No, you were just proving to the world that your emotions routinely override your brain. You demonstrate what I criticize some of doing. How some respond because their emotions are more important than logical thought. Thank you for demonstrating my point.

Clearly I did not dispute that as your point. I simply demonstrated the irony in your post. You criticize one for insulting while doing same in your own post.

You've only proven that you're a moron. When you get back to reality, let me know.

I have a paper on The Awakening that I need to crap out in the next hour and a half, but I was reading an <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0198810784/qid=1106073268/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/102-1987600-2352128?v=glance&s=books&n=507846">interesting book</a> about the life of Muhammad last night, and there was an offhand comment about the troubles of the middle east.

Essentially, before Islam came around, the desert was populated by nomadic tribes. They didn't have a code of ethics, or any sense of morality; they had honor, and a firm grasp of "what goes around, comes around." Murder was prevented within the tribe by the absolute rule of the chief/mob justice against anybody who can't settle a scuffle properly. Murder between tribes was kept in relative check by limited proximity and blood debts--the whole Hammurabi "eye for an eye" thing. If you killed a member of another tribe, you could count on that tribe killing parts of your tribe.

So the guy's saying something or other about how this works into the intricate politics of Muhammad's career, particularly about the idea of paying tribute for protection (wherein a more powerful group is honorbound to perform the retribution-killings for you, allowing an ethnic or religious or just smaller tribe to pay a modest sum for relatively violence-free living), and he offhandedly notes that part of the troubles in the middle east today is that this system has been removed and not been replaced. We have these countries, which were sort of arbitrarily grouped without much regard for ethnic groups or history (etc) by the colonists, and they're somehow supposed to be kept in check by the western higher authority of a punitive law enforcement agency. Except because that's antithetical to their traditional approach to life, they can't make it work well for them. And in the mean time there's no effective system.

I'm not really sure where I'm going with this, but it struck me as an interesting take on the problem. That maybe the "progress" we're bringing (e.g. western ideas of justice) is actually a step backwards, because it's removed a perhaps less "sanitized" if functional system without putting in place any effective alternative. Which is of course a very broad statement that anybody could have come up with ("oh, yeah, the middle east is fucked up"), so I'm not sure why I'm posting it.

But it's a very interesting, and remarkably secular, book about the early history of Islam.

(it should be noted that my geographic sense of the middle east is very, very vague, and I'm sort of lumping it all together as one big mess. And that I really didn't read anything in this thread aside from the first half of the first post, and a few nuggets of vitriol in the middle.)

ROFL and other acronyms indicating amusment.

(high five to you, radar, for excellent topical cleverness)

Can it explain or predict, for example, an Islam world contempt of the book Satanic Verses? Does it deal with the historic Islamic tolerance of other religions verses the extremist (Muslim Brotherhood) concept of religious purity?

I stated I wasn't being insulting, and you don't dispute that.

Then you state I was insulting in my post.


Uh, so do you dispute it or don't you? I'm getting confused here.....

Oh yeah, and you still haven't answered the question. You're very good at not answering questions, then smokescreening to a side issue.

Quote:
Oh yeah, and you still haven't answered the question. You're very good at not answering questions, then smokescreening to a side issue.

So, what did everybody have for supper last night?

Raw flesh. :hafucking

No offence to you Radar, but comparing anti-zionism to saying that terrorist action is justified is quite frankly, a stupidly ignorant claim.

Israel is not Judiaism. Israel is Zionism. Judiaism is Jews. Israel, while having a population that is a majority Jewish, is Zionism. Just as a country that has a majority Islamic population yet clearly has the view of the Quran distorted is not Islam.

Who gave Israel the right to settle on that land? Who gave them the right to try and force the Palistinians out of that land?

Sorry, but the very few self-hating Jews who are anti-Zionism don't speak for the other 90%+ who do support it. Zionism is Jewish.

Who gave Israel the right to settle on that land? The rightful owners....the UK in 1948, and Israel won more land in 1967 when they were attacked without cause. If you claim the UK didn't legitimately own the land because it was taken by force, then we'd have to go back until someone didn't own the land by force which was when Israel owned it!

The Palestinians were squatters, and NEVER EVER EVER EVER EVER owned a single square inch of land before 1948. The rightful owner of land does have the right to force out squatters, even if those squatters have built buildings.

Israel hasn't stolen any land ever.

So I take it the exile from Egypt, which brought the Israelis to the present day Israel, and led to the subsequent conquest of the surronding nations, isn't taking land from a different owner? What my point here is, who decided that the Israelis had the right to take the land away from the original settlers of that land? The land they currently occupied was settled by other people before they got there, they fought and killed them for that land.

Israel hasn't ever taken land in conquest. The only time Israel uses violence is in its own defense. Israelis WERE the original settlers of that land. The land they currently occupy was occupied by squatters who NEVER EVER OWNED THE LAND IN THE HISTORY OF THE PLANET EARTH, and the only land Israel has that wasn't given to them by its rightful owner (the UK) was the land they won in a war they didn't start when Egypt, the Palestinians, and several other Arab nations attacked them without provocation in 1967.

Not one speck of land was ever taken by conquest, or theft by Israel.

So are you choosing to ignore the conquest in the old testament or are you simply not familiar with it? If that isn't taking land, I don't know what is...

I'm curious, since I'm new to these boards. How come you can't be against zionist policies and the vile, dictatorial administrations of some of the other middle eastern nations?