Two people are dead and 115 people remain injured after 350 bombs detonated in or around government buildings all over Bangladesh today. (Thanks, Rahul.) The explosions which were apparently the work of Islamic militant group Jamayetul Mujahedin affected 63 of the country’s 64 districts. [link]
The bombs exploded in rapid succession between 10:30 and 11:30 in the morning, local time. From the BBC:
…timing devices were found at the scenes of blasts but most of the bombs were small, homemade devices – wrapped in tape or paper.
One of the deaths was a young boy in Savar, near Dhaka, who was killed when he picked up a device. [link]
The group responsible for the blasts was banned by the Bangladeshi government earlier this year; previously, the government had insisted that Bangladesh didn’t have a problem with Islamic Militancy, so this policy change was significant.
Leaflets from the Jamatul Mujahideen Bangladesh have appeared at the site of some of the blasts.
“It is time to implement Islamic law in Bangladesh” and “Bush and Blair be warned and get out of Muslim countries”, the leaflets say. [link]
Developing…
Since we are speaking in Bill Walton-esque absolutes, you’re absolutely a goddamned idiot. Hows that? Now explain to me how AALDEF propogates the equivalence between fundamentalist Muslim and brown. Very curious to know…Thats like saying Donald Rumsfeld supports Saddam Hussein….hmm bad example…like saying the CIA supports Afghan mujahadeen….hmm another bad example. Anyway, please explain this ostensible equivalence.
What Abhi’s saying, perhaps more bluntly than I have, is this: this is not just a community space, it’s also about the artistic rights of the writers.
Good: ‘Check this out’ is great, we use tips all the time.
Bad: ‘If you don’t write what I tell you, you are morally bankrupt’ is totally lame. Start your own blog. That’s why we did.
this sentence has bothered me all day; unfortunately, (or perhaps fortunately) i couldn’t comment from work. how ironic– the pious, conscious, noble Saurav who wants to make sure no one is left out is the one who makes me a token.
i’m an equal partner in this project.
i wasn’t chosen b/c i have a vagina.
i am not here for decorative purposes.
if anything my voice is probably “more heard” than several of my co-bloggers.
i don’t have “male” values and i am incensed that i might be characterized as such just b/c i’m not the sort of feminist that you approve of. your rant was unfair and petty (good luck? echo chamber? c’mon.) you are not privy to what goes on behind the scenes of this blog, and it’s easy to complain when that’s the case, isn’t it?
if you knew how much time and effort we invest in this blog, as we painstakingly try to maintain/improve the very qualities that keep you coming back, you’d feel shitty for assuming the worst about people who give up sleep, meals, even–oh–what’s this? FRIDAY NIGHTS just so we can blog around our full-time jobs and other obligations.
each of us has a personal blog (in my case blogS).
each of us has friends.
each of us has a family.
each of us should probably go to the gym.
sometimes some, if not all of those priorities get less than they deserve b/c we are so grateful for your loyalty and attention, we want to give you the blog that you deserve.
we never said we were perfect and you’re absolutely right, with our success comes serious responsibility…but we didn’t get to this amazing place by being idiots who stumbled ass-backwards into it a la Kramer.
how ’bout a little faith in us for once?
Fuck all yall, Saurav is the man. I’ve disagreed with him many times but he always comes up with well thought-out and articulate responses
Well, sure, I guess — if “Fuck all yall” is the standard. 🙂
Saurav has always injected an interesting class based perspective to SM
Meaning what…his laundry lists of ostensibly oppressed groups? Beyond denigrating SM for its shocking lack of desi dropouts and Pakistani proletarians, what “class based” perspective does he contribute?
And why would class warfare be worth injecting into the debate anyway? Newsflash: Marxism died with the end of the Soviet Union. Deng Xiaoping and Manmohan Singh got the message…why haven’t you?
If you are truly in search of knowledge and understanding, you have to understand your views and constantly exercise them. When I say exercise, I mean pull them and stretch them to test their vitality and validity.
It seems like you’re trying to set the record for the most useless fluff stuffed into a single paragraph. The above reminds me of nothing so much as the contentless page fillers I used to see back when I graded freshman essays.
…in any case, insofar as Saurav’s rather incoherent beef can be summed up, his main objection to this place is that he isn’t posting here:
It’s about ego, not about “vitality and validity”. There are plenty of opposing opinions here, but because sheer bloody-minded tokenism isn’t the obsession of the writing staff, he feels like his viewpoint is excluded.
The solution to this is simple. There might be a market for a “South Asian” blog which was nothing more than a front for leftist agitation, and which featured regular harangues of the readership from a “class based perspective”. Vurdlife, maybe you could ask to contribute an expletive ridden manifesto or two. I’m sure their standards would be low enough…
Now explain to me how AALDEF propogates the equivalence between fundamentalist Muslim and brown. Very curious to know
I’m talking about the left-wing useful idiots of Hindu descent who stop the deportation of Muslim fundies…fundies who’d slit their throat if given the chance. I’m talking about Indians who blur the difference between “Indian” on the one hand and “Pakistani/Bangladeshi” on the other hand…a cultural difference of utmost importance when it comes to the propensity for terrorism.
And spare me the tropes about how whites can’t distinguish the two. Clearly white society is capable of making the distinction. Ask your average white Brit or American whether they’d prefer to live next door to some Hindus or Sikhs. Then ask them whether they’d prefer to live next door to some Muslims. Dollars to doughnuts you’ll see a difference…a difference that is a function of rational decision making, including the knowledge that Muslims in the UK commit crimes at a much higher rate than Hindus:
Unfortunately — unlike the population at large — leftists of brown skin who’d pursue a “popular front” are incapable of making these trivial distinctions. The fact is that Indians are not Pakistanis, and Hindus and Sikhs are not Muslims. Non-Muslim browns have no interest whatsoever in wearing the sackcloth and ashes for a community that not only defends terrorism — or looks the other way — but that would treat us just as poorly as other “infidels” if given the chance.
And lest you think this is hyperbole, check out the mainstream UK Muslims on sharia:
39 Muslim groups signed this. This is not a minority opinion. These people defend sharia, for crying out loud. And in the states, these “Muslim charities” and legal orgs are cut from exactly the same cloth as the lefties over here who defended Sami Al-Arian, the Buffalo Five, and virtually every other accused terrorist…a group which includes AALDEF:
I didn’t see AALDEF champing at the bit to defend Eric Rudolph or Myron Tereschuk. So this is not about “principle”, but about racism. The non-Muslim browns at AALDEF disgust me…it is they who are the real racists, as they impede FBI investigations and defend Muslim terrorists just because they share the same skin color. Their loyalty is to a brown racialist fiction rather than the United States of America.
Sigh. I just got here. I was on vacation, I’m working my way semi-backwards through posts.
Chill out people, please. We need some love.
I am working on a system by which comment leavers such as yourself would get a red font, and comment leavers like me would get assigned a blue font. 🙂
I want blue with gold underlining please.
Um, to, ahem, cough cough, get back to the subject at hand:
1) Terrorism is of concern b/c it’s terrorizing, not because of the number of people it kills. It’s not the number one concern. But if you enjoy living and working and doing research and travelling with the relative ease of movement and predictability and fearless order most of us enjoy (and I mean relative, so nobody jump down my throat about the myriad ways those pleasures are not quite perfect in our various societies), then terrorism is of disproportionate concern. Routine, schedule, predictability–these are the building blocks of sustained creative work and innovation. Terrorism threatens that. More importantly it threatens that in a way that is easy to manipulate. I mean, hurricanes also threaten routine, predictability, schedule. But nobody realy has a way of causing them, so noone who profits from that disorder can increase them. People can cause sudden, surprising, disorienting violence however, and if they can link the results to a desire objective—even if that link only exists in their head, and never materializes–they will have an incentive to cause more. And if other other people see that the system doesn’t respond, other people may also cause more. (Classic broken windows theory.)
Now I agree that it’s not our most pressing problem. Personally I think energy/global warming is our most pressing problem. The fact is different people are suited to thinking about different problems, and they’re going to emphasize whatever problem catches their problem-solving fancy more. For all its intractability, terrorism might very well be a more attractive problem to government/journalistic types than energy crises and global warming. I mean, I certainly find myself more willing to read up on Al Qaeda than on coal-treatment and nuclear energy, and I’ve got energy issues in my blood.
2)Manish is spot on. The issue here is precisely that nobody was killed and yet 400 bombs went off simultaneously. It speakse of immense precision, organization, coordination, and control. It’s meant to terrorize a particular subset of people: a) people who care about Bangladesh for whatever reason and b) people who think a lot about logistics. That’s an important set of people–it includes the Bangladeshi government, several other governments, business types, investors, etc. It was mean to make them feel at risk. People behave differently when they are feeling risk. But as Razib pointed out, for most Bangladeshis–who’ve already got incredibly tough lives and plenty of problems to deal with–this may very well seem banal in a few days.
As an aside, I want to say, I like Sepia Mutiny b/c it’s very well done, not b/c of the specific content. I’d be happy to lap up other content that’s as well done somewhere else–the more the merrier.
Anna, I don’t really want to continue this “dialogue,” but I do want to address your point because it’s important and I want to clarify what I was saying–which I think you misread. No one said that because you’re a woman, you’re here because of that (I have no idea what the process was that went into any of you being chosen). What I said was that the overall tone of the blog is “middle class/upwardly mobile/professional hetero male Indian American” and that has to do with a number of structural elements to the blog (in addition to other things). You yourself have pointed out how often your looks get commented on; are you seriously arguing that the atmosphere created by the blog has nothing to do with that? Do you really like listening to men talking about women the way they do here on occasion?
And as for all the other adjectives I listed as part of the tone–I think they fit your voices, choices, politics, etc. fairly well. The point is that if you bring other types of perspectives in (over time, or perhaps in other ways that are not within SM but making a conscious effort to post things), perhaps there would be less grounds for complaint. The point isn’t to abandon all the values of SM as it exists right now–just that it move towards a direction that’s more genuinely reflective of different kinds of perspectives (both on and offline).
And stating that we readers don’t know waht’s going on behind the scenes because you choose not to tell us and therefore we need to just be quiet and have faith is a really poor argument given that Abhi has already laid out an argument for why I shouldn’t have any faith at all in that, and Manish has echoed that idea.
The only sm blogger who has remotely engaged my criticism in an open way is Amardeep because (I think) he also understands that a “South Asian” voice that goes no further and doesn’t look at any of hte dynamics within what “South Asian” means is a poor way to go about things. I think this is especially so with the amount of social capital you’re all accumulating.
You guys get mad props from all the other folks here most of the time (on anniversaries, blah blah blah), so I hope that one thread with intense critique from me (even if i was nasty about it–which, again, i apologize for) hopefully won’t kill you.
vurdlife, thanks for the support. biharis continue to be the best people in the world 🙂
Courtesy goes a long way.
The accumulation of capital doesn’t automatically demand expropriation 😉
I think it is fairly obvious from reading the comments on this blog that he contributes plenty of class-based arguments that have nothing to do with SM or its denigration.
There is a distinction between classism and “class warfare”. I suppose its all a commie-pinko haze to your discerning mind.
Your posts clearly establish that, unfortunately.
You don’t want to play the “I’m smarter than you” game with me, bucko. It is a game you have repeatedly lost in the past and will continue to do so.
AALDEF is not a Hindu organization, and a very small part of their makeup is Hindu for that matter. So even if your points are valid (they’re not, they are drivel), you’re still over-generalizing and misinformed.
They have not been surveilled or prosecuted solely on the basis of their race or ethnicity. Its the Asian American Legal Defense Fund (AALDEF), not the Randon White Guy Legal Defense Fund (RWGLDF).
Hey thats cool, HN browns like you disgust me as well. The above comment clearly shows that you speak from a position or ignorance and privilege. AALDEF does not defend terrorists, it defends people who are ensnared by the FBI and the government’s attack on brown people.
Before labelling the entire set of people who AALDEF and similar organizations have represented at deportation hearings as “fundies” try talking to one of them. Even one. Because I’m willing to bet a lot of money you’ve never done so.
(Disclaimer: I don’t work for AALDEF).
Go read “India for Beginners” or something. Maybe a dictionary, I dunno, its a waste of time educating you. Newslfash: India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are different countries, not cultures. Many groups in India share the same culture/language/ethnicity as many groups in Pakistan and Bangladesh. And you seem to equate Muslim culture with terrorism, I thought I’d inform you that India has the largest Muslim population of any country in the world.
You are not the person to be raising this point on this thread to me.
Courtesy unresponded to sometimes has the unfortunate consequence of turning into rudeness. I’m not the first person to bring up related points and I won’t be the last; I’m just the only one that’s managed to provoke a response in recent times (and an inadequate one at that), and this is unfortunately what it took. Perhaps someone more courteous than me will get through to you; or perhaps someone will have to do the same thing again three months from now. As Black Sheep says, the choice is yours.
Correct. It demands claims of accountability by the people who have contributed to it and are potentially affected by it, rather than quiet obedience or departure in the face of nonresponsiveness. As it turns out, one of the more unfortunate quirks of human nature is that people in control of resources often don’t like to be questioned on how they use them or what they’re doing with them.
Great post on the India Day parade; I’m sure the absence of a corresponding one on the Pakistan Day Parade beyond a throwaway line (or perhaps even a post on the problems with national identification for people who identify as South Asian!) has nothing to do with the points I raised above 😉
gc, your post disgusts me.
Yes, lots of white people hate Muslims, and if they could tell the difference, would leave the sikhs and hindus alone to persecute the Muslims. However, if all the muslims were put in camps or deported or whatever, then they’d focus on the non-Muslim desis. You don’t think Americans are upset over outsourcing, etc, and wouldn’t continue such remarks like dothead or sand nigger? Even if all muslims were wiped out, the Christians would turn their attention to Hindus, etc.
gc, YOU don’t understand sharia. They’re defending the sharia that governs inheritance laws, divorce, family living, and a hierarchy of authority of scholars that leads with a caliph, a Muslim pope basically. I mean, it wasn’t extreme when Catholics worldwide wanted a new Pope chosen, the same with Muslims.
You’re saying that people who defend Sami Al-Arian and the Buffalo Five are insane, far-left, and undermining America and our safety? Puhlease. Sami Al-Arian is a weak case, accused of being a mastermind and secret head of a terrorist organization, at a trial brought after he was failed to be fired by a college for being pro-Palestinian. The Buffalo Five were basically declared innocent by a judge, but were forced to plead guilty to some minor weapons violation or whatever because the Bush administration threatened to make them Enemy combatants because, well, just because.
If you want to say that race isn’t important but religion is a basis to judge and discriminate people, then you’re breaking the First Amendment and being a real jerk. Are you saying don’t profile all brown people, just Muslims? Let’s go sew gold stars, no, gold crescents to everyone’s shirts again and repeat history.
Since you’re unaware of what causes offense, let me spell it out: Hijacking another thread, flaming someone’s choice of topic and not asking whether there’s a legitimate reason to close comments is rude. Repeating it is rude. Your repeated rants about this blog are already a minor legend. Harping on how you would write this blog does not help your cause.
I missed the part where a free blog with zero revenues done by people in their spare time suddenly became Halliburton. The ‘resources’ I ‘control’ are what I say and how I say it, and I’ll defend that freedom to the death.
Or maybe the fact that the parade hasn’t happened yet.
Or maybe that we’re not a paper of record, we’re a blog. Where we write about things which interest us. And where we have every right to write about, and exclusively about, India Day, Cthulu Day or Flying Spaghetti Monster Day as the whim strikes.
You might want to spend less time trying to control what others write and more time writing what you want to read. You’re increasingly sounding like those who see something they want and dress up coercion in the guise of morality.
If you don’t like the blog, don’t read it. If it’s missing what you’d like to read, write it. Simple as that.
In the meantime, Saurav, I think you’re ‘hegemonist’ and morally bankrupt for not writing about the underrepresented topics I obsess about: literature, motorcycling and salsa. It’s beyond me how you can sleep at night 😉
It is a game you have repeatedly lost in the past and will continue to do so.
You do realize this sentence is ungrammatical, don’t you? Writing this in earnest is like wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with “your retarded”…minus the sense of irony. In fact, that particular faux pas is characteristic of your verbal diarrhea:
In case you still don’t get it, I’ll demonstrate with a sentence: “You’re retarded.” (Note that tricky apostrophe!)
You don’t want to play the “I’m smarter than you” game with me, bucko.
Heh:
In any case, what’s with this sudden focus on IQ? Don’t leftists believe that intelligence is a construct of the white patriarchy? Isn’t everyone “equal”, after all, according to your dogma — from the boyz in da hood to the semiliterate professional ethnics like yourself? I’m interested in finding out how you reconcile this belief with the facts on the ground. Specifically, I suppose the perenially “underrepresented” can at least claim “racism” to explain away their sorry academic performance…but what excuse do you have for not cracking 1000 on the SAT?
HN types
I’m an American nationalist and an atheist, not a Hindu nationalist. But with respect to the issue of Muslim terrorism at least, Christians, Hindus, and Jews — and Americans, Indians, and Israelis — are all on the same side as us atheists. Hypocrites like yourself who selectively apply secularism to the least medieval religions might not understand this.
try talking to one of them.
Oh, I know the type far too well. Fundies are fundies. I’ve lost family to Muslim terror in India. In this case, familiarity breeds contempt. It’s kind of like the sight-unseen contempt you have for Christian conservatives and Hindu nationalists…except it’s justified.
Your belief system is a canonical example of backwards leftism: hatred for Christians and Hindus (and
Jews“Zionists”) along with oodles of tolerance for those pooooor, misunderstood jihadists — the ones who’re really teddy bears when you meet them in person, when they’re not screaming “Death to the Great Satan!”, that is…So tell me, vurdlife…does hearing “one of them” in living color count as “talking to one of them”? Did you become convinced of the essential goodness of Islamic fundamentalists after the line about “American pig dogs”, the one on “Hindu devil worshippers”, or the bit about “Jewish monkeys”? Curious bystanders want to know.
This, by the way, is the motivation for Hindutva. I certainly don’t sign on to the whole package, but what you don’t get is that Hindu fundamentalism is a reactive ideology, a reaction to Islamic terror. Take away the Muslims, and Hindus are pretty docile. Proof: look around the world at the Hindu diaspora. Compare and contrast to the Islamic diaspora. As demonstrated by a glance at any map of the world’s ongoing wars, there is an obvious pattern: Islam has bloody borders. From the Balkans to Indonesia, from the smoking crater of Ground Zero to the smoking crater of the London Underground, Muslim minorities cause trouble — often violent, explosive trouble.
And when they aren’t blowing stuff up, they’re agitating for sharia in Canada, forcing their women to wear jilbabs in Britain, committing ‘honor’ killings in Germany, defending the stoning of homosexuals in the US of A, and mugging the leftists stupid enough to defend them in France.
And, of course, setting off four hundred simultaneous bombs in Bangladesh.
you seem to equate Muslim culture with terrorism, I thought I’d inform you that India has the largest Muslim population of any country in the world.
Oh, you’d inform me, would you? 🙂 Hahahaha, well…I hate to break it to you, but the country with the largest Muslim population is actually Indonesia, with more than 195 million Muslims. If you knew anything about the subject, you might remember that they had some star performers recently on the world stage…star performers who got a slap on the wrist for the cold blooded murder of 200 people. Guess those “moderates” didn’t show up at sentencing!
For your edification, number two with a bullet (or a well placed bomb, as is often their choice) is Pakistan with 135 million. India is only number three, with 120 million practitioners of the “Religion of Peace”.
Can you salvage anything from this glaring display of ignorance? At first glance…no. Given the patented vurdlife combination of factual error and hysterical grammar, one might think your original sentence fragment actually had negative information content. After all, if you believed it, you’d know less about the world than you did before you heard it! That’s not surprising, because it bears the mark of the leftist levelling impulse gone berserk; all must be “equal” in guilt, whether they be Hindu and Muslim — or killer and victim. And lies don’t matter if you’re PC, for standard operating procedure is to “balance the ledger” through legerdemain.
But be that as it may, to the extent this non-fact corresponds to reality, it might explain why India is the number one victim of Muslim terror. So how exactly does it mitigate against my central thesis? To restate:
you seem to equate Muslim culture with terrorism
The equation is simple: more Muslims = generally more terrorism. Given that Muslims are blowing things up from Bali to Britain, from Chechnya to China, and from Israel to Iraq…and given that Muslim-owned TV cheers them on as shahids all the way…and given the hundreds of millions of Muslims with positive opinions of Osama bin Laden…forgive me if I think there is much to this equation.
Damn, did I miss Cthulu Day again?
So your argument is that you, by fiat, closed comments on a thread with a potentially controversial topic (the writing of which, incidentally, completely failed to reflect your own alleged beliefs about South Asian unity) without providing any explanation. As a response, other people should therefore not comment publicly on that in a participatory site in the spaces that are available to them that, for better or for worse, designed to address desi issues that the MSM doesn’t cover (by your description). I’ll leave it to other people to decide which is more uncivil, given our respective power to express our opinions in this space on this set of issues.
But I won’t deny that I was unnecessarily rude in this thread and some others. I apologize, but, again, I point out, I haven’t always been on issues which touch on this overaching topic of inclusiveness and how it reflects in the blog posts and the blog as a whole.
Hence I used the term social capital. Look into it. It’s only if you make money from something that you’re responsible to the people potentially affected by it?
By the way, let’s not pretend that this social capital you have, down the road, is not convertible to financial gain if you chose to do so (which there is nothing to stop you from doing since you largely deny claims of accountability to your readership or the community that you write about).
In any case, you’re not writing on your individual blog here–you’re writing on a collective space in which there’s a significant contribution by people like me and many, many other who sustain a dialogue and that reaches tens if not hundreds of thousands of people over the course of a few months? Hence there’s a need for balance between creative direction by you guys and your responsibility to your readership and the people you affect (you know, like how you think cartoonists and radio DJs have that responsibility?).
All I’ve done is angry, loud, vehement, semi-controversial individual critique in the context of the space you set up and largely according to its rules. The farthest I went towards suggesting some form of structural regulation on what you say and don’t say in this post was to implicitly propose a public editor or an ombudsman of some kind.
Obviously you can write what you want and there’s little I can do to stop you from doing that on the long run wiithout bothering to engage in tactcs that I’d rather not spend the time or energy on. So have fun.
You’re right and I apologize. It was a badly chosen example of a trend. I should have just pointed to the Indian National Independence post.
Why?
Okay.
If you don’t like what cartoon writers produce or the Jersey Guys say, then just ignore them. Produce your own cartoons or radio broadcasts. Simple as that.
You made it through almost an entire comment without being unnecessarily glib and offbase in a way that totally ignores the context of the conversation. Oh well.
And as a final note, I don’t think any of you are morally bankrupt–especially given that I don’t know you, just like you don’t really know me. I just think your politics about collective blogs and identity politics (especially as reflected in this blog and how you choose to construct it and approach it) are narrowminded, shallow, and, most generally, suck.
I’d frame it in a more polite way, but I’d rather be good to myself than to you right now.
i’m curious– is there a blog that does this? how would it work? i’ve never read a blog with an ombudsman. you said many things, but this is what i can’t stop pondering…
It wasn’t in earnest, this is a blog for Krishna’s sake, not one of those intro level courses you TA’ed at Podunk University. Is that the best you can do?
Ahahah. Lets put it this way. It is mathematically impossible for you to have done better on the SAT’s than me. Figure that out genius.
Such as you and your boy Pat Robertson?
For your edification.
No, you are clearly an idiot.
Americans are blowing up things all over the world too. Does that mean American culture should be equated with terrorism? How many innocent civilians have died in Iraq and Afghanistan vis a vis how many died due to Islamic terrorism in all of its forms?
i swear, i’d pay good rupees to see you and gc
dissdebate each other in person. all the bluster of cable pundits, none of the wrinkly pink skin. 😉Podunk University
You have no idea. 🙂
It is mathematically impossible for you to have done better on the SAT’s than me.
Interesting, because the same is true for me (and, if I’m not mistaken, Manish). If you don’t believe me, just email Manish, Vinod, Razib, etc. So I guess we’ll have to call that a tie.
But a 1-1 score there means nothing when you’ve lost every other point — for what exactly is your link supposed to prove other than that you were wrong, again?
Not the largest as you claimed. With respect to the specific figures, those depend on the year and source of citation…but the rank order’s remained invariant for quite a while now. So your attempt to draw an equivalence between Islamic fundamentalism and Indian civilization by stressing the absolute number of Muslims in India simply failed. You know as well as I do that majority Muslim countries — unlike India — generally don’t have elections or a democratic tradition. You also know that nations ruled by Hindus and Christians are tolerant of Muslims, but the converse is generally not true.
But yet you persist in drawing ludicrous equivalences like the following:
How many innocent civilians have died in Iraq and Afghanistan vis a vis how many died due to Islamic terrorism in all of its forms?
Afghanistan was ruled by the Taliban. Were you really against deposing the Taliban? You know, the guys who converted soccer stadiums into open-air execution chambers where they shot innocent women in the head?
As for Iraq, the majority of civilians who’ve died there have been blown up by Islamic fundamentalists — on purpose. If America wanted to kill civilians at random, there’d be a lot more dead people than there are now.
But something about this country makes us refrain from running Humvees packed with explosives into groups of children while yelling “Allahu Akbar”. That something’s called civilization.
your boy Pat Robertson
You’re desperate. You’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel here. Pat Robertson is a moron, and I’ve never defended him. I’m an American nationalist and atheist, not a Christian evangelist. Robertson could die tomorrow and the earth would be a better place.
Can you say the same for the Islamic fundies? I think not…which is why you’re an apologist:
Before labelling the entire set of people who AALDEF and similar organizations have represented at deportation hearings as “fundies” try talking to one of them. Even one.
The clear implication here is that if I talked to one of them — any of them — I’d see that they weren’t fundies. You’re a liberal caricature in living color, the kind of person who believes Christian fundamentalism is a bigger threat than Islamic fundamentalism…the kind who variously maintains that Islamic fundies don’t exist, or aren’t a threat, or that we deserve their tender mercies anyway for fighting the Cold War.
And insofar as you enable Islamic fundies to carry on in this country, contributing to the defenses of the Sami Al-Arians and Abdul Rahmans, you’re part of the problem.
Push it far enough, and you’ll end up like Lynn e Stewart:
That’s what happens when you move over the line, from simply defending Muslim fundies at every opportunity to actively aiding and abetting them. But I’m sure that AALDEF and its ilk would never do that…
Abdul Rahmans
Heh. You know, for a second I confused Abdel-Rahman — Stewart’s “client” — with Abdul Rahman:
First, it’s funny that there are so many Muslim terrorists out to destroy the US that they had a namespace overlap of this kind. And it’s not the first — there’s also the potential Mohammed Atta confusion in the Able Danger business. Funny, isn’t it, how there aren’t two Gandhis, Wangs, Cohens, or Smiths on the FBI’s most wanted terrorist list — let alone one. Why is that, I wonder? 🙂
Second, this Abdul Rahman was born in America — in Bloomington, Indiana. But don’t question his patriotism!
only on a brown blog would the “my dick is bigger” contest hinge on SAT scores. 😉 hilarious.
only on a brown blog would the “my dick is bigger” contest hinge on SAT scores.
And only on such a blog would 1600’s be essentially unexceptional… 😉
So who scored 170+ on LSAT here ?
So who scored 170+ on LSAT here ?
Correction: Did anybody (gasp) score less than 170 here ?
It is mathematically impossible for you to have done better on the SAT’s than me.
Interesting, because the same is true for me (and, if I’m not mistaken, Manish).
You’re mistaken.
sigh. say it ain’t so, manish. now i have to crush on you a little less. 😉
wow…
so this is my first time on this site…and I don’t know whether to be offended or amused at the absurdity of GC’s posts.
I read through all the posts but I’m not sure if I’m understanding his/her point…so one quick question for GC: I’m a fairly religious Muslim but not a fundo, I think my past occupations and career aspirations will prove that. I was raised in America but have family back in the homeland, some of whom have been killed as a result of terrorism. I also hope to one day have children and pass on my Islamic values to them.
Now maybe it’s because I didn’t rock the SAT like you (to be honest, I never took the SAT)…but when you say “more Muslims = generally more terrorism” are you calling me, a cute little Muslim girl from the midwest, a terrorist? Or that my procreating will result in more terrorism??
Or when you say I am a part of “a community that…would treat [non muslims] … poorly” that I’d, God forbid, slit the throat of most of my friends, co-workers, or college roommates?
These are only a few questions that came to mind while reading through your scary posts.
This is in no way a provocation, I’m not trying to fight, diss, or debate you because that would be futile endeavor. There is no logical way to argue against a ludicrous generalized statement. I mean, isn’t that what they tell us not to do in debate club? (To make generalized statements and debate scaries like you)
If I’m understanding your posts correctly; trying to change your opinion is as easy as convincing the “fundies” (I’m not using your definition of this term. I mean the real fundos, not the average Joe…or more accurately – the average Ahmed) that not all Americans are evil …or as easy as building a time machine, sneaking into Nazi Germany and trying to convince Hitler that Jews have the right to exists. Yeah…it’ll be that difficult.
Sooo, in conclusion, my point is that I know I’m not a terrorist and I know I don’t support terrorism…but do you think my existence perpetuates terrorism?
Hopefully, due to my lack of prowess in coastal standardized tests, I did misunderstand your posts. Maybe you can clarify your position a little?
If I didn’t misunderstand and you answerd yes to my question…then you’re wrong, frighteningly so. Also, you’re probably ugly.
wha?! so maybe I am provoking you.
Ugh don’t bother engaging him, he’s the resident troll on SM. The opportunity cost is just too high.
Most of your points issue from a place of presumption, presumptuousness and down-right ignorance, but I’ll address them anyway, mostly to educate you my child.
Study Indian history. Muslims and Muslim culture have helped shape India into what it is today. If you want to ascribe success to India, you indirectly invalidate your own harangues against Muslims.
Show humility. You are in no position to assign value to human life. You haven’t “earned that shit”.
That is not the implication, that is the point.
For once, you are correct.
“Yeah we kill a lot of innocent people, but not like those others guys”….look who is desperate.
Partition. Next.
I am glad that someone out there remembers Niger. On the 15th, the “president” of Niger kicked the BBC out of famine-stricken areas and told the local media–which, in Niger, mostly means radio—to shut up about “the situation” or be considered to have joined the mutineers. (According to the last BBC post to BBC International Online, which was print only, there was another mutiny beginning within the army in Niger; the army seems to be armed by France, the U.S., and the Chinese.)
There has been virtually no news on Niger since then. One vague, confused Washington Post article about the worsening famine from somewhere near the border. For all we know there may be another Rwanda happening in Niger right now but there seems to be a total media blackout. For some reason, however, there is all sorts of news about the war in Somalia.
This president of Niger has to be seriously sociopathic because he said, last week, that “the people of Niger are obviously well-fed.” I wrote to ask the BBC why they weren’t screaming about this; I can imagine several reasons, but that and calling the embassies of Niger and France were all I could think to do. I landed on this site looking to see if there was any more news on Niger. This is what I got.
What has muslim culture down for India or any country? There have been no real post-islamic advances in societies. All the advances made by islamic culture were actually previously made be the pre-islamic peoples of the region or the recent converts. Islam creates a completely stagnant society. Regardless of what the Greeks, Indians, Persians, Mesopotamians, Egyptians etc in the past were made without islam.
As for partition, there are still muslims within India, while both Bangladesh and Pakistan were allowed to eliminate all Hindus inside their borders. This is the religion of peace. The concept of jihad and islamic law. A muslim is allowed to insult or provoke a person of any other faith by whatever means necessary, but a non-muslim cannot insult islam. A non-muslim must pay a tax for being non-muslim and if they do not they face lethal consequences. Stop paying the jizya tax and see what happens to the infidel. A person can become an infidel by simply not paying a tax for being non-muslim. Lest we not forget the millions of christians, jews, Zoroastrians, Hindus and Buddhists killed in islamic holy war. While other religions may have fanatics that claim they do not act in the name of the respective religion. It is very well outlined in the koran how and exactly what to do with an infidel. The abrahamic twins of christianity and judaism are not much better, and all have one singular world view which is undeniably true. Whereas Hinduism allows people to believe in their own way, without infringing upon the beliefs or rights of others. There is only a one way path in all abrahamic religions, which makes it completely incompatible with Indian religions.