bonoz
War Child
Them red necks will be sooooooooo pissed!
'Americans are not your enemy,' Obama tells Muslims - CNN.com
'Americans are not your enemy,' Obama tells Muslims - CNN.com
Them red necks will be sooooooooo pissed!
Intelligent and logical foreign policy
Obama may be the biggest and best weapon the West has in winning the GWOT, which is at it's core a war of soft power that involves winning the proverbial "hearts and minds" and demonstrating the nihilism of fanatical, suicidal Islamism.
when you look at the difference between Obama and, say, Karen Hughes, the white lady becomes so laughable in retrospect.
I wouldn't call it that.. not even slightly. People who think that the terrorists are "Islamic terrorists" or "Extremist Islamists" are clearly wrong. When the religion itself says something like "when you kill one innocent soul it's like you've killed the entire human kind" then surely it can't be used to label these wrong doers. These terrorists are terrorists. They use a religion to justify their actions but it is more about their extremist culture, not what religion they falsely pose to be part of.
BBC Tehran, Jan. 29
Nobody was expecting a long and warm honeymoon but the vitriol in President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's remarks to the new US administration was remarkable. President Barack Obama, in his first foreign interview earlier this week, offered what he called the hand of friendship if Iran "unclenched its fist." In response, Mr Ahmadinejad jumped back in the boxing ring and resumed a verbal volley of punches.
First he wished former US President George W Bush on his way: "God willing, he has gone to hell." Then Mr Ahmadinejad laid before his audience the ever-growing list of grievances Iran holds against the US: American support for the coup that unseated a democratically elected Iranian government in 1953 American backing for Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war; support for the "Zionist regime"; launching the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq under the pretext of 9/11--an incident as questionable as the Holocaust, he suggested. Americans had kept Iran away from scientific progress and injected the country with poverty, ignorance and illiteracy, he said. They had turned their embassy in Tehran into a "nest of spies", Mr Ahmadinejad continued. The US needed to stop talking down to the rest of the world, to change its language and act respectfully, he went on. All American troops should return home. And Washington should apologise for its crimes against Iran.
It was an exceptionally long and angry tirade, even by the standards of Mr Ahmadinejad. It was tempered only by a few slightly more encouraging words. If there really was a fundamental change in American policy, said Mr Ahmadinejad, then Iran would welcome it.
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Most observers in Iran believed Mr Ahmadinejad wanted some moves towards reconciliation with Washington, in order to help his bid for re-election in June. But with a long silence from Tehran on policy towards Mr Obama, it was already clear that a fierce battle was going on behind the scenes. In theory, it is the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, who is in charge of foreign policy, though in practice decisions seem to emerge from among a small group of senior officials, military officers and clergy. When there are differences over policy, the default is always to return to the old certainties: "Death to Israel! Death to America!"
For Washington, this sort of hostility at least helps resolve one dilemma: the administration must be in two minds whether to launch a diplomatic initiative towards Iran before the Iranian presidential election in five months' time. Why do anything now, when someone else might soon be in power? After all, dealing with Mr Ahmadinejad was always going to be a high-risk policy.
One of Mr Obama's consistent calls, in his election campaign, was for negotiations with Iran without precondition. For any new dialogue, this was not a promising start.
But they are Muslims, and they are Christians.look closely.
i was very careful -- i used the word "islamism." i also use the word "christianism." both of those words are used to describe people who wrap themselves up in the tapestry of a particular faith and use it to justify a rigid, fundamentalist, often medieval worldview that can result in mass murder. i use those words, intentionally, to distinguish from Muslims and Christians.
But they are Muslims, and they are Christians.
Intelligent and logical foreign policy
Nah, I think you can at least define by the degree to which some self-proclaimed believer deviates from the source scripture.
To take the Christian tradition, just for instance; Jesus preached certain things, in the written gospels. Those things are not particularly ambiguous or hard to understand. It is not difficult to spot when someone is preaching the very opposite. Even if they do call themselves Christian.
Now, whether those written gospels are good or not, I'll leave to the reader. But 'true' will have to be judged in relation to them, since they are the source document.
Ahmadinejad's a fool. I can't believe any one actually takes him seriously. It's not like he even has any real power.
Ahmadinejad's a fool. I can't believe any one actually takes him seriously. It's not like he even has any real power.
Totally agree with you.
Yet we teeter on the edge of WWIII with military action on the table and Israel desperate for approval on pre-emptive strikes with nuclear weapons.
Obama's olive branch is smart and very necessary.
But watch, anti-Obama people would say this is proof that he is a Muslim
I think what Obama said is a step in the right direction. I also think it helps that he has Muslim relatives and lived in Indonesia.
But watch, anti-Obama people would say this is proof that he is a Muslim
There will be a Muslim Prayer Room in the Whitehouse. Perhaps the Lincoln Bedroom? (probably not). Does it have to have a window facing East? It that required?
I actually attended a brown-bag lecture awhile back about qibla location (how the precise direction to the Kaaba is determined); turns out there are tons of qibla locators on the Internet as well as a considerable amount of controversy about the proper method to use. Even among the Muslims attending there were some rather emphatic differences as to whether one ought to pray facing southeast or northeast (i.e. from here in the American Midwest). No mention of there having to be a window though, I've never heard that. Jews pray facing Jerusalem three times a day (the Amidah) but here in the US at least, we just settle for generally facing east; I've never heard of anyone using locators or debates about directional methods or anything like that.
Not that this has anything to do with the thread topic...