Hey looks like the pope was partially correct

[tnf]

"Islamic militants vow war after pope comments
Middle East Christians express fears in face of continued Muslim fury"


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14888444/


Yay for peaceful religions.

[mjrpes]

I though the burning effigies of the Pope were quite ironic.

Funny... if Islam goes to war and Christendom is annihilated, then the Pope was correct. If Islam backs down and accepts the Pope's apology, then the Pope was wrong.

It's one of those things where the truth of a statement is found only in its reaction.

[hate]

catholic attention whores

[S@M]

if western powers demanded appologies and incited protests and violent reprisals every time some imam made off at the mouth... our economies would shut down and society would fall appart - who the fuck can or wants to live like that???

[Tormentius]

who the fuck can or wants to live like that???

The extremists want to...but they only want it to go one way.

[Turbine]

Christians are no different, what about all of the crusade wars?

And the little Pope living in his little city where he can pretend he matters.
Guess what, the dark ages are over, people VOTE now...

[Canidae]

The War of Intolerance

May the best religion win.

[Tormentius]

Christians are no different, what about all of the crusade wars?

You're comparing something that happened a thousand years ago to something happening right now :icon27:. You're right though, times do change and people vote now (women included) but thats not something that any Islamic fundamentalist group is championing now is it?

[tnf]

Christians are no different, what about all of the crusade wars?

And the little Pope living in his little city where he can pretend he matters.
Guess what, the dark ages are over, people VOTE now...

ahhh...the typical go-to of the crusades when it really doesn't apply to the situation at this time and when you probably don't even understand the entire situation behind the crusades (it wasn't just a one-sided deal...and no, I'm not covering for the Christians here, but I tire of people pulling the typical WHAT ABOUT THE CRUSADES? card everytime.)

So yea, Christians are very different in this day and age regarding this type of thing.

Christ that was a stupid statement.

[[xeno]Julios]

y'all need to read this fantastic piece by martin amis. It's in 3 parts and i'm halfway through the first.

an excerpt:

I will soon come to Donald Rumsfeld, the architect and guarantor of the hideous cataclysm in Iraq. But first I must turn from great things to small, for a paragraph, and talk about writing, and the strange thing that happened to me at my desk in this, the Age of Vanished Normalcy.

All writers of fiction will at some point find themselves abandoning a piece of work - or find themselves putting it aside, as we gently say. The original idea, the initiating 'throb' (Nabokov), encounters certain 'points of resistance' (Updike); and these points of resistance, on occasion, are simply too obdurate, numerous, and pervasive. You come to write the next page, and it's dead - as if your subconscious, the part of you quietly responsible for so much daily labour, has been neutralised, or switched off. Norman Mailer has said that one of the few real sorrows of 'the spooky art' is that it requires you to spend too many days among dead things. Recently, and for the first time in my life, I abandoned, not a dead thing, but a thriving novella; and I did so for reasons that were wholly extraneous. I am aware that this is hardly a tectonic event; but for me the episode was existential. In the West, writers are acclimatised to freedom - to limitless and gluttonous freedom. And I discovered something. Writing is freedom; and as soon as that freedom is in shadow, the writer can no longer proceed. The shadow, in this case, was not a fear of repercussion. It was as if, most reluctantly, I was receiving a new vibration or frequency from the planetary shimmer. The novella was a satire called The Unknown Known

Secretary Rumsfeld was unfairly ridiculed, some thought, for his haiku-like taxonomy of the terrorist threat:

'The message is: there are known "knowns". There are things that we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.'

Like his habit of talking in 'the third person passive once removed', this is 'very Rumsfeldian'. And Rumsfeld can be even more Rumsfeldian than that. According to Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack, at a closed-door senatorial briefing in September 2002 (the idea was to sell regime-change in Iraq), Rumsfeld exasperated everyone present with a torrent of Rumsfeldisms, including the following strophe: 'We know what we know, we know there are things we do not know, and we know there are things we know we don't know we don't know.' Anyway, the three categories remain quite helpful as analytical tools. And they certainly appealed very powerfully to the narrator of The Unknown Known - Ayed, a diminutive Islamist terrorist who plies his trade in Waziristan, the rugged northern borderland where Osama bin Laden is still rumoured to lurk.

Ayed's outfit, which is called 'the "Prism"', used to consist of three sectors named, not very imaginatively, Sector One, Sector Two and Sector Three. But Ayed and his colleagues are attentive readers of the Western press, and the sectors now have new titles. Known Knowns (sector one) concerns itself with daily logistics: bombs, mines, shells, and various improvised explosive devices. The work of Known Unknowns (sector two) is more peripatetic and long-term; it involves, for example, trolling around North Korea in the hope of procuring the fabled 25 kilograms of enriched uranium, or going from factory to factory in Uzbekistan on a quest for better toxins and asphyxiants. In Known Knowns, the brothers are plagued by fires and gas-leaks and almost daily explosions; the brothers in Known Unknowns are racked by headaches and sore throats, and their breath, tellingly, is rich with the aroma of potent coughdrops, moving about as they do among vats of acids and bathtubs of raw pesticides. Everyone wants to work where Ayed works, which is in sector three, or Unknown Unknowns. Sector three is devoted to conceptual breakthroughs - to shifts in the paradigm.

Shifts in the paradigm like the attack of 11 September 2001. Paradigm shifts open a window; and, once opened, the window will close. Ayed observes that 11 September was instantly unrepeatable; indeed, the tactic was obsolete by 10am the same morning. Its efficacy lasted for 71 minutes, from 8.46, when American 11 hit the North Tower, to 9.57, and the start of the rebellion on United 93. On United 93, the passengers were told about the new reality by their mobile phones, and they didn't linger long in the old paradigm - the four-day siege on the equatorial tarmac, the diminishing supplies of food and water, the festering toilets, the conditions and demands, the phased release of the children and the women; then the surrender, or the clambering commandos. No, they knew that they weren't on a commercial aircraft, not any longer; they were on a missile. So they rose up. And at 10.03 United 93 came down on its back at 580mph, in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, 20 minutes from the Capitol.

I found it reassuringly difficult, dreaming up paradigm shifts. And Ayed and his friends in sector three find it difficult too. Synergy, maximalisation - these are the kinds of concept that are tossed from cushion to floormat in Unknown Unknowns. Here, a comrade argues for the dynamiting of the San Andreas Fault; there, another envisages the large-scale introduction of rabies (admixed with smallpox, methamphetamine and steroids) to the fauna of Central Park. A pensive silence follows. And very often these silences last for days on end. All you can hear, in Unknown Unknowns, is the occasional swatting palm-clap, or the crackle of a beetle being ground underfoot. Ayed feels, or used to feel, superior to his colleagues, because he has already had his eureka moment. He had it in the spring of 2001, and his project - his 'baby', if you will - was launched in the summer of that year, and is still in progress. It has a codename: UU: CRs/G,C.

Ayed's conceptual breakthrough did not go down at all well in Sector Three, as it was then called; in fact, it was widely mocked. But Ayed used a family connection, and gained an audience with Mullah Omar, the one-eyed Islamist cleric who briefly ruled Afghanistan - an imposing figure, in his dishdash and flipflops. Ayed submitted his presentation, and, to his astonishment, Mullah Omar smiled on his plan. This was a necessary condition, because Ayed's paradigm shift could only be realised with the full resources of a nation state. UU: CRs/G,C went ahead. The idea was, as Ayed would say, deceptively simple. The idea was to scour all the prisons and madhouses for every compulsive rapist in the country, and then unleash them on Greeley, Colorado.

As the story opens, the CRs have been en route to G,C for almost five years, crossing central Africa, in minibuses and on foot, and suffering many a sanguinary reverse (a host of some 30,000 Janjaweed in Sudan, a 'child militia', armed with pangas, in Congo). On top of all this, as if he didn't have enough to worry about, Ayed is not getting on very well with his wives.

Those who know the field will be undismayed by the singling out of Greeley, Colorado. For it was in Greeley, Colorado, in 1949, that Islamism, as we now know it, was decisively shaped. The story is grotesque and incredible - but then so are its consequences. And let us keep on telling ourselves how grotesque and incredible it is, our current reality, so unforeseeable, so altogether unknowable, even from the vantage of the late Nineties. At that time, if you recall, America had so much leisure on its hands, politically and culturally, that it could dedicate an entire year to Monica Lewinsky. Even Monica, it now seems, even Bill, were living in innocent times.

[S@M]

for some reason i dont feel illuminated - terrorists have long term plans seems to be the thrust of it.
Pakistan cant even get laws passed to protect women who have been raped from being killed as whores unless 4 men testify in the womans favour - I think there is a few differences between modern christianity and islam

[Chupacabra]

y'all need to read this fantastic piece by martin amis. It's in 3 parts and i'm halfway through the first.

an excerpt:

text

i read that. its pretty interesting, thanks; but whats it got to do with the topic--unless its some subtle point? if there's more to it and you have yet to post it or comment on it, i understand, otherwise it feels like youre trying to derail the thread.

[Canidae]

I think he is giving us a "Hitlers Diary " glimpse of the touchy feely side of the radical Islamic hero of our times and how they are brainwashing the followers of the muslim religion into participating in their latest Islamic empire building exercise...or I could be wrong

[[xeno]Julios]

y'all need to read this fantastic piece by martin amis. It's in 3 parts and i'm halfway through the first.

an excerpt:

text

i read that. its pretty interesting, thanks; but whats it got to do with the topic--unless its some subtle point? if there's more to it and you have yet to post it or comment on it, i understand, otherwise it feels like youre trying to derail the thread.

The first part seems very relevant no? Talking about the nature of extremism etc.

[LawL]

Religion

[Hannibal]

The Do-It-Yourself Deity

[HM-PuFFNSTuFF]

The Do-It-Yourself Deity

hehe nice find

plausibility quotient of one, but i have such low expectations from my god

[Deathshroud]

Time to polish the nukes!

[neh]

if any of you had read any martin amis you'd realise that hes giving you the treatise for fictional novella ...

turning his eye onto fundamentalist islamics rather the usual subjects (being the culturally bereft in high society in uk, the working class in the uk, capitalism in general) - oh and btw he already did the nazis (or more specifically the gift of nazi war criminals to actually get on with the rest of their lives after unleashing so much evbil and not getting caught - its called "Times Arrow")

[stocktroll]

there are very few bible thumping "my way or the highway" christians around
most dont flip out by every little remark or joke and even avoid showing their religon out in public

[busetibi]

Guess what, the dark ages are over,

someone should tell the muslims then, they seem to be caught in the fucking twilight zone

[MKJ]

Religion

word

[busetibi]

Islam - the religion of peace?
A MASSIVE oxymoron...

[Dave]

Islam - the religion of peace?
A MASSIVE oxymoron...

All this does is reduce Islam to the sole cause for animosity between us and them. Basically what I'm getting from you here is that Islam = evil and all the other things that go on behind the scenes like imperialism, oil hoarding, economic depression and so on don't factor into the violence. But fuck all of that... It's us against them after all. They want to take away our freedom.

[S@M]

Islam - the religion of peace?
A MASSIVE oxymoron...

All this does is reduce Islam to the sole cause for animosity between us and them. Basically what I'm getting from you here is that Islam = evil and all the other things that go on behind the scenes like imperialism, oil hoarding, economic depression and so on don't factor into the violence. But fuck all of that... It's us against them after all. They want to take away our freedom.

did u read any of the linkage from Jules post Dave? It makes a compelling case that violence is inherent in how islamists see themselves, their history, and their future...