Scene After IDF Attack In Gaza 1/1/09

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- Mohammed's role in Islam I can't speak to with certainty; I think religion being a personal matter is a personal interpretation for individual muslims. - zaron

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FYI: The words used are nikah and dukah for the events that occur at 6 and 9 respectively. Now, nikah which is the equivalent of an engagement or in Islam a legal binding promise to be in state of marriage and dukah is when the woman moves into the man's house and becomes his wife. Intercourse may or may not happen but it is rarely documented in religious texts. - zaron.

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This is quite interesting. I would be mildly surprised if you were fluent in Arabic. (Given that you don't know too much about Muhammad's role in Islam.) It's possible that you are though - after all I don't know you or your background, any more than you know mine. (So you can drop the asinine comments about me getting out more & befriending more Muslims. If you actually knew me, you'd know how silly that remark was.) It's worth pointing out though that your assertion that the translation of the hadith that I used did not say that Muhammad and Aisha's marriage was consummated. Clearly, as I showed, that is precisely what it did say. The hadith is regarded as reliable, the institution who have made it available to the public can hardly be accused of providing a biased translation, since they appear to want to help bring people of different faiths together, and the fellow who carried out the actual translation is hugely qualified and well respected. I provided a link to his "CV" earlier. Check it out. Against that we have you saying, well no they're wrong. So there.

Hardly a compelling argument, that. Care to try again?

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The events of the last 60 years have a direct causal link to what happens today and you can see the continuous thread of events that have led to what happens today that is why these events are relevant. - zaron

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Talking of the last 60 years, it is my understanding that after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, Arab governments criticised Israel for not helping Palestinian refugees, but at the same time Arab governments did not grant refugees citizenship, provide them with new homes, or provide funds to improve conditions in refugee camps. I believe I'm correct in saying that in 1957, at a Refugee Conference in Syria, a resolution was passed saying that "Any discussion aimed at a solution of the Palestine problem which will not be based on ensuring the refugees' right to annihilate Israel will be regarded as a desecration of the Arab people and an act of treason." The Arab League actually barred Arab states from granting citizenship to Palestinian refugees - or their descendants. Khalid al-Azm, the Syrian Prime Minister, wrote in 1973, "Since 1948 it is we who demanded the return of the refugees [..] while it is we who made them leave [..] We brought disaster upon [..] Arab refugees by inviting them and bringing pressure to bear upon them to leave. [..] We have rendered them dispossessed [..] We have accustomed them to begging [..] We have participated in lowering their moral and social level [..] all this in the service of political purposes." Now I have not read Khalid al-Azm's memoirs, so I cannot tell if those comments of his are taken out of context. Nevertheless, the bare facts behind his statements seem to be clear enough. King Hussein of Jordan has also apparently said that the Arab nations have used Palestianian refugees "for selfish political purposes." He described this behaviour as "criminal." (Sources: Wikipedia: Palestinian refugees - Treatment in Arab countries; Dershowitz, "The Case for Israel", John Wiley & Sons, pp. 87-88.)

One book I have read is the Tory MP Michael Gove's "Celsius 7/7." In it he says: "It is important to recall, and now almost always forgotten, that the land Israel occupied (after 1967) was not, in any formal, legal, internationally recognised sense, Palestinian. It was Syrian, Jordanian and Egyptian territory. And what was striking about the people who lived on that territory, who were thought of as Palestinian, is the way they were treated between 1948 and 1967 by all Israel's neighbours. They were herded into, and kept pinned up inside, refugee camps. [..]

While Arab countries busied themselves expelling Jews after 1948, and Israel made enormous efforts to absorb every Jewish arrival fully into Israeli life, those same Arab nations that were so anxious to make themselves Judenfrei did next to nothing to provide their Arab brothers with a stable footing. Quite the opposite. [..]

It is striking [..] that no pressure was placed on Jordan, Egypt or any other Arab nation to help construct the institutions of Palestinian statehood during the long years when they occupied what has come to be considered Palestinian national territory. It is only following the occupation of that land by Israel that it has become considered imperative to transform that territory into a new, and distinct, Palestinian state.

What this melancholy tale of Palestinian neglect at the hands of Arab states demonstrates is the hypocrisy at the heart of so much Arab propoganda against Israel, propaganda that much of the world is inclined to take at face value. The leaders of Arab states, none of them until very recently with even the slightest claim to be called democrats, have exploited the plight of the Palestinian people as a way of demonizing Israel, and creating a force to drive Israelis into the sea.

If it were true that solidarity with the Palestinians was the primary political force motivating feeling among both Arab elites and Arab peoples, then we would have seen investment pour into building up schools, hospitals and democratic structures in the Palestinian territories during those periods when they were either under the control of Israel's neighbours or of Yasser Arafat's PA leadership. Which, of course, never happened. Money certainly has flowed from other Arab, and indeed Islamic states, into the Palestinian territories over the years. That cash has not been sent to build a state, but to destroy one.

The reason why Israel is hated by the rulers of so many Arab states, by the leaders of so many terrorist organisations, and especially by the world's Islamists, is not because of any specific crime against the Palestinians. In the eyes of all these individuals, and organisations, Israel's greatest crime is simply to exist at all. Israel's existence as an openly plural, explicitly Western, conspicuously successful democracy in the heart of the Islamic world is just too much to bear. And not just for the autocrats and fanatics of the Islamic world. It is too much for many in the West to bear too. Israel's success is a standing rebuke to so many of the assumptions cherished by the region's other leaders and the West's own radicals, that it inspires a hatred that can, and does, lead to irrationality." (Michael Gove MP, "Celsius 7/7," Phoenix, pp. 55-56.)

Well you should be happy because i see Obama being a tool of the Jews.
People dont like it when such a small minority have such disproportionate power.
This causes ANTI-SEMITISM.
I knew when i saw Obama walking around with that disgusting cloth on his head schleping for jewish votes that we where in trouble.
I see Obama being wide open for criticism on this front.

SB,

Are you drunk?

N.

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Originally Posted by Solitary Brother

Well you should be happy because i see Obama being a tool of the Jews.
People dont like it when such a small minority have such disproportionate power.
This causes ANTI-SEMITISM.
I knew when i saw Obama walking around with that disgusting cloth on his head schleping for jewish votes that we where in trouble.
I see Obama being wide open for criticism on this front.

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You are either very high on some serious shit, have had a recent head injury or are mentally deficient in some way. Please let us know which one it is so i can respond appropriately.

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Originally Posted by zaron

First off Islam is not an ideaology but a religeon which in terms of a technical definition might be the same but in practical application is distinct because people choose an ideology but the vast majority of people though technically can choose a religeon are born into it. Essentially, it is for the vast majority of people (whether they choose to practice or not) an association by birth.

When you attack something such as this it is loosely the equivalent of attacking someone who is gay for being gay or attacking Jews for being Jewish which is also not an ethnicity but a religeon. Accordingly, if being anti-Jewish is the same as being anti-semitic (Arabs are also semites by the way) or being racist, than the same relationship holds true for Islam and muslims. You seem to be a smart fellow, so I doubt that you have failed to grasp this on your own. This is why being anti-Islam or anti-muslim is as wrong as being anti-Jewish.

This is also why all the remarks that you mention above are extremely offensive, if you don't like people throwing around "anti-semitic" slurs than you should probably try to refrain from doing the same to others.

Finally, if you think that human culture, customs and civility haven't evolved over the course of 1300 years and cannot understand what the contextual difference between something that happened in 640 and 1940 then you may be well served by installing a moat around your abode as there maybe some marauding vikings on the prowl.

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Religion is an ideology. It is an idea, a belief, much like Communism. People are born into Communism just like they are born into a religion. There is nothing wrong with hating an ideology. It is an idea and the idea of religion happens to be evil.

Isn't "evil" a religious concept?

Ask a dozen different religious people to give their definition of it, and you'll get a dozen different replies!

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Originally Posted by SarahG

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Originally Posted by Niccolo

Were they just a bunch of stupid bastards? Or were they helping to indoctrinate children, so that they would become suicide bombers, or something of that sort?

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You'll find the two are not mutually exclusive.

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I wonder if some of the people on this thread, who would like everyone to think their primary concern is the wellbeing of innocent Palestinian children, would like to address these questions?

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That'll never happen, just as people will remain silent when its pointed out that these 3,000+ rockets were putting Israeli children at grave risk, or that Hamas and Hezbollah both intentionally went into residential places to fire rockets HOPING that counter-strikes would take out these Palestinian & Lebanese children.

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It's so obvious that double standards are employed here - let's just consider "innocent women and children," as the saying goes, for a moment. zaron has said that the Palestinian's plight makes his blood boil, because it's like a woman being raped and then being vilified for being raped.

I pointed out to him that if women being raped and then being vilified after they had been raped made his blood boil, then perhaps he ought to consider real cases of women being raped, then being vilified, and far worse, after they had been raped. I provided the link for a report on honour killing carried out by CIVITAS, and suggested he read it.

Predictably, zaron felt that discussing the very subject he himself had introduced five minutes earlier should now be thought of as ... "changing the subject."

Of course zaron never did manage to explain how his blood boils when he invents a simile, and says the conduct of someone he wants to criticise is like something which, as we all know, actually happens to women in many Islamic cultures, while he remains indifferent to the plight of many young women who are afflicted by that particular strain of misogyny.

Niccolo, you are a long winded, annoying little man