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The Soviet Union was not a "principled opponent."
From Lenin to Litvinov to the post-Afghan collapse (and don't fool yourself into imagining that the Soviet adventure in Afghanistan was not the proximate cause of its demise, what "broke" it), America's global enemy was unprincipled, not a "gentleman" among nations. In other words, disloyal in the extreme, deceptive, dishonest, devious, devilish, not at all characteristic of gentile nations (i.e., "gentile"-men without a religious "Book" as their national foundation, a wholly racist characterization really) from the Flood until now. Agreements and honor mean nothing to marxist-leninist communists, truth is meaningless except as defined by the party, I know the dialectic well, first-hand, myself. It is false and false to all humanity without exception.
Today America has chosen -- designated, identified, declared -- another opponent, the people and nation of Afghanistan, for over a thousand years a nation of muslims. This is not an unprincipled opponent, but rather a nation upon whom integrity is incumbent. It is by the honor and integrity of Afghanistan collectively whether they survive or return to God in Whom they all believe. They are an ancient people, a proud people, a hardy people in the world's most inhospitable terrain, surrounded by ninety percent of their land that is saturated with ten percent of the world's land mines, but hidden in the ground waiting and not sitting on shelves in munitions dumps like most of the rest.
It would be unAmerican to consider them falsely. Not to mention a serious mistake.
American money, Afghanistani blood, and -- well, looky here -- Bin Laden and his money and loyalists -- destroyed the Soviet Union. Interesting. The most inhumanly false nation ever seen on the face of the earth after Sodom and Gomorrah went to Afghanistan and perished. Must be something there. A generation of Soviet occupation failed to establish atheism and the Soviets perished in the attempt. And Bin Laden was an American hero at the time, he was killing commies.
I do not know for sure, personally, here in a remote area of the other Washington, whether they are *all* muslim, although I am lead pipe certain that there are muslims among them -- lots of'em, staunchly faithful to the core. I have faith that the leading Taliban are, and I see many indirect evidences that they are. That does not mean that I agree with everything they do, but they're responsible for what they do, not me. I am persuaded that they are muslim, because that is good manners -- it is not good manners to be suspicious of someone without cause, and I have seen no evidence that provides cause to be suspicious of them. Only the suspicions of others, which do not play well with me in terms of influencing my thinking about people I haven't met. I have met some Afghani mujahideen, and they seemed to me like good muslims, those I have met. They were certainly "good muslims" when they were fighting the Soviet Union with American money and missiles. I suspect they still are.
Here is today's "big news" that is supposedly "against" the Taliban. Notice that they refuse to throw away their integrity and insist that they will instead consider evidence as they should. And as we should. And as we *would* (and in most other cases *do*) except for anger against people we don't know and really don't know much about.
Boy, I can hear it now:
"You ideologues are going to kill us all for the sake of your so-called sacred principles! Tell him to give himself up, 'Umar, he'll listen to you."
"How? How? How can we be a part of such a deception before ALLAH, that muslims had anything to do with that terror? He had nothing to do with it -- we've been watching him day and night for years now! We know this man. He prays with us! We'd have to kill him ourselves for bringing such shame on us were there evidence for that. Where is it? They refuse!"
I'm sure glad I'm not going to be there for that, I don't speak Pushtu or Dari, and it's liable to be pretty loud. Besides, I don't like cruise missiles and a lot of people don't want them to think for themselves, especially not all in one place like that.
Do I care? Sure I do. I care about a lot of things here. I care about five thousand people admitted to paradise last week, and three more since then in American towns and cities -- all five thousand and three killed by people with the same mentality. A mentality that we've seen all over America and in the media.
I care about miles of roads saturated with armor-piercing land mines over which people plan to move American soldiers who don't know the roads, which go through *very* fundamentalist areas of Pakistan beyond the control of the central government. I care about the results of the rulers of Pakistan provoking a guerrilla revolution among its people that is genuinely likely to bring it down in a bloodbath. I care about people who will freeze this winter and people who will be incinerated. And I care about people who will do, for the wrong reasons, the wrong thing and destroy themselves in the process -- as the terrorists did, although I sure don't care about them.
Any of them. I don't care about the ones that burned, I don't care about those who helped them, I don't care about those who financed them, I don't care about those who sent them, and I don't care about those who inspired them to kill themselves of hatred, either. And I don't care about the cowardly Americans who killed a Sikh in a drive-by, sneaky, surprise, cold-blooded murder, or those who killed an American immigrant Pakistani grocery store owner, or those who killed an American Coptic Christian formerly of Egypt. They're just more terrorists. And I don't care about the terrorists in this newsgroup, either, who flame passions and promote prejudice and call people to abandon reason in the heat of a moment or flame war or some pretended patriotic frenzy of madness.
I think I'll avoid becoming a terrorist, thank you, you can have your own war, children. Take it wherever you want, I'm not a traffic cop. Bring it here if you like, please be sure you kill all of us, don't leave anyone of us in the same world with the likes of you. Be careful not to kill innocent teenagers who might be hanging around, just Americans who happen to believe in God like you don't.
I find it refreshing that for the first time in over a century, America has an honorable opponent. If. I hope the Taliban have an honorable opponent, I'd like to see them turn out to be muslims and *not* by seeing that they've all become martyrs to a terrorist nation destroying itself. Or maybe they'll sell out an innocent man and get bombed into oblivion anyway, that's what people seem to really want, no one cares about truth, just kill'em all and let God sort'em out, they ain't Americans anyways.
Or are we a nation of terrorists, American superpower terrorists? Americans all over the country are setting up block-watch type protections for America's mosques. I know of at least two spontaneous, non-muslim, beer and bacon almost-militia groups, approved, loosely coordinated, and everyone licensed to carry by the local police departments, comprised of Gulf War veterans and others who think the Constitution means something, who are protecting muslims around the clock, not a muslim among them. Jews and Christians turned out all over the country to go surround their local muslim mosques and protect those inside from harassment.
What a truly interesting "backlash" this is turning into ... just the opposite of what the terrorists intended. Instead of turning Americans totally *against* muslims, Americans (stubborn folk) are turning to take a closer look at muslims in America and find that it's like looking in a mirror, once you get past appearances.
Imagine that. Now I wonder about Afghanistan ... and whether or not their opponent has honor and integrity.
How about it, folks -- would you buy a used car from George Bush? Or your State Senator?
=======
Defiant Taliban hit back as clerics stand by bin Laden
KABUL, Sept 18 (AFP) -
Afghanistan's ruling Taliban Tuesday told their people to be ready for a holy war as Islamic scholars gathering to decide Osama bin Laden's fate made it clear they would not hand over the man wanted "dead or alive" by the United States.
The Islamic regime's army also unleashed a fierce offensive against their last opponents within the country in a bid to pre-empt US moves to strengthen them.
The display of defiance from the Taliban came as their supporters in Pakistan mounted the biggest anti-American demonstration yet, heightening fears that any US attack on Afghanistan will have devastating implications for the stability of its neighbour.
"Of course if there is an invasion of an Islamic country, there will be jihad against the invaders," a senior Taliban official told AFP as hundreds of Islamic clerics, or ulema, streamed into Kabul.
"After the invasion jihad will be the only alternative and that is the obligation of Muslims."
The ulema are expected Wednesday to begin a meeting which will consider whether to extradite bin Laden, who is suspected of orchestrating last week's terror attacks on New York and Washington and has been indicted in New York for the 1998 bombing of two US embassies in Africa.
The Taliban have previously hinted they might give bin Laden up for trial in a neutral, preferrably Muslim, country.
But the clerics arriving on Tuesday were in no mood for compromise.
"Even if the whole of Afghanistan is devastated we won't hand him over until there is a solid proof against him," Mullah Mohammad Hassan, a representative of Paktika province told AFP.
Another scholar, Mawlawi Abdul Zahir from the Bagram district of Kabul, added: "We are ready for to defend ourselves if the Americans attack us.
"We have already defeated and taught a lesson to their British grandfathers and their Russian brothers," he said.
In their biggest offensive in months, Taliban forces launched an attack in the northeastern province of Takhar in a bid to cut their opponents' key supply lines from neighbouring Tajikistan.
Fierce fighting was still raging Tuesday, an opposition spokesman told AFP.
The onslaught represents an attempt by the Taliban army to exploit last week's death of the opposition's charismatic commander Ahmad Shah Masood and cut their supply lines before the mountainous region's harsh winter sets in.
If they succeed, the opposition forces could be eliminated before they have time to reap the benefit of an anticipated surge in support from the United States in the wake of last week's terror attacks.
Ordinary Afghans were fleeing the main cities in fear of a US strike, with thousands massing near the Pakistani border. Those who stayed behind were becoming increasingly anxious over possible civil unrest or conflict between rival factions of the ruling Islamic militia.
In neighbouring Pakistan, a crucial US partner for any attack on Afghanistan, hundreds of police and paramilitaries had to be deployed in the teeming port of Karachi to prevent more than 5,000 radical Islamic students marching on the US consulate.
It was the largest anti-US demonstration in the current crisis and also the biggest since military ruler Pervez Musharraf seized power two years ago.
Troops remained on alert but there was no movement out of barracks pending the outcome of the talks in Kabul, which Pakistan is desperately hoping will produce some sort of compromise.
Pakistani radicals have vowed to join any Afghan jihad and warned the government that helping the US in any attack will mean civil war.
Pakistan President Musharraf has promised his "unstinting cooperation" with any US action. But political leaders have warned him that this must stop short of letting Pakistan be used as the launching pad for an attack.
"If the government agrees to let American ground troops into Pakistan there will be a hell of a reaction," a former senior army officer, retired Lieutenant-General K.M. Azhar, told AFP.
The meeting of the ulema in Kabul had been due to start Tuesday but was delayed because many scholars had not been able to get to the city in time.
The unexpected decision to seek a ruling from the scholars was announced by Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar after a high-level Pakistani delegation visited him Monday in the southeastern city of Kandahar, where bin Laden is also based.
The ulema includes many non-Taliban scholars who could be prepared to countenance some sort of deal -- although any decision, or fatwa, will have to be approved by Omar, who is married to bin Laden's eldest daughter.
A team led by the head of Pakistan's intelligence services, the Taliban's main backers, gave Omar a blunt warning Monday that the country could be bombed back to the stone age if bin Laden is not handed over.
US President George W. Bush has warned that Americans will not rest until they secure justice.
"There's an old poster out west that says, as I recall, 'Wanted dead or alive'," he said during a visit to the Pentagon, a target in last week's suicide attacks along with the World Trade Center in New York.
The Taliban consider bin Laden an honored "guest" and have repeatedly rejected his extradition in the past, despite UN sanctions following the twin US embassy bombings in East Africa in 1998 which he is accused of masterminding.
The last Afghan jihad was issued against the Soviet Union after its 1979 invasion of the country and resulted, a decade later, in the Red Army beating a humiliating retreat.
=======
"I have to let the 'ulema make a decision, or they will think it's because he's my son-in-law."
"What -- that bunch of politicians and opportunists? They'll kill my father and he's innocent. How can you think it?"
Glad I missed that completely imaginary discussion, too.
Intellectual exercise for all you genius-class analytical savants: remove the rhetorical slant, bias, and loaded terminology and extract the bare facts. There's a meeting scheduled for Wednesday -- should America kindly refrain from sending a cruise missile or some other million-dollar "message" to obliterate it.
was-salaam, ankaboot
1 Posted on 09/18/2001 23:30:36 PDT by ankaboot
I vote to refrain. The Afghan and Paks will kill themselves off anyway, fighting between themselves.
2 Posted on 09/19/2001 00:39:30 PDT by meenie
I vote to refrain. The Afghan and Paks will kill themselves off anyway, fighting between themselves.
3 Posted on 09/19/2001 00:40:12 PDT by meenie
Intellectual exercise for all you genius-class analytical savants
How in the hell do you "analyze" a data dump? I guess you think this “mass of words” holds some deep meaning, all I see are the equivalent to a verbal ink blot test.
4 Posted on 09/19/2001 00:47:54 PDT by Texasforever
Intellectual exercise for all you genius-class analytical savants: remove the rhetorical slant, bias, and loaded terminology and extract the bare facts.
*WAY* too rambling and unfocussed -- it falls apart when I try to boil it down to anything coherent, it fails to reduce to any actual argument.
Try again.
5 Posted on 09/19/2001 00:57:32 PDT by Dan Day
How in the hell do you "analyze" a data dump? I guess you think this "mass of words" holds some deep meaning, all I see are the equivalent to a verbal ink blot test.
LOL!
Thank you! I didn't expect it would be so immediately revealing about those who read it. Thanks for proving it in preliminary field trials.
was-salaam,
ankaboot
6 Posted on 09/19/2001 01:02:21 PDT by ankaboot (muslims@earthlink.net)
Thank you! I didn't expect it would be so immediately revealing about those who read it. Thanks for proving it in preliminary field trials.
Glad I could help...sleeper
7 Posted on 09/19/2001 01:05:28 PDT by Texasforever
He had nothing to do with it -- we've been watching him day and night for years now!
However, he has already confessed to his involvement in the previous WTC bombing, the Cole bombing, and the US embassy bombings. Don't you think those are already enough?
If you don't, you can follow him to hell.
8 Posted on 09/19/2001 05:05:57 PDT by N00dleN0gg1n
Intellectual exercise for all you genius-class analytical savants:
Thematic Apperception Test bump.
9 Posted on 09/19/2001 05:12:27 PDT by dighton
Resorted to this, but it Fluked-out.
10 Posted on 09/19/2001 06:44:45 PDT by Orual
However, he has already confessed to his involvement in the previous WTC bombing, the Cole bombing, and the US embassy bombings. Don't you think those are already enough?
Thanks! What a great compliment to my writing, for you to stretch to such lengths to re-create reality! You're believing your own propaganda, that's cute.
You forgot the genius who went into panic on the ferry boat and was tried in Washington State for bringing bomb-making components into the Unites States. He was a "Bin Laden operative" -- the sole proof of which in our federal court was that he had been in Afghanistan sometime between 1992 and 1995.
And you forgot that Bin Laden was also responsible for the break-up of earth into drifting continents, the Black Plague, two World Wars and the common cold.
And he invented the Internet.
Americans! We come up with the best cartoon characters in the world! And then vote for them!
If you don't, you can follow him to hell.
Follow Bin Laden? That's a joke. Americans follow nobody.
Falsified soil samples from our "ally" sent our cruise missile to a pharmaceutical factory that turned out to have no connection whatever with Bin Laden, while millions of dollars of them cruised toward Bin Laden blew down a tent.
Still no leads on the brazen attack on the U.S.S. Liberty ... Oops, I mean the U.S.S. Cole.
And you seem to forget that the blind Shaykh 'Umar 'Abdur-Rahman answered a hypothetical question from an FBI informer posing as a muslim, and that is the ONLY evidence that persuaded a federal jury to convict him (not Bin Laden) of masterminding the first WTC bombing.
The only thing you "know" about any muslim is what you see in the movies.
Clue for you: read the credits.
was-salaam,
ankaboot
11 Posted on 09/19/2001 11:56:40 PDT by ankaboot (muslims@earthlink.net)
Hi,
The sudden hostility against Arabs and Muslims can be devastating to the economies of USA, Canada and Europe.
Harassments are too obvious at the points of entries as well as for those already living in those countries. Islamic centres across US are being attacked, an Egyptian Orthodox Christian and a Punjabi Sikh was murdered and many more open hostilities towards those who looked like Arabs or Muslims.
I looked through this freerepublic site and confirmed that hostility toward the Arabs and Muslims, eventhough the culprits behind the WTC bombings are yet to proven. Some even mentioned obliterating Afghanistan with nukes and some suggest the take-over of Mecca and Medina.
The attackers might happened to be kamikaze Muslim IMPERSONATORS who wants Christians and Muslims to kill each other. If they are Muslims indeed, they don't represent all Muslims.
If the hostility towards Arabs and Muslims continues for the next several weeks, the economic impact would be devastating one, especially to USA, Canada and Europe.
Arabs and Muslims will search for alternative partners in Asia in terms of technology, education, trade, manufacturing and tourism. They may even divert their trillions of dollars of savings to East Asian banks.
Many companies, hotels, entertainment centres, private schools and investment banks will collapse. Many more Americans will lose their jobs to join those who just hit the streets this month.
They made the choice and thereafter deserved the consequences.
12 Posted on 09/22/2001 14:37:57 PDT by armann
The attackers might happened to be kamikaze Muslim IMPERSONATORS who wants Christians and Muslims to kill each other. If they are Muslims indeed, they don't represent all Muslims.
If the hostility towards Arabs and Muslims continues for the next several weeks, the economic impact would be devastating one, especially to USA, Canada and Europe.
Arabs and Muslims will search for alternative partners in Asia in terms of technology, education, trade, manufacturing and tourism. They may even divert their trillions of dollars of savings to East Asian banks.
Many companies, hotels, entertainment centres, private schools and investment banks will collapse. Many more Americans will lose their jobs to join those who just hit the streets this month.
You don't think this is exactly what those behind the terror war intend?
The backlash failed, although it was the obvious initial result of the Tuesday Terror -- the anti-muslim and anti-Arab rhetoric hit the airwaves within minutes, with fully prepared speeches from Prime Ministers and former Prime Ministers and such. Americans almost immediately began flocking to America's mosques to find out about muslims, to guard our mosques, to put bodyguards around our leaders under local police supervision. Bookstores have sold out of their stocks of Qur'an translations. Imams are telling me their capacity to welcome new muslims is completely overwhelmed. It didn't work.
I think the rest of the terrorists' plans will also not work. The whole thing could just possibly backfire.
was-salaam,
ankaboot
--
Rejoice, muslims, in martyrdom without fighting,
a Mercy for us. Be like the better son of Adam.
Waiting for the Antichrist
Islam the Straight Path to God
Guide to Events
Message from the Muslim Community
A Political Process for Muslim America
"What I expect from American Muslims"
"Here may be our problem with Islam"
Position of US National Muslim Organizations
Taliban Leader summons religious scholars
US Rejects Afghan Clerics' Ruling on Bin Laden
FBI Obtains Terrorist E-Mails
Farrakhan Warns of Armageddon
A Principled Opponent
A Serious Islam Question
Text of Fatwa by Bin Laden -- False and Void
"Smoking them out" is not new in the Middle East
China's Role in Osama Bin Laden's "Holy War" on America A Moment For Truth
13 Posted on 09/26/2001 23:37:01 PDT by ankaboot (muslims@earthlink.net)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
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