Iranian President’s visit
As a patriotic Christian American I want to thank Mr. Ahmadinijad for coming to our country and presenting his opinion.
No two peoples ever share exactly the same viewpoints. We still conduct diplomacy.
We must debate.
I don’t agree with everything that he said.
Israel destroyed Palestine and does not recognize their borders (that will trigger AIPAC’s vigilant monitoring’s eloquent response along with an insult).
Debate that!
He came from so far away to speak, and I appreciate the real effort that he made to explain himself and avoid WW3 or Armageddon.
Having a diplomatic dialog with our two great countries means so much more in the big picture. Our peoples share so much as fellow earthlings: radioactivity in the jetstream!
Our current politicians fan these flames of hatred. To encourage them is to want to hate, and contaminate the planet.
It is unchristian, undiplomatic and unenvironmental.
The mendacious colonizing Neocon war profiteers that control our government now want to wag the dog and nuke Iran.
It is a detriment to our species as a whole.
That policy is devastating to our environment; their solution to global warming is nuclear winter!
Mr. Ahmadinajad keeps trying to talk to us. Encourage words.
Freedom means diversity of opinion and we can’t turn off a war.
This letter has not been edited.
Good letter Eric
There is a propaganda campaign underway by the powers that be painting Mr. Ahmadinajad as another Saddam , and unfortunately,it seems to be picking up supporters, informed and otherwise.
What the corporate-media fails to mention is that Mr. Ahmadinajad has been a teacher,a professor, and has earned a Phd.in Transportation Engineering.
And his countrymen love him.
Now lets compare him to our "leader"
Mr Bush has been a sadistic failed Governor of Texas, having executed more people than any other Governor in history, while mocking and ridiculing those condemed.
He's an alcoholic.
He's a cocaine addict.
He's a failure at every business for which he's ever been given responsibility . (Including failing to find oil in Texas AND the Middle east).
He was a "C " student, and barely graduated Harvard, even WITH powerful connections.
He's squandered goodwill post 9/11 and made our country into a laughingstock.
He's an idiot who has lied us into an unwinable war.
And his countrymen think so too.
Come to think about it, our country could use a good Transportation Engineer, what with our bridges falling down and schools, hospitals, and public buildings falling into disrepair.
How about we invite Mr, Ahmadinajad to help us rebuild our infrastructure.
But don't have Mr. Bush request his help.
He would only f*** that up too.
Well,I do agree that talking is what we should do,and it does seem that one of the things we've been saying lately to the Iranians lately is that their irresponsible rhetoric about exterminating the population of our ally Israel has placed their country right in the cross-hairs.I think they got the message that going nuclear on anyone means their entire country will become a radioactive desert,uninhabitable for millenia.So they talk and dance as fast as they can.Excellent.
I can't help but think Viet Nam would now be a much better place had Nixon been as tough as W. has proven to be.
Just curious Jimminy, but where did they say that the population of Israel should be exterminated?
He did question why the Palestinians should be made to bear the cost of Europe's shoddy treatment of the Jews, and he has questioned whether Israel is a legal state, but where does he say the inhabitants should be exterminated?
Iran wants nukes, lets give them one.... or 3.
Posted by on October 20, 2007 06:32 PMJimminy: "Iranians lately is that their irresponsible rhetoric about exterminating the population of our ally Israel has placed their country right in the cross-hairs."
Could you give us the names of those Iranians who provided that rhetoric? How long a list would it be? How many of the 65 million Iranians joined in the rhetoric.
But thanks for the post. It gives me license to tell a story I like to tell:
There was this guy, by the way, his name was Jimminy, who said that all Indians walk in single file. Asked how he knew that, he said that he saw three Indians yesterday and they were walking in single file.
Posted by Truth on October 20, 2007 07:22 PMJust another religious fundamentalist with no public support for his policies.
Sound famliar?
Posted by jay on October 20, 2007 10:30 PMWell,let's flog Boxer good and proper another time or two before the knackers come pick him up........Okay,guys,when exactly did Iran open diplomatic relations with Israel and sign a treaty of alliance with the Israelis and the US? Was it when the Syrians decided to send food instead of guns to Gaza and the West Bank? Or was it when the Iranian-sponsored insurgents freed those 3 American soldiers without chain-sawing their heads off Methinks we're gettin' a little whiff of that good ol' Ivy League anti-Semitism out in these here parts,by golly.
Posted by Jimminy on October 20, 2007 11:17 PMDMZ,
Hell why don't we have him just run for the presidency of the US, his talking point and campaign promises would be almost the same as the current Dems anyway. This way he will immediately have nuclear weapons.
Posted by jgd777 on October 21, 2007 08:34 AMI don't think the gay community will support
Ahmedinejad.We wouldn't have enough nooses to hang them all in the public square.
We would have to get rid of the Holocaust Museum and that thing called the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
The good thing would be the burka companies would be booming in business,we wouldn't have to worry about religious people,everyone would have to be muslim,I think he would solve our illegal immigration problem.
We would have to give up most if not all of our freedoms we have today, but we are used to that right?
George Bush has turned our country into a mini Iran.I bet he even gets advice from
Ahmedinejad on how to run a dictatorship and silence people who don't agree with his evil plan to turn us into an Iran like country.
Someone needs to tell Bush and Cheney to hurry time is running out. In one year we will have a new regime in power and they might undo all he has done to model the U.S. after Iran.Unless the Democrats win The White House.
Posted by on October 21, 2007 09:23 AM"his talking point and campaign promises would be almost the same as the current Dems anyway."
Come on fellas...even you far right wingers are smarter than this quote would imply.
Posted by jay on October 21, 2007 10:25 AM"We must debate."
Would you also debate Hitler, Stalin, Mao on their perspective, their opposing point of view? There is no right, there is no wrong--everything is relative? Evil is every bit as good a choice as is good? Genocide is morally jiustified, so their righteous position needs to be heard?
Sorry, Eric, but you are no Christian; stop kidding yourself and lieing to others. Nuts like you give Christians and Jews a bad reputation.
Posted by Hank on October 21, 2007 11:11 AM
And I forgot, you are no more an American patriot--as you claim--than was Adolph Hitler. Nuts like you can only give American patriots a bad reputation.
Posted by Hank on October 21, 2007 11:15 AMHank,I'm not sure that debate and dialogue are what we're talking about here. I think the best that we could get from tyrants who come here is for them to spout their garbage rhetoric and look like clowns. I'm happy with that.
It is true that people here come up with stuff that matches Ahmedinejad and others of his ilk in verbal flatulence,but I'm pretty sure those rants are just random outbreaks of undiagnosed self-managed Tourette's Syndrome..
jay,
You surely know better. The far Right-wingnuts are the ones puting forth the quote in the first place. Read, "Hank". That IS the far Right-wing, in a few, short sentences.
I can't understand why everyone else doesn't see that. It's as plain as the words on the screen. "Hank", and his confreres ARE the spokes-persons of the whole of "grass roots Republicanism/"conversativeism" today. That's all there is. There ain't no more. Read them, and you have it.
Posted by Old Grouch on October 21, 2007 12:28 PMI'm pretty sure that Ahmadinijad isn't knowledgeable about how westerners would look at a comment like the Israeli state being illegitimate and the holocaust being exaggerated etc.(I'll bet he left his country about as often as Bush did while governor of Texas). However, in the Middle East, that is exactly how the Arab world looks at things and we need to understand that. One thing that we, in the west, believe is that the creation of Israel over the indigenous population is no longer an issue, and now we must focus on terrorism etc. The fact is that a whole lot of the Arab world(and also Iran)think the state was created immorally and illegally by a UN mandate (even though the Arab population of the area resisted). They think European powers and the US created the state to allay their guilt over having done nothing to stop the Holocaust. Along with that feeling, is one that says they don't understand why Israel can have 200 nuclear weapons and Iran (or for that matter anyone we Americans don't like) can't. Actually, I'm surewe wouldn't allow even allies like Egypt or Jordan to have them either. So what do we expect them to think?
Posted by observer on October 21, 2007 02:40 PMEric Bard has my sympathies in his being a Christian. As to his letter, American's should embrace Voltaire's may not agree with him but I'll defend to the death his right to speak on American soil.
Deicide Corner: “Not one man in ten thousand has goodness of heart or strength of mind to be an atheist.” -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Posted by RG: Deicide, r22037@yahoo on October 21, 2007 03:33 PM"in the Middle East, that is exactly how the Arab world looks at things and we need to understand that"
Ignorant generalizations like this are part of the problem.
Observer do you realize that the vast majority of Iranians are pro-West, pro-US and whose last two presidents were US-friendly?
Iran, like the US, made a mistake at the polls. We both ended up with short-sided religious fundamentalists with incompetent foreign policy skills.
We should no more want to punish Iran than the rest of the world punish us.
Posted by jay on October 21, 2007 03:49 PMObserver says a great many things that are absolute fact.It is also an absolute fact that the Confederate States of America hated Abraham Lincoln just as much as the Islamics hate the only nation on Earth ever to go to war against the Confederacy and its hideous racism.
The Islamics' relative lack of sophistication about most nuances of Western culture probably isn't terribly important. One nuance,though, that is crucial for the Islamics to understand clearly is that Israel and the USA are each capable of bringing the Apocalypse down on our enemies.That neither we nor the Israelis have consigned Islam to its version of the Hereafter is due to another nuance of Western culture-Christian charity,and its Judaic twin.
There is an Islamic religious/cultural nuance that seems to escape many hereabouts.Quite simply,Islam says that non-Muslim is non-human,and for some fourteen centuries the've prayed for the means to kill most of us and enslave the rest.That they haven't is due not to closet-humanist mullahs but to their lack of WMD.
One other modest observation....Although Saddam Hussein didn't have WMDs,his actions in refusing UN inspectors free access led us all to believe otherwise,and therefore could be termed a bluff.Saddam bet his life that W wouldn't call.He lost.
Posted by Jimminy on October 21, 2007 07:20 PMAhmadinajad is a liar. There's not a country in this world that doesn't have gays. Well, maybe he IS telling the truth--he killed all of his country's.
He's a terrorist who is hiding under the title of President. Plain and simple.
And for all you nutcases out there, don't take that last statement as a prompt to attack Bush. Think of something more original. It is getting old and tired. It's like blaming someone for your constipation.
Posted by c on October 21, 2007 09:36 PMJimminy,
I'm trying to read between the lines in order to understand what you are saying. I think I finally managed to decipher it. You seem to understand so little about Islam, that you make the rediculous accusation that the religion is somehow different from the religion of the old testament that the Jews use. Did you actually read the violent nature of God in the old testament (it would make your skin crawl). Actually Islam says that Jew and Christians are "people of the book" and therefore children of Abraham etc. Anyway, please don't ascribe to Islam some horrible difference from "civilized" faiths in order to make some innane point. There is an old saying: "you can tell a lie from its size"!
Posted by observer on October 22, 2007 07:06 AMobserver,
As history shows, if we don't demonize the other fellow - and his "book", as well as everything about his culture, language, and life - we can't successfully mount a crusade.
Presently, we are in a quagmire, overseas in a truly foreign environment, with the "purpose" of bringing "freedom and democracy" - our brand, of course - to them, at the end of an assault rifle. That they neither need, nor want, our brand of political, social, and religious life is quite beside the point. They're going to "get it", or we are going to keep on sending our youth to "die trying" to make them take it.
Since even at home, the majority of the Nation has come to realize that there is something askew here, it is necessary to try to whip up enthusiasm for our "crusade". One way to do this is by insisting that this culture, and its peoples, are an imminent danger to us, all the way over here, across the ocean. And, of course, if we don't "win" the "crusade" there, they will immediately show up, in Denver, Colorado, all ready to take us over and bring about the destruction of our own way of life.
Never mind the reality of their own cultural fragmentations; their lack of both the raw materials and the manufacturing capacity to create the arms necessary for conquest; their lack of transportation to maintain supply lines adequate for an overseas invasion; etc., etc.,; just go on screaming, like fearful little kiddies crying for Mommy not to turn out the lights - because there's a boogey man under the bed, or in the closet - and that way everyone will come to have the same fearful need to go on "crusading".
Oh, yes! Don't forget the wonderful examples of the old Cold War, where marchers in the streets carried signs reading, "Kill a Commie for Christ". That 'won" the Cold War for us, didn't you know? It "defeated" the "evil empire". The Elmer Gantry in the pulpit says so! So, let's go after those "Islamofascists" today!
All depends on which book you worship, and which pulpit filling blatherer you have telling you what the book is supposed to mean.
Posted by Old Grouch on October 22, 2007 07:46 AMJimminy claims Saddam lost. America lost. If the war ends today the price tag will be two trillion dollars, two nations left in ruin, the GOP neutered; the election of Hillary made a certainty. Space does not permit the chronicle of how much America lost; how much the Iraqis lost. Millions are refugees.... Must impose the virtue of brevity on myself. End.
Deicide Corner: I'm horny enough to be a TV Evangelist (maybe Sharon is interested).
Posted by Richard Grimes, Deicide r22037@yahoo Free copy of FreeThought today at ffrf.org (check out the radio on October 22, 2007 09:25 AMI repeat. The USA and Israel each are most assuredly capable of ending the existence of the enemy in a day's time. Yet we do not launch,and neither do the Israelis.Muslims have not been rounded up and locked away in the camps once tenanted by Japanese-Americans. Those two(out of multitudinous) examples are clear and convincing evidence of American decency and Judaeo-Christian charity towards the enemy,even though they're also examples of LBJ-worthy tactical ignorance and,almost incidentally,prove conclusively that we are really not at war.
The squawkings of the last three posters tell us,however,that they,like the Islamics and the Soviets before them,hate and envy a strong America and will make common cause with whoever they think is our most powerful enemy. In a way,the prevalence of their sentiments is even more evidence that we are not at war.If we were,they'd all be waving Old Glory,instead of sh*tting on it.
",hate and envy a strong America and will make common cause with whoever they think is our most powerful enemy."
That's just the point of the folks railing against Republican incompetence.
Republican policies have made us less safe, destabilized the middle east and allowed AQ to restrengthen to levels seen on 9/10.
Maybe you should be asking yourself why you continue to support such a track record....that is if you, as you say....like "waving Old Glory, instead of sh*tting on it".
Posted by jay on October 22, 2007 12:30 PMJimminy,
I see where you are another of those who thinks his headfull of fertilizer produces well cultivated thought; just as with "An American", "Hank", the little twerp whose name starts with "K", and the rest of the crowd who slam and insult under the guise of their being more "patriotic".than anyone else.
Well, at least you can congratulate yourself on having found your level, and the quality of company you fit in with. Maybe "An American" will even let you play with his G.I.Joe Imitation Model AK47 water-rifle he takes to bed with him. That is, if his Mommy hasn't confiscated it, after she discovered the wet sheets.
Posted by Old Grouch on October 22, 2007 01:06 PMAw gee.....All I did was adduce a little evidence that we are not at war,and point out( as more evidence) that since the swinish rants of the Hate-America-First claque continue unabated,the First Amendment has not been suspended. Somewhat to the dismay,I think, of the last two posters.
Posted by Jimminy on October 22, 2007 05:43 PM"Old Grouch" has a much larger vocabulary than "Jimminy".
Posted by observer on October 22, 2007 06:11 PMWell, Jimminy,
Perhaps you might clarify your idea that "we are not at war". Is it your belief that "being at war" includes blind, un-thinking, un-reserved adherance to whatever be the propaganda put out by the "war office"? And is it your position that disagreeing with the handling of a war is, somehow a sign of "hating America"? If so, you have nothing to complain about when someone tells you have found your level, among your peers.
Merely casting aspersions upon those who don't agree with you is not a sign of "adducing evidence", for anything. Unless you are offering the idea that anything other than acceptance of YOUR positions is automatically to be classed as "hatred" for the Nation. Which may, indeed, be an indication of the size of your own swell-headed ego, and your concept of yourself as THE embodiment of "Americanism". But that simply places you among those previously named; and gives indication of how your presentations are valued by those who have grown up, beyond snot-nosed adolescence.
Posted by Old Grouch on October 22, 2007 06:16 PMShucks,OG.You were sufficiently excercised to construct a fairly literate,although rather boneheaded reply,so you must have thought my words worth the time and mental energy spent in composing your response.
I will continue to point out that our current Mideast adventure is not war.There's no declaration,no vow to beat the enemy into unconditional surrender,no internment of those who look like the enemy,no pressure on dissidents to remain quiet, no conscription,and no plan to try survivng enemy leaders for crimes against humanity.
I will also continue to point out that the hate-America claque,which OG seems lately (and surprisingly) to have joined,knows well the difference between making war on the enemy and the kind of shadowboxing we've been doing lately,but nevertheless continues,as it has for some forty years,to trash their country and exalt the enemy regime du jour.
I,and millions of others,say that's sh*itting on Old Glory.
Jimminy,
I wonder how many people know that the US is the only country not to lower their flag to host country dignitaries at the Olympic games? I wonder what other nations think when they see that only America refuses to let its troops at the UN be commanded by a foreign commander?(what if everyone in the world claimed the same right, would chaos ensue?) American Jews can fly to Israel for free and bonds for the State of Israel are tax free. Now, If you were an Arab, what sort of image would you have of the U.S.? An arrogant and powerful country that only cares for Israel...no hope for anything equitable in the Middle East.
If you really wanted to stop terrorism, you would solve the Israeli-plestinian problem. That is an impossibility without some sacrifice by Israel, since two people claim the same piece of land. Thus we obfuscate and talk about Arab and Islamist terrorism, which tends to keep Americans (like you) happy and fulfilled.
Observer-the lucidity, factual integrity,and temperate demeanor of your 7:50 post all point up the subtle and complex nature of the problems that exist in the area being discussed.
Yes,it's true that the USA and the American people have a special relatonship with Israel and the Israelis,one that's at least as close as that which we have with the other English-speaking nations.It's my belief that that relationship will continue as it is deep into the future.Yet it is also true that the formation of Israel was accomplished through what could well be described as eminent domain on an international scale,and those who were dispossessed could certainly be expected to expected to resent it equally deeply into the future,resentment we could similarly expect the established Arab nations to feel,and act upon with their own militaries as well as through Palestinian proxies in the West Bank,Gaza,and southern Lebanon.
It'd be odd indeed if the Arab countries DIDN'T see the USA as "an arrogant,powerful country that only cares for Israel"......
If you read this post before it scrolls into the archives,I'd like to ask for your comments on the following: It seems that in this confrontation we are tending to see ouselves through the eyes of the other side to a greater extent than in most other international confrontations in the last 100 years or so.The only other example I can recall of such organized,literate,and relatively persuasive advocacy of the other side's viewpoint took place during the Viet Nam conflict.
I do think that whatever rapport we might feel with those who oppose us,they still have interests antithetical to ours,and more importantly,whatever rapport with us the populations of Iran and Syria and Russia may feel, those populations have almost no voice in the decisions their governments make.By their actions,those governments make clear that they are in a state of war with Israel,and by extension the USA.In other words,we may not be at war with them,but they are most certainly at war with us.
Let me return to Viet Nam for a moment:the peace accords ending our role in that conflict guaranteed the independence of South Viet Nam.We all know that the NVA invaded and conquered South Viet Nam as soon as the fallout from the Nixon resignation assured them the US would default on our treaty obligations to SVN.What is less well known is that upon their victory,North Viet Nam began to imprison their Viet Cong allies and neutralized them as both a political and military force.That example should resonate with us today.We may be(perhaps too much)able to empathize with our adversaries,but trust them? I don't think so.