Report: Israel attacks flotilla, 10 die

[tomfon]

Originally Posted by Skybird

Yes, the AKP wants to establish turkey as the master patron of Muslims in the region, and they want to bring Europe under their influence by demographic pressure being set up in foreign nations native populations (=strong Turkish sub-cultures that become powerful enough to influence national politics in favour of Turkish interests, and islam). I'm preaching this since years, but not many listen, because it is not what they want to hear. One can even refer to quotes and statements and explanations by responsible Muslim leaders and Turkish politicians themselves - clever know-it-alls in the West still insist they know it better than the Turks themselves and that they know for sure that the Turks do not mean things the way they tell them.

I agree with you. What i really don't understand though is why Europeans turn a blind eye to the whole thing? If they believe they know better than the Turks then they must be stupids. Turkish politicians seek ways of satisfying the interests of their own country. If you ask me, they are doing just fine. The problem is that Europe should do the same. Diplomacy and politics must obey to the Newtonian principle of Action-Reaction. I think that Europe lacks both parts of the equation, at least for the time being.

Also, I do not agree with the results of the study you mentioned. They seem quite naive: "Muslim = bad behaviour, Christian = good behaviour"?
But then again, maybe, i did not understand what you wanted to say.
Could you elaborate, please? Any links in English, s'il vous plait?

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by tomfon

I agree with you. What i really don't understand though is why Europeans turn a blind to the whole thing? If they believe they know better than the Turks then they must be stupid. Turkish politicians are looking for ways to satisfy the interests of their own country. If you ask me, they are doing just fine. The problem is that Europe should do the same. Diplomacy and politics must obey to the Newtonian principle of Action-Reaction. I think that Europe lacks both parts of the equation, at least for the time being.

Also, I do not agree with the results of the study you mentioned. They seem quite naive: "Muslim = bad behaviour, Christian = good behaviour"?
But then again, maybe, i did not understand what you wanted to say.
Could you elaborate, please? Any links in English, s'il vous plait?

The study has just been published in Germany, two days ago or so, I do not know of any english link, maybe tomorrow in the English edition of Der Spiegel. Currently, this of several German news sites:

http://www.n-tv.de/politik/Machokult...cle907123.html

Vor allem Jungs aus muslimischen Zuwanderer-Familien zeigten sich dabei im Vergleich zu ihren Altersgenossen als besonders gewalttätig, das heißt, sie begingen nach eigenen Angaben – und nach Angaben von Opfern – häufiger Delikte wie Körperverletzung und Raub. Die Kriminologen interessierte zudem der Zusammenhang mit der Religion, sie fragten die Schüler, wie gläubig sie sind – mit ebenfalls sehr bedenklichen Resultaten: Häufiges Beten und Moscheebesuche bremsen die Gewaltbereitschaft nicht: Wer besonders religiös lebt, das legt die Statistik nahe, schlägt sogar häufiger zu. "Selbst wenn man soziale Faktoren herausrechnet, bleibt ein signifikanter Zusammenhang zwischen Religiosität und Gewaltbereitschaft", sagte Pfeiffer.

Christen weniger gewaltbereit

Bei evangelischen und katholischen Jugendlichen zeigte sich eine gegenläufige Tendenz: Wer seinen Glauben lebt, begeht seltener jugendtypische Straftaten. Dies gilt gerade auch für christliche Zuwanderer, die meist aus Polen oder der ehemaligen Sowjetunion stammen.

The study was done by the Kriminologisches Forschungsinstitut Niedersachsen. It questioned several tens of thousands individuals.

The result you criticise, is a result they make on basis of their numerical findings. The found a correlation between strength of faith, and record of criminal/violent behavior, saying the stronger the christian faith of the subject is, the more peaceful it showed to be, whith the muslim juvenile showing the more crimianl/aggressive behavior the stronger the role Muslim religion played in his life. they also said that this is because of the typical macho-culture Muslim male juveniles grow up with and that islamic culture educate them in: that that creates a male role model that educates them to behave like that. These differences in behavior they xclaim to be typical for muslim male juveniles, I see cionfirmed almost every ime I walk in town. Groups of men of Muslim foreign origin definetly behave different than similiar groups of asian, western europeans or Africans - they are much more "macho" indeed. I go as far as saying that "machismo" is one of the most typical characteristics of men from various ME countries, even more so with the young ones.

Earlier studies have found this: that the offsprings of the original migrants coming to germany, the now third generation, are much more religious and conservative than even their grandparents ever where. Somehow, this integration thing goes 180° at the wrong direction.

I then linked this to what I repeatedly have said in the past: that a Christian for wanting to behave violent and aggressive, he must explicitly violate the teachings of Jesus (Christ-->Christian, I do not talk of the church and it's politics), where for a Muslim behaving vilent towards others (women, infidels), he must explicitly follow the teachings of Muhammad (Quran). Jesus and muhammad's teachings are lightyears apart, one could almost say the one is the anti-thesis to the other. I can only lauch out loud when "tolerant" Christians and priests think they must try to ennoble themselves when wanting to compare Muhammad and Jesus and claim that they were preaching the same things. They were not. One could as well claim that Stalin compares to Ghandi.

Also, as I said before, too, tolerance cannot be shown by the weak (it simply is impossible), but only by the stronger of two or more sides. The weak must suffer what the stronger does or does not to him. The stronger has the freedom to enforce his will upon the weak - or stay away from doing that. The latter is called tolerance. Tolerance is a possible characteristic of the stronger one, not the weaker one. In the confrontation of the Wetsern world with Islam, I do not see the West as the stronger one, but the weaker one, due to its rotten inner structure and confused self-understanding, and due to the archaic power coming from this totalitarian will for unity and dominance in islam. islam always is stagnating in its inside, but to the outside it is a barbaric power brimming with vitality and aggressive, expansive energy. We in the west crucify ourselves over implications inside implication of more implication of our oh so civilised self-description. We weaken ourselves by making simple things complicated that way, and call that political correctness, for example, or sensibility (or tolerance, which is wrong, as I explained). Islam preaches to crush everything (external differences, internal critics) in order to acchieve maximum, undisputed power by totalitarian unity. Our precious Western "tolerance" - real or just imagined - is no match for such a relentless force.

[Schroeder]

Thanks for the link.

[MH]

Here is an article i just found which also expresses my feeling about this thread....its a bit old but still holds.

Kill a Jew for Allah
The Mideast problem.
Mr. Derbyshire is also an NR contributing editor
March 22, 2002 9:20 a.m.

recently got a long, carefully composed e-mail from a reader, who begged me to circulate it among "other opinion-formers." It laid out a plan for peace in the Middle East. The writer, obviously an intelligent and well-informed person, had composed the e-mail with great care. With some passion, too — he really wants to find a solution to the Israel-Arab problem. Here was a public-spirited person doing his citizenly best to promote an idea that, he fervently believed, would put an end to the horrors.
And what was that idea? In a nutshell: The U.S. should lean hard on Israel to abandon the Jewish settlements in Arab land — i.e. beyond Israel's pre-1967 borders. These settlements (my reader argued) were the root cause of all the strife. Closing them down would remove the main casus belli; and the good faith shown by this act would open the eyes of the Arabs to the fact that peace with Israel is possible. The logjam would be broken.
I don't know what to say to people like this. Obviously they are decent, good citizens. Obviously they are trying their best — trying to be constructive, to give some hope to the world. How do I tell them what I feel? Which is, that they are floating in orbit between Uranus and Neptune — inhabiting some place that does not touch the real world at any point.
Look: Possibly there would be some abstract justice in closing down the settlements, I don't know. I don't see it myself, I must admit. Why should Jews not live among Arabs? Lots of Arabs live in Israel, and do very well there. There are rich Israeli Arabs; there are Israeli-Arab pop stars and comedians; there are Israeli-Arab intellectuals, teachers, writers, businessmen, athletes. Why, when the whole thing gets sorted out, should there not be Jews living in Arab territory — as there were for centuries past? What, exactly, is wrong with the settlements? I don't see it.
But, okay, let's suppose there is some valid moral objection to the existence of the settlements; and let's suppose my reader's plan were to be carried out, and all the settlements were removed, their populations transferred back to metropolitan Israel, their buildings razed, their fields ploughed with salt. Does anybody think it would make a damn bit of difference? There was no such thing as settlements, no such thing as "occupied territories," before the 1967 war. There were no such things in 1960, for example, when Adolf Eichmann was abducted from his hiding-hole in Buenos Aires by Israeli secret agents, an event recorded by Saudi Arabia's principal government-controlled newspaper as: "ARREST OF EICHMANN, WHO HAD THE HONOR OF KILLING 6 MILLION JEWS".
The problem of the Middle East is not the settlements. It is not this piece of land or that piece. It is not the Golan Heights or East Jerusalem or Temple Mount. It is not oil, or land, or water, or history, or geography, or metaphysics. The problem is in plain sight. You know what the problem is, and so do I. The problem is that the Middle East hates the Jews.
I say "the Middle East" because I don't know any more precise way to say it. You can't say "the Arabs" (though of course the Arabs hate the Jews more than anyone), because the Iranians and the Pakistanis and the Berbers of North Africa hate the Jews too, and they are not Arabs. You can't say "the Muslims". That is a lot closer, I think, and there surely cannot be much doubt that institutional Islam is riddled with Jew-hatred. Still, Malaysia is a Muslim country, and they don't hate the Jews, except in a go-along, pro forma sort of way, to keep on good terms with the Saudis and Gulf Emirs.
And I am sure, before you write to tell me, that lots of people in the Middle East don't hate the Jews. Lots of Arabs, millions probably, don't hate the Jews. Probably lots of non-Arab Muslims don't hate the Jews, either. Yet it's hard to avoid the impression, from reading the MEMRI translations, from looking at the kinds of things taught in schools all over the Middle East (and in Islamic schools here in the U.S.A. — see below), from listening to the pronouncements of Middle East politicians (remember the Syrian foreign minister explaining to the Pope — to the Pope! — that: "When I see a Jew in front of me, I kill him"?) and from random conversations with New York cab drivers, that visceral, murderous Jew-hatred is awfully widespread among Arabs, Pakistanis, Iranians, and North Africans. Awfully widespread.
In between getting that e-mail and answering it, I did two unrelated things, by way of my daily work. One was to prepare an editorial snippet for the print National Review about Islamic schools here in the U.S., based on a long study in the Washington Post of February 25th. There are estimated to be between 200 and 600 private Islamic day schools in the U.S., with up to 30,000 students in attendance. They use textbooks imported from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. One in use at the Islamic Saudi Academy in suburban Virginia instructs readers that a sure sign of the Day of Judgment will be that Muslims will fight and kill Jews, who will hide behind trees that say: "Oh Muslim, Oh servant of God, there is a Jew hiding behind me. Come here and kill him." School authorities did some fast damage control when the Post confronted them (as the Saudis are doing over the now-famous Blood Libel article). The textbooks are in process of being replaced with special versions more suitable for American students, they assured us, with the kill-a-Jew-for-Allah stuff left out. Presumably that stuff remains untouched back home in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, Syria, Iran, Libya,... Their kiddies will get the right message, you can be sure: "What do you mean, you don't hate Jews? Look, even the blessed trees hate them!"
The other thing I did was read Jeffrey Goldberg's article about Saddam Hussein in The New Yorker (titled "The Great Terror" in the 3/25/02 issue).
"Iraqi dissidents agree that Iraq's programs to build weapons of mass destruction are focused on Israel. 'Israel is the whole game,' Ahmad Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress, told me. .... "[Saddam] thinks he can kill one hundred thousand Israelis in a day with biological weapons....' Students of Iraq and its government generally agree that Saddam would like to project himself as leader of all the Arabs, and that the only sure way to do that is by confronting Israel."
Seems to me, from what I read and hear, that those students are quite right: That by "confronting Israel" via killing a hundred thousand Israelis in a day, Saddam would win the hearts of the entire Arab world, and of the Iranians, Pakistanis, Afghans and North Africans, too. (Does Hamid Karzai, Washington's new darling, hate Jews? Has anyone asked him?) I am sure Saddam himself believes this to be the case, and he is, with all his endearing little character flaws, a man who knows something about the Arab mentality.
It is not too difficult to envisage a plan by which the spoken grievances of the Arabs against Israel could be addressed, and some compromise struck. The chancelleries of the world — including Israel's — are in fact full of such plans, drawn up with loving care by legions of diplomats, experts, politicians, ambassadors, scholars and private do-gooders like my reader, across decades of time. In an atmosphere of goodwill, and genuine desire for a solution, the Palestine circle could be squared. You'd just have to pull one of those plans down from the shelf, blow the dust off it, and say: "Let's take this for a starting point, shall we?" The circle is not going to be squared though — not by George W. Bush, not by my e-mail pal with his elaborate scheme to shut down the settlements, not by another round of "shuttle diplomacy," not by any amount of work on a "peace process". It isn't going to be, because there is no goodwill, and no real desire on the part of Israel's enemies for a solution. Or rather, there is a widespread desire for only one solution — the extinction of Israel and the driving out, or mass killing, of the Jews. That's what they want, the Middle East; that's all they want.
I don't think we should be sending diplomats to the Middle East. I think we should be sending teams of psychiatrists. This is a diseased culture, a sick culture. Go back to that disgraceful recycling of the Blood Libel in the Saudi press. Do you think anyone in that newspaper's readership thought there was anything odd about it, anything deplorable about it, anything untrue about it? I don't think so. To the newspaper readers of Saudi Arabia, it was routine stuff, a statement of the obvious. If MEMRI hadn't brought it to the attention of the civilized world, do you think the Saudi authorities would have bothered about it? Do you think, even now, they really have a clue what all the fuss is about? Of course the Jews use gentile blood to make their cookies. Doesn't everyone know that? We'd best pretend to be shocked, though. Those Americans are so-o-o sensitive!
We are dealing here with people who are, not to put too fine a point on it, nuts. The Arabs, the Iranians, the Pakis, the Libyans: they are nuts, the great majority of them. Nuts. Not playing with a full deck. Not too tightly wrapped. One brick short of a load, one coupon short of a toaster. The smoke not going all the way up the chimney. Not quite 16 annas to the rupee. Nuts.
Is there anything we can do about it? Only what Peggy Noonan told us to do in her brilliant Wall Street Journal piece last week: Do what you do when you find yourself in a roomful of glittering-eyed lunatics down at the local funny farm. Keep smiling, talk softly, don't make any sudden moves, keep nodding and smiling, and keep a tight hand on the stun gun in your pocket. The Middle East contains three hundred million people, and most of them are crazy as coots. Glad I don't live there.

[Skybird]

A very good - German! - text from today, on why the recent destruction of Turkish-Israeli relations has nothing to do with the Gaza flotilla, and what role Washington's traditional missionising naivety in foreign relations plays in it.

http://www.achgut.com/dadgdx/index.p.../print/0016579

[VonHesse]

Iran's Revolutionary Guard naval forces offer to escort further Gaza-bound ships.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37537320...deastn_africa/

If the Iranians actually do send naval forces to Gaza, this situation is going to spiral even further out of control.

[MH]

Originally Posted by VonHesse

Iran's Revolutionary Guard naval forces offer to escort further Gaza-bound ships.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37537320...deastn_africa/

If the Iranians actually do send naval forces to Gaza, this situation is going to spiral even further out of control.

Yep..thats going to do much good for the Palestinians.

Wow MH not only do you run from the fact that you posted pure lies in the name of propoganda but now you come up with an extremly partisan source printing its report a chain e-mail which by default ranks as bull.

Honestly you have failed in such a spectacular fashion its incredible , do your country a favour and just sign up to "megaphone" to add your voice to spreading the propoganda.

For gods sake(or for G*ds sake) you have fallen at just about every step, even when facing a hate filled bigot who appears entirely detached from reality like OTH you repeatedly threw the game away by telling such obvious falsehoods.
Seriously defend your nation by all means , pull out all the stops to make your points....but putting out obvious falsehoods only serves to destroy the standing of that which you wish to protect.

[MH]

Originally Posted by Tribesman

Wow MH not only do you run from the fact that you posted pure lies in the name of propoganda but now you come up with an extremly partisan source printing its report a chain e-mail which by default ranks as bull.
.

You missed the point completely but im not surprised....
Propagabda?....doesn't any thing quoted or found or interned can be labeled as propaganda?
Instead of saying this for the third time or urging me to "think" try to write something that makes sense but please don't quote international sea laws.

Iran's Revolutionary Guard naval forces offer to escort further Gaza-bound ships.

Now that could be interesting, I wonder how that would work with either the UN or the egypt/isreal bi lateral.
Come to think of it , when it comes to this dispute who exactly does Iran recognise anyway for them to be able to do legal escorts in that territory?

[MH]

Originally Posted by Tribesman

Now that could be interesting.....

Yes intresting it could be......

You missed the point completely but im not surprised....

The point? I asked you why you was lying for the sake of pure propoganda.
You didn't reply you just posted a pile of unrelated crap as an "answer"
When challenged on that unrelated crap you replied with an opinion piece on a chain e-mail.
Why are you so afraid of the subject?
You wrote earlier that I am looking at the subject too closely and asking too many questions.
Why are you willing to just repeat lies and skirt the subject entirely without even a real look?
Are you really that afraid to look in the mirror?

Yes intresting it could be......

Another example, you just don't have the faintest idea do you.

try to write something that makes sense but please don't quote international sea laws

Excuse me, but when it comes to international sea laws its rather difficult to avoid them in a situation involving international maritime law, moreover when one party in an issue claims they are justified under international sea laws then those laws become absolutely central to the issue don't they

[TLAM Strike]

Originally Posted by VonHesse

Iran's Revolutionary Guard naval forces offer to escort further Gaza-bound ships.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37537320...deastn_africa/

If the Iranians actually do send naval forces to Gaza, this situation is going to spiral even further out of control.

Thats a funny one! The IRGCN has not ships capable of operating that distance without making port to refuel. Their Houdong class PCFGs can only sail about 800 nms and are not capable of UNREP. The other ship's they operated are just Boston Whalers and Boghamers. Only way they would be able to get there is if they hauled their boats over on another transport ship or just sent troops to act as guards aboard the "aid" ships.

If the IRGCN tangled with the Israeli Navy it could be seriously bad. The IRGCN are those yahoos in speedboats that attacked the shipping in the Gulf back in the Tanker War. The IRGCN has a reputation for being undisciplined and would probably shoot first just to kill some Israelis.

Terrorists helping idiots help terrorists. Thats a new one...

[Skybird]

Rubber- and high sea-speedboats with missiles, operating from Lebanon.

No, that is no joke.

If they get sunk, the loss for Iran is almost not to be felt, but the anti-Israel propaganda victory would be tremendous.