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Re: war...

Morning,

Michael Cade wrote:
> Why you wouldn't think he was intelligent is hard to fathom.  

Well, for me it's his poor school record combined with his total lack of
mastery of the English language unless it's been written out for him
beforehand.  Oh, he's a skillful politician, no doubt, but intelligent?  I
don't think so.  He's no Jefferson.

> The extinction of the Jews alone is a pretty clear similarity.

The horrific irony in all this is that Arab hatred of Jews is a uniquely late
20th century phenomenon.  Muslims and Jews lived side by side in peace and
harmony for over a thousand years.  Muhammed called on his followers to treat
the "peoples of the book" (Christians and Jews) with respect, because they
worshipped the same god.  Granted, they were second class citizens, but only
second class.  Pagans had absolutely no rights.  Muslims never perpetuated
pogroms, ghettos, or extermination camps against the Jews.  Those were all
European phenomena.  So-called Christendom.  It was the creation of the state
of Israel, and more, the manner of its creation, that got the Muslim world
upset.  They see it as yet another Western crusader state, like those of the
middle ages, when the streets of Jerusalem ran ankle-deep in the blood of the
inhabitants slaughtered by the Europeans.  And now the European anti-semitism
is starting to make in-roads into Islam, which is tragic.  I've even heard that
"The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" has become widely read and quoted, and
that's a Russian forgery that claims to be a conspiracy document, showing that
the Jews are out to take over the world.

> Since you won't go for profiling, what (if any) solution can you give? 

Investigation and evidence.  Innocent until proven guilty.  What so many people
don't seem to realize is that if you give that up, the wheels of beurocracy can
grind you up as well.  The people who support this are so sure that only "them"
are going to get profiled that they don't care.  After all, "we" are never
going to do anything worthy of profiling for.  Haven't you ever had a false
charge on a bill?  Glitches happen.  See Brazil.  See it twice.  Then see The
Net (bad movie, but it is chilling in the realistic way people simply think "if
it's in the computer, it must be true").  If one of us is not safe, than all of
us are not safe.  Remember that poem that goes "they came for the jews, and I
didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Jew"?  It goes on like that for several
lines, substituting another group for "Jew" each time, and then it ends "then
they came for me, and there was no one left to speak up".  We cannot afford
to give in to profiling.  The cost is too high.

> Um look at the whole Palestinian conflict.  It certainly appears to be more
> than 1 vile terrorist that doesn't agree with the people you know. 

Yeah, it's called the State of Israel.  Okay, let's look at the *whole*
Palestinian conflict.  Say you're a Palestinian Arab.  You and your relatives
have lived in a country for over 1300 years.  Let's let that number roll around
in our brains for a bit: ONE THOUSAND THREE HUNDRED YEARS.  Then along come
these western states, who have been invading you periodically for about a
thousand years, and (a) carve up your country and give it to a bunch of foreign
refugees, whose plight you had nothing to do with, (b) force you out of your
homes and cities, and then (c) invade and occupy the half of the country you
had left and subjugate you to oppressive terror and violence.  Wouldn't you be
pissed off?  There have been resolution after resolution in the UN against the
occupation, but nothing happens.  Why?  Because the US supports Israel and
tells the rest of the world to go f*&k itself, like we *always* do.  Like we
did when the world court convicted us of war crimes in Nicaragua in the 80s.
The Muslim world sees the US pummel Iraq and Kosovo under the umbrella of UN
resolutions, but completely ignore resolutions with regard to Palestine.  Is it
any wonder they think we are racist hypocrites?

And I am really sick of people talking about Muslim Americans as if they were
somehow less American than Christian and/or Caucasian Americans.  As if "they"
were in "our" country.  If they're American citizens, it's their country, too.

I'm not even going to address WS's racist comments except to say that it was
like a slap in the face to see the word "raghead" on this list when I checked
in this morning.  I would hope we could avoid that in the future.  Not because
it's not PC, but because it's mean and stupid.

Sadly yours,
-- 
Don Smith                    Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment
donaldas at umich_edu                          http://xte.mit.edu/~dasmith/

"I feel terrible sadness when I hear "Let's get back to 'normal'".
In other words, we have nothing to learn or change."  - Sylvia Aruffo
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