness that worries me. The actual motives. As I said, the need for an enemy, coupled with eutopian idealism is the driving force behind a lot of right-wing philosophies. Don't really want to reffer to nazi Germany, but it's the best example.

This blinkered view that at a drop of a hat, all muslims will rise up and take over the world is utter horseshit and very dangerous, as it seems to imply that muslims will only understand military force, not diplomacy. It is, as I said before, ideological chauvanism.

um, uh, the Nazi's were leftists because Hitler took communist ideals (again, leftism) and transformed them to meet his racist ways.

get that through your thick skull.

 

[Kulindahr]

Fair point man. But it's what drives this simple-mindedness that worries me. The actual motives. As I said, the need for an enemy, coupled with eutopian idealism is the driving force behind a lot of right-wing philosophies. Don't really want to reffer to nazi Germany, but it's the best example.

This blinkered view that at a drop of a hat, all muslims will rise up and take over the world is utter horseshit and very dangerous, as it seems to imply that muslims will only understand military force, not diplomacy. It is, as I said before, ideological chauvanism.

Personally I believe that what drives most of the simple-mindedness is our school system. We've had a couple of decades of liberal philosophy that made having students feel good about themselves was more important than learning to think. School papers became recitation of information, not analysis, and "I feel" was taken as a legitimate premise for a conclusion.

If they thought they wouldn't be shot for it, most Muslims would probably rise up and say to Hamas, Al Qaeda, and their sort, "Fuck off!" Bush was right when he said we're fighting this on their behalf, too, because although they don't support the militants, if those folks win, everyone will be stuck with them. It's like a clip I heard of an Afghanistani woman talking about the Taliban, "We thought it wonderful that people truly devoted to the Qu'ran would want to lead. We didn't expect they'd be brutally oppressive."

 

[EwanSF]

um, uh, the Nazi's were leftists because Hitler took communist ideals (again, leftism) and transformed them to meet his racist ways.

get that through your thick skull.

Blow me.


And no. National socialism is the ideological opposite of socialism primarily because, and this is the good bit, it had fuck all to do with socialism. What "communist ideals" did hitler use then? To the best of my memory hitlers top priority was ultra-nationalism, universaly accepted as a rightwing ideal, seeing as socialists are internationalists. The socialis workers bit of the full NSDAP title came from a merger of the german workers with the socialist workers party who like most german political groups had a broad anti-semitic base. Any pretenses of socialism were swiftly abandoned. Also, hitler did everything in his power to keep the bourgeoisie in thier previous position of privilage, seeing as that's where most of his financial backing and original support came from.

I'm struggeling to think how you could actualy be more wrong.

 

[EwanSF]

Personally I believe that what drives most of the simple-mindedness is our school system. We've had a couple of decades of liberal philosophy that made having students feel good about themselves was more important than learning to think. School papers became recitation of information, not analysis, and "I feel" was taken as a legitimate premise for a conclusion.

We have that here as well, although not quite to the same extent. Fuckin' depressin' so it is.