Muslim Miss USA:

[Pinocchio Liberal 268]

There is no %, only those guilty of the act are guilty, period - that is one of the reasons why we have a justice system that acts against individuals not representatives of a group.

Okay. I guess we will have to wait and see if that logic holds true. Lets hope your right.

[mawilson 2,133]

There is no %, only those guilty of the act are guilty, period - that is one of the reasons why we have a justice system that acts against individuals not representatives of a group.

A whole arsenal of conspiracy law already exists through which the justice system

can act against groups. The fact is, many organizations (such as the Mafia, the

Nazi regime in Germany, various terrorist groups, and even the military) are structured

in a way that makes it impossible (or extremely difficult) to establish individual guilt.

Conspiracy charges are therefore appropriate when only collective guilt can be established.

[Peikko 1,575]

Okay. I guess we will have to wait and see if that logic holds true. Lets hope your right.

Wait and see?

[Peikko 1,575]

A whole arsenal of conspiracy law already exists through which the justice system

can act against groups. The fact is, many organizations (such as the Mafia, the

Nazi regime in Germany, various terrorist groups, and even the military) are structured

in a way that makes it impossible (or extremely difficult) to establish individual guilt.

Conspiracy charges are therefore appropriate when only collective guilt can be established.

The Neurenberg trials charged individuals, not groups. In fact, I do not recall any case where a group was charged rather than an individual - a company, yes but then that is not the same thing at all. There is conspiracy law, but that is always applied to individuals being part of a conspiracy - care to provide examples of what you are referring to?

[Sofiyya 1,687]

Include the former Yugoslavia and the numbers are not quite as disparate as they might otherwise have been.

This is a story, one of many, of ethnic cleansing violence done against Muslims by Christians. Note that the perpetrators are not identified by their religion, but the victims are.

Serb cousins guilty of burning Muslims alive

(CNN) -- A U.N. tribunal convicted two Serb cousins Monday of having burned alive more than 100 Muslims in what the presiding judge called a part of the "wretched history of man's inhumanity to man."

Milan Lukic and Sredoje Lukic were convicted of crimes dating back to the early 1990s, during the bitter ethnic conflict that ravaged the former Yugoslavia.

Milan Lukic organized a group of local paramilitaries with ties to police and the military, sometimes referred to as the "White Eagles" or "Avengers," according to an indictment. Before and during the war, his cousin Sredoje Lukic worked as a policeman before joining the group.

The crimes include two incidents in which Muslim men, women and children were forced into homes that were then set on fire -- and some who tried to escape were shot.

Milan Lukic was found "guilty of persecutions, murder, extermination, cruel treatment and inhumane acts, as crimes against humanity and war crimes, in relation to six discrete incidents," the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) at the Hague said. He was sentenced to life in prison.

Sredoje Lukic was found guilty of "aiding and abetting the commission of the crime of persecutions inhumane acts, murder and cruel treatment." He was sentenced to 30 years in prison.

Their crimes were committed during the 1990s. Bosnia-Herzegovina seceded from Yugoslavia in 1992 and Radovan Karadzic declared himself president of a Bosnian Serb republic.

The Bosnian Serbs, backed by the Serb-dominated Yugoslav military and paramilitary forces, quickly seized control of most of the country and laid siege to Sarajevo, the capital. During the conflict that followed, the Serb forces launched what they called the "ethnic cleansing" of the territories under their control -- the forced displacement and killings of Muslims and Croats.

The cousins' cases are a small part of the caseload the Tribunal has dealt with regarding violations of humanitarian law committed in the former Yugoslavia between 1991 and 2001.

Since its creation the Tribunal has indicted 161 people on charges of serious violations of humanitarian law.

The court found Milan Lukic responsible for the murder of 59 Muslim women, children and elderly men in a house in the town of Visegrad. "On 14 June 1992, the victims were locked into one room of the house which was then set on fire," the tribunal wrote. "Milan Lukic was found to have placed the explosive device into the room, which set the house ablaze. Milan Lukic shot at people trying to escape from the burning house."

Sredoje Lukic "knew what would happen to the victims that he helped herd" into the home, the court wrote in its judgment.

Milan Lukic was also found guilty of the murder of at least 60 Muslim civilians in another house in Visegrad later that same month. The court found that he and others "forced the civilians inside the house, blocked all exits and threw in several explosive devices and petrol, setting the house on fire."

In all, the court found that Milan Lukic "personally killed at least 132 Muslim people."

The defense for both men denied the accusations against them, but the evidence demonstrated their guilt, the court said in its judgment.

"The perpetration by Milan Lukic and Sredoje Lukic of crimes in this case is characterized by a callous and vicious disregard for human life," presiding judge Patrick Robinson said.

"In the all too long, sad and wretched history of man's inhumanity to man, the Pionirska street and Bikavac fires must rank high.

"At the close of the twentieth century, a century marked by war and bloodshed on a colossal scale, these horrific events stand out for the viciousness of the incendiary attack, for the obvious premeditation and calculation that defined it, for the sheer callousness and brutality of herding, trapping and locking the victims in the two houses, thereby rendering them helpless in the ensuing inferno, and for the degree of pain and suffering inflicted on the victims as they were burnt alive."

[Pinocchio Liberal 268]

Wait and see?

I always believed that personal experience was the best teacher. I guess the future of the matter will show us at some point. Did you hear they fired up that nuke plant in Iran?

[Sofiyya 1,687]

NEWS WATCH: Thousands Mourn Srebrenica Massacre Victims, Criticize UN

Sunday, July 11, 2010 (6:49 pm)

SREBRENICA/BUDAPEST (Worthy News)-- Tens of thousands of people have commemorated the 15th anniversary of Europe's worst massacre since World War II in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica. Survivors have expressed frustration over the United Nation's perceived failure to prevent the killing of more than 8,000 Muslims by Serb forces in July, 1995.

In the summer heat, huge crowds of mourning Muslims attended the biggest funeral near the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica.

A hillside was dug out with graves for 775 green-draped coffins of recently identified victims of Europe's largest mass killing since the Holocaust. The youngest victims were two boys, aged 14, who were laid to rest alongside thousands of bodies already in the graveyard.

The funeral at the Potocari Memorial Center was part of the 15th anniversary commemoration of what became known as the Srebrenica massacre.

More than 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed by forces led by Bosnian-Serb General Ratko Mladic who seized Srebrenica on July 11, 1995, during the Balkan conflict that broke up Yugoslavia.

KILLING SPREE

Investigators say the troops went on a week-long killing spree as U.N. troops protecting the town stepped aside. Survivors are angry that Mladic remains at large. But they have also criticized the United Nations for allegedly failing to prevent the massacre.

Before Sunday's ceremony, relatives of two men killed by Serbian forces at Srebrenica filed a complaint with the Netherlands' prosecutor's office against commanders of the U.N. Dutch battalion, Dutchbat, which was based in the Srebrenica enclave.

The complaint charges the Dutchbat commanders with complicity in war crimes, lawyer Liesbeth Zegveld explained to Radio Netherlands Worldwide.

"...There is sufficient evidence for war crimes and genocide in this case. The commanders of Dutchbat have evicted the victims from the Dutchbat compound in Srebrenica on the 13th of July 1995," Zegveld said. "They have forced them to leave a safe environment. It is supported by statements made at the time by the Dutchbat military stating that they feared for the fate of the Muslim men. That they feared a mass execution. That they knew that the men who were evicted from the compound were not arriving in the safe area ... whereas the women and children did arrive."

SOLDIERS OUTNUMBERED

Dutch soldiers have said they were outnumbered and not able to halt the Serbian invasion.

The presidents of all the states that made up the former Yugoslavia were present for the commemoration, including Serbia's President Boris Tadic. Some in the crowd yelled "Bravo, Boris!" others asked "Where is Mladic?"

There was no official seen from the United Nations.

Several Christian aid groups, including the Samaritan's Purse of American evangelist Franklin Graham, have in recent years tried to help survivors and promote reconciliation in a troubled land.

In a statement read for him at the ceremony, U.S. President Barack Obama urged "governments to redouble their efforts" and arrest those responsible for the war crimes at Srebrenica.

Obama called the Srebrenica genocide a "stain on our collective consciousness" after decades of pledges of "never again" following Nazi atrocities, during World War II.

[mawilson 2,133]

The Neurenberg trials charged individuals, not groups. In fact, I do not recall any case where a group was charged rather than an individual - a company, yes but then that is not the same thing at all. There is conspiracy law, but that is always applied to individuals being part of a conspiracy - care to provide examples of what you are referring to?

No, you are correct, of course - you can't charge a "group" with a crime, only a person.

[Peikko 1,575]

I always believed that personal experience was the best teacher. I guess the future of the matter will show us at some point. Did you hear they fired up that nuke plant in Iran?

Iran is Iran and Britain and the US have spent years poking that particular hornets nest. I doubt it will end in war, but the extremists currently in government are certainly dangerous. There are other countries that are volatile and threatening, North Korea for example.

[Sofiyya 1,687]

Grisly clues in Bosnia's largest mass grave

By Russ Baker, Special to The Christian Science Monitor / September 8, 2003

NEAR MEMICI, BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA

High atop Crni Vrh (Black Peak), in a vast clearing across the road from a garbage dump, an earthmover is scooping. At first glance, it looks like preparations for a large swimming pool. But a closer look reveals men and women working on their hands and knees, and they are not construction laborers.

This site, where excavations began in late July, is 44 yards by 13 yards - and more than 4 yards deep - making it physically the largest grave site found in Bosnia and Herzegovina since the end of the 1992-1995 war here.

While it is as yet uncertain how many victims it may contain, the site is already significant in another way: The bodies buried here were moved from elsewhere to this remote site - apparently to make evidence of genocide harder to find. "We believe this is a secondary mass grave," says Sasa Stjepanovic, of the Sarajevo-based International Commission on Missing Persons, which on a recent day had three anthropologists and two archeologists combing the dirt at Crni Vrh.

Cumulatively, this site near the village of Memici and 16 other recent, smaller discoveries in the area demonstrate a coordinated reburial effort that could not have gone on without high-level approval. As such, they could have ramifications in the ongoing trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic in The Hague, and possible future trials of the fugitive Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and his general, Ratko Mladic. All three have repeatedly denied personal knowledge or responsibility for such war crimes. That line will now be even tougher to maintain, since the victims come largely from villages that were under control of Milosevic's Yugoslav National Army and their allies under Karadzic and Mladic.

The discoveries also underline the failure, eight years after the war's end, of the Bosnian Serb and Serbian authorities and public to openly acknowledge what happened here. "As has happened in cases before, they will quietly let these dark crimes pass, with silence from institutions - but the public here will also be silent," says Branko Todorovic, president of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights of Republika Srpska.

More than 200,000, most of them civilians, died in the Bosnian war. The majority came from areas that were ethnically "cleansed" of Muslims and are now part of the Republika Srpska (the Bosnian Serb Republic), the Serbian enclave that shares an uneasy peace with the Muslim-Croat Bosnian Federation. Of 30,000 people reported missing at the war's end, about a quarter have been exhumed, many identified through DNA comparison with surviving relatives.

Many victims' relatives say they won't be at peace until Karadzic and Mladic, thought to be the slaughter's key architects, are in custody. Eight years after being indicted by The Hague war crimes tribunal, they're still on the run, and few observers believe that they'll be captured soon.

Hajrudin Mujanovic, deputy prosecutor of Tuzla area, says that authorities were directed to Crni Vrh by a witness to the reburial operation. Although most of the victims' identity papers had been removed, overlooked documents identified them as being from around Zvornik, once a majority-Muslim city on the banks of the Drina River dividing Bosnia and Serbia.

Every few days, Ahmed Grahic, chairman of the Association for Prisoners and Missing Persons in Bosnia and Herzegovina, comes to Crni Vrh, hoping to turn up information about his father and two brothers. In May 1992, the Yugoslav army forced the residents of villages near Zvornik into a mass march. The men deemed to be of fighting age were driven to a school workshop, where they were jammed in. Many were killed or died in the crowded, airless quarters. The survivors were put on buses and taken elsewhere. "From that day, we've been looking for them," Grahic says. "The government of Republika Srpska never tried to help us. They just tried to cover up the crimes."

The bodies at Crni Vrh are thought to have been moved from their initial resting places in 1995 or early 1996. Some of the victims reburied there were placed in body bags of the Yugoslav National Army - an efficient solution but a strange choice for those intent on claiming no involvement of Serbia in the atrocities. Because the bags were numbered, "there had to be a list," Mr. Mujanovic says.

One foreign investigator says he expects the site to yield perhaps 300 bodies, but Amor Masovic, co-chair of the Bosnian Federal Commission for Tracing Missing Persons, predicted that more than 500 bodies would be found, thereby topping the largest previous find of 424 victims. Other investigators have said that as many as 700 might be found. Mr. Masovic is scheduled to testify at Milosevic's trial, and says he expects to be asked about Crni Vrh.

The news of such discoveries is being reported by state television and independent media in Republika Srpska. But down the hill, in Zvornik, the townspeople aren't talking. A quick sampling of residents found eerily identical quick responses that "we don't know anything." Zvornik now is virtually all-Serb, although wary Muslim residents are gradually returning to the area with the encouragement and assistance of the international community.

At a local radio station, Radio Osvit, one of the few independent news media in this part of Republika Srpska, director Zorana Petkovic, talked about the difficulty of coming to terms with what went on here. "A lot of people are guilty, and a lot of people feel guilty," she says. "A great number of people didn't have the means to stand up to it."

Ms. Petkovic says, though, that most Serbian civilians didn't know what was being done, and in their frustration tune out such news and focus instead on what they believe is anti-Serb bias in underreporting of atrocities committed by Muslims. That's typical of a continuing problem: an effort to create equivalency out of a conflict in which innocent people of all ethnicities died, but the vast majority were Muslims slaughtered in an organized effort.

"Until the international community defines precisely what happened from 1992-1995, there cannot be an awakening of the Serbian people," says Masovic.

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

It isn't even a matter of punishment. It is a matter of sensitivity. Do some basic research and see how many mosques are in the 20 sq mile area around the twin towers footprints.

We need to be sensitive, not PC about this matter. No one will miss any "mosque time" by not having it built near ground zero.

ps, A little bird told me that Islam loves to build mosques on land that they consider "conquered."

Nothing wrong with that. Just don't need a conquering reminder near ground zero.

Sensitivity tells you what is fair in this case. If you can't see it, then you don't have it, either.

Again. It's only insensitive if you are making an assumption that Islam and mosques are synonymous with 9/11, they are not.

If you are saying that the mosque should not be built because of that then you are essentially endorsing an act of collective punishment. Apparently a few people object to this being referred to as bigotry, but that's what it clearly is.

[Sofiyya 1,687]

what's your point? None of those businesses/corporations employees/stockholders made claim in the name of the business to blow up two buildings and lead to the destruction of several more.

Neither did the Muslims associated with the proposed community center, but they are being told that they are not wanted in the neighborhood because it's sensitive "hallowed ground". Does the area look like it's being treated as hallowed ground? Not just no, hell no.