Fanatical Islam

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InfoWarrior82
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Re: Fanatical Islam

Post by InfoWarrior82 »

Oldemandalton wrote:
InfoWarrior82 wrote: Sheesh! For someone who claims to not want pre-emptive war, you sure seem like you're a propaganda arm of the establishment!
Pointing out that there ARE evil men who have corrupted Islam and want to destroy Israel and kill all of the Jews does not mean I want a war. The P.C. crowd, MSM and naïve pacifists have turned a deaf ear to the Jihadists and fanatical Islamists and their penchant for the use of terror and force, and then try and lump them with the peaceful Muslims. Just trying to inject reality in to the discussion, InfoWarrior.
Okaaayy. But I'm still not scared.

Oldemandalton wrote: BTW, I completely appose NATO or the West getting involved militarily in Syria except to try and get humanitarian aid to the victims of the civil war there. Let the Arab League deal with their own.
Uh oh! Where did Oldmandalton go? Looks like Ron Paul has been posting under your handle. :p

P.S. how do you comprehensively get aid to those who need it?

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Oldemandalton
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Re: Fanatical Islam

Post by Oldemandalton »

InfoWarrior:
Okaaayy. But I'm still not scared.

Scared? If you are informed with the truth and prepared, what is there to be afraid of?
Oldemandalton wrote:
BTW, I completely appose NATO or the West getting involved militarily in Syria except to try and get humanitarian aid to the victims of the civil war there. Let the Arab League deal with their own.


Uh oh! Where did Oldmandalton go? Looks like Ron Paul has been posting under your handle.



No, Ron Paul would have defended Assad and called those who oppose his tyranny as paid mercenaries of the CIA and the Mossad. 8-| :))
P.S. how do you comprehensively get aid to those who need it?
Through the Red Cross and Red Crescent working together, which they are trying to do as we speak.

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InfoWarrior82
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Re: Fanatical Islam

Post by InfoWarrior82 »

Oldemandalton wrote:
InfoWarrior:
Okaaayy. But I'm still not scared.

Scared? If you are informed with the truth and prepared, what is there to be afraid of?
I guess, concerned would be a better word.
Oldemandalton wrote:
Oldemandalton wrote:
BTW, I completely appose NATO or the West getting involved militarily in Syria except to try and get humanitarian aid to the victims of the civil war there. Let the Arab League deal with their own.
InfoWarrior:
Uh oh! Where did Oldmandalton go? Looks like Ron Paul has been posting under your handle.



No, Ron Paul would have defended Assad and called those who oppose his tyranny as paid mercenaries of the CIA and the Mossad. 8-| :))
Apparently, you are not aware of the al-qaeda "freedom fighters" being loaded into Syria from Libya... after we handed Libya to the terrorists. And this whole notion that Ron Paul defends dictators... please! Would you say he defended Saddam Hussein because he didn't want a conflict in Iraq?!?!?! Obviously, what he is defending is our constitution and bill of rights. You already admitted that you were against that war anyway.

Oldemandalton wrote:
P.S. how do you comprehensively get aid to those who need it?
Through the Red Cross and Red Crescent working together, which they are trying to do as we speak.
And how is that working out?

Oldemandalton wrote: The P.C. crowd, MSM and naïve pacifists have turned a deaf ear to the Jihadists and fanatical Islamists and their penchant for the use of terror and force, and then try and lump them with the peaceful Muslims.
Wow, you actually think the MSM is ignoring all the violence in the middle east? If anything I see them hyping all the terror threats and the establishment politicians all arguing this is why we need to strike pre emptively. Perhaps you haven't watched Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, etc. lately? In reality, they are lumping in extremist Muslims in with the ENTIRE MIDDLE EAST! If I wanted pro-war propaganda, I would just turn on one of these news channels at anytime during the day or night.

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AussieOi
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Re: Fanatical Islam

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Does anyone want to verify if these quotes are legitimate?


“Loss of virtue is too great a price to pay even for the preservation of ones life – better dead clean, than alive unclean. Many is faithful the Latter-day Saint parent who has sent a son or a daughter on a mission or otherwise out into the world with the direction: ‘I would rather have you come back in a pine box with your virtue than return alive without it.’”–Apostle Bruce R. McConkie, Mormon Doctrine (all editions), page 124.

” . . . Your virtue is worth more than your life. Please young folk, preserve your virtue even if you lose your lives. Do not tamper with sin . . . do not permit yourselves to be led into temptation.”–President David O. McKay, quoted in THE MIRACLE OF FORGIVENESS by Spencer W. Kimball

“…There is no true Latter-day Saint who would not rather bury a son or daughter than to have him or her lose his or her chastity — realizing that chastity is of more value than anything else in all the world.”–Heber J. Grant, quoted in THE MIRACLE OF FORGIVENESS by Spencer W. Kimball

“Also far-reaching is the effect of loss of chastity. Once given or taken or stolen it can never be regained. Even in forced contact such as rape or incest, the injured one is greatly outraged. If she has not cooperated and contributed to the foul deed, she is of course in a moe favorable position. There is no condemnation where there is no Voluntary participation. It is better to die in defending one’s virtue than to live having lost it without a struggle.”–Spencer W. Kimball, THE MIRACLE OF FORGIVENESS

“… For behold, many of the daughters of the Lamanites have they taken prisoners; and after depriving them of that which was most dear and precious above all things, which is chastity and virtue–”–Moroni 9:9

“The victim must do all in his or her power to stop the abuse. Most often, the victim is innocent because of being disabled by fear or the power or authority of the offender. At some point in time, however, the Lord may prompt a victim to recognize a degree of responsibility for abuse. Your priesthood leader will help assess your responsibility so that, if needed, it can be addressed. Otherwise the seeds of guilt will remain and sprout into bitter fruit. Yet no matter what degree of responsibility, from absolutely none to increasing consent, the healing power of the atonement of Jesus Christ can provide a complete cure.”
- Apostle Richard G. Scott “Healing the Tragic Scars of Abuse,” General Conference, Ensign, May 1992

“Of course, a mature person who willingly consents to sexual relations must share responsibility for the act, even though the other participant was the aggressor. Persons who consciously invite sexual advances also have a share of responsibility for the behavior that follows. But persons who are truly forced into sexual relations are victims and are not guilty of any sexual sin.”
- First Presidency Letter to General Authorities, Regional Representatives, and other priesthood leadership, 7 Feb. 1985

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AussieOi
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Re: Fanatical Islam

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Should I add old testament quotes about killing people for breaching what are to use some pretty hmm laws?

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BroJones
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Re: Fanatical Islam

Post by BroJones »

I'm so glad that President Packer was willing to speak out regarding Islam -- here is what he said in October 2006:
Building Bridges of Understanding:
The Church and the World of Islam
President Boyd K. Packer,
Acting President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles
of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter‐day Saints, gave this introduction of
Dr. Alwi Shihab prior to Dr. Shihab's forum address on 10 October 2006.

…Ahead of us, indeed already all around us, is
the world of Islam. Christianity and Islam
will clasp hands in cooperation and
understanding or clench fists in
confrontation and prejudice….

The Doctrine and Covenants has this very
interesting prophecy: “For after your
testimony cometh the testimony of
earthquakes, that shall cause groanings in
the midst of her, and men shall fall upon the
ground and shall not be able to stand.
“And also cometh the testimony of the voice
of thunderings, and the voice of lightnings,
and the voice of tempests, and the voice of
the waves of the sea heaving themselves
beyond their bounds” (D&C 88:89–90;
italics added).

Knit together by world history and by Old
Testament history and doctrine, the Church
and the Islamic world can see each other as
People of the Book, indeed Family of the
Book.

The First Presidency called a special fast for
funds to aid the victims of the tsumani. The
money flowed in—several million dollars.
Part of our purpose in traveling to Indonesia
was to review the significant Church
humanitarian relief to those hardest hit. The
assistance began flowing immediately, and it
continues today.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints expresses “special love and concern
for the eternal welfare of all men and
women, regardless of religious belief, race,
or nationality, knowing that we are truly
brothers and sisters because we are sons and
daughters of the same Eternal Father.”1

We believe that “the great religious leaders
of the world such as Mohammed, Confucius,
and the Reformers, as well as philosophers
including Socrates, Plato, and others,
received a portion of God’s light. Moral
truths were given to them by God to
enlighten whole nations and to bring a
higher level of understanding to
individuals.”2 [Statement of the First Presidency, February 15, 1978]


It is important that we in the West
understand there is a battle for the heart,
soul, and direction of Islam and that not all
Islam espouses violent jihad, as some
Western media portray.

It is as well important that friends in the
Islamic world understand there is a battle for
the heart, soul, and direction of the Western
world and that not all the West is morally
decadent, as some Islamic media portray.

Church members and Muslims share similar
high standards of decency, temperance, and
morality. We have so much in common. As
societal morality and behavior decline in an
increasingly permissive world, the Church
and many within Islam increasingly share
natural affinities.
Muslim scholars point out that the Quran
does not restrict Paradise to Muslims. The
Quran rewards all those of faith who
perform righteousness and believe in the
after-life. The Book calls Jesus Christ
Messiah, Son of Mary, and by the names
Messenger, Prophet, Servant, Word, and
Spirit of God.4




Alwi, a devout Muslim of Arabic ancestry,
and I, a Christian and devout Mormon, have
agreed to symbolically walk arm in arm into
the future. Together we hope to build a
bridge.
Except what that symbolizes is
accomplished, all of us face a very dark and
very dangerous future.
I agree 100% with President Packer!

waking
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Re: Fanatical Islam

Post by waking »

+1 Dr. Jones. Is there really room in our hearts for hatred? Not accusing anyone of that here. I know memebers of my own extended family that have no regard for any muslim since 9/11. It makes me sad.

sbsion
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Re: Fanatical Islam

Post by sbsion »

the difference between fanatical Islam and fanatical Isreal is MONEY, who controls it?

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AussieOi
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Re: Fanatical Islam

Post by AussieOi »

It took 5 pages for someone to give us the quote I am sure many of us (hopefully) we waiting for
In the meantime, we give people rope

We believe that “the great religious leaders of the world such as Mohammed, Confucius, and the Reformers, as well as philosophers
including Socrates, Plato, and others, received a portion of God’s light. Moral truths were given to them by God to
enlighten whole nations and to bring a higher level of understanding to individuals.”2 [Statement of the First Presidency, February 15, 1978]

GIVEN
TO
THEM
BY
GOD

BY GOD
BY GOD
BY GOD

But Having had this discussion 20 times before with other warmongers peddling fear, ignorance and intolerance, I know the next replies will be

"........the church just says that as an olive branch, it doesn't really believe that"

To that end, if it is good enough that Christianity was corrupted
if it is good enough that Catholicism (Universal church) was corrupted
if it is good enough that Judaism was corrupted
....but no, Islam always was evil.

kill the thread

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Oldemandalton
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Re: Fanatical Islam

Post by Oldemandalton »

Dr. Jones, here are some more excellent articles on the LDS Church and Islam:

Ishmael, Our Brother, By James B. Mayfield
http://www.lds.org/ensign/1979/06/ishma ... r?lang=eng

Mormonism, Islam, and the Question of Other Religions, By Daniel Peterson
http://www.fairlds.org/fair-conferences ... ns#enloc41

A Latter-day Saint Perspective on Muhammad, By James A. Toronto
http://www.lds.org/ensign/2000/08/a-lat ... uery=islam

I have never heard of the Church or the GAs in Conference Talks, Manuals, magazine articles, etc. ever criticizing any other church or religion. I would be very disappointed if they did. How can you criticize another religion and at the same time try and apostelize among them? It would do no good to criticize Mohammed as a false prophet as well as Confucius, Ellen G. White, and others.

The Title of this thread is” Fanatical Islam” which alludes to the fact of there being a non-Fanatical Islam which I have never denied. I have stated in other posts that it is the Jihadists and fanatical Muslims who have hijacked their religion to preach hate and violence against the innocent. As the “Palestinian” people are victims of their fanatical leaders so are the good Muslims who have been corrupted by those evil religious leaders who twist the words of Mohammed and use the post-Mohammed hadith, to turn a religion into a death cult where you can receive salvation by killing others. Thankfully not all have succumbed to these wicked teachings and some brave Islamic leaders have even come out to criticize those who have. Unfortunately these are few and have been not been given as much air time as the more vocal fundamentalist Islamists have.

Canadian documentary filmmaker Martyn Burke did a documentary for PBS about how moderate Muslims are being silenced and intimidated by Islamist extremists entitled “"Islam vs. Islamist". Not surprising that P.C. crowd at PBS spiked the show before it was aired.
Here is a clip:







Here is an interesting and informative article from the Ensign by Hugh Nibley a scholar of the ancient world and Old Testament:




Islam and Mormonism—A Comparison



Hugh Nibley
Professor of History and Religion Brigham Young University

http://www.lds.org/ensign/1972/03/islam ... n?lang=eng

The late great Classical scholar Werner Jaeger once said that the only time the lectures of the immortal Eduard Meyer were really interesting and the only time he was ever able to fill his lecture hall at the University of Berlin was when he talked about the Mormons.

Eduard Meyer was the last mortal to attempt single-handed a history of the Ancient World; others before him had written monumental histories of antiquity, “but never before had such work been undertaken by anyone with a comparable preparation.”1 “He had a special preference for the history of religion which never left him, from his dissertation (at the age of twenty) to the great work of his old age,”2 and that is why in 1904 he spent a year in Utah; he was convinced that “Mormonism … is not just another of countless sects, but a new revealed religion. … What in the study of other revealed religions can only be surmised after painful research is here directly accessible in reliable witnesses. Hence the origin and history of Mormonism possesses great and unusual value for the student of religious history.”3

In particular, “Mormonism,” he writes, “excited my interest at an early age before all else because of the surprising analogy, extending even to the smallest details, between it and the fundamental drives, external forms, and historical development of Islam: here one might hope to discover significant clues for a proper understanding of Mohammed and his religion. … there is hardly another historical parallel as instructive as this one. … It is impossible to undertake the scholarly investigation of the one without a closer acquaintance with the other.”4

It would be foolish not to take advantage of the spade-work already done by so competent a researcher as Meyer. Let us consider then the points on which he believes the Moslems and Mormons to be most alike and on which they differ. At the outset, the resemblances pointed out by Meyer are quite superficial, while the differences are profound and fundamental.

First as to the likenesses: Islam owed its impact on the world and its great appeal to its followers to the electrifying announcement that God had again spoken from the heavens and that after 600 years of silence the voice of a prophet was again heard in the land. It was this announcement that aroused the scorn and derision of the world and brought down storms of denunciation and persecution on the head of that prophet. Here indeed is a closer parallel to the case of Joseph Smith; in fact, early Mormon leaders saw no reason why Mohammed should not be considered a true prophet, for there have been many prophets, great and small, in the past whose words are not in the Bible.

But the striking resemblance turns almost at once into an equally striking contrast when the Moslems announce that Mohammed is the last of the prophets and that there can be no prophet after him. “When a doctrine is sealed,” writes an eminent Moslem scholar, “it is complete, and there can be no further addition. The holy Prophet Mohammed closed the long line of Apostles. … there has been and will be no prophet after Mohammed.”5 Thus Islam ignored its one unique advantage over conventional Judaism and Christianity, the joyful tidings that God still speaks from the heavens through his prophets.

Upon learning about the Mormons, Moslems usually comment favorably on the resemblance between the Word of Wisdom and Moslem rules of abstinence; but again the parallel is weakened by the fact that only a small minority of Moslems, such as the strict and rigorous Wahabis, observe such rules. The toleration of more than one wife in both religions is based on quite different principles and at any rate has been of limited application in both societies. Both religions advocate high moral principles, but then so do most other religions.

Most fundamental are certain doctrinal traditions that, while found in the Koran, have been rejected by conventional Christianity and Judaism but have always been a part of Mormonism. Great emphasis is placed, for example, on the concept of dispensations, i.e., the restoration of prophetic gifts and divine authority after long periods of apostasy and darkness through the sending of a great prophet. This doctrine was necessary to justify Mohammed’s appearance as a new prophet but became a dead letter in Islam after his death.

The Koran tells how at a great council held in the heavens at the creation of the earth God set forth the plan of salvation, and how Satan rejected the plan, refused to bow to Adam, and was cast out of heaven by main force, falling to this earth, where he now undertakes to tempt the children of men during their time of probation here below.6 Such teachings enjoy great prominence in the newly discovered documents of the early Christian and Jewish saints and sectaries of the desert, documents of which Eduard Meyer knew nothing but which now go a long way toward explaining how the teachings got into the Koran.

Actually, these things belong to the mysteries of the Koran and have never meant much to Moslems. Meyer himself limits the resemblances between Mormonism and Islam to “fundamental drives, external forms, and historical development,” all of which are secondary to the real genius of a religion—what its followers really believe. As mentioned before, in Meyer’s work it is the differences between Islam and Mormonism that are most significant.

In the first place, Meyer, who feels quite at home with the great Moslem leaders, is puzzled and annoyed by the Mormons; he finds it “easier to reach a confident conclusion about Mohammed, Abu Bekr, Omar, than about Joseph Smith or Brigham Young, in spite of the relatively much greater amount of material surviving concerning the latter.”7 He can explain Mohammed as a human being, plagued with doubts and misgivings about the nature of his calling and the authenticity of his visions.

“For Joseph Smith, on the other hand,” he reports, “it is a most distinctive characteristic that any such sort of doubt or misgiving is utterly out of the question.”8 The biblical prophets annoy Meyer in the same way; since for him there is no such thing as revelation, he insists that “Jesus never claimed direct revelation … never had a vision … never once predicted future events.” The passages in the Bible that describe the Lord as doing such things Meyer simply attributes to later invention.

“It goes without saying,” Meyer decides, “that the Gospel of John is utterly worthless as a source,”9 and as for literal-minded prophets like Ezekiel, he simply loathes them. But the thing to notice is that Meyer puts the Mormon prophets in the same category with the deluded prophets of the Bible and in a very different category from Mohammed.

The intractable Joseph Smith “thinks of spiritual things in a far cruder and more materialistic way than Mohammed … all of his manifestations, visions, healings, ecstasies, etc., are quite everyday things to him and his followers. … For Mohammed on the other hand, the only miracle [the ‘sign’] is the revelation of the words of the divine book. … he forcefully denied possessing any of the other miraculous powers possessed by the ancient prophets …”10 The italics emphasize that Joseph Smith is again classified with the prophets of Israel and not with the prophet of Islam. “Both think of God as having corporeal form,” writes Meyer, “but Smith in his first vision sees God Himself, the Father and the Son, just as Moses and others saw him; while to Mohammed only the angel appears.”11 More italics reinforce the point.

While Joseph Smith taught “the continuation of direct prophetic inspiration, along with charismatic gifts of tongues, healings, etc.,” to be generally enjoyed whenever the true church is upon the earth, “the idea of any miraculous powers in the possession of his followers is utterly out of the question” for Mohammed.12 Again Joseph Smith is among the prophets: “He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works … shall he do. …” (John 14:12.)

“Mohammed was able to win the loyalty of men of such superior intelligence and high social standing as Abu Bekr and Omar … while Joseph Smith’s followers belonged almost without exception to the dregs of the people. …” Here one is reminded that in the early Jewish and Christian writings the followers of the prophets are regularly designated as “the poor,” because they really were the poor and outcast. But Mohammed was able “to command unswerving submission” of these followers, whereas “the first to follow [Joseph Smith] later fell away and were expelled from the Church.”13

Among those who maintained family and party loyalty to Mohammed were many who did not take him seriously as a prophet, and many soon found it to their temporal advantage to support him regardless of their beliefs. But Joseph Smith never had anything to offer his followers but the sure word of prophecy, and Meyer notes with wonder that there were those whom he “threw out of the Church” who never denied his prophetic calling.

It was, of course, the Book of Mormon that first suggested the parallel between its author and Mohammed, each of whom claimed to have given the world a divine book brought to him personally by an angel. But there all resemblance ends; the differences between the two books are as great as those between their authors. The Book of Mormon, though transmitted and translated by divine ministration, was an earthly book, written by the hands of men, as is all scripture, and hence apt to contain the mistakes of men. The Koran, on the other hand, is held by most Moslems to be “identical with the uncreated eternal Word of God that is written on the heavenly tablets; literally, not in any figurative sense. …” Even the ink, paper, and binding are accepted in the most literal sense as the Uncreated Word of God.14

The Book of Mormon is a history of the doings of very fallible humans, while devotees of the Koran disdain to attribute to it anything as banal as human history. While Joseph Smith “copies out the peculiar written characters of the holy book,” Meyer notes, “such a thing would never have occurred to Mohammed.”24 And whereas Joseph Smith “claims that he actually dug it up and kept it in his house … for Mohammed it always remains in the hands of the angel.”15

There is nothing like the testimony of the Three Witnesses to support Mohammed’s story, the Koran repeatedly and solemnly affirming that it is its own witness, and though Meyer naturally rejects the testimony of the witnesses out of hand, still it jars him. “The essential thing is, that this vision was for the Three Witnesses an absolutely real occurrence, on the complete and literal actuality of which none of them ever betrayed the slightest trace of a doubt. The opponents of the Mormons made every conceivable effort to get these men to retract their testimonies and to admit that there was a deception; but they remained unshaken, and continued to the end of their lives to affirm the truth of the revelation and the authenticity of the Book of Mormon. Far harder to explain is the testimony of the eight witnesses.”16

Since he will accept neither book as inspired, Meyer prefers the Koran to the Book of Mormon, because it took years of painful study to produce and it shows “a conviction won through genuinely strenuous mental effort, and even at times a poetic exaltation.”17

Naturally one prefers the work of a thinker and a poet to a big history turned out all at once by a very young man who is both ignorant and strangely devoid of misgivings: “… the vocabulary is exceedingly limited, except for the numerous peculiar words and proper names invented by the author, in which he gives his imagination free rein.”18

Mohammed, with his purely spiritual book, never takes the terrible risks that Joseph Smith does, though the Koran constantly flings out meaningless challenges. Meyer fails to appreciate that the Book of Mormon is a highly testable document, since for him there is nothing to test: there is no revelation, so there is no point to challenging any document, including the Bible, that claims it. While both the Koran and the Book of Mormon claim to be strictly in the biblical tradition, Mohammed, as Meyer observes, “has but a dim conception” of the Bible, and even the greatest Moslem scholars are astonishingly ignorant of the scriptures; in no way has the Book of Mormon supplanted the Bible as has the Koran.

The key to understanding both the likenesses and differences between Mormonism and Islam is to be found in the double nature of the latter, which draws from both “vertical” and “horizontal” traditions. Vertical Judaism and Christianity is that brand of religion that believed in the necessity of direct revelation, inspired leaders, charismatic gifts, the coming of a real Messiah and a real millennium; the predominance of such beliefs at an early time has become apparent from the oldest Jewish and Christian manuscripts, whose recent discovery has completely changed the picture of Christian beginnings.

Both Judaism and Christianity, it would now appear, began as charismatic vertical religions that were in time completely suppressed and supplanted by the horizontal or academic way of thinking, which holds that one should reverence only the tradition handed down horizontally from one generation of teachers and scholars to the next and that the complete religious life is comprised in the proper observance of established customs and the acceptance of officially approved doctrines. However, Islam arose in a time and place in which much of the old vertical attitudes of the desert sectaries (a person excessively devoted to a particular sect) still survived, but in which also the influence of the schoolmen was well established and on the increase. Hence the two elements mingle and impart a spirit of ambiguity and controversy to every Moslem discussion.

Since Islam’s debt to the early desert sectaries (such as those represented by the Dead Sea scrolls) has not yet been seriously studied, a few illustrations may be helpful. One evening in March of the year A.D. 620 Mohammed took a walk to the valley of Mina on the western outskirts of his hometown of Mecca, where some pilgrims were camping. Some of the campers were Jews—Chasraj from Yathrib in the north—who had separated themselves from the rest of their people, after the immemorial custom of the desert sectaries. They were looking for a prophet, and they accepted Mohammed as their inspired leader; the next year they returned and secretly entered a covenant to support him. Thus the Prophet’s first solid support came from the vertically minded sectaries of the desert.

At the same time he had his famous dream of journeying to heaven from the temple at Jerusalem and there meeting Moses, Christ, Abraham, John the Baptist, Enoch, and Aaron, and seeing Adam presiding as judge over the great assembly of all his children. These are the figures that dominate in the early apocryphal writings of the Jews and Christians—no wonder Mohammed’s Arabic relatives shook their heads in perplexity and doubt. And when Mohammed himself had serious doubts about the divinity of his calling, it was one of the sectaries who had read both the Old Testament and the New, his wife’s uncle Maraka, who told him that his visions were genuine and that he would be the special prophet to his people.

But the early Christian and Jewish traditions that survive in the Koran and in works by its early commentators came to the Arabs secondhand and were never really assimilated or understood by them. “No knowledge have I of the chiefs on high, discussing among themselves,” says Mohammed; “only this has been revealed to me: to give warning plainly and publicly.”19 That is, Mohammed has heard about the council in heaven, but he really knows nothing about it. So we are told of God’s plan, laid down at the foundation of the earth; and yet the plan is no plan at all, for punishment and reward have nothing whatever to do with individual behavior and all things happen—”don’t ask why or how” (bila kaif)—according to the imponderable will and pleasure of God.

Like the early Christians and Jews, the Koran is aware of the great importance of the rites and ordinances of the temple, yet the cult of Jerusalem was supplanted almost immediately by the more familiar and very ancient cult of Mecca. “Though Mohammed was in fact a charismatic leader,” after the manner of the early sectaries, according to a recent study, “… the concept of the charismatic leader had little part in the Qur’anic system of ideas.”20

Though the Koran recalls the marvelous works of God for and among the Chosen People, “Mohammed did not claim to be a saint, and deliberately renounced the doing of miracles.”21 He was not in the line of the great prophets, the restorers, all of whom spoke with the Lord face to face and whose ministries were marked by signs and wonders; he was, as Waraka said, “The prophet for this people (an-nabi li-hadhihi-l-’ummah).” He was a reformer and a great one, but he was not a restorer; of the things the Bible talks about he had, as Meyer observes, little or no understanding.

But if Islam came early enough to catch the last echoes of early Christianity and vertical Judaism, it also came late enough to find the schoolmen in complete control of the situation. The official theology of the church and the synagogue was that which the churchmen and the rabbis had learned from the University of Alexandria, and the Moslems lost no time falling in line, quickly producing a host of learned theologians whose mental and verbal gymnastics could put the Christian and the Jewish doctors to shame.

Their interpretations, imposed upon the more “primitive” teaching of the Koran, make every point of doctrine in Islam a disputed one. The mollahs (Muslims trained in law and doctrine) insist that Islam is the ultimate world religion and criticize other religions as being geographically limited and culturally conditioned; yet the ordinary Moslem boasts that no one can understand the Koran except a born Arab.

While the official theology constantly reiterates that Mohammed is the last of the prophets (a point not pressed in the Koran itself), a large part of the Moslem world looks forward to the coming of other prophets, notably the Mahdi, and has ever been eager to follow leaders claiming divine inspiration. Trying to reconcile the two views, A. Y. Ali writes, “God’s teaching is and will always be continuous, but there has been and will be no prophet after Mohammed.”22

If God can teach continuously without a prophet, why Mohammed? If God’s entire message could be put in a small book 1200 years ago, why not 2400 or 3600 years ago? If men have needed prophets in the past, as the Koran itself pointedly asks, why not today? Though it was its vivid eschatology that gave Islam its great initial appeal (as it did Christianity and Judaism), Islam, like its sister religions, has become particularly weak in the field of eschatology: Mohammed now turns out to be a prophet who does not prophesy.

Constantly repeating the old formula of the sectaries, that God is gentle and forbearing, the Moslems early adopted a policy of conquest by force and have ever been imbued with the polemical and party spirit that has kept the doctors of all religions divided and squabbling through the centuries.

The same ambivalence is apparent in the attitude to the Koran. Hailed as “the book that makes things clear,” in a world in which the rabbis and the doctors of the church could never agree among themselves about their own scriptures, the Koran soon turned out to be an object of even greater disagreement than the Bible, while many Moslems point to its supreme obscurity as a sign of its divinity. There are as many conflicting commentaries on the Koran as there are on the Bible, and as many conflicting sects claiming its true interpretation: one of the most famous hadiths or sayings attributed to Mohammed is that “there are seventy-seven sects in Islam (already in his day) and all but one are for the burning!”

It is claimed that the Koran eschews the arts of rhetoric for the plain, simple language that can be grasped by one and all, yet in the teaching of the Koran the principal emphasis has always been on i’rab, correct pronunciation, with the insistence that it is more important to pronounce the words with the correct enunciation and the proper tone of voice than it is to understand what they mean.

The Koran claims to be the complete and final word of God, yet the doctors of Islam have handed down tens of thousands of hadiths, that is, things that Mohammed is reported to have said or would have said (according to them) to clarify and extend the teaching. The Koran declares that no amount of intellectual effort will avail in understanding the word of God, yet it was the Moslem teachers who first turned wholeheartedly to Aristotle to find an answer to theological questions, and it was from them that the scholastic philosophers of the medieval church later took over.

The central theme of Moslem as of Christian theology is the nature of God, and while the Moslem doctors boast of being free of the contradictions and obscurities that have ever marked the course of trinitarian theology, their wholehearted acceptance (along with the Christians and the Jews) of the God of the Alexandrian school-men—absolutely, exclusively, totally, inconceivably one—soon got them into even worse predicaments than the Christian theologians.

Thus the Moslem doctors have often noted that a God who is totally incomprehensible leads straight to atheism and idolatry (as among the Sabaeans); yet incomprehensible he must be if he is to be absolutely unique, unapproachable, indescribable, totally unlike any other thing—and he must be all those things if he is to be the Only One: there can be nothing like him.

Even to imagine God as having any “partners” of any kind sharing his nature and his activities is the great crime of shirk; he does all things himself without the need or wish for any helpers—yet the Moslem creed requires belief in God, his angels, his prophets, his apostles, his books, i.e., with a whole host of agents through whom the all-sufficient God somehow operates in his dealings with men. And while it is wicked to think of man as having anything whatever in common with God, still man is supposed to love him, yearn to be with him, seek the reward of gazing upon his face, and in the end become completely identified with him, one with whom he can have nothing in common!

It is outrageous blasphemy to think of a Son as participating in his glory and power; how much worse, then, to conceive of other and lesser beings existing beside him—man’s very existence is a crime: yet the Moslem theologians admit that man exists, along with a lot of other not so glorious things. For though God alone created all things, and though he is perfectly good and does only what he wants to do, the doctors insist that evil is a reality and that the world is full of it. The problem of evil goes thus unanswered.

The idea that God might have children is utterly abhorrent to the Moslems: we are not his children but things that he has created out of nothing; but he created us with tragic weaknesses in our nature: this anomaly leads to the fatalism and cynicism of an Omar Khayyam.

The Koran hails Jesus as a true prophet and a great one, yet Moslem theology rejects all his teachings about the Son of God as false; it teaches that Mary was “the woman of truth” who conceived Jesus by the Holy Ghost and bore him when she was still a virgin, yet it deplores the idea that God should have a Son.

A well-known teaching in Islam is that “we come out from God and to him we shall return.” This has led to much controversy among Moslem theologians. How can we go from and return to him if he is everywhere? In nothing is the dual tradition of Islam more apparent than in the division of its great teachers into two main schools, one of which insists on a completely formless and incomprehensible God while the other teaches of a God who has a body just like a man’s. The former asks: “Can God have any attributes whatever without completely destroying belief in his invisible, unchanging Oneness?”23 Yet a famous teacher of the other school, Abu Amir, “would slap on his own thigh and say [commenting on Sura 68: 42], ‘God has a real thigh, just like this one here!’”23

The Koran can define God in terms of the schools and then go right on talking about him as a real person. It can tell us that men are lost or saved by his good pleasure alone and through no act of theirs and then insist that all men are individually responsible in all things. It swears by the Bible, which it never reads, and knows nothing of the Messiah. The Moslems insist that nothing whatever can be known about God and then fill libraries with treatises on his true nature. It is outrageous presumption for anything to exist beside him, they say—yet here we are. He created absolutely everything that is out of his own perfect nature, and yet the world is full of evil.

Ability to live with such basic contradictions would seem to be a highly developed trait among the Arabs. “The Oriental is not a realist,” writes a famous Moslem scholar; “he is above all an idealist. He certainly hears and contemplates nature … but what he grasps is very soon altered, or rather stylized”; then he quotes P. Ricard: “Muslim art … turns away from the reality of existing things. It appears to reject all that binds it closely or remotely to the living world. It only permits the representation of inner, imaginary vues. …”24

The Arab sees what he wants to or as he wants it to be. The same type of licensed thinking is the hallmark of conventional Christian theology, and it was because Mormonism turned away from this theology of freewheeling symbol and fantasy that it was anathema to all the churches. For all its superficial resemblances to Islam, Mormonism is even farther removed from it than from sectarian Christianity.

Notes
1.Enciclopedia Italiana, s.v. Eduard Meyer, vol. 23, p. 140.
2.Der Grosse Brockhaus (1932), vol. 12, p. 494.
3.Eduard Meyer, Ursprung and Geschichte der Mormonen (Halle, 1912), p. 2.
4.Ibid., p. 1.
5.Abdullah Yusuf Ali, The Holy Qur’an (Lahore, 1938), in his commentary on Sura 33:40.
6.Koran 2:30–37; 15:29–51; 17:62–66; 18:51f; 20:117–21; 38:70–89.
7.Meyer, op. cit., p. 13.
8.Ibid., p. 60.
9.Ibid., pp. 278ff.
10.Ibid., p. 81.
11.Ibid., p. 82.
12.Ibid., p. 80.
13.Ibid., p. 82.
14.I. Goldziher, Vorlesungen über den Islam (Heidelberg, 1910), p. 112; the quotation is from al-Ash’ari.
15.Meyer, op. cit., p. 82.
16.Ibid., p. 24.
17.Ibid., p. 82.
18.Ibid., p. 42.
19.Koran 38:70f. In the verses that immediately follow, the story of the council in heaven is recounted in some detail, following the Jewish and Apocryphal writings quite closely.
20.W. M. Watt, in Numen, vol. 7 (1960), p. 78.
21.Goldziher, op. cit., p. 22.
22.Ali, op. cit., comm. on Sura 33:40.
23.Goldziher, pp. 103, 106.
24.Goldziher, pp. 103, 106.
25.Mohammed Zerrouki, in The Islamic Review, March–April 1951, p. 57.

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Re: Fanatical Islam

Post by AussieOi »

Dear Oldmandalton

I would put it to you that more people have been killed in the (supposed) name of Christ, than militant Islam have ever killed, or will ever kill

I also put it to you, that it was "our way of life" meaning, the white, anglo protestant vision, that slaughtered millions across the world since the Korean war

I do not believe we have a leg to stand on in relation the modern Crusades, or which the US, British, Australian, French, German alliance to invade and murder in the name of "democracy" and "our way of life" compared to what creep Islam is upon us

Seriously, I assume you are an LDS, but can i ask, are you actually a true Christian, or a US republican Christian, bitter, prejudiced, afraid and pathologically violent?

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Re: Fanatical Islam

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I always wondered why it would be easier to radicalize and Islamist than a Christian. There are fanatical Christians but just not that many. There are millions of radicalized Muslims. In the article below Lauren Green gives an explanation why.



Is There Something In Islam That Makes Believers More Susceptible to Radicalization?

By Lauren Green

Published March 10, 2011

Many times, when people I meet find out I'm a religion correspondent, they usually respond -- that is, after the deer in the headlights stare-- with something like, "Religion is very divisive," or "Religion is the reason for all the problems in the world throughout history."
My usual answer to those theological musings is that, "Religion is the red herring. What's at the heart of all divisiveness is sin." Sin is basically people either behaving badly, selfishly, or making themselves equal to a sovereign being. This is the heart of human nature. And it's humans that practice all religions.

This response, more times than not ends the conversation. On rare occasions it launches a whole new discourse.

But with the House Homeland Security Committee hearing lead by Rep. Peter King in Washington, D.C. focusing on Islamic radicalization, once again religion itself is center stage.

There are those liberal voices that call the House hearing an assault on Islam, McCarthyism bent on demonizing a great religion. Still others make the point that with so many acts of terror in the name of Islam, we simply need to understand what makes it happen.

My area is religion, not politics. So my queries about Islamic terrorism tend to break the question down theologically and ask the question, "is there something in Islam itself that makes believers more susceptible to radicalization?"

Most religions are built basically the same; do these things -- pray, penance, repent, etc -- and earn your salvation.

I say most because Christianity actually is different. It says your salvation has already been given.

But both Islam and Christianity contain very violent verses in their Holy books. For example in The Bible it says in 2 Chronicles 25:12 "The army of Judah also captured 10,000 men alive, took them to the top of the cliff and threw them down, so that they were all dashed to pieces."(NIV) Or, in Deuteronomy 13:15 "You must certainly put to the sword all who live in that town. Destroy it completely, both its people and its livestock." (NIV)
While in the Koran there are plenty of these kinds of verses, 2:193 "Fight against them (unbelievers) until there is no dissension, and the religion is for Allah. "Fight until no other religion exists but Islam.

And, 8:12, 14 "I shall cast terror into the hearts of the unbelievers. Strike them above the necks, smite their fingertips…. the punishment of the fire is for the unbelievers."

So why is it that today the majority of terrorists are more Muslims and not Christian?

One theory put forth to me is that Islam is simply going through a violent stage. The religion is about 600 years younger than Christianity. And if we look back at Christianity there's plenty of violence to recount. There are the Crusades, the Inquisition, the burning of "heretics", anti-Semitism, etc.

But that doesn't answer the question of whether or not the fault lay within religion itself or its followers. The truth is there are good Muslims and there are bad Christians. So what is the difference?

I believe essentially there are three things that may make Islam more prone to radicalization. One is the Koran itself. The fact that it's not a narrative makes it easier to pick and choose verses to fit your interpretation.

Two, the Prophet Mohammed's own words and deeds. In Islam's early days, Mohammed spread the faith with the sword.

Three, Islam was introduced into a world rife with tribalism; a shame and honor culture which revered and respected power. Much of what's going in Libya and what went on under Saddam Hussein, are extensions of that tribalism.

So first why is the Koran not being a narrative a big issue?

Lets' take for example take the Judeo - Christian Bible. It is a narrative of redemption. It is a single storyline beginning with God creating a perfect world. But then there was a great sin which became the progenitor of all sins. Through that sin everything became broken. Decay, debauchery and disease entered the world. That sin had to be atoned for to reconcile God with his creation.

The entire Old Testament is God working toward that goal. According to Christians, the climax of the drama is Jesus death on the cross which atones for the sin. His resurrection then defeats man's ultimate enemy, death itself. All sins can now be forgiven because God Himself, through the person of Jesus, received the judgment that man deserved.

Theologians like Dr. Timothy Keller, author of "Kings Cross," and Dr. John Rankin of the Theological Education Institute, says that when we read the violent, immoral or unethical acts throughout the Bible, we can make a distinction between what is "Prescriptive," "Descriptive" or "Time sensitive." Prescriptive meaning "is this a command of God?" and if so is it for a certain instance in history or all time? Or is the verse descriptive in that the narrator is showing what happens absent instruction from God.

Dr. Leon Kass in his book "The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis" says that many of the relationships in the Old Testament are paradigmatic. For example, looking at Adam and Eve or Cain and Able not primarily as something that happened but as something that always happens when human beings take matters into their own hands.

The Koran, not being a narrative, is organized from long verses to short verses, stipulating how the followers of Islam should conduct their lives, to revere Allah in law, religion and ethics. Together they form the five pillars of Islam: The creed, the daily prayers, fasting during Ramadan, almsgiving, and the pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in a lifetime.

There are conflicting interpretations of the Koran, but without a clear narrative, with one consensus of purpose, followers who do violence in the name of Islam can legitimately claim they are acting within the parameters of their faith.

Second, the prophet Mohammad himself. His words and deeds. This becomes the most fractious element for the Western world. For to insult the prophet is worthy of death to some Muslims, as witnessed by the reaction after cartoons of Mohammad were published in a Danish newspaper.

Mosab Hassan, author of "Son of Hamas", is a Muslim convert to Christianity. His father was one of the founders of Hamas. Hassan says, "In order to know what Islam is all about we need to study and learn the behavior of Mohammad, the same in Christianity we need to study who Jesus is.
"Studying the two personalities explains why we have more violence in Islam than it is in Christianity and Judaism."

Defenders of Islam say early on in Mohammad's ministry he encountered much persecution. Military action was then justified to further the cause.
That contrasts of course with Jesus' ministry. He preached about loving your neighbor and doing good to those who despise you.

Both religions came out of the same region wrought with tribalism. However, Christianity begins in a secluded sect, the line the Israelites, the Jews. Jesus ministry begins with the those people whose laws, religious rituals and customs are already primed for such an appearance: The sacrificial shedding of blood to atone for sin (Yom Kippur); scriptures foretelling of a coming Messiah that will "purify the sons of Levi" (the Levites were the priestly tribe), and of the suffering servant, that "was pierced for our transgressions... and by his wounds we are healed."

Islam had no such cultural DNA to graft itself onto. It met violence with violence. It used the cultural resources familiar to its founder.

As Christianity spread it filled the world with the message of forgiveness even unto death.

As Islam spread, some followers have found it difficult to unshackle themselves from what was deemed necessary early on in the faith's infancy. Not knowing the difference between what was then and what should be now has become the conflict within Islam. And now it is a concern for the rest of the world as well.

Lauren Green is religion correspondent for Fox News Channel.

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2011/03/ ... alization/

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Re: Fanatical Islam

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You win this thread too
2-nil

You must be a great sunday school teacher

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Re: Fanatical Islam

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AussieOi:
Dear Oldmandalton
I would put it to you that more people have been killed in the (supposed) name of Christ, than militant Islam have ever killed, or will ever kill

If you study history the Crusades were a response to the Muslim’s relentless expansion of their religion and empire through Jihad. Not that either Christian nor Muslim fought a “civilized” war, oxymoron. War dehumanizes the men who fight it, add religion and it gets even worse when “God is on your side”.

Not sure of the body count between Christians killing “for God” and Islamic Jihads. I know there have been an awful lot of Jihads over the centuries. At least the Christians “grew” out of the desire to spread Christianity by the sword and to exterminate apostates groups and Jews. We are a lot more peaceful now using missionaries and passing out Bibles. Islam has not matured to that point yet if they ever will. See the above article.
I also put it to you, that it was "our way of life" meaning, the white, anglo protestant vision, that slaughtered millions across the world since the Korean war
I do not believe we have a leg to stand on in relation the modern Crusades, or which the US, British, Australian, French, German alliance to invade and murder in the name of "democracy" and "our way of life" compared to what creep Islam is upon us
SE Asia- we were fighting against Communist aggression.
Bosnia- we were helping Muslims. I opposed
Kuwait- again we were helping Muslims. I opposed
Iraq- Mistake
Afghanistan-Al Qaeda. I favored our going after the Taliban and Al Qaeda after the 9/11 attack but we should have left a looooong time ago.
Libya-Mistake
Syria would be a mistake.
Seriously, I assume you are an LDS, but can i ask, are you actually a true Christian, or a US republican Christian, bitter, prejudiced, afraid and pathologically violent?
Sometimes even “true Christians” have to go to War AusieOi. If we MUST it should be as short as possible with a goal in mind, no nation building.
You win this thread too
2-nil
How do you “win a thread”? An exchange of ideas and debate is healthy for everyone involved. That’s how we learn from each other.
You must be a great sunday school teacher
Thanks, I think. :) I have been in the past.

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Re: Fanatical Islam

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COMMON THEMES

Some common themes can be seen in many of these U.S. military interventions.

First, they were explained to the U.S. public as defending the lives and rights of civilian populations. Yet the military tactics employed often left behind massive civilian "collateral damage." War planners made little distinction between rebels and the civilians who lived in rebel zones of control, or between military assets and civilian infrastructure, such as train lines, water plants, agricultural factories, medicine supplies, etc. The U.S. public always believe that in the next war, new military technologies will avoid civilian casualties on the other side. Yet when the inevitable civilian deaths occur, they are always explained away as "accidental" or "unavoidable."

Second, although nearly all the post-World War II interventions were carried out in the name of "freedom" and "democracy," nearly all of them in fact defended dictatorships controlled by pro-U.S. elites. Whether in Vietnam, Central America, or the Persian Gulf, the U.S. was not defending "freedom" but an ideological agenda (such as defending capitalism) or an economic agenda (such as protecting oil company investments). In the few cases when U.S. military forces toppled a dictatorship--such as in Grenada or Panama--they did so in a way that prevented the country's people from overthrowing their own dictator first, and installing a new democratic government more to their liking.

Third, the U.S. always attacked violence by its opponents as "terrorism," "atrocities against civilians," or "ethnic cleansing," but minimized or defended the same actions by the U.S. or its allies. If a country has the right to "end" a state that trains or harbors terrorists, would Cuba or Nicaragua have had the right to launch defensive bombing raids on U.S. targets to take out exile terrorists? Washington's double standard maintains that an U.S. ally's action by definition "defensive," but that an enemy's retaliation is by definition "offensive."

Fourth, the U.S. often portrays itself as a neutral peacekeeper, with nothing but the purest humanitarian motives. After deploying forces in a country, however, it quickly divides the country or region into "friends" and "foes," and takes one side against another. This strategy tends to enflame rather than dampen a war or civil conflict, as shown in the cases of Somalia and Bosnia, and deepens resentment of the U.S. role.

Fifth, U.S. military intervention is often counterproductive even if one accepts U.S. goals and rationales. Rather than solving the root political or economic roots of the conflict, it tends to polarize factions and further destabilize the country. The same countries tend to reappear again and again on the list of 20th century interventions.

Sixth, U.S. demonization of an enemy leader, or military action against him, tends to strengthen rather than weaken his hold on power. Take the list of current regimes most singled out for U.S. attack, and put it alongside of the list of regimes that have had the longest hold on power, and you will find they have the same names. Qaddafi, Castro, Saddam, Kim, and others may have faced greater internal criticism if they could not portray themselves as Davids standing up to the American Goliath, and (accurately) blaming many of their countries' internal problems on U.S. economic sanctions.

One of the most dangerous ideas of the 20th century was that "people like us" could not commit atrocities against civilians.

German and Japanese citizens believed it, but their militaries slaughtered millions of people.
British and French citizens believed it, but their militaries fought brutal colonial wars in Africa and Asia.
Russian citizens believed it, but their armies murdered civilians in Afghanistan, Chechnya, and elsewhere.
Israeli citizens believed it, but their army mowed down Palestinians and Lebanese.
Arabs believed it, but suicide bombers and hijackers targeted U.S. and Israeli civilians.
U.S. citizens believed it, but their military killed hundreds of thousands in Vietnam, Iraq, and elsewhere.
Every country, every ethnicity, every religion, contains within it the capability for extreme violence. Every group contains a faction that is intolerant of other groups, and actively seeks to exclude or even kill them. War fever tends to encourage the intolerant faction, but the faction only succeeds in its goals if the rest of the group acquiesces or remains silent.

But we are good Christians, and so we could not be as bad as Fanatical Islam, right

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Re: Fanatical Islam

Post by Fairminded »

AussieOi wrote:COMMON THEMES

Some common themes can be seen in many of these U.S. military interventions.

First, they were explained to the U.S. public as defending the lives and rights of civilian populations. Yet the military tactics employed often left behind massive civilian "collateral damage." War planners made little distinction between rebels and the civilians who lived in rebel zones of control, or between military assets and civilian infrastructure, such as train lines, water plants, agricultural factories, medicine supplies, etc. The U.S. public always believe that in the next war, new military technologies will avoid civilian casualties on the other side. Yet when the inevitable civilian deaths occur, they are always explained away as "accidental" or "unavoidable."

Second, although nearly all the post-World War II interventions were carried out in the name of "freedom" and "democracy," nearly all of them in fact defended dictatorships controlled by pro-U.S. elites. Whether in Vietnam, Central America, or the Persian Gulf, the U.S. was not defending "freedom" but an ideological agenda (such as defending capitalism) or an economic agenda (such as protecting oil company investments). In the few cases when U.S. military forces toppled a dictatorship--such as in Grenada or Panama--they did so in a way that prevented the country's people from overthrowing their own dictator first, and installing a new democratic government more to their liking.

Third, the U.S. always attacked violence by its opponents as "terrorism," "atrocities against civilians," or "ethnic cleansing," but minimized or defended the same actions by the U.S. or its allies. If a country has the right to "end" a state that trains or harbors terrorists, would Cuba or Nicaragua have had the right to launch defensive bombing raids on U.S. targets to take out exile terrorists? Washington's double standard maintains that an U.S. ally's action by definition "defensive," but that an enemy's retaliation is by definition "offensive."

Fourth, the U.S. often portrays itself as a neutral peacekeeper, with nothing but the purest humanitarian motives. After deploying forces in a country, however, it quickly divides the country or region into "friends" and "foes," and takes one side against another. This strategy tends to enflame rather than dampen a war or civil conflict, as shown in the cases of Somalia and Bosnia, and deepens resentment of the U.S. role.

Fifth, U.S. military intervention is often counterproductive even if one accepts U.S. goals and rationales. Rather than solving the root political or economic roots of the conflict, it tends to polarize factions and further destabilize the country. The same countries tend to reappear again and again on the list of 20th century interventions.

Sixth, U.S. demonization of an enemy leader, or military action against him, tends to strengthen rather than weaken his hold on power. Take the list of current regimes most singled out for U.S. attack, and put it alongside of the list of regimes that have had the longest hold on power, and you will find they have the same names. Qaddafi, Castro, Saddam, Kim, and others may have faced greater internal criticism if they could not portray themselves as Davids standing up to the American Goliath, and (accurately) blaming many of their countries' internal problems on U.S. economic sanctions.

One of the most dangerous ideas of the 20th century was that "people like us" could not commit atrocities against civilians.

German and Japanese citizens believed it, but their militaries slaughtered millions of people.
British and French citizens believed it, but their militaries fought brutal colonial wars in Africa and Asia.
Russian citizens believed it, but their armies murdered civilians in Afghanistan, Chechnya, and elsewhere.
Israeli citizens believed it, but their army mowed down Palestinians and Lebanese.
Arabs believed it, but suicide bombers and hijackers targeted U.S. and Israeli civilians.
U.S. citizens believed it, but their military killed hundreds of thousands in Vietnam, Iraq, and elsewhere.
Every country, every ethnicity, every religion, contains within it the capability for extreme violence. Every group contains a faction that is intolerant of other groups, and actively seeks to exclude or even kill them. War fever tends to encourage the intolerant faction, but the faction only succeeds in its goals if the rest of the group acquiesces or remains silent.

But we are good Christians, and so we could not be as bad as Fanatical Islam, right
:ymapplause: :ymapplause: :ymapplause:

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Re: Fanatical Islam

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The Tenets of Terror

A special report on the ideology of jihad and the rise of Islamic militancy.

By Robert Marquand, Staff writer / October 18, 2001

PESHAWAR, PAKISTAN
Hailing from the pancake-flat terrain of Punjab in east Pakistan, Hasan Ali dreams of a Muslim Utopia.

The Islamic law student would like to create - through a holy war, if necessary - an Islamic state that spans the globe. All nations would be under the control of sharia (Islamic law), with the locus of authority in Saudi Arabia, "the center of Islam." And for the first act, he looks to Osama bin Laden, "our hero No. 1, our religious leader, our model, our general."

Hiding somewhere in the mountains of Afghanistan, the gray-bearded Ayman al-Zawahiri shares the same vision, and has been working side by side with Hasan's "hero No.1" for more than a decade. Mr. Zawahiri's life tracks the evolution of modern Islamic militancy - from his arrest at age 15 as a member of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood to his place today as the guiding intellect of Mr. bin Laden's Al Qaeda network.

Zam Amputan traveled across four time zones from the Philippines to attend a madrassah in Peshawar, Pakistan. He returned home, burning for a jihad. But now he has turned his back on Islamic militancy.

These future, present, and lapsed holy warriors have one thing in common: All are deeply etched by a steel-tipped Islamic fundamentalism that's now shaping international events - from the US-cratered roads of Kabul to clashes in Algeria's countryside to the carnage of Sept. 11 in New York.

President George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair stress that the "war on terrorism" is not a battle between the West and Islam. But surely they mean mainstream Islam. If one listens to students, like Hasan, in Pakistan, or Osama bin Laden's latest video footage, one hears the language of a holy war, and the dark strains of a theology that is gaining popular acceptance. Some dub it Wahhabism. Others call it primitive Islam or Salafiyya.

Basically, Islamic experts say, it's a hybrid and simplistic blend of Islamic fundamentalism. This "Islam" seeks to eradicate all forms of Islam other than its own strict literal interpretation of the Koran. It comes packaged with a set of now well-known political grievances, often directed at US foreign policy, and justifies violence as a means of purging nations of corruption, moral degradation, and spiritual torpor.

In one sense, this strain of Islamic ideology has been around for at least the past two decades. It's been taught in the proliferating fundamentalist madrassahs in Pakistan. It has been fueled by petrodollars from Saudi Arabia, and preached in mosques from Egypt to Indonesia. And it continues to inspire militant groups such as Al Queda, the Taliban, Islamic Jihad, Abu Sayyaf, and many others.

What is new - and appears to be gathering momentum with every US air strike in Afghanistan - is the intensity of feelings this ideology has created among younger Muslims. Even in the traditionally more "moderate" Muslim nations of Southeast Asia, a culture of jihad is now spreading.

One's credentials as a "true Muslim" are increasingly based on a willingness to use violence. In just the past year, the walls of buildings throughout northern Pakistan have become hand-scrawled billboards for "jihadi training," complete with phone numbers. And people are calling.

"I never thought I would see a Pakistani or a Punjabi willing to kill himself for Islam," says a local Pashtun journalist, who has interviewed bin Laden. "You used to see a lot of boots, AK-47s, and flak jackets around here. But no jihad. The number of suicide bombers in a group like Lashkar [e-Tayyiba] used to be maybe 10 or 20. Now it is close to 400."

Vali Nasr, a specialist on Muslim extremists at the University of San Diego, Calif., (and a Shia Muslim) agrees. "I've been to Pakistan over the past 20 years, and the Pakistan I see today is unrecognizable to me, even though I've been working on fundamentalism from the beginning," he says. Speaking of the impact of Saudi funds for madrassahs, he says, "a madrassah ... was a seminary where a student spent years at the foot of educated scholars, ulema, and became well versed in all aspects of Islamic jurisprudence, law, philosophy, theology.... In recent years, some are just [run by] petty mullahs with a half-baked understanding [of Islam]."

This generation of poorly educated mullahs look at Islam through the lens of a violent jihad - rather than looking at jihad through the lens of Islam, experts say.

Many Muslim scholars rightly shudder at the free and loose use of "jihad" by the Western media - since they do not want the term, which means "internal struggle for a just cause," co-opted by extremists or used to negatively depict all of Islam.

At the same time, Khalid Ahmed, an editor at The Friday Times, a weekly in Lahore, Pakistan, points out that "jihad is precisely the term being used to captivate youth here. The moderates are going to have to start dealing with that."

CROSSROADS OF A HOLY WAR

If Afghanistan is the birthplace of this jihad, Peshawar is its staging ground. This dusty city of intrigue just east of the Khyber Pass is where many of today's Muslims came to pick up both the Koran and the Kalashnikov. Bin Laden and Zawahiri met here. Hasan Ali and Zam Amputan both studied at schools here funded by Saudi money.

When the Soviets attacked Afghanistan in December 1979, the initial prognosis in the West was that the native population lacked the unity to resist. It was felt that the proud ethnic groups in the country would never unify enough to drive out the communists. The answer, agreed to in Washington, the Middle East, and Pakistan was - Islam. The creation of the mujahideen warriors was the result - fighters that would come from around the Muslim world and take up arms in the name of a holy war.

The project succeeded quite well. A "pipeline" of weapons, warriors, and networks of engaged mullahs was established from the Middle East through Peshawar, Pakistan - and into Afghanistan. Money from the Middle East and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) - funneled through the Pakistan Interservices Agency (ISI) - was used to buy food, clothing, supplies, weapons, and intelligence. Local madrassahs became ideological training grounds for those who were termed by everyone from President Carter to President Reagan as "freedom fighters."

Along with the new fervor to fight the Soviet infidels, a new set of insights and pan-Islamic ideals developed, capturing the hearts and minds of young Muslims, along with a powerful new interpretation of an old Islamic idea - jihad. Later, after the war, the Afghan Arabs would take their battle-tested skills and sharp-edged ideology home to Yemen, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the Philippines, Kenya, and the United States. "Scratch an Islamic militant group today and you find Afghan Arabs behind it," says a Jakarta-based diplomat.

City of hard stares

It was in this frontier city of hard stares and hospitals for wounded mujahideen, goatherds, and CIA agents, as well as shops lined with red and orange kilim carpets that, by all accounts, bin Laden first met Zawahiri in the mid-1980s.

But it wasn't Zawahiri's first trip to Peshawar. The eldest of five sons of a prominent Cairo family, the Egyptian surgeon spent half a year here in 1980, working in a hospital for wounded mujahideen, says Mohammed Salah, author of a soon-to-be-published book on Al Jihad, the Egyptian militant group. He showed the Monitor a copy of a frayed blue airmail letter sent from Peshawar, dated Nov. 24, 1980. In it, Zawahiri wrote an Arabic ode to his mother, a personal plea from a son longing for forgiveness, and some word from home.

She met my bad doings with goodness without asking for any return....
May God erase my ineptness and please her despite the offenses...
O God may you have pity on a stranger who longs for the sight of his mother.

At the time, Zawahiri was a principal member of Al Jihad, the radical Egyptian group. He closes the letter by sending hello to "Mr. Farrag," probably a reference to Mohammad Abd al-Salam Farrag, the leader of Al Jihad in the late 1970s.

Less than a year after the letter was written, President Anwar Sadat was assassinated. Egyptian police scooped up 60 to 70 members of Jihad, including Zawahiri, and put them on trial.

It was Sadat's assassination that started to make Zawahiri a name known beyond the Egyptian secret police.

In the internecine squabbling among militant groups in Egypt, Zawahiri emerged as the chief spokesman to the media - known for the clarity of his thinking and for his good English. His pedigree probably helped, too.

His grandfather was the imam of Al Azhar Mosque, Egypt's most prestigious Islamic institution. At the time, Zawahiri also had a running discourse with Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, the blind Egyptian cleric now in a New York prison for his involvement in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

"Within the prison walls, he began to campaign against Abdul Rahman's leadership [of Jihad], saying he wasn't a just leader," says Mr. Salah, the journalist. "He wanted to lead the group to greater power." And, more senior Jihad leaders had been sentenced to life in prison, whereas Zawahiri served three years, for possession of a gun, and was released.

A year after being released from prison, Zawahiri returned Peshawar, to care for wounded soldiers, with the Islamic Red Crescent, the Muslim equivalent of the Red Cross.

Bin Laden's spiritual leader

Just outside Peshawar, in what is today the Jalozai Afghan refugee camp, is the "martyrs graveyard." There lie some 6,000 mujahideen - most of whom died in the Afghan jihad. Among them is a small marker set with green words that read "star of the martyrs." This is Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian, who, along with his two sons, was killed in a car bomb blast here Nov. 3, 1989. The assailants are still unknown.

But in the mid80s, Mr. Azzam was bin Laden's spiritual leader: Part cleric, part mujahed, and university professor, he is the author of a half-dozen books, and is widely regarded as the figure who was instrumental in introducing Arabs to the Afghan fight.

"Azzam was the man who developed the idea of jihad in a complete way," says Mukahil ul-Islam Zia, a professor at the Islamic Center at Peshawar University, who has a set of Azzam's works on the shelf behind his computer screen. "Azzam enshrines the need for armed struggle as part of daily life, to deal with problems deemed by Islamic legal scholars to be unjust. He first starts with an anti-Israel agenda. But then he takes it further."

Azzam's home was the first stop for many Arabs just off the plane. He worked to integrate them with the Afghan fighters, and helped start the Jihad Training University at the Jalozai camp. In 1984, bin Laden and Azzam worked together, setting up training camps in Afghanistan. By the time of Azzam's death, his Al Had group was in healthy Arab recruiting competition with another Peshawar-based group - bin Laden's Al Queda, which eventually absorbed part of his mentors group.

"Osama would have been nothing without Azzam," says a Taliban expert. "Before he came to Peshawar, Osama was a kind of playboy, a dilettante, not serious, not what we see today."

For years, Arab and Muslim intellectuals had dealt with the question of how their tradition and faith could survive the onslaught of a modern world, and of post-colonial anomie. There was disaffection with corrupt Arab tyrants running military states that dealt indifferently with Islam. With the Israeli project to take over Palestinian villages and later the West Bank. With a post-war America pouring out images of Marilyn Monroe, the Beatles, and the bikini.

Nowhere did Islam seem "protected," flowering, safe from the influence of the modern world and the secular infidel.

It was not until the creation of the Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s that the disparate elements, mullah and foot soldier, dreamers and doers, came together to be forged in a fighting force. Peshawar was the place where sweet Pakistani "milk tea" and an ethnic Pashtun brand of Islam, Deobandism, were served. Deobandism is a 19th-century Indian school of Islam that was tied closely to the anti-British movement, and that had always been more severe and strict than the milder South and Southeast Asian Islamic variants.

What Azzam did was to begin melding - in a practical ideology - the Arabic forms of Islam with the Deobandi versions. It was an ideology of jihad. Azzam's own inspiration was an Egyptian writer, Sayyid Qutb, who in the 1950s began to divide the world into the sacred (a perfect Islamic state), and the profane (the non-Islamic world). Mr. Qutb, in works like "Signposts on the Road," and "A Muslim's Nationality and his Beliefs," confronted modernity. He read Freud, Darwin, and Marx. He visited the US in the 1950s, and found that Western ideas of commerce, civil society, the nation-state, and free expression couldn't be harmonized with absolute Islam. He opposed treaties, agreements, and other liberal forms of statecraft as weakness and capitulation. He began to articulate the need to overthrow Muslim rulers, and was executed in Egypt in 1966.

Like many of the students in today's Pakistani madrassahs, and many in the Taliban ranks, Qutb had a faith that Islam is peaceful and moderate - but that this needed Utopia, a world like the one the prophet administered for 30 years in Mecca and Medina, and must be achieved by force.

"In the world there is only one party of God, all others are parties of Satan and rebellion," Qutb wrote in "A Muslim's Nationality." "Those who believe fight in the cause of God, and those who disbelieve fight in the cause of rebellion."

Zawahiri, too, would have been quite familiar with Qutb. The year that Egyptian President Gamel Abdel Nasser ordered Qutb hanged, Zawahiri was arrested for being a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. And Qutb's books became so popular on the university campuses of Cairo in the 1970s that the government banned them.

"Qutb is considered ... the founder of Islamic religious groups, especially the violent or jihadi groups," says Diaa Rashwan, a senior researcher of Islamic militant groups at Egypt's al-Ahram Center for Strategic Studies. While other Islamists at the time were looking to change their societies from within, Qutb was an influence on Zawahiri and others like him, "to launch something wider."

Back in Pakistan in 1985, Zawahiri started calling on his cohorts from Egypt to join him. He sought out freelance mujahideen, mercenaries on the side of Islam against the Soviets. In Peshawar, sources say, Zawahiri became a natural magnet for the movement. It is there that he met bin Laden, though the two at first may have seen each other as competitors in the business of mujahideen training and succor. He put out a newspaper, Mujehedoon, to spread his ideas, and to keep a running commentary on the latest thinking on jihad.

Those newspapers became the forerunner of a variety of jihadi magazines that are now published and sold widely in Pakistan - and read the way American youth read "Boy's Life" in an earlier era. They tell of mujahideen battlefield feats and of the need for strict observance.

A 'MODERATE' STUDENT

One such reader today is Hasan Ali, the madrassah student who wants to one day be a lawyer in Islamabad. Short, chunky, bearded, Ali combines an intense demeanor with a mild-speaking tone, and he often lapses into a shy smile when teased by friends. (Ali has a wife and child in his Punjab village, and some classmates say he ought to either bring her to the college or move back to the village - rather than going home every weekend.)

Ali is "very social," meaning that he is constantly attending islamic functions and conferences, and is networking with other students. Some are Afghans who will not let him meet with a Westerner in his dorm room. All the students keep close tabs on what is happening in the jihadi subculture, and they see the Taliban as heroes. Ali is serious enough about his Islam to have attended three different madrassahs around Pakistan. He turns cold when asked if he has gone "for the training," the euphemism for military instruction that many madrassah students see as integral to their education. He will not say. He sips green tea, excuses himself partway through an interview to pray outside at dusk, and then returns.

Ali does say that the Islamic movement, which he sees as one single worldwide movement, needs a military wing. The companions of the prophet had a military wing, even when traveling in places that already had an army. In Pakistan, Ali feels that eventually, the tides of Islam, the feelings on the streets, will "absorb" the military, the army, and that there will be no need for a violent takeover.

"Unlike the West, religion and politics are the same thing in Islam," he says. "The mosque is the place where one worships, where government, legal and military decisions are made." Saudi Arabia, "the center of Islam," is the place where the authority for a single Islamic state - starting in the Middle East, moving to Central Asia, and then throughout the world - should be. Osama, he says, understands the "problems of the Muslims. If America is going to attack us, it will result in America's death," Ali says.

Ali is described by his fellow students as having a "moderate outlook."

The Wahhabi influence

Unquestionably, one strain of Islamic thought and practice is found, more than any other, in and around the new fundamentalism: Wahhabism. This is a Saudi Arabian variant of Islam. It follows a literal interpretation of Islam, as strict and forbidding as the baking desert sands of its origins. Saudi cleric Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab in the 18th century sought to remove the multifarious readings of the Koran that evolved in the centuries after the prophet. He was backed by the House of Saud, which eventually took Wahhabist views as national policy. Infidels were to be dealt with harshly. Local customs, laws, saints, or rituals - anything not found in a literal reading of the Koran - were to be abandoned as idolatry. Saudi Arabia, especially, as the home of Mecca and Medina, Islam's holiest sites, should free itself of any un-Islamic influence.

Today, Saudi oil wealth gives what would be a minority orthodox faction in the Muslim world a disproportionate amount of influence. Saudi funds pour out, officially and unofficially, across the globe - paying for new mosques from Bosnia to Boston, as well as Islamic centers, university chairs, conferences, and organizations for the promotion of orthodox Islam, primary schools, charities, and visiting scholars.

Exact figures on the petrodollars pushing Saudi orthodox Islam are hard to come by. But few experts say that Saudi funds are directly used for the export of militant training. Indeed, today, the Saudi government does not particularly want to fund fundamentalism that will turn on the government, as has bin Laden (In 1994, the Saudis revoked his citizenship). One of the original aims of funding orthodox Islamic institutions was to check the spread of Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini's Shia fundamentalism in the Gulf region in the 1980s.

Nor does Saudi money come labeled as "Wahhabi funding." (Wahhabism in many parts of the world is viewed suspiciously.) Rather, funding for mosques or schools simply comes with the requirements that certain teachings and practices be observed: Women should cover their heads and be subservient, students should focus more on the Koran and less on "worldly" instruction, Islamic law (sharia) should be taught as the only real law, and other forms of Islam should be abandoned. Yet in practice, and even if unintentionally, experts say, the spread of Wahhabist or revivalist Islam, has been a breeding ground for militant behavior, and for an assault on local traditional forms of Islamic practice.

In Central Asia, for example, "you have Tajiks and Uzbeks who haven't heard a sermon in 20 years, and now all they hear is about how fanatical they should be," says Professor Nasr. "Somebody from Southeast Asia ... with a much more culturally rich and syncretic Islamic tradition, with more coexistence between religion and culture, between Hindu, Buddhist, Christianity ... [goes to a Wahhabi-funded] seminary. And even if he doesn't get military training, returns home with the view that there should be no compromise, no cultural coexistence with non-Muslims."

"Osama and the House of Saud don't agree on very much," says a Pakistani human rights worker in Peshawar, speaking gingerly. "But they do agree on the spread of Wahhabism."

"From Algeria to Indonesia, what I see is a move to push sharia law," says Mr. Ahmed, the editor in Lahore, Pakistan. "The harder Arab strains of Islam are behind this move. Indonesia is nothing but a beautiful 'low church' version of Islam with lots of singing and dancing, mysticism. But this sharia movement will try to purge that Islam and make it as pure as everywhere else."

In the past 20 years, literally hundreds of mosques have been set up in Southeast Asia for the purpose of teaching "pure Islam." The move is fueled by Saudi funding, and by guerrilla fighters trained in Afghanistan who came back home.

The original leaders of Indonesia's Lashkar Jihad and Islamic Defenders Front, as well as Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines, all fought with the mujahideen. All are now committing acts of violence in the furtherance of their aims - a sharia-based state.

Indonesia, though majority Muslim, has always been resolutely secular. The Wahhabi-influenced Muslims there feel like outsiders, and often preach that the nation's political elite are "infidels."

Militant Laskar Jihad leader Jaf'ar Umar Thalib dismissed both Megawati Sukarnoputri, the current president of Indonesia, and Abdurrahman Wahid, the past president, as "not real Muslims" when the Monitor met him last year. That may sound strange, particularly in the case of Wahid, who chairs Nadhlatul Ulama, an academic group that is the world's largest Muslim organization. But Wahid is resolutely a traditional Javanese Muslim who also prays to ancestors and ancient seers and visits holy places not mentioned in the Koran.

In the Middle East and North Africa, particularly in Algeria and Egypt, the return of the Afghan vets coincided with an upsurge of Islamic militancy in the 1990s.

When the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989, and the Afghan mujahideen began fighting among themselves, many Arabs left. Bin Laden moved to Sudan in 1991, and took up his campaign against the Saudi regime.

Zawahiri, according to press reports, shaved his beard, dyed his hair, and went to California and Texas for a few weeks in 1991. He visited mosques and community centers under an assumed name, raising money for "Afghan widows and orphans."

In the 1990s, flush with Afghan vets, the Egyptian Islamic Group, and Jihad (the militant group Zawahiri belonged to), launched a series of attacks on politicians and tourists. In 1997, six Islamic militants massacred 58 foreign tourists and at least four Egyptians in Luxor, Egypt.

The next year, Zawahiri and bin Laden publicly reunited, although terrorism experts say that the two were working together throughout the 1990s.
On Feb. 23, 1998, an Arab newspaper introduced to the world the "International Islamic Front for Combating Crusaders and Jews." The founding document was signed by "Sheikh" bin Laden, Zawahiri "Amir of the Jihad Group" in Egypt, and the leaders of the Egyptian Islamic Group, the Jamiat-ul-Ulema-e-Pakistan, and the Jihad Movement in Bangladesh. It condemned the "sins" of American foreign policy for declaring "war on God, his messenger, and Muslims." And it called "on every Muslim ... to comply with God's order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it."
Six months later, the US Embassies in Tanzania and Kenya were bombed.

On a different jihad

While the allure of jihad and defending Islam against America draws many today, not all the young men who are radicalized stay that way.

As a boy growing up as part of the 5 percent minority in the Philippines, Zam Amputan, remembers feeling that Muslims were destined to be forever marginalized unless they were governed by the Koran.

His father was a respected religious teacher, and the family, by Mindanao standards, was well off. Amputan attended a private Catholic school, and after college, the opportunity arose to attend a madrassah in Pakistan. At the height of the jihad against the Soviets, his trip to Peshawar in 1987, like those of other believers, was sponsored by the Saudi-based World Assembly of Muslim Youth. There he was exposed to the Wahhabi ideology, which he saw as a powerful tool against oppression.

He returned to Mindanao full of zeal, thinking of ways to create a separate Islamic state in the southern Philippines.

But as he matured, he says, his ideas changed. Amputan doesn't know exactly what altered his radical route, though he cites a 1995 trip to Iran, in which he began to believe it was a huge mistake to give clerics control over the temporal world.

"I always used my own reasoning, and it led me to a different understanding of the Koran," says Amputan. "The problem with the religious state is that they say religious teachers have the ultimate responsibility to interpret the Koran. I have a different reading: It's each individual's responsibility."

The views of this father of four put him at odds with the growing number of militants in the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), a separatist group with whom he sympathized. (In March 2000, Amputan survived an assassination attempt by the MILF, while driving home from a radio talk show he hosted.)
"Extremist, intolerant views of Islam have come to monopolize the religious dialogue here, and the moderates have to do more to change that," Amputan says. "My personal jihad is to stop extremism. But few are fighting yet."


Reporting by staff writers Jane Lampman in Boston; Scott Peterson in Douab, Afghanistan; Ilene R. Prusher in Cairo; and Warren Richey in Amman, Jordan; as well as special correspondents Sarah Gauch in Cairo and Dan Murphy in Manila.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/1018/p1s2-wogi.html

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Re: Fanatical Islam

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Hamas Cleric Says Al-Aqsa Cannot Remain ‘Under the Control of Those Whom Allah Described as a Bunch of Apes and Pigs’

Posted on March 4, 2012 at 11:48pm by Christopher Santarelli
The Blaze

Image

The Middle East Media Research Institute has transcribed troubling video of a Hamas preacher from Khan Yunis, Gaza, which aired on Al-Aqsa TV two weeks ago:

“We say loud and clear: The struggle for Palestine is not a political struggle. It is a purely ideological struggle. It is a clear religious struggle between Islam and Zionism. It is a struggle between Truth and Falsehood, between Islam and heresy, between light and darkness, between good and evil.

We cannot possibly accept [Al-Aqsa] remaining under the control of those whom Allah described as a bunch of apes and pigs, the scholars of whom Allah describe as asses carrying books, or as a dog that pants when you beat it and pants when you don’t. After all these descriptions of the base position that befits them – these contemptible people cannot lord over the great people, these slaves cannot lord over the masters. The masters today are all the Muslims.”

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Re: Fanatical Islam

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I noticed you "forgot" to respond to my comment, OMD.

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Oldemandalton
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Re: Fanatical Islam

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InfoWarrior
I noticed you "forgot" to respond to my comment, OMD.
Did you miss me InfoWarrior. I feel loved. :ymhug: :D

Aussie kept me busy for a while. :))



OMD:
No, Ron Paul would have defended Assad and called those who oppose his tyranny as paid mercenaries of the CIA and the Mossad.
InfoWarrior;
Apparently, you are not aware of the al-qaeda "freedom fighters" being loaded into Syria from Libya... after we handed Libya to the terrorists. And this whole notion that Ron Paul defends dictators... please! Would you say he defended Saddam Hussein because he didn't want a conflict in Iraq?!?!?! Obviously, what he is defending is our constitution and bill of rights. You already admitted that you were against that war anyway.

Yes I know InfoWarrior, I posted the same info on this thread: http://www.ldsfreedomforum.com/viewtopi ... 8&start=30

Qatar and the Saudis are funding al Qaeda Sunnis from Libya and Iraq to join with the rebels, and ex-Syrian troops who couldn’t stomach the massacre of civilians they were ordered to do.

Many Ron Paul followers have regurgitated the RT, Press TV and Alex Jones propaganda that it is all a CIA/Mossad war against the angelic and peaceful Assad. If you noticed a wink and a smile I was just teasing the propagandized forum members. :D Thought you would have caught that.

I know that Ron Paul does not defend dictators per se but he does appease them which, in my book, is not much different. Remember; "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke.

Ron Paul would open trade with tyrants and help them economically. Probably even trade them necessary proscribed equipment to enrich uranium, acquire ICBM tech (as Clinton did with China), and build nuclear weapons. “It’s in the Constitution and our founding fathers said to”. 8-|
Oldemandalton wrote:The P.C. crowd, MSM and naïve pacifists have turned a deaf ear to the Jihadists and fanatical Islamists and their penchant for the use of terror and force, and then try and lump them with the peaceful Muslims.

InfoWarrior:
Wow, you actually think the MSM is ignoring all the violence in the middle east? If anything I see them hyping all the terror threats and the establishment politicians all arguing this is why we need to strike pre emptively. Perhaps you haven't watched Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, etc. lately? In reality, they are lumping in extremist Muslims in with the ENTIRE MIDDLE EAST! If I wanted pro-war propaganda, I would just turn on one of these news channels at anytime during the day or night.
They aren’t ignoring the violence, InfoWarrior, but they are ignoring very important facts;
1.The growing encroachment of Sharia in American and European Law.

2.That there are several members of the Muslim Brotherhood in the White House.

3.The goal of fanatical Islam to set up a worldwide Caliphate.

4.Iranian leaders’ belief in the 12th Imam and their desire to hasten his return.

5.The Occupy Movement is working with Socialists, Communists, Anarchists, and now are in Iran with the fanatical Mullahs there!

6.The MSM insults Christianity and Judaism daily, whose principles our nation was founded on, while Islam is sacrosanct and treated with reverence. (They ALL should be treated equally)

Yes the MSM is pushing us to unrighteous wars such as in Libya, Syria, and Africa. An attack by Israel on Iranian uranium enrichment sites would not be a “pre-emptive strike” since they have already been at war with Iran for decades. It would be taking the war that the Israelis have been fighting in their own land for decades and finally take it to Iran.

You must remember, InfoWarrior, Iran itself can silence the war drums and bring peace to the Gulf. All they have to do is:
Stop enriching uranium beyond their need for nuclear fuel.
Prove this by letting inspectors visit suspected nuclear weapons facilities.
Stop funding terrorism around the world.
Stop teaching and fomenting hate of the Jews, Israel and America.

If Iranian leaders did this there would be peace and we could close our bases and go home. This is what the people of Iran want.

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Re: Fanatical Islam

Post by Fairminded »

I think your list is off, OMD.

Iran can stop the drums of war if they:

Start selling oil exclusively to the US and allies at a reasonable (read cripplingly low) price.
Topple their own regime and set up one friendly to the US. (before we do it for them)
Quit talking about taking their oil off the dollar.
Let global banks gain a foothold in their country.

Of course this probably wouldn't be enough to convince the MDGs to leave them alone, but it's a start.

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InfoWarrior82
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Re: Fanatical Islam

Post by InfoWarrior82 »

Sorry, didn't notice that you had responded to me somehow in another thread...
Oldemandalton wrote:
Qatar and the Saudis are funding al Qaeda Sunnis from Libya and Iraq to join with the rebels, and ex-Syrian troops who couldn’t stomach the massacre of civilians they were ordered to do.

Many Ron Paul followers have regurgitated the RT, Press TV and Alex Jones propaganda that it is all a CIA/Mossad war against the angelic and peaceful Assad. If you noticed a wink and a smile I was just teasing the propagandized forum members. :D Thought you would have caught that.
Who thinks Assad is a great guy? Could you point me to one example where they think he's angelic and peaceful? I'm going to keep going back to this point Old Man: because Ron Paul didn't support war in Iraq... automatically makes him think Saddam Hussein is peaceful and angelic? The point is, we have no business meddling. (You knew that anyway though).

Actually, NATO forces were the ones who invaded Libya. What was the first thing done in this invasion as the bombs were falling? Yep! You guessed it. They set up a very special bank.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MD14Ak02.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Several writers have noted the odd fact that the Libyan rebels took time out from their rebellion in March to create their own central bank - this before they even had a government. Robert Wenzel wrote in the Economic Policy Journal:

I have never before heard of a central bank being created in just a matter of weeks out of a popular uprising. This suggests we have a bit more than a rag tag bunch of rebels running around and that there are some pretty sophisticated influences.

Alex Newman wrote in the New American:

In a statement released last week, the rebels reported on the results of a meeting held on March 19. Among other things, the supposed rag-tag revolutionaries announced the "[d]esignation of the Central Bank of Benghazi as a monetary authority competent in monetary policies in Libya and appointment of a Governor to the Central Bank of Libya, with a temporary headquarters in Benghazi."

Newman quoted CNBC Senior Editor John Carney, who asked, "Is this the first time a revolutionary group has created a central bank while it is still in the midst of fighting the entrenched political power? It certainly seems to indicate how extraordinarily powerful central bankers have become in our era."

Another anomaly involves the official justification for taking up arms against Libya. Supposedly it's about human rights violations, but the evidence is contradictory. According to an article on the Fox News web site on February 28:

As the United Nations works feverishly to condemn Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi for cracking down on protesters, the body's Human Rights Council is poised to adopt a report chock-full of praise for Libya's human rights record.

The review commends Libya for improving educational opportunities, for making human rights a "priority" and for bettering its "constitutional" framework. Several countries, including Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia but also Canada, give Libya positive marks for the legal protections afforded to its citizens - who are now revolting against the regime and facing bloody reprisal.

Whatever might be said of Qaddafi's personal crimes, the Libyan people seem to be thriving. A delegation of medical professionals from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus wrote in an appeal to Russian President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin that after becoming acquainted with Libyan life, it was their view that in few nations did people live in such comfort:

[Libyans] are entitled to free treatment and their hospitals provide the best in the world of medical equipment. Education in Libya is free, capable young people have the opportunity to study abroad at government expense. When marrying, young couples receive 60,000 Libyan dinars (about 50,000 US dollars) of financial assistance. Non-interest state loans and as practice shows, undated. Due to government subsidies the price of cars is much lower than in Europe and they are affordable for every family. Gasoline and bread cost a penny, no taxes for those who are engaged in agriculture. The Libyan people are quiet and peaceful, are not inclined to drink and are very religious.

They maintained that the international community had been misinformed about the struggle against the regime. "Tell us," they said, "who would not like such a regime?"

Even if that is just propaganda, there is no denying at least one very popular achievement of the Libyan government: it brought water to the desert by building the largest and most expensive irrigation project in history, the $33 billion GMMR (Great Man-Made River) project. Even more than oil, water is crucial to life in Libya. The GMMR provides 70 percent of the population with water for drinking and irrigation, pumping it from Libya's vast underground Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System in the south to populated coastal areas 4,000 kilometers to the north. The Libyan government has done at least some things right.

Another explanation for the assault on Libya is that it is "all about oil," but that theory, too, is problematic. As noted in the National Journal, the country produces only about 2 percent of the world's oil. Saudi Arabia alone has enough spare capacity to make up for any lost production if Libyan oil were to disappear from the market. And if it's all about oil, why the rush to set up a new central bank?

Another provocative bit of data circulating on the net is a 2007 Democracy Now! interview of US Gen. Wesley Clark (Ret.). In it he says that about ten days after September 11, 2001, he was told by a general that the decision had been made to go to war with Iraq. Clark was surprised and asked why. "I don't know!" was the response. "I guess they don't know what else to do!" Later, the same general said they planned to take out seven countries in five years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.

What do these seven countries have in common? In the context of banking, one that sticks out is that none of them is listed among the 56 member banks of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). That evidently puts them outside the long regulatory arm of the central bankers' central bank in Switzerland.

The most renegade of the lot could be Libya and Iraq, the two that have actually been attacked. Kenneth Schortgen Jr., writing on Examiner.com, noted, "ix months before the US moved into Iraq to take down Saddam Hussein, the oil nation had made the move to accept Euros instead of dollars for oil and this became a threat to the global dominance of the dollar as the reserve currency and its dominion as the petrodollar."

According to a Russian article titled "Bombing of Lybia - Punishment for Ghaddafi for His Attempt to Refuse US Dollar," Qaddaffi made a similarly bold move: he initiated a movement to refuse the dollar and the euro and called on Arab and African nations to use a new currency instead, the gold dinar. Qaddafi suggested establishing a united African continent, with its 200 million people using this single currency. During the past year, the idea was approved by many Arab countries and most African countries. The only opponents were the Republic of South Africa and the head of the League of Arab States. The initiative was viewed negatively by the USA and the European Union, with French President Nicolas Sarkozy calling Libya a threat to the financial security of mankind; but Qaddafi was not swayed and continued his push for the creation of a united Africa.

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And that brings us back to the puzzle of the Libyan central bank. In an article posted on the Market Oracle, Eric Encina observed:

One seldom mentioned fact by western politicians and media pundits: the Central Bank of Libya is 100% State Owned.... Currently, the Libyan government creates its own money, the Libyan Dinar, through the facilities of its own central bank. Few can argue that Libya is a sovereign nation with its own great resources, able to sustain its own economic destiny. One major problem for globalist banking cartels is that in order to do business with Libya, they must go through the Libyan Central Bank and its national currency, a place where they have absolutely zero dominion or power-broking ability. Hence, taking down the Central Bank of Libya (CBL) may not appear in the speeches of Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy but this is certainly at the top of the globalist agenda for absorbing Libya into its hive of compliant nations.

Libya not only has oil. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), its central bank has nearly 144 tons of gold, in its vaults. With that sort of asset base, who needs the BIS, the IMF and their rules?

All of which prompts a closer look at the BIS rules and their effect on local economies. An article on the BIS web site states that central banks in the Central Bank Governance Network are supposed to have as their single or primary objective "to preserve price stability." They are to be kept independent from government to make sure that political considerations don't interfere with this mandate. "Price stability" means maintaining a stable money supply, even if that means burdening the people with heavy foreign debts. Central banks are discouraged from increasing the money supply by printing money and using it for the benefit of the state, either directly or as loans.

In a 2002 article in Asia Times titled "The BIS vs National Banks," Henry Liu maintained:

BIS regulations serve only the single purpose of strengthening the international private banking system, even at the peril of national economies. The BIS does to national banking systems what the IMF has done to national monetary regimes. National economies under financial globalization no longer serve national interests.

... FDI [foreign direct investment] denominated in foreign currencies, mostly dollars, has condemned many national economies into unbalanced development toward export, merely to make dollar-denominated interest payments to FDI, with little net benefit to the domestic economies.

He added, "Applying the State Theory of Money, any government can fund with its own currency all its domestic developmental needs to maintain full employment without inflation." The "state theory of money" refers to money created by governments rather than private banks.

The presumption of the rule against borrowing from the government's own central bank is that this will be inflationary, while borrowing existing money from foreign banks or the IMF will not. But all banks actually create the money they lend on their books, whether publicly owned or privately owned. Most new money today comes from bank loans. Borrowing it from the government's own central bank has the advantage that the loan is effectively interest free. Eliminating interest has been shown to reduce the cost of public projects by an average of 50 percent.

And that appears to be how the Libyan system works. According to Wikipedia, the functions of the Central Bank of Libya include "issuing and regulating banknotes and coins in Libya" and "managing and issuing all state loans." Libya's wholly state-owned bank can and does issue the national currency and lend it for state purposes.

That would explain where Libya gets the money to provide free education and medical care and to issue each young couple $50,000 in interest-free state loans. It would also explain where the country found the $33 billion to build the GMMR project. Libyans are worried that NATO-led airstrikes are coming perilously close to this pipeline, threatening another humanitarian disaster.

So, is this new war all about oil or all about banking? Maybe both - and water as well. With energy, water and ample credit to develop the infrastructure to access them, a nation can be free of the grip of foreign creditors. And that may be the real threat of Libya: it could show the world what is possible. Most countries don't have oil, but new technologies are being developed that could make non-oil-producing nations energy independent, particularly if infrastructure costs are halved by borrowing from the nation's own publicly-owned bank. Energy independence would free governments from the web of the international bankers and of the need to shift production from domestic to foreign markets to service the loans.

If the Qaddafi government goes down, it will be interesting to watch whether the new central bank joins the BIS, whether the nationalized oil industry gets sold off to investors and whether education and health care continue to be free.


And who are these "NATO's Little Helpers" anyway? Al Qaeda. Wait just a darn minute! Ain't them those terrists that took down the twin towers? So, NATO hands over an entire country to Al Qaeda... hmmmm... then these same "rebels" are being used to fight the regime in Syria... hmmmm....

http://www.prisonplanet.com/hillary-cli ... syria.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


Hillary Clinton Admits US and Al-Qaeda On Same Side in Syria


US and France arm rebels with anti-aircraft missiles

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Thursday, March 1, 2012

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has admitted that Al-Qaeda and other groups on the State Department’s terror list are on the same side as the United States in Syria and that they are aiding opposition rebels.

In an interview with BBC News (watch video), Clinton states, “We have a very dangerous set of actors in the region, Al-Qaeda, Hamas, and those who are on our terrorist list, to be sure, supporting – claiming to support the opposition [in Syria].”

Clinton’s admission that Al-Qaeda is supporting the armed insurrection in Syria dovetails with reports that the same Al-Qaeda terrorists who helped overthrow Colonel Gaddafi in Libya were airlifted into Syria by NATO forces.

Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri’s has also publicly expressed support for Syrian rebel forces.

These terrorists have been blamed for bloody attacks that have killed both Syrian regime officials and innocent civilians, including a bombing earlier this month in Syria’s second city of Aleppo which killed 28 people.

The recent Arab League report, which was almost universally ignored by the mainstream media, also concluded that both sides of the conflict were responsible for indiscriminate violence and that terrorist groups were helping the rebels carry out attacks.

Despite the admission that terrorists are aiding opposition forces in Syria, the establishment media has attempted to pour cold water on the issue, primarily through mouthpieces like ‘Syria Danny’ – an “activist” who has been afforded ample time by the corporate press to beg for a military invasion.

“It is richly ironic that the unelected fundamentalist Sunni regimes of the Persian Gulf are supporting Al Qaeda affiliated groups within Syria purportedly to “bring about democratic reforms,” writes Professor Michel Chossudovsky. “This is the same dynamic that prevailed in Libya where the overthrow of that country’s government by Western and Gulf Arab powers has now led to a collapse in human rights and social conditions.”

Despite claims to the contrary, a general in the Free Syria Army, the opposition militia, has told journalists that the rebels are being armed with anti-aircraft missiles by the United States and France.

“In Homs on Tuesday, a general claiming to be from the rebel group appeared on camera and told a journalist from Reuters news agency that “French and American assistance has reached us and is with us.” When asked to elaborate on the nature of the assistance he added, “We now have weapons and anti-aircraft missiles and, God willing, with all of that we will defeat Bashar [President Assad],” reports RT.

Former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds also reported that US troops landed on the Jordanian and Syrian border back in December for the purpose of training militants to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad.

It was also revealed earlier this month that British Special Forces are already on the ground in Syria advising and directing the rebel army.



And just for fun:





Oldemandalton wrote: I know that Ron Paul does not defend dictators per se but he does appease them which, in my book, is not much different. Remember; "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke.


Spoken like the true Neo-Con that you are. Most certainly mis-applying that quote to something that has nothing to do with the foreign policy that Jesus Christ and the founding fathers would approve of. Again with the word "appease". No, the word you are looking for is: Meddling in sovereign countries' affairs to which we have no business sticking our nose in.


Oldemandalton wrote: Ron Paul would open trade with tyrants and help them economically. Probably even trade them necessary proscribed equipment to enrich uranium, acquire ICBM tech (as Clinton did with China), and build nuclear weapons. “It’s in the Constitution and our founding fathers said to”. 8-|


=)) Funniest thing I've heard all day.


Oldemandalton wrote:
InfoWarrior:
Wow, you actually think the MSM is ignoring all the violence in the middle east? If anything I see them hyping all the terror threats and the establishment politicians all arguing this is why we need to strike pre emptively. Perhaps you haven't watched Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, etc. lately? In reality, they are lumping in extremist Muslims in with the ENTIRE MIDDLE EAST! If I wanted pro-war propaganda, I would just turn on one of these news channels at anytime during the day or night.


They aren’t ignoring the violence, InfoWarrior, but they are ignoring very important facts;
1.The growing encroachment of Sharia in American and European Law.


Meant only to instill fear to divide an conquer. (A distraction.) Balkanization is a tactic that the fascist globalists are using much like the Romans did with much success.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balkanization" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


Oldemandalton wrote: 2.That there are several members of the Muslim Brotherhood in the White House.


The Muslim Brotherhood is not what you think it is.

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/20 ... otherhood/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

http://ce399fascism.wordpress.com/2011/ ... zine-2004/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

http://www.historycommons.org/context.j ... ncy_202700" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Oldemandalton wrote: 3.The goal of fanatical Islam to set up a worldwide Caliphate.

4.Iranian leaders’ belief in the 12th Imam and their desire to hasten his return.


There are fanatical Christians here in the U.S. who want racial purity and hasten the return of Jesus. UH OH!

Oldemandalton wrote: 5.The Occupy Movement is working with Socialists, Communists, Anarchists, and now are in Iran with the fanatical Mullahs there!


Ok? Your point?

Oldemandalton wrote: 6.The MSM insults Christianity and Judaism daily, whose principles our nation was founded on, while Islam is sacrosanct and treated with reverence. (They ALL should be treated equally)


Agreed. They do so only because it serves their purposes.


Oldemandalton wrote: Yes the MSM is pushing us to unrighteous wars such as in Libya, Syria, and Africa.


Interesting. You believe these wars are unjust. Why? What makes preemptive war with Iran just? Does Iran have a little bit more hate in them than Syria? If all you have is that "They said they'll do this.." or "They said they'll do that.." doesn't cut the mustard.

Oldemandalton wrote: An attack by Israel on Iranian uranium enrichment sites would not be a “pre-emptive strike” since they have already been at war with Iran for decades. It would be taking the war that the Israelis have been fighting in their own land for decades and finally take it to Iran.


Now this is just plain ridiculous. In what dimension in this universe would Iran consider Israeli warplanes crossing their border to bomb them as just "a continuation of a already ongoing war"? What would Russia think of such an attack? China? Pakistan?

Oldemandalton wrote: You must remember, InfoWarrior, Iran itself can silence the war drums and bring peace to the Gulf. All they have to do is:
Stop enriching uranium beyond their need for nuclear fuel.
Prove this by letting inspectors visit suspected nuclear weapons facilities.
Stop funding terrorism around the world.
Stop teaching and fomenting hate of the Jews, Israel and America.

If Iranian leaders did this there would be peace and we could close our bases and go home. This is what the people of Iran want.


Again. Spoken like a true NeoCon.

kingbmm
captain of 100
Posts: 234

Re: Fanatical Islam

Post by kingbmm »

Info,
I understand that your on track to be Hezbollah's top recruit for 2012!
Congratulations...

User avatar
AussieOi
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 6137
Location: Sydney, Australia

Re: Fanatical Islam

Post by AussieOi »

kingbmm wrote:Info,
I understand that your on track to be Hezbollah's top recruit for 2012!
Congratulations...

onward christian soldiers, marching onto war

great job my vampire friend, you and old man should go on the road with the WWI (world wrestling for israel) and you can be a tag team

kingbmm
captain of 100
Posts: 234

Re: Fanatical Islam

Post by kingbmm »

...and you can continue to literally fulfill prophecy in the scriptures regarding the deception that will occur in the last among the saints.
You've actually helped to further strengthen my testimony...I should send you a "thank you" card!

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