immaturity and hypocrisy vs. compassion and intelligence

ladies and gentlemen, some of these posts are a disgrace to read. i have been biting my tongue for the last two days, mainly out of disbelief...i had convinced myself in studying the reparations and apologies given to japanese internment camp survivors, that Americans would never again trash the constitution in moments of rage. and yet, 60 years later, we see it again.

"sand nigger"??

ive never been more ashamed to be american than reading some of this crap. INDIVIDUALS are responsible for this tragedy, my friends....not muslims, not islam, not arabs, not afghanistan, not pakistan, not palestine....not even, as of yet, is Bin Laden even responsible.

the foundations of justice and liberty demand that we (a) first ESTABLISH guilt before proclaiming it and that (B) when that guilt is established, we punish FAIRLY and accordingly.

in case none of you notice the hypocrisy, you ALL whine and whine about cops and unfair justice (see AMTRAK threads) when it affects YOUR PERSONAL LIBERTY (as criminals, i might add) and yet you are all so willing to trash those (supposedly inherant) HUMAN rights of entire peoples when it is convenient. how cowardly of you all.

not one person will deny the horror of tuesdays events. but what our country is founded on is justice and liberty for all. for ALL. thats unequivocal. we do not suspend these values simply becasue this is tragically horrific. and since when did racism become justified by tragedy??? except for the people who did this, not one human being is guilty of the crime, especially not arab-americans or muslim americans who have the exact some rights that you have. and, with one fell swoop, so many of you want to erase that right. how sad, how deeply sad.

and as to sinking to the level of counter-terrorism (revoking the executive order banning assassination) and civilian attacks ("bomb afghansistan!!"), this is an age-old concept of an "eye-for-an-eye" and, i hate to break it to yall, but we, as a nation, decided centruies ago that that is barbaric and inhuman.

even in the face of great loss and tragedy, the human solution is to appraoch this matter with an eye on justice and future prevention...draconian INHUMAN punitive assaults on entire nations and peoples only proves that the hypocrisy of american justice is that it applies only to US, not humans as a whole....and maybe its that kind of selfish (and illogical - how can inherant human liberty be confined to geographically-defined nation states?!) thinking that drives certain destitute populations of this planet to hate us with such fervor.

dont get me wrong, i am deeply proud of this country, and deeply moved by the loss (personal even, for me in the WTC) ...but i believe in the sanctity of the american concept of ordered liberty...and so many of you have spat in the face of that with all of your racist hate-mongering posts. god forbid the day comes when someone who looks like or thinks like YOU does an unspeakable act, and you watch as your human rights fly out the window like so much wasted human life....

may god have mercy on all of your souls....hatred accomplishes nothing.

may justice and ordered liberty prevail.

god bless america.

agreed

well said

Word up

i agree with this pretty thoroughly.

allbeit i feel like human emotion is greatly to blame in clouding judgement on this issue.

i think what's worse is this same cloud will infect the very people we have trying to catch these individuals. that scares the shit out of me. i'm a skeptic deep down and as boxcarwilly has stated in another thread. big government and the media have a stranglehold on what we are seeing and invariably feeling from the tragedy at hand.

You have hit the proverbial nail right on its fucking head my son. Watching all this from the UK has just got me shit scared that your gung-ho, chimp-faced president is gonna drag the whole world into some seriously scarey shit. NiseNSF for pres.

i've never heard him referred to as 'chimp-faced' before....

Word, I'm glad you posted this. I'm going to print and have my war mongering friends read it. It's amazing to me that people who can hold an intelligent conversation on quantum mechanics can sink to such levels as to use the term "Sand Nigger". I truly applaud this thread. And as I've said sooooo many times before, AN EYE FOR AN EYE MAKES US BLIND. Peace, and respect yourselves and each other.

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AIM: DurtyTrol

[This message has been edited by Apelles (edited 09-13-2001).]

yep to this

at my university, the palestinian solidarity table in this open public speech area has been spit on and had to shut down. and my sister lives in dc and a girl she knows, who happens to be from india and is not even muslim, got put into a coma from a savage beating . this shit is horrible

my apologies also go out to people bearing the brunt of this american racism.

or in simplier terms, some of you mother fuckers on this board are just straight up closet racists, and feel like this tradgedy lets you off the hook and able to let loose with it. fuck that shit. i'll never understand how graffiti writers can try to cop attitudes about being better than someone else based on race or class. dispicable.

well said, bro..a lot of hurt and angry people right now, but we don't want to continue the cycle. Not all middle easterners are in this together.. arafat donated blood, and the photographer who videotaped those palestinians celebrating was actually threatened with death -by other palestinians.

good post nise...

As so many people have done before, lets compare this terroristic action to the last.

The Oklahoma City bombing.

Just as it is now, the country was in agreeance that this was a terrible tragedy.

However, that seems to be the only consistant reaction to the said terrible tradedys.

When an American, motivated by racism, destroys a building and kills many, America's reaction is to acknowledge the loss and "move on."

Now, when the attack is from over seas, somehow we find it easy "acknowledge the loss" once again, only this time we mimic the rasicm of the last.

It's not only hypocritical, but also fightening.

If I was to ever say, "God Bless America," I'd be sure to leave out most of the Americans in it.

well put

well said nise

coup cold fusion

Originally posted by powder:

As so many people have done before, lets compare this terroristic action to the last.

 

The Oklahoma City bombing.

 

Just as it is now, the country was in agreeance that this was a terrible tragedy.

 

However, that seems to be the only consistant reaction to the said terrible tradedys.

 

When an American, motivated by racism, destroys a building and kills many, America's reaction is to acknowledge the loss and "move on."

 

Now, when the attack is from over seas, somehow we find it easy "acknowledge the loss" once again, only this time we mimic the rasicm of the last.

 

It's not only hypocritical, but also fightening.

 

If I was to ever say, "God Bless America," I'd be sure to leave out most of the Americans in it.

 

Damn...we finally get a nice levelheaded thread going and somebody has to go say some stupid shit like this...shit don't end.

nobody's forgotten about oklahoma city...plenty of hate was directed at white trash...mcveigh is dead... now some even worse shit has happened and people are- surprise surprise!- confused and emotional again.

"If I was to ever say, "God Bless America," I'd be sure to leave out most of the Americans in it."

-I think that speaks for itself. jeez.

Originally posted by dumpybottom:

or in simplier terms, some of you mother fuckers on this board are just straight up closet racists, and feel like this tradgedy lets you off the hook and able to let loose with it. fuck that shit. i'll never understand how graffiti writers can try to cop attitudes about being better than someone else based on race or class. dispicable.

I = in agreement!

i appreciate the intelligent way you have criticised this. i too am tired of hearing the two extremes that are "fuck america,we deserved it" and "bomb the sand niggers". i do believe though,that whoever did this,which almost ever clue points at bin Laden and the Al-Quaida (sp?),is very fucked. i really doubt that they expected nearly the whole world to side with us in this matter. this is a war on terrorism that the better part of the world is going to win. and i also agree with the president making no distinction between these terrorists and the countries that harbor them.

Whatever. At what point did I incinuate that anyone had forgotton about Oklahoma? But please, I don't know where you live, but no one was going out and beating up anyone that "looked like they were white trash."

Do you know how many people have ended up in the hospital already, just because they look like they're middle eastern? Saying something like, "plenty of hate was directed at white trash," is just stupid.

But you're right, shit don't end. Not just on message boards, not anywhere. Now don't get so scared just because I use this example to point out the inherant racism in our society.

And when I said, "If I was to ever say, "God Bless America," I'd be sure to leave out most of the Americans in it," I was pointing out how for whatever empathy America has tword this violent tragedy, it is delt largely with counter violence.

And when you say, "I think that speaks for itself. jeez," it obviously didn't speak to you. jeez.

Damn...we finally get a nice levelheaded thread going and somebody has to go say some stupid shit like this...shit don't end.

nobody's forgotten about oklahoma city...plenty of hate was directed at white trash...mcveigh is dead... now some even worse shit has happened and people are- surprise surprise!- confused and emotional again.

"If I was to ever say, "God Bless America," I'd be sure to leave out most of the Americans in it."

-I think that speaks for itself. jeez.

im still trying to figure out why some people on this board are obsessed with race myself. certain people asking whatever happened to writing being an inner city thing in the name of hip hop?

well guess what, writing isnt all about hip hop and it does not have to be inner city either. writing is strictly about SELF-EXPRESSION. to me it is a way of saying i am out here, and i do feel alienated from society and YES i am white. i do not have any belief whatsoever that i am better because of the color of my skin, hair, or eyes. but i have to listen to people bitchin and throwin shit in my face because i am a part of a majority. thats right, i asked to be born white...i completely forgot...

the same people crying out discrimination also can be discriminating against others, it is a two way street.

Truth! Word up nise. well spoken, I agree one hundred percent.

AYE

writing is self-expression of what??

in respoinse to what was said about the oklahoma city bombing, i'd like to point out that after this tradgedy very little effort was put into eradicating and/or subduing rightist malitias/orginazations in america. i speculate that this is due, largely, to the fact that these groups ideals are closer aligned with the politics of those currently in power making certain powers in our government more sympathetic towards them.

on the subject of holding acountable entire countries (including innocent civilian populations a.k.a. PEOPLE who dont nescecarily share the beliefs of their rulers, PEOPLE with FAMILIES) for the acts of terror executed by a comparably small group of political powers and terrorist organizations, i would like to present this letter written to a friend of a friend by an afghannie american:

Dear Gary and whoever else is on this email

thread:

I've been hearing a lot of talk about "bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age." Ronn Owens, on KGO Talk Radio today, allowed that this would mean killing innocent people, people who had nothing to do with this atrocity, but "we're at war, we have to accept collateral damage. What else can we do?" Minutes later I heard some TV pundit discussing whether we "have the belly to do what must be done."

And I thought about the issues being raised

especially hard because I am from Afghanistan, and even though I've lived here for 35 years I've never lost track of what's going on there. So I want to tell anyone who will listen how it all looks from where I'm standing.

I speak as one who hates the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. There is no doubt in my mind that these people were responsible for the atrocity in New York. I agree that something must be done about those monsters.

But the Taliban and Ben Laden are not Afghanistan. They're not even the government of Afghanistan. The Taliban are a

cult of ignorant psychotics who took over Afghanistan in 1997. Bin Laden is a political criminal with a plan. When you think Taliban, think Nazis. When you think Bin Laden, think Hitler. And when you think "the people of Afghanistan" think "the Jews in the concentration camps." It's not only that the Afghan people had nothing to do with this atrocity. They were the first victims of the perpetrators. They would exult if someone would come in there, take out the Taliban and clear out the rats nest of international thugs holed up in their country.

Some say, why don't the Afghans rise up and

overthrow the Taliban? The answer is, they're starved, exhausted, hurt, incapacitated, suffering. A few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there are 500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan--a country with no economy, no food. There are millions of widows. And the Taliban has been burying these widows alive in mass graves. The soil is littered with land mines, the farms were all destroyed by the Soviets. These are a few of the reasons why the Afghan people have not overthrown the Taliban.

We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age. Trouble is, that's been done. The Soviets took care of it already. Make the Afghans suffer? They're already suffering. Level their houses? Done. Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their hospitals? Done. Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine and health care? Too late. Someone already did all that. New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs. Would they at least get the Taliban? Not likely. In today's Afghanistan, only the Taliban eat, only they have the means to move around. They'd slip away and hide.Maybe the bombs would get some of those disabled orphans, they don't move too fast, they don't even have wheelchairs. But flying

over Kabul and dropping bombs wouldn't really be a strike against the criminals who did this horrific thing. Actually it would only be making common cause with the Taliban--by raping once again the people they've been raping all this time. So what else is there? What can be done, then? Let me now speak with true fear and trembling. The only way to get Bin Laden is to go in there with ground troops. When people speak of "having the belly to do what needs to be done" they're thinking in terms of having the belly to kill as many as needed. Having the belly to overcome any moral qualms about killing innocent people. Let's pull our heads > out of the sand. What's actually on the table is Americans dying. And not just because some Americans would die fighting their way through Afghanistan to Bin Laden's hideout. It's much bigger than that folks. Because to get any troops to Afghanistan, we'd have to go through Pakistan. Would they let us? Not likely. The conquest of Pakistan would have to be first. Will other Muslim nations just stand by? You see where I'm going. We're flirting with a world war between Islam and the West. And guess what: that's Bin Laden's program. That's exactly what he wants. That's why he did this. Read his speeches and statements.It's all right there. He really believes Islam would beat the west. It might seem ridiculous, but he figures if he can polarize the world into Islam and the West, he's got a billion soldiers. If the west wreaks a holocaust in those lands, that's a billion people with nothing left to lose, that's even better from Bin Laden's point of view. He's probably wrong, in the end the west would win, whatever that would mean, but the war would last for years and millions would die, not just theirs but ours. Who has the belly for that? Bin Laden does. Anyone else?

> > > Tamim Ansary

> > >

i hope this helps some of us see things from a broader and more humanistic perspective.

i'd also like to add that killing innocent people is no answer to the loss of innocent people. people are people. they have the same emotions and passions and love that we possess. lets not get lost in the moment. i know its hard to turn the other cheek. in fact i dont think we should turn the other cheek, but, lets be responsible about who we retaliate against. we dont need to answer extremeism with extremeism. thats not justice, its hypocracy.

love and respect.

drizo.

I thought your comments were very intelligent and reasonable..and thanks for posting that letter.

...but (always a but) I had one little problem with it...

Originally posted by drizo:

...the fact that these groups ideals are closer aligned with the politics of those currently in power making certain powers in our government more sympathetic towards them.

ummm...just to play devil's advocate here, but the govenment didn't seem particularly sympathetic to either the people at ruby ridge or the people at the waco massacre. (unless that was "tough love".....)

just a thought.

peace.

i guess i just meant the groups that dont step too far over the line, say like the kkk. then again, political terrorism is just the norm in our society and as long as the killing, and im not inferring that they go crashing cropdusters into black babtist curches on sunday mornings (but killing is killing right?), happens in bumble-fuck nebraska who gives a shit, right?

ps. blind nationalism is VERY VERY VERY VERY dangerous... so go buy buy buy your paper diposable american flag, right now!!! god bless america!

pss. i just saw a very very short small short blerb,for lack of a better word i can think of at 7 am on a sunday, in last mondays paper stating that the u.s. had bombed iraq and that 7 people had been reported dead, and, also that the military waould not disclose an official death toll. this smells seriously like sunbaked rotten fish after a 40 of king cobra. why is this not news? why has no one i know heard about this?

i think your a terrorist.

i think youre ignorant,and, that youll likely die in world war three like all the other sheep, fighting for people who dont give a shit about you.

Nobody wants to kill innoscent people anymore than we wanted having thousands of innoscent americans killed. If the Afghanistans hate the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden so much, then they will be happy we will most likely be going in there and physically removing them from exsistance. I'm not saying killing is justified, but what are we supposed to do? Get better security on planes, definately... But what about car bombs? mail bombs? Germ warfare? Snipers? We can't just let out country be brutally fucked with and then scramble around on the defense while they're planning some other way to fuck us up.. we have to take action, and we have to make an offensive example, so that it doesn't happen again. That's not because we're bullies... it's because as American's we relish in our security and I speak for most of us when I say I don't want to be afraid of getting killed everytime I'm in a group of 100 + people. If the Afghanistan people are worried about the battle America has planned for them, then they should be working with us. Handing him over.. Instead they are saying he's done nothing wrong, and he's a guest in their country. Obviously they don't hate him that much. And yeah you're right, we expect an "innoscent until proven guilty" trial in America, but reguardless if Osama Bin Laden had anything to do with the terrorist attacks or not, he's done harm to Americans in countless other ways and gotten away with it.

As for the rasism issue, I agree 100%. Fuckin Apu is no more a suspect in this case than I am.

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PRUDE - If I had nuts, you'd be on 'em.

I am embarassed of the rash of racila attacks within our country towards Arab-Americans. These people are scared to death, and are torn between two country's. All our country is focused on is getting back at these shits. And immigrants who are Americans have family in other country's who are scared for their family's. I feel sad when I think about the way people treat each other. Good points NISE