08-02-2010, 05:45
|
#1
|
Quiet Professional
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: NorCal
Posts: 15,370
|
War On Terror's Other Cost: Undeserved Anger At All Muslims
A US serviceman explains how he keeps anger over Islamist terrorists from becoming prejudice against Muslims in general.
However - YMMV...and so it goes...
Richard
War On Terror's Other Cost: Undeserved Anger At All Muslims
CSM, 30 July 2010
This September and October, Americans mark the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and the ninth year of war in Afghanistan, respectively. This war has become arguably the longest in our history. Given the jihad-until-doomsday rhetoric of the Islamists, the war on terror will probably stay with us in one form or another for the foreseeable future.
As the costs mount in blood and treasure, little wonder that the war corrodes the way we think about Muslims and Muslim countries. After all, the worst attack on American soil was hatched in Afghanistan, allegedly planned by a Pakistani, and carried out mainly by Saudis.
It is admittedly tempting to let conflict define our relationship with Muslims. Controversial bus ads about Islam in several US cities are forcing an uncomfortable conversation about this relationship. For those of us who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, it becomes personal. Nobody likes getting shot at.
Firsthand Experience In A Muslim Country
But several years ago, I had a different kind of experience in a Muslim country – one I like to recall in contrast to the events that dominate the news today.
On the first flight of my deployment, our Air Force C-130 cargo plane lifted off from Dhaka, Bangladesh. Water the color of mocha rippled beneath us, inundating slums and hovels, streets and fields. Bangladesh was suffering a flood of historic proportions.
Unlike most floods in the US, where a river overflows its banks and runs swollen along its course, the Bangladeshi flood had no identifiable river channel. Just a flat, drenched expanse – miles of it. As we climbed, the water stretched to the horizon. It was like an inland sea, dotted with treetops and shanty roofs. Tarp shelters clustered on the few patches of ground high enough to remain dry.
We carried about a dozen Bangladeshi air force cadets; it was the first time most of them had ever flown. Several minutes after takeoff, an oil pump failed. In less than 90 seconds, all the oil from one of our four engines spewed and misted into the floodwater. We shut down the engine, declared an emergency, turned around, and landed back at Dhaka. Muddy water lapped at the airfield’s perimeter.
I apologized to the cadets for their short and perhaps nerve-wracking ride.
They did not seem fazed.
“Not a problem, sir!” one of them barked, locked at attention. We could not get those guys to relax, but even through extreme military protocol, they exuded goodwill. “Thank you for the experience, sir,” another offered.
Due to the flood, our mission to demonstrate the capabilities of the C-130 Hercules quickly turned into a real-world relief operation. Working with Bangladeshi civilians and military personnel, we delivered food and medical supplies to places where floodwater had cut off highways. The Bangladeshis ended up buying four refurbished C-130s for just that purpose.
Not A Single Moment Of Hostility
We encountered not one single moment of hostility, not from anyone anywhere in that devoutly Muslim country. It was 1998.
I still have fond memories of the Bangladeshis, their delightfully subtle sense of humor, and their grit and creativity in the face of adversity.
Heartbreakingly poor, they knew how to get the most from whatever they had.
“Sir, we must save the fuel in this generator if you really do not need electricity now,” one soldier told me. Second to Islam, the guiding creed of Bangladeshis seemed to be common sense.
Granted, this was all before 9/11, but it shows that Americans and South Asian Muslims are not necessarily natural enemies. Bangladesh does have its radical Islamists, but the country has never become a major schoolhouse, refuge, and transit point for them like its historical cousin, Pakistan. Islam alone is not the problem.
Sloppy Thinking
In the post-9/11 world, it’s way too easy to get sloppy in our thinking and extend our anger over terrorism to Muslims in general.
I understand the root of this anger: My wife works in the Pentagon. In 2001, I worked as an airline pilot – friends of friends were on the hijacked planes that slammed into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. On my first missions in Afghanistan, I carried in my flight suit pocket an outdated navigational chart that depicted the Twin Towers.
Yes, I still harbor anger about 9/11. I get angry about continued efforts to attack the US, such as the attempted Times Square bombing earlier this year.
I get angry when I hear of soldiers maimed by improvised explosive devices. I get really angry when my aircraft’s cargo compartment contains flag-draped boxes.
But when I feel that anger metastasize into prejudice, I try to remember that Bangladesh mission, when the allies were Muslim, and the only enemies were hunger and waterborne disease.
Thomas W. Young is a flight engineer with the West Virginia Air National Guard, a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the author of the “The Mullah’s Storm,” a forthcoming novel set in the Afghanistan war.
http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/...at-all-Muslims
__________________
“Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of (another)… There are just some kind of men who – who’re so busy worrying about the next world they’ve never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.” - To Kill A Mockingbird (Atticus Finch)
“Almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.” - Robert Heinlein
|
Richard is offline
|
|
08-02-2010, 08:50
|
#2
|
Guerrilla
Join Date: Jan 2009
Location: Virginia
Posts: 144
|
On the other hand...
The link: http://article.nationalreview.com/43...rew-c-mccarthy
July 31, 2010 4:00 A.M.
It’s About Sharia
Newt Gingrich resets our national-security debate.
by Andrew C. McCarthy
The 2010 midterms have not happened yet, but the 2012 campaign is under way. For that we can thank Newt Gingrich. Not because Gingrich is a candidate, though he almost certainly is. And not because he can win, because that is by no means certain. We should thank Gingrich because he has crystallized the essence of our national-security challenge. Henceforth, there should be no place to hide for any candidate, including any incumbent. The question will be: Where do you stand on sharia?
The former speaker of the House gets the war on terror. For one thing, he refuses to call it the “war on terror,” which should be the entry-level requirement for any politician who wants to influence how we wage it. Gingrich grasps that there is an enemy here and that it is a mortal threat to freedom. He knows that if we are to remain a free people, it is an enemy we must defeat. That enemy is Islamism, and its operatives — whether they come as terrorists or stealth saboteurs — are the purveyors of sharia, Islam’s authoritarian legal and political system.
This being the Era of the Reset Button, Gingrich is going about the long-overdue business of resetting our understanding of the civilizational jihad that has been waged against the United States for some 31 years. It is the jihad begun when Islamists overran the American embassy in Tehran, heralding a revolutionary regime that remains the No. 1 U.S. security challenge in the Middle East, as Gingrich argued Thursday in a provocative speech at the American Enterprise Institute.
The single purpose of this jihad is the imposition of sharia. On that score, Gingrich made two points of surpassing importance. First, some Islamists employ mass-murder attacks while others prefer a gradual march through our institutions — our legal, political, academic, and financial systems, as well as our broader culture; the goal of both, though, is the same. The stealth Islamists occasionally feign outrage at the terrorists, but their quarrel is over methodology and pace. Both camps covet the same outcome.
Second, that outcome is the death of freedom. In Islamist ideology, sharia is deemed to be the necessary precondition for Islamicizing a society — for Islam is not merely a religious doctrine, but a comprehensive socio-economic and political system. As the former speaker elaborated, sharia embodies principles and punishments that are abhorrent to Western values. Indeed, its foundational premise is anti-American, holding that we are not free people at liberty to govern ourselves irrespective of any theocratic code, that people are instead beholden to the Islamic state, which is divinely enjoined to impose Allah’s laws.
Sharia, moreover, is anti-equality. It subjugates women and brutally punishes transgressors, particularly homosexuals and apostates. While our law forbids cruel and unusual punishments, Gingrich observed that the brutality in sharia sanctions is not gratuitous, but intentional: It is meant to enforce Allah’s will by striking example.
On this last point, Gingrich offered a salient insight, one well worth internalizing in the Sun Tzu sense of knowing one’s enemy. Islamists, violent or not, have very good reasons for the wanting to destroy the West. Those reasons are not crazy or wanton — and they have nothing to do with Gitmo, Israel, cartoons, or any other excuse we conjure to explain the savagery away. Islamists devoutly believe, based on a well-founded interpretation of Islamic doctrine, that they have been commanded by Allah to kill, convert, or subdue all who do not adhere to sharia — because they regard Allah as their only master (“There is no God but Allah”). It is thus entirely rational (albeit frightening to us) that they accept the scriptural instruction that the very existence of those who resist sharia is offensive to Allah, and that a powerful example must be made of those resisters in order to induce the submission of all — “submission” being the meaning of Islam.
It makes no sense to dismiss our enemies as lunatics just because “secular socialist” elites, as Gingrich called them, cannot imagine a fervor that stems from religious devotion. We ought to respect our enemies, he said. Not “respect” in Obama-speak, which translates as “appease,” but in the sense of taking them seriously, understanding that they are absolutely determined to win, and realizing that they are implacable. There is no “moderate” sharia devotee, for sharia is not moderate. Gingrich noted that in response to global outcry against the prospect of death by stoning for an Iranian woman, Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, convicted of adultery, the mullahs’ great concession appears to be that she will be hanged instead. Islamism is not a movement to be engaged, it is an enemy to be defeated.
Victory, Gingrich said, will be very long in coming — longer, perhaps, than the nearly half-century it took to win the Cold War. Invoking JFK, he urged that the survival and success of liberty will still require an unwavering commitment to pay any price and bear any burden, for as long as it takes. Will that entail an ambitious project to democratize Islamic countries — notwithstanding that sharia dictates waging jihad against Westerners who try? Gingrich’s embrace of President Bush’s second inaugural address suggests that he may think so.
How we go about it and whether we use our military to spearhead a “forward march of freedom” are matters the former speaker did not flesh out. He also wondered aloud why, after nearly nine years in Afghanistan, we had not tasked military engineers and contractors to blanket that backward land with highways, the roads to advancement and prosperity. But we haven’t defeated the enemy yet. One can agree wholeheartedly with the former speaker that, having taken on a war against Afghan Islamists, it is imperative that America win. But in World War II, which Gingrich invoked repeatedly, and to great effect, we had our priorities straight: unambiguous victory first; then, and only then, the Marshall Plan’s ambitious reconstruction of Europe and Japan.
Debate over all of this is essential. The crucial point is that we must have the debate with eyes open. It is a debate about which Gingrich has put down impressive markers: The main front in the war is not Afghanistan or Iraq but the United States. The war is about the survival of Western civilization, and we should make no apologies for the fact that the West’s freedom culture is a Judeo-Christian culture — a fact that was unabashedly acknowledged, Gingrich reminded his audience, by FDR and Churchill. To ensure victory in the United States we must, once again, save Europe, where the enemy has advanced markedly. There is no separating our national security and our economic prosperity — they are interdependent. And while the Middle East poses challenges of immense complexity, Gingrich contended that addressing two of them — Iran, the chief backer of violent jihad, and Saudi Arabia, the chief backer of stealth jihad — would go a long way toward improving our prospects on the rest.
Most significant, there is sharia. By pressing the issue, Newt Gingrich accomplishes two things. First, he gives us a metric for determining whether those who would presume to lead us will fight or surrender. Second, at long last, someone is empowering truly moderate Muslims — assuming they exist in the numbers we’re constantly assured of. Our allies are the Muslims who embrace our freedom culture — those for whom sharia is a matter of private belief, not public mission. Our enemies are those who want sharia to supplant American law and Western culture. When we call out the latter, and marginalize them, we may finally energize the former.
It’s that simple. Not easy, but simple.
__________________
Bordercop
Perge Sed Caute
Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same - Ronald Reagan
If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn't sit for a month - Theodore Roosevelt
We herd sheep, we drive cattle, and we lead people. Lead me, follow me, or get out of my way - George S. Patton
|
Bordercop is offline
|
|
08-02-2010, 08:59
|
#3
|
Area Commander
Join Date: Aug 2008
Location: Southern California
Posts: 4,478
|
Then again...
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bordercop
The link: http://article.nationalreview.com/43...rew-c-mccarthy
<<SNIP>>
On this last point, Gingrich offered a salient insight, one well worth internalizing in the Sun Tzu sense of knowing one’s enemy. Islamists, violent or not, have very good reasons for the wanting to destroy the West. Those reasons are not crazy or wanton — and they have nothing to do with Gitmo, Israel, cartoons, or any other excuse we conjure to explain the savagery away. Islamists devoutly believe, based on a well-founded interpretation of Islamic doctrine, that they have been commanded by Allah to kill, convert, or subdue all who do not adhere to sharia — because they regard Allah as their only master (“There is no God but Allah”). It is thus entirely rational (albeit frightening to us) that they accept the scriptural instruction that the very existence of those who resist sharia is offensive to Allah, and that a powerful example must be made of those resisters in order to induce the submission of all — “submission” being the meaning of Islam.
<<SNIP>>
It’s that simple. Not easy, but simple.
|
FWIW, Jessica Stern has spent time getting to know the enemy in a number of different settings and contexts.
Foreign Affairs published her view of the enemy in its January/February 2010 issue. That essay is available here. Her view differs markedly from that of Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Sullivan. Ms. Stern avers:
Quote:
...Terrorist movements often arise in reaction to an injustice, real or imagined, that they feel must be corrected. Yet ideology is rarely the only, or even the most important, factor in an individual's decision to join the cause. The reasons that people become terrorists are as varied as the reasons that others choose their professions: market conditions, social networks, education, individual preferences. Just as the passion for justice and law that drives a lawyer at first may not be what keeps him working at a law firm, a terrorist's motivations for remaining in, or leaving, his "job" change over time. Deradicalization programs need to take account -- and advantage -- of these variations and shifts in motivations.
Interestingly, terrorists who claim to be driven by religious ideology are often ignorant about Islam. Our hosts in Riyadh told us that the vast majority of the deradicalization program's "beneficiaries," as its administrators call participants, had received little formal education and had only a limited understanding of Islam. In the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe, second- and third-generation Muslim youth are rebelling against the kind of "soft" Islam practiced by their parents and promoted in local mosques. They favor what they think is the "purer" Islam, uncorrupted by Western culture, which is touted on some Web sites and by self-appointed imams from the Middle East who are barely educated themselves. For example, the Netherlands-based terrorist cell known as the Hofstad Group designed what one police officer described as a "do-it-yourself" version of Islam based on interpretations of takfiri ideology (takfir is the practice of accusing other Muslims of apostasy) culled from the Internet and the teachings of a drug dealer turned cleric.
Such true believers are good candidates for the kind of ideological reeducation undertaken by Task Force 134 in Iraq and by the prison-based deradicalization program in Saudi Arabia. A Saudi official told the group of us who visited the Care Rehabilitation Center in Riyadh last winter that the main reason for terrorism was ignorance about the true nature of Islam. Clerics at the center teach that only the legitimate rulers of Islamic states, not individuals such as Osama bin Laden, can declare a holy war. They preach against takfir and the selective reading of religious texts to justify violence. One participant in the program told us, "Now I understand that I cannot make decisions by reading a single verse. I have to read the whole chapter."
|
Last edited by Sigaba; 08-03-2010 at 00:18.
Reason: Fixing a typo, adding a quote
|
Sigaba is offline
|
|
08-02-2010, 11:58
|
#4
|
Area Commander
Join Date: Oct 2007
Posts: 3,465
|
I respectfully choose to disagree with Mr. Young for the following reasons, which I posted in a similar thread.
1. It took me almost ten years to go to the WTC site and pay my respects.
(I lived on Leonard Street btw Church & Brdway)
2. A VIVID NYC memory from that time frame: Muslim cab drivers beeping their horns and being extra jovial towards each other, while the city picked itself up…that day and for weeks after the attack.
3. My wife has three really close girl friends. One lost her entire wedding party that day. I mean, who comprises a wedding party, your very best sisters, friends etc…now all dead; is but one permissible islamic example: the right to kill anyone at anytime.
I knew so many people that died that day, people I trained and had worked with, innocent people that dined in my restaurant, companies that we catered events for, or just the Joe who said hello on his way to work, the guy that doesn’t get to see his kid grow up…fuck these scumbags muslims. They will never assimilate to/in our culture. ..but you know that already?
4. You want me to be politically correct in response to a belief system that a. see’s no value in our openness, or personal freedoms.
b. actively engages with deadly force on a NOW current/regular/routine basis while simultaneously seeking to smother and suppress any mention of their muslim belief/religion campaign. Especially, as it continues to destroy/subvert our freedoms to confront it.
5. There is no solution in appeasement, accommodation, or tolerance with muslim ideology. They must be confronted without compassion or mercy, as an entire culture and destroyed with the same deadly indiscriminant force.
6. I am beyond anger, I am hateful to the core of my being. If you're a rag head, I do not believe anything you say, and I don't trust you, Not because I don't want to, but because Your religion taught me that.
There a section in Philadelphia that has been declared a muslim only section, by native converts no less. Do the math on that, and then look up what a former Mayor Frank Rizzo did when confront with the Move organization in the 70's.
We can't be far from the edge at this point. Farrakhan stated recently that he wanted to push the devils over the edge; all he has to do is order/send his true believers into the street with their AK's. Do It!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Edited for inaccurate word choice. Richard
|
Penn is offline
|
|
08-02-2010, 11:59
|
#5
|
Guerrilla
Join Date: Apr 2010
Location: Home of the Free
Posts: 111
|
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sigaba
FWIW, Jessica Stern has spent time getting to know the enemy in a number of different settings and context.
Foreign Affairs published her view of the enemy in its January/February 2010 issue. That essay is available here. Her view differs markedly from that of Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Sullivan.
|
Her resume (Harvard) automatically puts her argument into question due to a conflict of interest. So too would Georgetown or other Ivy league schools on the Saudi pay roll.
As for Saudi's "Deradicalization Program," converting AQ Terrorists into Muslim Brotherhood operatives hardly constitutes success. YMMV.
__________________
Do not say this unfatherly expression, "Well! Give me peace in my day."
Rather a generous parent would say, "If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace;"
and this single reflection, well applied, is sufficient to awaken every man to duty.
|
Thomas Paine is offline
|
|
08-02-2010, 13:23
|
#6
|
BANNED USER
Join Date: Aug 2009
Location: Western NC
Posts: 1,243
|
War On Terror's Other Cost: Undeserved Anger At All Muslims
I really don’t see it that way, my beef isn’t with ALL Muslims, my anger, or should I say my loathing, is directed towards the supremacist ideology of Islam. Most of the people who are now Muslim never chose to be so, simply because almost all of their ancestors were forced into being Muslim, whole countries were conquered, and Sharia law was imposed - and the penalty of death - is levied towards those who want to leave.
c2.5 The unlawful (haram) is what the Law-giver strictly forbids. Someone who commits an unlawful act deserves punishment, while one who refrains from it out of obedience to the command of Allah is rewarded.
(3) and unbelief (Kufr), sins which put one beyond the pale of Islam (as discussed at o8.7) and necessitate stating the Testification of Faith (Shahada)…
o8.2 In such a case, it is obligatory for the caliph (A: or his representative) to ask him to repent and return to Islam. If he does, it is accepted from him, but if he refuses, he is immediately killed
(A: though if there is no Caliph (def: o25), no permission is required.
o8.7 (2) to intend to commit unbelief, even if in the future. And like this intention is hesitating whether to do so or not: one therby immediately commits unbelief:
(The Reliance of the Traveller)
Countries with theocratic regimes or tendencies, puts pressure on everyone to become Muslim. I’m certain most Muslim’s as a rule, are pretty good folks, yet the ideology of Islam, encourages the struggling towards the political goal of the dominance of Islamic law. However, the existence of good a Muslim does not invalidate Islamic teachings from the Qur’an that advocate intolerance and violence toward non-Muslims.
o1.2 The following are not subject to retaliation:
(2) a Muslim for killing a non-Muslim
(3) ….for killing an apostate…
(pgs. 580-590 / Reliance of the Traveller)
o4:17 There is no indemnity for killing a non-Muslim...
(pgs 588-595)
How many Generals during WWII would have been willing to kiss Mein Kampf
If the anger towards the Muslim population is as predominant as the original article indicates, wouldn’t there be a backlash?
Quote:
The Phantom Backlash
by Robert Spencer
Backlash fever is sweeping the nation...
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano declared: “We object to, and do not believe, that anti-Muslim sentiment should emanate from this. This was an individual who does not represent the Muslim faith.” She said that DHS was taking steps to “prevent everybody being painted with a broad brush.”
The media was mining the same territory. AP reported Friday that there had been “immediate” anti-Muslim “backlash.” What happened? Did armed bands of furious Islamophobes throw molotov cocktails at mosques? Did ferocious white supremacists maul fragile little girls in hijabs on their way to school? Did angry bigots spit at pious imams quietly going about their business?
No.
Had there been any report -- any report at all -- of any innocent, random Muslim being attacked in a “backlash” after the Fort Hood jihad?
Nope. Not one. Americans are decent people. Americans believe people are innocent until proven guilty...
|
The rest here > http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=34363
Last edited by T-Rock; 08-02-2010 at 23:21.
Reason: grammer :-)
|
T-Rock is offline
|
|
08-02-2010, 15:45
|
#7
|
Area Commander
Join Date: Feb 2004
Location: OK. Thanking Our Brave Soldiers
Posts: 3,614
|
Quote:
Originally Posted by Penn
I respectfully choose to disagree with Mr. Young for the following reasons, which I posted in a similar thread.
1. It took me almost ten years to go to the WTC site and pay my respects.
(I lived on Leonard Street btw Church & Brdway)
2. A VIVID NYC memory from that time frame: Muslim cab drivers beeping their horns and being extra jovial towards each other, while the city picked itself up…that day and for weeks after the attack.
3. My wife has three really close girl friends. One lost her entire wedding party that day. I mean, who comprises a wedding party, your very best sisters, friends etc…now all dead; is but one permissible islamic example: the right to kill anyone at anytime.
I knew so many people that died that day, people I trained and had worked with, innocent people that dined in my restaurant, companies that we catered events for, or just the Joe who said hello on his way to work, the guy that doesn’t get to see his kid grow up…fuck these scumbags muslims. They will never assimilate to/in our culture. ..but you know that already?
4. You want me to be politically correct in response to a belief system that a. see’s no value in our openness, or personal freedoms.
b. actively engages with deadly force on a NOW current/regular/routine basis while simultaneously seeking to smother and suppress any mention of their muslim belief/religion campaign. Especially, as it continues to destroy/subvert our freedoms to confront it.
5. There is no solution in appeasement, accommodation, or tolerance with muslim ideology. They must be confronted without compassion or mercy, as an entire culture and destroyed with the same deadly indiscriminant force.
6. I am beyond anger, I am hateful to the core of my being. If you're a rag head, I do not believe anything you say, and I don't trust you, Not because I don't want to, but because Your religion taught me that.
|
Very well said, Chef.
Lost a lot of co-workers that day, and a part of my soul. A lot of folks did.
In addition, each and every precious American Soldier, who has since given their life in battle against this enemy, are the ones whom I would ask, "Is The War On Terror's Other Cost: Undeserved Anger At All Muslims?"
Some Americans will never forget, and will never forgive.
Holly
|
echoes is offline
|
|
08-02-2010, 16:44
|
#8
|
Quiet Professional
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: NorCal
Posts: 15,370
|
Quote:
...and will never forgive.
|
Gawd...how un-WWJD...or is it.
Richard's $.02
__________________
“Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of (another)… There are just some kind of men who – who’re so busy worrying about the next world they’ve never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.” - To Kill A Mockingbird (Atticus Finch)
“Almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.” - Robert Heinlein
|
Richard is offline
|
|
08-02-2010, 17:01
|
#9
|
Guerrilla Chief
Join Date: Dec 2008
Location: The Nam
Posts: 777
|
This posting was the lunch conversation with me and Big H. He knows where I am coming from albeit rather a bit more emotional (cuz I am a girl) than for some of you. Penn, hadn't posted his comments before I left for lunch...but I am 100% with him.
The interesting thing about the lunch, my fortune cookie stated "Hate does not conquer hate. Only love can conquer hate". How appropo, right?
I agree with Echoes to an extent....I did forgive but I didn't forget. I will never forget and until every last one of them is either sent packing or they realize this is America, not another nation of islam...none of them will be my friend. None of them are the slightest bit removed from suspicion. Those monsters that perpetrated the most heinous attack on our country...they assimilated. They were neighbors, co-workers, friends, fellow students. Look what they did!!
I appreciate and respect everyone's opinion on this forum. We are all entitled to our feelings ...especially about things we are passionate about. But no amount of "feel good, kumbyah" stories will change my mind about them. And when I am put in a position where I HAVE TO deal with them, I am polite and businesslike but I do not go out of my way for them.
__________________
A tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny ~ Aesops Fables; The Lamb and the Wolf
Am fear nach gleidh na h-airm san t-sith, cha bhi iad aige 'n am a' chogaidh
"He that keeps not his arms in time of peace will have none in time of war" Old Gaelic
Arms discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property... Horrid mischief would ensue were the law-abiding deprived of the use of them. Thomas Paine
|
Saoirse is offline
|
|
08-02-2010, 17:18
|
#10
|
Area Commander
Join Date: Feb 2004
Location: OK. Thanking Our Brave Soldiers
Posts: 3,614
|
Quote:
Originally Posted by Richard
Gawd...how un-WWJD...or is it.
Richard's $.02 
|
Richard Sir,
If you so choose, you will have to explain the above abreviations, because I do not know what you have said, Sir.  Sorry....
My sentiment remains the same:
"...Each and every precious American Soldier, who has since given their life in battle against this enemy, are the ones whom I would ask, "Is The War On Terror's Other Cost: Undeserved Anger At All Muslims?"
Holly
|
echoes is offline
|
|
08-02-2010, 17:40
|
#11
|
Area Commander
Join Date: Oct 2007
Posts: 3,465
|
Delusional political correctness, but in the end, muslim strategy at work.
Quote:
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano declared: “We object to, and do not believe, that anti-Muslim sentiment should emanate from this. This was an individual who does not represent the Muslim faith.” She said that DHS was taking steps to “prevent everybody being painted with a broad brush.”
|
Appeasement, Accommodation, & rationalization
Quote:
I really don’t see it that way, my beef isn’t with ALL Muslims, my anger, or should I say my loathing, is directed towards the supremacist ideology of Islam. Most of the people who are now Muslim never chose to be so, simply because almost all of their ancestors were forced into being Muslim, whole countries were conquered, and Sharia law was imposed - and the penalty of death - is levied towards those who want to leave.
|
|
Penn is offline
|
|
08-02-2010, 18:15
|
#12
|
BANNED USER
Join Date: Aug 2009
Location: Western NC
Posts: 1,243
|
Quote:
Appeasement, Accommodation, & rationalization
|
Rationalization….yeah….however, I do not believe they should be accommodated nor appeased, and I think Islam should be demoted to cult status.
Nevertheless, my views fall more in line with those of Hassan Yousef: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odTyzaKYYd8
My father was an employee of Marsh and the impact of 9/11 was nothing short of devastation - 295 employees & 60 contractors were killed
Quote:
Gawd...how un-WWJD...or is it.
|
IMO, Muslims are like Obama voters, a few of them may mean well, but they know not what they do...
|
T-Rock is offline
|
|
08-02-2010, 18:30
|
#13
|
Quiet Professional
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: NorCal
Posts: 15,370
|
Quote:
...a few of them may mean well, but they know not what they do...
|
According to some theologian somewhere in History, some Jewish guy may have said that once...
And so it goes...
Richard
__________________
“Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of (another)… There are just some kind of men who – who’re so busy worrying about the next world they’ve never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.” - To Kill A Mockingbird (Atticus Finch)
“Almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.” - Robert Heinlein
|
Richard is offline
|
|
08-02-2010, 19:00
|
#14
|
Area Commander
Join Date: Oct 2007
Posts: 3,465
|
Or,
I remember the Jesuits were very firm disciplinarians, and no matter how much I wanted Hey Suez to intervene, he was a no show.
WWJD, what HS always does, transcend into vapor, put the mojo on the next spiritual leader who has been echoing his direct contacts and construct a musk-ox at ground zero, as a faith based test on true enlightment, forgiveness, and oneness with the various single deity belief systems; all mind you, as a marketing ploy to create revenues streams tied to sales insuring the believers resting spot next to the pearly gates. Or, Hey Suez, in his galactic comedic awareness has you invest your life savings not in Jim Jones, but in Bernie Madoff. HS, then reclines in his chair, lights a cobia, chuckles over Fidel, and Hugo, and thinks " Damm that was a great last name I gave Bernie". While in the background, you hear someone complain' to no one in particular "Jesus Christ what are you doing".
Out of the whirl wind you hear " Oh nothing , just Giving Nuclear weapons to I'm in Jihad".
|
Penn is offline
|
|
08-02-2010, 19:06
|
#15
|
Area Commander
Join Date: Feb 2004
Location: OK. Thanking Our Brave Soldiers
Posts: 3,614
|
Quote:
Originally Posted by Richard
According to some theologian somewhere in History, some Jewish guy may have said that once...
And so it goes...
Richard 
|
Richard Sir,
Again, am confused.
Holly......
Last edited by echoes; 08-02-2010 at 19:13.
|
echoes is offline
|
|
Currently Active Users Viewing This Thread: 1 (0 members and 1 guests)
|
|
Posting Rules
|
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts
HTML code is Off
|
|
|
All times are GMT -6. The time now is 14:45.
|
|
|