Pakistan disabled girl arrested for blasphemy

[Confused 2 94]

No, most Muslim terrorists are not committing their acts because of religion; they are fighting against what they perceive as foreign occupation of their land. According to the landmark study of suicide terrorism by Robert A. Pape, who studied every single suicide terror attack from 1980 to early 2004:

Hmmmmm, really??? You must believe every person in this world (non-muslim) to be a complete idiot to actually not when you said that....

As for your knowledge base WOM, you are obviously biased (so am I actually, because I am done with mumbai blasts, suicide bombers, 9/11, taliban, Al Queda, training camps etc etc) so you cannot convince me and a lot of others who see things or are beginning to see them that Peace & tolerance are probably not even known to you know whos.

Edited September 10, 2012 by Confused 2

[Sofiyya 1,687]

I have been in the US military. Not an overtly Christian atmosphere for sure. We darn sure don't have mandatory daily prayer.

I live near the Air Force Academy in CO Springs, Colorado. There is a definitively Christian atmosphere here, proselytizing and trying to get cadets to convert, so much so that there is constant complaining about it.

The Christian right also infiltrated the military training to advocate against Islam.

I am not going to keep arguing with you. Most Islamic countries have harsh laws, suppress women, and are intolerant of other views. Islam supports a world wide culture that supports radicalism or it would not be possible for it exist. If the good Muslims you speak of vastly outnumbered the bad Muslims and despised them, the bad Muslims would not have so much influence. Also your argument that the Islamic Brotherhood is not a fundamentalist radical orgnization is laughable. Look up Fundamental Islam on Wikipedia and look at the first paragraph.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_fundamentalism

If I looked up "Christian fundamentalism" or "Jewish fundamentalism" on Wikipedia (a sorry site for truth), I wouldn't get a good impression of either. Is that the best you can do? It's certainly not good debating. No wonder you want to give up.

If I used terms like "most White people", "most Christians", most Americans" to make a negative point, it would be rejected for being 1. too general, 2. too stereotypical, 3. too ignorant. All three apply to your generalizations, stereotypes and ignorant assertions.

The "bad Muslims" certainly do not outnumber the "good Muslims" because, if they did, we'd all be in big trouble. You and people like you who take their cues from the "bad Muslims" are responsible for their undue influence, not us.

I have never before heard many of these details. I have long known that Israel did not have clean hands where it came to issues with the palestinians but never knew how bad. I would like to hear what response the Israel supporters on here can make to this. Is all of this really true?

Have you heard about Zionist terrorism and how the leaders who killed the most people are now the heroes of Israel?

[Sofiyya 1,687]

Hmmmmm, really??? You must believe every person in this world (non-muslim) to be a complete idiot to actually not when you said that....

As for your knowledge base WOM, you are obviously biased (so am I actually, because I am done with mumbai blasts, suicide bombers, 9/11, taliban, Al Queda, training camps etc etc) so you cannot convince me and a lot of others who see things or are beginning to see them that Peace & tolerance are probably not even known to you know whos.

Considering that what they're doing is most often in contradiction to the religion, it is a truthful claim. If that's not so, then bride burning and abuse of women is done with the consent of Hinduism (which is a very violent religion). It must be, since so many Hindus do it.

[Sofiyya 1,687]

Interesting, India's Hindus use pro-Hinduism law to persecute Christians

India: Hindu radicals use the law to persecute Christians in Andhra Pradesh

The Indian state does not have any anti-conversion law, but enforces three ordinances that ban non-Hindus from proselytising near Hindu temples. A Pentecostal clergyman could go to jail because of calendars found in his possession. Meanwhile, a court convicts 11 Christians on forced conversion

By Asia News Thursday, April 19, 2012

Mumbai - Even without anti-conversion laws, ultranationalist Hindus have a legal tool to persecute Christians, said Sajan George, president of the Global Council of Indian Christians (GCIC), namely the Worship or Prayer (Prohibition) Ordinance of 2007, which empowers the State to prohibit propagation of other religions in particular places of worship or prayer than the religion traditionally practiced there. Recently, a group of activists from the Rashtriya Sawayamsevak Sangh (RSS) used it to demand the arrest of Rev Ahron, a Pentecostal pastor accused of trying to convert Hindus near the Hindu temple in the city of Dharmapuri.

On Monday, the clergyman was visiting the city to meet Kople Easwar, a member of the state's legislative assembly. As he waited for his friend, a group of Hindu radicals saw him and the pocket calendars he carried.

After attacking him, they forced him to hand over the calendars and dragged him to a police station, where they filed a complaint against him on the basis of Government Order 746, which bans propaganda by other religions near the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams temple and 19 other Hindu temples across the country.

For the GCIC president, these ordinance and orders "violate rights protected by the Indian constitution." For this reason, the "chief minister of Andhra Pradesh should change them."

On a related story, a local court convicted 11 Christians from the village of Kyatamballi on the basis of these rules on charges of forced conversions that go back to 2007.

Two of the accused received a 20-month sentence and 5,000-rupees (US$ 100) fine. The other nine were given a 12-month sentence and a 2,000-rupee fine (US$ 45) each.

[The Nature Boy 4,224]

Considering that what they're doing is most often in contradiction to the religion, it is a truthful claim. If that's not so, then bride burning and abuse of women is done with the consent of Hinduism (which is a very violent religion). It must be, since so many Hindus do it.

Ok you win. All Muslims are peace loving beatniks. They hate violence and want equal rights for women and more tolerance for other religion in their countries. 9-11 was a plot between the Saudi royal family and George Bush.

[Sofiyya 1,687]

Ok you win. All Muslims are peace loving beatniks. They hate violence and want equal rights for women and more tolerance for other religion in their countries. 9-11 was a plot between the Saudi royal family and George Bush.

If you're not interested in an honest discussion, just say so.

[웃 910]

The number of times a religious person has killed in the name of <insert Imaginary Friend> = 10s of billions

The number of times an atheist killed in the name of <insert Imaginary Friend> = 0

I win.

[james&olya 1,121]

Have you heard about Zionist terrorism and how the leaders who killed the most people are now the heroes of Israel?

That much, yes, of course. But like most political argument these days it gets reduced to stupid sound bites devoid of context and background!

[The Nature Boy 4,224]

If you're not interested in an honest discussion, just say so.

No it's just pointless in having a discussion with someone who is telling most Muslims hate the oppression of woman and the intolerance of other religions but on the flip side it is common practice in almost all Muslim countries.

[Boiler 45,517]

Almost?

[The Nature Boy 4,224]

Almost?

Seems like there is one of those Muslim countries on an island somewhere that does not execute women for getting raped.

[PalestineMyHeart 1,897]

Why we are in gaza now

Israel is in gaza now for the simple reason of stopping the rockets and achieving a ceasefire that will last for a long time. it has started with a 6 month quiet period in which over 400 rockets were fired on israel from gaza with no retaliation.

there is no denying that the human situation in gaza sucks. Israel tries to aid in allowing food shipments, money and international aid through passages, but at the end of the day, right now, it is trying to defend itself. nothing more, and nothing less. with force, yes. because nothing else before that has worked.

My link

First of all, most of the people of Gaza are refugees - Palestinian families driven from their homes by Zionist terror gangs and militias in 1947-1948, and then again by the Israeli army in 1967. Some of them live within sight of their homes and property, now seized by Israel. The tiny Gaza Strip, with 1.6 million people jammed into 146 square miles (about 25 miles long by 5 to 7 miles wide) is now the most crowded place in the world.

The transformation of Gaza into what it is today - the world’s largest concentration camp - began decades ago, long before there was a Hamas or any rockets. After the 1967 occupation, Israel put stringent restrictions on Gaza’s exports and commercial production. It was a calculated move to turn the Gaza Strip into a captive market, totally dependent on Israeli products, and a cheap labor pool dependent on work in or for Israel. The Israeli term for it was “economic warfare.” It later built a series of fences around the Strip, so that all entry or exit could be controlled by Israel (even along the Egyptian border - Israel controlled those checkpoints as well.)

Hamas developed in the 1990s, and Israel actually helped fund and support it in the early days, thinking that it would serve as a rival to Yasser Arafat’s Fatah and help keep the Palestinians divided. Israel also liked the fact that Hamas was a Muslim organization (Fatah was secular) because that fed into Israel’s propaganda that the conflict was a religious one of Muslim vs. Jew, rather than what it is: a conflict over Israel’s ethnic cleansing, and its illegal occupation and annexation of Palestinian territory.

In 2005, Ariel Sharon (Likud) decided to unilaterally “disengage” from Gaza, pulling Israel’s 8000 settlers out of Gaza, and destroying the homes and farms it left behind. Sharon presented this withdrawal to the world as a “painful concession” in the interest of peace. In reality, it was a show designed to strengthen Israel’s control of the West Bank. “See - we gave up Gaza. Now we just want to keep these ever-expanding settlements in the West Bank.“ The few thousand illegal settlers in Gaza were always a drop in the bucket compared to the number Israel has in the West Bank, which now total more than half a million.

The world was treated to compelling images of tearful Israeli settlers leaving Gaza; however, quite a few of them were actually extremists from the illegal West Bank settlements of Kiryat Arba, etc., arriving on the scene in the final days to perform for the TV cameras.

After the "disengagement," Israel promptly moved many of the Gaza settlers, along with tens of thousands more, into illegal settlements in the West Bank.

Once its settlers were cleared out from Gaza, Israel further tightened the closures on the Strip and began to attack much more forcefully, now able to terrorize the inhabitants with the full might of its considerable arsenal, without any worries of hitting their own people. Like shooting fish in a barrel.

You‘ve heard the hasbara: “See - we gave up Gaza. And now all we get are rockets in return.”

In fact, Israel began tormenting Gaza long before Hamas existed, and has continued tormenting them. Israel's plan is to continue until all the Palestinians in Gaza can be squeezed out into Egypt or points beyond - then Israel will immediately annex the territory. With feeble response from the international community, Hamas was the only thing standing in its way.

So on to Hamas. In the first half of the 2000s, Hamas started making the transformation from militant resistance group to more of a mainstream political party, and began to run for legislative offices. It moderated its policies, ending suicide bombings, and making moves toward acceptance of a two-state solution based on the pre-1967 armistice lines (the so-called “Green Line,” the borders recognized by the international community.)

In 2006, Hamas swept to a political majority in the Palestinian legislature, in an election certified as free and fair by international observers - it was even called the most democratic election in the Arab world. U.S. President George W. Bush had publicly welcomed Hamas’ participation in the campaign phase, even though he had been advised by all experts on all sides that Hamas would likely win, in a landslide. And that’s exactly what happened.

After a short stunned pause, the U.S. (along with/led by Israel) threw a temper tantrum, refusing to recognize the new government, and then tried to back a covert coup in Gaza to be carried out by the losers (Fatah.) Israel immediately launched operations to kidnap and imprision more than 60 elected Hamas members of the legislature in the West Bank. The attempted coup in Gaza was quickly stamped out by Hamas, but Fatah was able to seize control of the legislature in the West Bank and despite losing the election, was promptly recognized by the U.S. and Israel as the legitimate government of the Palestinians.

Since then, you’ve heard non-stop noise from Israel demonizing Hamas as simply a terror group, and the U.S. and E.U. joined Israel in trying to strangle Hamas by withholding Palestinians’ own tax revenues as well as foreign aid, knowing full well it would throw the 1.6 million people living in the Gaza Strip into an even worse humanitarian crisis.

What Israel really doesn’t like about Hamas is not about the rockets, which are a minor irritation that have killed far fewer people per year than traffic accidents in Israel (about 41 people since 2001, some of whom are soldiers, and quite a few of whom are actually Palestinian citizens of Israel - "Israeli Arabs.") What Israel really can't stand is that Hamas won’t agree to Israel’s terms - that Israel get to keep the illegal settlements in the West Bank, keep control of a huge swath of the West Bank along the Jordan border, keep control of Palestine’s airspace and coast, keep control of its water resources, etc. etc. This is what Israel cannot abide in any Palestinian government.

Israel had many cease-fires with Hamas in Gaza; Israel is almost always the first to break them. And ultimately, it was Israel that broke the cease-fire in November 2008, on purpose, in order to launch Cast Lead, which it had planned in advance for more than six months. This was supposed to be the final extermination of Hamas, no matter what the cost in Palestinian civilian lives. It also served as a price-tag operation, to assuage Israel’s wounded pride about the utter failure of its war against Hezbollah in 2006. In an assault that lasted 22 days, Israel slaughtered more than 1400 Palestinians in Gaza, including more than 350 children. But it completely failed to oust Hamas.

This is a longer article about what Israel has done to Gaza written by Avi Shlaim, an Oxford professor of international relations who served in the Israeli army. It’s a good read for anyone who has heard Israel's side, but would like to hear the other side of the story - and not just from me.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/07/gaza-israel-palestine

There is a lot of mis and dis information running around the web right now.

And he's doing his part to add to it. Another hasbarist.

I hope that the facts can help sort things out. I hope that I had done justice to the facts.

Before writing this, I did some fact checking with a well known middle-east researcher before publishing this, and will update this post on problems or important comments.

Bwahahahaa most of his article is devoid of facts - it's packed with misrepresentation and outright falsehoods.

And if the so-called researcher that he supposedly checked with is so “well known,” why didn’t he even name him ?

Edited September 10, 2012 by wife_of_mahmoud

[PalestineMyHeart 1,897]

My link

The size of israel

Israel is Tiny. Seriously. Much smaller than California, Norway or Argentina (see more places to compare). I can take my car and drive from north to south in about 6-8 hours of non stop driving. Compare israel to the size of its surrounding countries and you begin to see what “small and surrounded with enemies” feels like. Jews have literally nowhere else to go. Arabs have lots and lots. yet they insist that Israel be destroyed. And Israel still has to defend itself from many threats all around. and now, also from within.

What a bunch of hooey.

Lebanon is even smaller than Israel, and has an extremely hostile neighbor to its south (Israel) which has invaded it repeatedly and killed tens of thousands of its people, and which continues to violate its airspace with drones and make threats against it. Does Lebanon get to justify invading Israel, slaughtering tens of thousands of Israelis, and slicing off some of its territory "for security" ??

Israel accepted its borders when it announced the establishment of its state. However, its own leaders are on record saying they would accept those borders only for the time being, but then move to expand the state later. And that's exactly what they have done or tried to do at every opportunity.

The reason Israel has diplomatic problems with many of its neighbors is because of Israel's continuing agressive behavior - it has repeatedly invaded its neighbors, occupied their lands, moved its colonists into those occupied lands, and then claimed to have the right to annex their territory.

The scary yellow on the maps is another Shell Game. What countries on that map "insist that Israel be destroyed" ?? I know plenty that have criticized Israel's government, but that's a different thing - and Israel criticizes neighboring governments all the time.

And some of those scary yellow countries already recognize and have full diplomatic relations with Israel - such as its next-door neighbors Egypt and Jordan. Morocco and South Sudan, as well as Turkey (in the vicinity, but not pictured in the map) also recognize Israel and have diplomatic relations.

Just because one state is small and others are bigger does not justify the small state stealing territory or oppressing people of the larger states. Bill Gates has a massive fortune and I don't - does that give me the right to slice off a piece of his house, move into it, and then whine about how he's a big meanie for not wanting to let me keep what I stole ? "I mean he has so much, and I have so little - not to mention it's very frightening to me to think he might want to try to get his stuff back. Only a bigot would deny me the right to have a little piece of his stuff, right ???"

The "nowhere else to go" line is another red herring - many immigrants choose to go to Israel, coming from first-world countries such as the U.S., Great Britain, France, Germany, or Australia, and on and on, where they and their families were neither persecuted nor oppressed (at least not within the past 6+ decades, in the case of Germany.) A lot of these Israelis keep their dual passports, and even spend most of their time residing in those other countries.

No country is demanding that Israelis leave Israel; they are demanding that Israel end its illegal occupation and colonization of the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan (which belongs to Syria) and Shebaa Farms (which belongs to Lebanon.) The insinuation that Palestinians can just go somewhere else because "look at all the land the Arabs have" is the equivalent of the insinuation that Israelis can just go somewhere else, because "look at all the land Europe and the U.S. have."

And don't you love the way the map shows the West Bank and Gaza as if they are part of Israel.

Edited September 10, 2012 by wife_of_mahmoud

[Boiler 45,517]

What has this to do with Blasphamy?

?

[PalestineMyHeart 1,897]

You say only 60 say they are Christian but then claim more than 80% are. Your not being honest. I have been in the US military. Not an overtly Christian atmosphere for sure. We darn sure don't have mandatory daily prayer.

You need to read more carefully. This is what I said (links are there in case you want to go back and read it in the original):

According to a 2008 U.S. Department of Defense survey of active-duty military, 22% self-identify as evangelical or Pentecostal, 19% self-identify as Roman Catholics, 20% self-identify as simply "Christian." That's 63%. Another 20% self-identify as "no religious preference," but most of these are nondenominational Christians - only .5% call themselves "atheist." A even smaller number self-identify as Muslim or Jewish. So you're looking at more than 80% Christian (those who definitely believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ)

63% denominational Christians plus 20% who are mostly nondenominational Christians (who do not identify as atheists, Muslims are Jews) = 80+%.

I never made any claims about the U.S. military having "mandatory daily prayer" - that is completely beside the point, which was how many members of the U.S. military are Christians. Even if you grudgingly accept the 63% who are self-identify as Christians rather than "no preference," it is still far more than your guess of "less than half."

I am not going to keep arguing with you. Most Islamic countries have harsh laws, suppress women, and are intolerant of other views. Islam supports a world wide culture that supports radicalism or it would not be possible for it exist. If the good Muslims you speak of vastly outnumbered the bad Muslims and despised them, the bad Muslims would not have so much influence. Also your argument that the Islamic Brotherhood is not a fundamentalist radical orgnization is laughable. Look up Fundamental Islam on Wikipedia and look at the first paragraph.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_fundamentalism

Well you're describing Pakistan and Saudi Arabia again, but are you describing "most" Muslim countries, or Islam ? No.

And again, you need to read more carefully. I didn't say "the Islamic Brotherhood is not a fundamentalist radical organization." (I am assuming you mean the Muslim Brotherhood, which is what we were talking about.) This is what I said - that the MB is not "the granddaddy of al-Qaeda," which was the claim you had made:

As far as the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda - although they were both influenced by Sayyid Qutb, the MB is not connected to AQ; in fact, they hate each other. Al-Qaeda's ideology is that its version of Islam overrules everything, including democracy. The Muslim Brotherhood accepts the legitimacy of civil society and democratic elections, and (after some members engaged in violence against Egyptian government repression in '50s and '60s) it renounced terror and violence back in the 1970's, in an agreement with Anwar Sadat.

For these reasons and more, the Muslim Brotherhood considers al-Qaeda to be terrorists, and has condemned the 9/11 attacks. In return, al-Qaeda considers the Muslim Brotherhood to be traitors and unbelievers, and has condemned the Brotherhood.

Moving on...

The 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran is seen by Western scholars as a political success of Islamic fundamentalism. Economist Eli Berman argues that Radical Islam is a better term for many post-1920s movements starting with the Muslim Brotherhood, because these movements are seen to practice "unprecedented extremism", thus not qualifying as return to historic fundamentals.^[4]

LOL. So Eli Berman wants to call them "radicals" because they are "extremists." In fact, all extremists are radicals. But not all radicals are extremists (unless you consider feminists, environmentalists, vegetarians, etc. to be "extremists." Maybe you do.)

What has this to do with Blasphamy?

?

I'm not the one who brought it all up. You didn't mind then, but you sure mind when it gets answered.