Re: [CTRL] (Fwd) Off to Baghdad!

[Xxx Yyy]

What a poetic little piece alamaine.  Recently I read a piece in which a journalist claimed that it was "outrageous" that she was actually checkpointed when she wanted to get to Arafat.  And then there's the real world where evil, cruelty, powerlust, revenge, jealousy can possess the minds of men who have left the restraits of morality behind.  Yes, it's primitive at the individual, community and country levels.  It happens in homes, on backstreets, in boardrooms and on the battlefield.  Sometimes laws can restrain these displays but only if everyone agrees to play by those rules and punish everyone who breakes the rules.  The Islamic countries have been living by their own set of rules which are in conflict with other sets of community rules.  And what seem to be the rules by which the Muslims live?  Here is an exerpt from a larger piece which spells some of them out.


http://www.jcpa.org/jl/vp449.htm
Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs
March 2001
APOCALYPTIC FEARS NOW; UNFORSEEN RISKS TOMORROW: ISRAEL'S POORLY PREDICTED FUTURE
Manfred Gerstenfeld


Propagating Murder

The importance of Palestinian education is particularly important for two reasons. Today, Islam is the one powerful, worldwide ideological stream in many parts of which a culture of death and murder is widely propagated.

This trend is not limited to the Shi'ites, of whom Iran and the Lebanese Hezbollah are prime examples. In Sunni Baghdad, tens of prostitutes were beheaded last year. In Saudi Arabia beheadings are a regular punishment. In Algeria, major massacres by Muslim fundamentalists have been going on for years. During the month of Ramadan alone, at the end of 2000, more than 300 people were murdered there. In Syria, Bashir Assad has come to power whose father killed tens of thousands of civilians in Hamma. Although not officially proven, it is very likely that the Libyan government of Kaddafi had the bomb placed on the PanAm plane which exploded over Lockerbie.

It is hardly by chance that the world's most wanted terrorist, the Saudi Osama Bin Laden, is an Arab. He has been indicted by the United States for the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania which killed over 200 people. Furthermore, he is suspected of having organized the attack in October 2000 on the American ship USS Cole in the port of Aden, where 17 American servicemen were killed; even after that, he moved so freely in Afghanistan that he was shown in January 2001 on an Arab satellite channel, attending the wedding of his son.15

In Indonesia, a country of "moderate" Southeast Asian Islam, the recent explosions of mass murder and expulsion in Timor and the Moluccas are a further example of violence inspired by Islam. During Christmas 2000 in various parts of Indonesia, bombs exploded near churches, killing 13 and wounding 200.16 Over the past decades, hundreds of thousands have been killed in pogroms of various kinds.

No other prominent culture today speaks about holy war the way several main Muslim currents do. Sending young Palestinian children to attack soldiers is one aspect of it. This is not a new tactic, however; it was already applied by the Iranians in their war against Iraq.