On 2002-09-29 13:26, lifechanger wrote:
It's all about the resurgence of Barbarians who would hold the free people of the world hostage to their barbaric minds....
Bwa ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!
The Normans were once regarded as barbarians by the Greeks and Romans,they then came to take over western world through Crusades.
Who really is the barbarian,he who comes from nothing and fights for freedom and identity or he who has everything and oppresses those who are a threat.
I like hearing people think they belong to a land,because I always like to ask them if they know how far back there ancestry goes and what and where there grandparents did and came from?
Even the royal family can only go back a 1000 years.What before that?Bakers?
As soon as some people make a bit of money they think they're somebody.
Ha Ha Ha.
On 2002-09-30 16:19, Nestor wrote:
… but remember that the deepest thoughts and the innermost sense of life is in fact, very simple. And all the “LORDS” of the arth with all their complicated jargon, have never given us a solition but the stupid WAR
There'd be a rather simple solution:
muslim religuos authority might officially condemn that 'holy war' sh** as one big lie by local wannabe heroes not better than their 'enemy' counterparts.
I'm waiting for this all the time now or did I miss something ?
Suicide bombing people going to a dancefloor isn't related to any political terms but just disgusting stupidity.
September 11th simply prooved that there are idiots able to do anything without considering global consequences.
And I have to admit it's hard not to hate someone juggling with the fate of at least half the planet for a totally obscure 'reason'.
But that (real small) minority is faster with their guns than with their minds, so I'm afraid any discussion with them is useless.
Unfortunately withdrawing moral support isn't a matter of a few weeks. But at least it would offer the opportunity for muslim leaders to show responsibility and some common sense.
It be much easier to support a clear position against war with this background.
Otherwise I'm not so shure as I'm convinced those weirdos have to be stopped one way or the other.
If the case escalates we all know what might evolve.
U.S. News and World Report
BY MORTIMER B. ZUCKERMAN•EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
A shameful contagion
Europe is sick again. The memory of 6 million murdered Jews, it seems, is no longer inoculation against the virus of antisemitism. It has taken hold, on the supposedly liberal left as well as the xenophobic right, all too long unchecked by feeble political leadership with one eye on the vengeful sentiments of millions of anti-Zionist immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East. The historic antisemitism denying individual Jews the right to live as equal members of society has horribly coalesced with a new version of antisemitism that denies the collective expression of the Jewish people, namely Israel, to live as an equal member of the family of nations. From Kiev in the East to Bilbao and Barcelona in Spain, and Rome in the South, from Marseilles to Paris to Berlin in the West, the poison is at work. Somehow antisemitism in Europe has outdone every other ideology and prejudice in its power and durability. Fascism came and went; Communism came and went; anti-semitism came and stayed. And now it has been revitalized.
"Fire and Broken Glass." Some of the manifestations of the campaign are spelled out in a report by the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights aptly titled "Fire and Broken Glass." The summary of evil deeds can only sketch the daily nightmare. Jews, and people presumed to be Jewish, are assaulted across the region. Attackers, shouting racist slogans, throw stones at schoolchildren, at worshippers leaving religious services, at rabbis. Jewish homes, schools, and synagogues are firebombed. Windows are smashed. Scores of Jewish cemeteries are desecrated with anti-Jewish slogans and threats and Nazi symbols on walls and monuments. In Belgium, thugs beat up the chief rabbi. In Britain, the left-wing journal the New Statesman depicts a large Star of David stabbing the Union Jack. In London, a young student reading Psalms is stabbed 27 times on a city bus. A mural in a Scottish church depicts a crucified Jesus surrounded by Israeli soldiers. In Italy, La Stampa publishes a Page 1 cartoon of a tank emblazoned with the Jewish star pointing its gun at the baby Jesus, who pleads, "Surely, they don't want to kill me again." In France, where there have been hundreds of acts of violence, walls in Jewish neighborhoods have been defaced with slogans proclaiming, "Jews to the gas chambers." In Germany, the Free Democratic Party has unofficially adopted antisemitism as a campaign technique to attract Germany's sizable Muslim minority. A former German defense minister blames the power of the Jews for all the perceived ills of American foreign policy. German Jews are advised not to wear anything in public that will identify them as Jewish because their safety cannot be guaranteed. A listing of such incidents could fill, and fill again, this entire magazine–even though they represent just a fraction of the total number of such crimes, their racial origin concealed in routine statistics of ordinary assault and vandalism.
All it takes for evil to flourish, as Edmund Burke reminded us, is for good men to remain silent. That, alas, has been the pattern. When things were getting out of hand a year ago, the French government finally made a forthright stand, and it had an effect. (Kudos to Harvard University President Lawrence Summers, who recently spoke out forcefully against antisemitic trends in U.S. academia.) Many public officials in Europe make racist, anti-Jewish statements but too often escape rebuke. Many Europeans are shocked by the re-emergence of hatred of Jews, but the most common reaction has been complacency. Israel seems to be absorbing Europe's lingering anti-Jewish feelings, which are easier for many to express as anti-Zionism than antisemitism.
How do they do this? By applying two of the oldest antisemitic techniques: the double standard and moral equivalency. The double standard is manifest in the way Jews and the Jewish state are judged in a way no other people would be. With venom unsurpassed in modern dialogue, Europe demands that Israel acts as if it has to win the "moral man of the year" award just to defend itself. Israel is attacked for any deviation, no matter how trivial, as if responding to those that seek its destruction is a moral failure. This pernicious, and intellectually dishonest, double standard has the effect of implicitly denying Israel the right to the same measures of self-defense that any other state would exert. When Israelis take steps to assert their collective rights of self-defense in the face of unprecedented terrorist attacks against innocent Israeli civilians, they encounter an almost unanimous condemnation from the European establishment and the European media. European detractors turn every Israeli act of defense into its current euphemism: crimes against humanity. The Europeans took the election of Ariel Sharon as a license to view every act of self-defense as an aggression. They forgot what produced Sharon's election, namely the terrorism that Yasser Arafat launched in September 2000 against the most left-wing government in Israeli history–a government that had just made the most far-reaching proposals to settle the conflict.
What provoked Europe's latest hostility was Israel's incursion into the West Bank, which was in response to the unprecedented campaign of terror, culminating in the Netanya Passover bombing in which 29 Israelis perished and more than 140 were injured. If any other country in the world were bleeding from terrorism at the same rate as Israel, would there be any question of its right to defend itself? To deny Israel's right to defend itself, of course, is to deny the right of the Jews to a state that can perform the minimal function of protecting its own citizens.
The European double standard toward Israel takes many forms. Witness the eagerness with which so many in Europe diminished, and even dismissed, Israel's previously unimaginable concessions at Camp David, swallowing the Palestinian version of events there, despite a forceful American repudiation of that spin. Witness the almost hysterical reaction in Europe to a nonexistent massacre in Jenin, even as it failed to pay attention to the cumulative massacres of civilians in Israel. The Guardian newspaper in London betrayed its historic association with the founding of Israel with the outrageous editorial utterance that Jenin was every bit as bad as 9/11. Witness Europe's virtual acquiescence in the World Conference Against Racism held in South Africa, where Israel, the only democracy in the region with a program of civil rights and full Arab participation in government, was accused of genocide, ethnic cleansing, racism, and apartheid, while the vicious racism of the Middle East and Africa was ignored.
Paradox upon paradox. The traditional attacks from the right based on national, religious, or ethnic reasons have been surpassed by the more driving force of the extreme left, which invokes political or universal reasons, like human rights, antiglobalism, and socialism. Ever obsessed by anti-Americanism, they have seized on the Middle East crisis as a way to attack the United States and Israel as being unfeeling toward the poor of the world. For them, the Palestinians have become the poster child for Third World victimization. Indeed, the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is portrayed as an extended human-interest story told exclusively from the Palestinian point of view. Unmentioned is the fact that there is not a single democratic state in the entire region, that there would not be a single Israeli soldier in any Palestinian city or any checkpoint were Jews not the daily targets of terror. Ignoring the corrupt, authoritarian regime in Palestine, the critics from the left attack Israel on universalist issues, arguing that Israel is an occupying power in the West Bank oppressing the Palestinians. They pay not the slightest heed to the fact that Israel is there because the Arabs made war. Never do they acknowledge that the Palestinians could have had their own state just two years ago, and perhaps be flourishing in peace now, if they had not been incited to still more insensate violence. The paradoxes are dizzying–and malign. Israel, a country victimized by terrorism, stands accused of perpetrating terrorism, the Jews described as Nazis, and their Arab tormentors cast in the role of helpless Jews.
Next, of course, is the moral-equivalency trap. When Israel responds to terrorism, Europe treats it as if the response and the terrorism are morally equal; as if there were no difference between the arsonist and the firefighter; as if Israel's response, which seeks to minimize civilian casualties, is equal to the terrorism, which seeks to maximize civilian casualties; as if the premeditated campaign of suicide murder were a sane response to an extraordinarily generous proposal that would have provided Palestinians with a state–a proposal many in Palestine now fervently wish their corrupt and vicious leadership had embraced.
Of course, the point of the double standard and moral equivalency is to create the impression that Israel is an illegitimate state, among the world's worst human-rights violators, and thus legitimize the extinction of a state the Arabs have never accepted. The insight of Amos Oz, a liberal Israeli writer, is pertinent. He is haunted, he says, by the observation that before the Holocaust, European graffiti read "Jews to Palestine," only to be transformed in modern times into "Jews out of Palestine." The message to Jews, notes Oz, is, "Don't be here and don't be there. That is, Don't be."
Europe seems to be unconscious of the virulence of the campaign of lies against Israelis in Palestine and throughout the Middle East, where the fact of the Holocaust is routinely described by media and governments as a Jewish invention, and where teachers foment a hatred of Israel and fail even to acknowledge its existence in history texts and maps in the schools subsidized by Europeans!
The unprecedented and unbridled hatred embodied by jihad, sanctioned by authoritarian Arab states, is, of course, a device to divert their populations from the failures of their own societies. But Europe, the killing fields of so many Jews, should know better. It should be the first to understand that Jews, of all people, have the right to defend, even overdefend themselves from the consequences of hate. Europe has a historic duty to redeem the crimes committed on its soil by first recognizing and then repudiating the persecution Jews face today and vigorously defending the collective right of the Jewish state to defend itself from its legions of hate-blinded enemies.
Anything less defames the glories of a European civilization dedicated to the dignity of man, freedom, honor, and decency.
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Lifechanger on 2002-09-30 21:28 ]</font>
May all the words of all these great Men, constructive, peaceful people who have been among us through millennia from all languages and nations, vibrate in our hearts, within us!
May Love really touch our inner world!
May us all become brothers and sisters, whatever the circumstances!
May us become part of a single family forever and ever!
May us return to nature, to the source of peace and understanding!
May this world never go back to suffering and pain!
***
I’m not going to participate any more in this thread, and I regret to have started it. I thought we would desire peace together, some positivity, and I found exactly the opposite. I found the very seed of what I was first talking about… which in fact, reaffirms my believe that war is inside mankind, not outside it. Such a small minority can sometimes do… so much harm! It’s soooo sad!
we was in war 5 years and i was in the croatian army too.
i even didn't know what is pulsar then - about 5 years ago.
and what we have now after war?!
manny people died for what - for WHO!?
dear, lifechanger, you're clever guy, but you don't know what is war.
unfortunately, while people on the both sides thinking on that way - sadam and bush will have enough "meat for guns"
by Bob Dylan
Come you masters of war
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build the big bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks
You that never done nothin'
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it's your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly
Like Judas of old
You lie and deceive
A world war can be won
You want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain
You fasten the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion
As young people's blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud
You've thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
For threatening my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You ain't worth the blood
That runs in your veins
How much do I know
To talk out of turn
You might say that I'm young
You might say I'm unlearned
But there's one thing I know
Though I'm younger than you
Even Jesus would never
Forgive what you do
Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul
And I hope that you die
And your death'll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I'll watch while you're lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I'll stand o'er your grave
'Til I'm sure that you're dead
_________________
<font size=-2>got my mojo working, but it just won't work on you</font>
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: sandrob on 2002-10-01 07:46 ]</font>
lifechanger: you know very little about the European society, and reading the articles (on the opionion-page of USnews) of M. Zuckerman won't help you getting closer to the truth (out of curiosity I read most of his articles available on the website)
Does 'A shameful contagion' then just floods lies? No, I think most of those recent incidents mentioned might have happened. Just like the European press reports about strangely-dressed obscure anti-semitic sects, about arabs getting killed or blacks being dragged behind pickup trucks in the US because they are what they are. However, it's insulting and a *big mistake* to suggest that these incidents are supported by the average European or American!!!!!!!
We *don't* have an historically antisemitic society. Virtually everybody here knows that and acts like that, and we most certainly haven't forgotten those 6 million. I find this EXTREMELY IMPORTANT to point out: WE (vast majority) ARE NOT AGAINST JEWS!!!!!!!!! Just like all other suggestions in the article about 'our' point of view regarding the jews and palestinians are heavily exagerated and taken out of all context, if not completely false. There's just too much mentioned to defend every single claim, although I easily could, but I have better things to do
Therefor I will attempt to express just one example of the european feeling towards the isreal-palestinian conflict. Which, I noticed, has shifted from an almost full pro-israel outlook to a more *nuanced* (and NOT per se anti-semitic!) point of view over the past 10 years. Of course this is my personal experience, please correct me if I'm wrong, fellow-europeans!
Example: UN Resolution 194 (december 1948) has never had much support from israel to say the least... simply put: Israel should leave the area's it *should* leave. Isreal didn't occupate palestinian grounds because of terrorist violence in the first place like it claims nowadays; in fact they did 20 years before the Palestinian 'terrorists' invented throwing stones at the Israeli soldiers on their very own grounds in 1987! Most of us europeans having suffered from a foreign country's occupation, we kind of understand the the anger with the palestinians building up in all those years. Does that mean we support terrorists blowing up schoolbusses? OF COURSE NOT!!!
The same '2-parties-2-views'-sentiment has influenced other aspects of 'the' european opinion on the israel-palestinian conflict, as well as US-vs-middle-east policies, US-supremacy-vs-rest-of-the-world, capitalism-vs-rest-of-the-work, etc etc etc.
In the case of Isreal, I strongly believe this way of reasoning shouldn't be read as maintaining double standards or even as anti-semitism. We just have another opinion, taking facts and factors into consideration that are considered of little or no importance by Isreal and more than half of the USA. Just like you tend to emphasize other things than we do.
I know that in the end the vast majority of the human beings all around the globe just want a good place to live with their beloved, in peace and love instead of spilling energy and blood on conflicts that arise from cultural differences pushed to the extreme for the sake of it.....
Please accept just that as a fact and the world will instantly be a better place!
I am writing a VERY peaceful song at the moment - and sorry if I got carried away. Yes there is no point just jibbering away cutting each other up. (although that's what I do in Philosophy ).
I'll post the song and call it 'peace' when I've finished it !
"May us become part of a single family forever and ever!"
Too much emphasis on being happy. The only reason for accomplishing anything is because we are unhappy or have a hunger or desire for something we don't have, also I would like to point out that happiness is a relative term. It's not a matter of being happy or depressed it is how happy you are, also you can be both happy and sad at the same time. Everyone wants easy answers, that it the problem with this world. There is no such thing as good and evil. First of all I am an atheist so these terms are meaningless to me and secondly they turn the world black and white. There are billions of shades between but nobody wants to see it that way because that makes things way more complicated. One basic flaw in human beings is that if we don't understand something we will either make up an answer (god's way) or we seek someone elses answer (with no proof whatsoever).
If doctor Phil says there are 8 major events in your life that define who you are and if you can write them down you will be happy, people flock to him. He is a guru. I fail to see how each human being can have the exact same number of life altering events. blahhh!
I HATE PEOPLE!
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: braincell on 2002-10-01 09:04 ]</font>
I like the musical approach to "picking sides"....
Springtime for Schröder and Germany
City Journal ^ | September 2002 | Stefan Kanfer
Remember Sir Noel Coward’s wonderful song, “Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to the Germans”?
We must be kind—
And with an open mind
We must endeavor to find
A way—
To let the Germans know that when the war is over
They are not the ones who’ll have to pay.
We must be sweet—
And tactful and discreet
And when they’ve suffered defeat
We mustn’t let
Them feel upset
Or ever get
The feeling that we’re cross with them or hate them.
Our policy must be to reinstate them.
. . . .
Don’t let’s be beastly to the Germans
For you can’t deprive a gangster of his gun
Though they’ve been a little naughty to the Czechs and
Poles and Dutch
But I don’t suppose those countries really minded very much.
Let’s be free with them and share the BBC with them.
We mustn’t prevent them basking in the sun.
Let’s soften their defeat again—and build their bloody fleet again,
But don’t let’s be beastly to the Hun.
Here’s a modern update:
“Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to Gerhard”:
We must be dupes
And with our U.S. troops
We must leap right through the hoops
On hand.
We’ll let the Germans know that when Iraq’s defeated
They are not the ones we’ll reprimand.
We must keep mum,
For Saddam needs a chum,
And Schröder’s rule of thumb
Is “Gratitude
Is platitude.
My attitude
Is win regardless of the costs and quarrels;
Since when did politics have any morals?”
Don’t let’s be beastly to the chancellor
Just because his victory is a canard.
After all, his gaffes are minor, and his party’s even littler
(Just a trifling comparison with Bush and Adolf Hitler).
Let’s get jokes from him, and buy a Volks from him
He’s reliable as a good old St. Bernard
We’ll continue troops across the sea, protecting good old Germany
And never be beastly to Gerhard.
We should be dopes—
And never misanthropes.
We’ll walk the slippery slopes—
What’s more:
We’ll let the Germans see that alles is forgiven
For the things they’ve said about the war.
If they are rude
And sometimes rather crude
It’s just a transient mood.
We mustn’t judge
Or try to nudge
Or hold a grudge.
It’s difficult for them to find enjoyment
In dealing with increasing unemployment.
Don’t let’s be beastly to the chancellor
He is really rather something of a card.
For there’s several million Muslims he has got to satisfy
And the Zionists in Deutschland are in very short supply.
Let’s turn the other cheek again, and all play hide-and-seek again
While thanking him for his utter disregard.
He melded Socialist and Green, and wants Iraqi gasoline,
But let’s not be beastly to Gerhard.
So strange,lot of different expressions about war in this forum.At the end i'm happy to see Sandrob around there.Cause in Croatia they know well what it is "More than lot of us" and Today in 2002 it is one of the most beautiful and cool country in all europe.They are humans (ok i exclude fuckin economic problems ,we have all that around).
At the end all humans are fragile that's why we should work to take care more about others and one day the word war will disseapear of my dictionnary.what a dream hmmm
1 hour ago i read a mail with a simple word of a friend "Take it easy " he know what he say
Latest Gallup poll on how Americans view the major players...the shaken political and economic and panty-waist views of the lefties...well, they'll continue to get more and more bug-eyed as they realize the building rage against those who harbor terrorists around the globe.
The Bush-Dems popularity contest. With a vital debate going on, whom do Americans like better?
Who do Americans view more favorably, George W. Bush or Al Gore? Dick Cheney or Tom Daschle? Colin Powell or Dick Gephardt? Donald Rumsfeld or Hillary Clinton? There are some answers in a newly released Gallup poll, and they are reassuring news for the Bush national-security team as the public debate over Iraq intensifies.
Last week Gallup pollsters read respondents a list of well-known names and asked, "As I read each name, please say if you have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of those people — or it you have never heard of them." This is what they found:
President Bush got a 70 percent favorable rating, versus a 28 percent unfavorable rating (two percent said they had no opinion).
Vice President Cheney received a 65 percent favorable rating, against a 24 percent unfavorable (four percent said they had never heard of him, and seven percent had no opinion).
Secretary of State Powell got an 88 percent favorable rating, versus a six percent unfavorable rating (three percent had never heard of him, and three percent had no opinion).
Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld received a 61 percent favorable rating, against a 19 percent unfavorable rating (ten percent said they had never heard of him, and another ten percent had no opinion).
The survey, taken at a time when both sides in the Iraq debate made significant public statements, produced starkly different results for leading Democrats:
Former Vice President Gore got a 46 percent favorable rating and a 47 percent unfavorable rating (seven percent said they had no opinion).
Senate Majority Leader Daschle got a 39 percent favorable rating and a 26 percent unfavorable rating (16 percent of respondents said they have never heard of him, while another 19 percent said they have no opinion).
House Minority Leader Gephardt received a 40 percent favorable rating and a 23 percent unfavorable rating (20 percent said they have never heard of him, while 17 percent had no opinion).
New York senator Hillary Clinton received a 47 percent favorable rating and a 44 percent unfavorable rating (nine percent had no opinion).
The numbers for the administration's leading figures are so favorable that even their staunchest foreign ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, scored higher than every U.S. Democratic leader. Gallup found that Blair had a 69 percent favorable rating, versus an eight percent unfavorable rating (14 percent had never heard of him and nine percent had no opinion). Whatever it says about how seriously Americans follow politics, the fact that more of them know and like Blair than Daschle or Gephardt is not good news for Democrats.
Finally, the party is not getting much help from its former president, Bill Clinton, who has been a nearly ubiquitous presence during the Iraq debate. The poll found that Clinton received a 47 percent favorable rating and a 49 percent unfavorable rating, with four percent having no opinion.
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: lifechanger on 2002-10-01 14:59 ]</font>
). 
