unable to confirm report bin Laden dead

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I hope he's a goner, and given Karl Rove's "October Surprise" may have been leaked ahead of time, I don't doubt it. After it's confirmed as a fact, it will be interesting to see if public opinion changes for better or worse in regard to going after Al Qaida and similar strains of Islamic Militant groups.
 

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This article was in the sunday newspapers in the UK the other day.
 
It's sad that a whole country (and probably generation after generation of civilians) is going to pay because of one man's arrogance and stupidity.

What a fucking joke!
 
if his corpse is produced nov 4th, a scant 3 days before the mid term elections, will some think it's a conspriacy?:hmm:

dbs
:wink:
 
Irvine511 said:
whenever i get in a huff about the potential for apocalyptic mass death embedded in the structure of religion -- any religion -- someone invariably posts about the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka who were the original suicide bombers.
:angel: :wink:

is it right to target Islam so specifically? or, is it right to exclusively target Islam?
I don't know that I've ever called them "the original" suicide bombers, but they certainly paved the way for establishing its international recognition as one chillingly efficient "asymmetrical warfare" tactic (though the Buddhist monks who've often dominated the Sinhalese paramilitaries opposing them aren't exactly on the Noble Eightfold Path either). But A_W is right to point out that in a global sense they're small potatoes, as their aims are mostly limited to Sri Lanka and their ideologies quite purely nationalistic; concerning deep's point, I would argue that the same applied to both Jewish (Irgun/Haganah) and Palestinian (Fedayeen) terrorists of the 1940s: none of these groups were significantly fueled by apocalyptic theologies. Same with the IRA; one occasionally still sees them (and their Protestant counterparts) cited as examples of "religious terrorists," but I find that laughable. You could perhaps make some case for religious ideologies fueling the current actions of the (Christian) LRA in Uganda and NLFT in eastern India, as well as the various (Sikh) paramilitaries active in the Punjab, but again all these groups are quite focused on local aims.

Certainly not all Muslim-comprised militant groups active today are "Islamist" in character nor globally focused either; however, given the number which are, the ease of transnational collaboration nowadays, and the concentration of most of them in or near countries which are unstable, theocratic, or currently occupied by Western armies (basically, the crescent stretching from NW Africa east to Kashmir--though about 50% of the world's Muslims live outside this zone), the risk of ideological seduction--and, not to forget, the lure of access to highly developed tactical, munitionary, financial and communications networks that comes with it--is dangerously high. It would be foolish to underestimate this, and the difficulty of keeping tabs on such diffuse networks is, undeniably, frighteningly daunting. But the reason why I tend to bring up the Tigers as a corrective when nightmare-death-cult-type scenarios come up is because it's the circumstances which fostered the development of their ideology (and they certainly do have one--all terrorist groups do) that must be addressed in order to defeat that ideology, and I think it's a bit easier to see that when we perceive a group's ideology as safely circumscribed (which, in principle, it isn't--if you reeeaaally wanted to get paranoid about it, Tamil Eelam is a dream with potential to spread to some 74 million people and seriously destabilize at least 4 other countries; in fact, it was an Indian Tamil who assassinated Indian PM Rajiv Gandhi in Chennai). Handwringing about the sinister interpretive possibilities of various hadiths won't do any good, nor is it logical to expect it to; if Islam were just some death cult, it wouldn't have stuck around as long as it has nor would it have been associated with the heights of civilization it has been. How did so many of the ancient madrassas in Waziristan become training camps for mujahideen? How did an Iranian-grown militant group come to be the dominant political force in South Lebanon? Why have the political loyalties of Britain's 50-year-old Muslim community suddenly become such cause for concern? How did Mogadishu become a no-man's-land sparred over by lawless warlords? There are time-and-place-specific answers to all these questions but they aren't in the Quran. It's a waste of time, lives and intellect to look there.
 
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