London’s Hour of Reckoning

#364 by hamidm2 on July 15, 2005 7:54am PT


........... on a personal note, i do not consider myself an atheist


We should start a club..we can print bumper stickers saying:

Cult: A small unpopular religion
Religion: A large popular cult.

#356 aquaris,
i am afraid the time for ``surgical`` treatment is either past or soon to be. an unfortunate chemo will debilitate all of us, so stubborn is the malignancy.

my hope is in the next generation...a sustained ``war on terror`` with increasing pain to the elite who fund it (always..follow the money) for a generation should yield results. the situation is definately different now than say, 10 years ago, when the petri-dish was brimming with warm an humid climate of post-afgan war, and only kashmir was running high-temperature, and the west was on a economic boom.

i must increase precious metals and alternative investments in my port-folio.

romair,


.............you really should go to a mosque more frequently to find out what your brethern are up to instead of basing your opinions about the ummah on conversations with your imaginary friends ......... the mosque i go to - at least twice a year and for the occassional wedding and funeral - is derided as being a ``social club`` by other mosques in the area who are appalled by the fact that women are allowed to enter by the front door ............. the membership consists of many people who have seven figure incomes and regularly rub shoulders with congressmen and governors and are listed in the who`s who of the area .......... but yet ............ but yet they are imprisoned in the ghettos of their mind which, as i said before, has been polluted by the puritanical strain of islam that has remained unchanged for fifteen hundred years and which is tahmed is so vigorously trying to change !

........... on a personal note, i do not consider myself an atheist and have nothing against people going to mosques, churches and synagogues if it makes them feel better .........there is nothing wrong with personal faith even if it involves worshiping cows and jewish men of dubious parentage ............. but i am against all organized religions that seek to divide humanity and wreak havoc in the name of arrogant and vengeful gods - and, at this point in history, islam is clearly the main culprit ..............

Ozer Khalid..............

are you the half Rajput half turk who sports a blazing sun tattoo on his arm??

#355 by dost-mittar on July 15, 2005 4:46am PT



Reality Check:


HAHA....DM...Things are so bad with Capt Clueless that even you have started giving him a reality check instead of trying to refute his lame reasoning...

dm #355 If only more people were as honest and fair-minded as you are....

Never fear, dm. To paraphrase Churchill when Britain stood alone before the Nazi armies: We shall fight them on the internet, we shall fight them in the drawing rooms, we shall never surrender. ;-)

PewResearch (Prashant): Glad we agree on something. I would add that this culture of arrogance and contempt for other religions is not based on the Quran, and I have been saying this for years on chowk. This culture is based on a history of kingships (from where we get the sharia and draconian punishments) and jehaliyat/superstitions (from where we get beliefs in the hajj being the ritual to wash away all sins and so forth). The only real antidote is first and foremost democracy.

the hits just keep on coming...

Now it turns out the London bombers were trained, in part, by the indigenous Kashmiri freedom fighters who the paki army never nurtured and armed and who the paki junta abhors...

Bomber met Islamabad church bomber in 2003-intelligence source
Fri Jul 15, 2005 12:41 PM BST
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ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - One of the London suicide bombers met in 2003 with a man later arrested for bombing a church in the Pakistani capital, intelligence sources said on Friday.

Pakistani security agencies are investigating possible links between militant groups based in Pakistan and Shehzad Tanweer, a Briton of ethnic-Pakistani origin who was one of four bombers in the July 7 London attack that killed 53 people.

One of the groups being checked is Jaish-e-Mohammad (Army of Mohammad), linked to al Qaeda and banned by Pakistan in 2002.

The other group is Lashkar-e-Taiba, which like Jaish has a record of fighting in Indian Kashmir, but unlike Jaish has a reputation for tight discipline and is not known to have any operational ties with al Qaeda.

One Pakistani intelligence source said Tanweer visited Pakistan in 2003 and 2004.

During the first visit, the source said, Tanweer met Osama Nazir, who was arrested last December for the 2002 bombing of a church in Islamabad that killed two Americans among others.

``He met Osama Nazir in a mosque in Faisalabad,`` an intelligence official said. Tanweer`s family comes from Faisalabad, a city in eastern Pakistan.

Nazir was a member of Jaish, and security agents called in Jaish supremo Maulana Azhar Masood on Thursday for questioning.

``So far all leads are heading towards Jaish-e-Mohammad,`` an intelligence official said.

British-born Islamic militant Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, now under sentence of death for the murder of U.S. reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002, was also believed to be a member of Jaish.

Another intelligence official said Tanweer, 22, had made a second visit to Pakistan in late 2004 and had stayed in the city of Lahore from December until last February, during which he visited several mosques and madrassahs, or religious schools.

#356 by aquaris on July 15, 2005 4:53am PT


Indians especially the Paki-haters gleefully try to get any thing and I mean any thing
Negative about Pakistan from such incidences.,and loose no oportunity at *#()&^%
Basihing .


That`s right...the fact that brit-pakis, trained by paki army nurtured kashmiri freedom fighters, blew themselves up killing 52 innocents isn`t the real issue..the real issue is how posts by Indians makes pakis do it...


In this way loose objectivity , hence their credibility , at least in my view.!


And your view, or for that matter, the view of whole of pakiland, doesn`t matter much...

Romair #348 you write ``My analyses is that, after Iraq, it will die down in Europe. But continue against the USA. This was the situation, in Europe, before Iraq.``

Not true. Examples: the Pan Am Lockerbie attack that killed all passengers on a jumbo jet; the Achille Lauro attack where a wheelchair bound man was pushed overboard on his wheelchair by terrorists; the targetting and killing of perhaps a dozen israeli athletes in munich olympics. All took place before the Iraq war.

Romair:

``So before jumping to conclusions, I would like to ask you, why you think the Pakistani elite should be panicky? And what exactly my sentiments are?``

As I said to tahmed, I was referring to various articles and opinions, for example by Ahmad Rashid and ferozk on this board. With regard to your sentiments, I was referring to statements in those letters, such as ``Mr Blair should not have played Sancho Panza to the American Don Quixote``.

the Bottom Line question in my opinion is
What is the reason.? Why are theydoing it..? Especially when they know it will only
further malign the image of their religion...!!

Indians especially the Paki-haters gleefully try to get any thing and I mean any thing
Negative about Pakistan from such incidences.,and loose no oportunity at *#()&^%
Basihing .

In this way loose objectivity , hence their credibility , at least in my view.!
Yes muslims have a problem, and it needs to be surgically analysed and corrected.
But Professor Pape research provide a better , immpartial and objective analysis.
But perhaps political expediencies of the Super Power and the Tow Power [ USA is the super power and UK is the Tow Power ] do not allow such objective analysis from their
leaders.
......52 Deads, innocent victims, who had done no harm to any body, ....and then there are
over a million victims again, innocent and had nothing to do with either the so called
terrorists or the invaders , lost their lives for what....??
So that some one somewhere On some site SCORE points...??

But perhaps there is silver lining on the cloud, perhaps this horrible incident bring home
a point , a need to look beyond Political objectives by the Involved Powers.

Thanks Mr Romair for answering to the objections of Mr bbabu

Romair:

Reality Check:

``It doesn`t matter whether we are in Afghanistan or anywhere else in the world. They want to break our society. I actually believe that,`` he said. If Canada is attacked, he says, it will be only because it`s a free country.
``They detest our freedoms. They detest our society. They detest our liberties,`` he said.

This quotation (with which I do not agree!) is not by Bush or Rumsfeld but by Canada`s top army boss, General Rick Hillier. From our Deputy Prime Minister to the garden variety security experts, everyone is saying that Canada is one of the five countries on the Al Qaeda`s list of target countries. While I am agnostic to this viewpoint, there are reports of Al Qaeda sleeper cells in Montreal and Ottawa and the millenium bombing accused, Algerian Al Ressam, was indeed from the Montreal sleeper cell.

tahmed32#346:
I consider people who read Dawn as the upper middle class Pakistanis and those who write to it are probably more upper than others.
As far ``panicky`` I was referring to various articles and opinions expressed on this board.
BTW, if there is going to be a battle for the soul of Islam, I hope that your side wins. And I also agree with the comparison, or rather the contrast, you made between Blair and Modi in their response to the London and Godhra attacks.

Tahmed, you write:
``It will be alive and well after the US has left Iraq. It will be alive and well as long as muslims dont get of their ``We are the Chosen People`` high horse and end their religio-ego-trip.``

You are right, and Tom Friedman of the New York Times has written a piece (see sunlight`s cut and paste, #353) that makes essentially the same case. Dost Mittar has also long argued on Chowk that Muslims learn something, somewhere that results in their treating (people of?) other faiths with contempt. This is the problem that sets the ball rolling towards Sunni Muslim homicide bombings. Since it took hundreds, if not thousands, of years for this mindset to get established, it may take a comparable lenght of time for a course correction, if it is possible at all. If the source of this teaching is the Koran, then the job is even more difficult because the painful remedy may include disavowing portions of it.

More cut-and-paste from Friedman (New York Times) http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/15/opinion/15friedman.html

``Also at work is Sunni Islam`s struggle with modernity. Islam has a long tradition of tolerating other religions, but only on the basis of the supremacy of Islam, not equality with Islam. Islam`s self-identity is that it is the authentic and ideal expression of monotheism. Muslims are raised with the view that Islam is God 3.0, Christianity is God 2.0, Judaism is God 1.0, and Hinduism is God 0.0.``

``Part of what seems to be going on with these young Muslim males is that they are, on the one hand, tempted by Western society, and ashamed of being tempted. On the other hand, they are humiliated by Western society because while Sunni Islamic civilization is supposed to be superior, its decision to ban the reform and reinterpretation of Islam since the 12th century has choked the spirit of innovation out of Muslim lands, and left the Islamic world less powerful, less economically developed, less technically advanced than God 2.0, 1.0 and 0.0.``

``This is not about the poverty of money. This is about the poverty of dignity and the rage it can trigger.``

``How does that happen? Britain`s Independent newspaper described one of the bombers, Hasib Hussain, as having recently undergone a sudden conversion ``from a British Asian who dressed in Western clothes to a religious teenager who wore Islamic garb and only stopped to say salaam to fellow Muslims.``

``The secret of this story is in that conversion - and so is the crisis in Islam. The people and ideas that brought about that sudden conversion of Hasib Hussain and his pals - if not stopped by other Muslims - will end up converting every Muslim into a suspect and one of the world`s great religions into a cult of death. ``

As usual, some brilliant comments from Ayaz Amir in Dawn (let me be the first to cut and paste):

``It is no use saying that Islam is a religion of peace or that there is a foul plot afoot to misrepresent Islam and blacken its name when from Bali to Madrid to London it is Muslims who are behind acts of terrorism. To outsiders a religion is known by the fruits it produces and if the present brand of terrorism has a Muslim substance to it, it becomes difficult to sell the ‘true meaning of Islam’.``

``...what we in the Muslim world excel in is internalized anger which, far from harming anyone else, turns us, collectively, into victims of impotent despair — despair falling eternally short of meaningful action, despair deriving a kind of masochistic pleasure from its own helplessness, despair now finding expression in mindless terrorism.``

``Lacking the power to correct our own weaknesses, we tend to blame outsiders for our misfortunes. Thus, even as Muslim rulers turn to the US for support and protection, at the popular level frustration boils over into strident anti-Americanism. Sure, there is much that America can be blamed for, not least its blind support of Israel. But we should not lose sight of the fact that America has not invented Muslim weakness; it merely exploits it, turning it to its advantage.``

``America has a vested interest in Muslim dictatorships because dictatorships are easier to handle. But then again, Muslim dictatorship is not an American invention; merely an American convenience.``

``Bin Ladenism, which is a peculiar distillation of Wahabi Islam, and the terrorism which has come to be its favourite tool, are no answers to American domination or Muslim weakness. In fact, Bin Ladenism, with its narrow interpretation of Islam, is itself a reflection of Muslim weakness because it shows a preoccupation with the very elements which constitute the core of Muslim backwardness: a romantic attachment to a glorified past, an emphasis on literalism, and a comprehensive failure to understand what makes the modern world tick.``