Uhhh, why do they need medical aid? Hellllo? They blowed themselves up real good.
Posted on 06/18/2002 6:02:40 PM PDT by RCW2001
Tuesday, June 18, 2002
©2002 Associated Press
URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2002/06/18/international1044EDT0560.DTL
(06-18) 07:44 PDT LONDON (AP) --
Cherie Blair, wife of Britain's prime minister, said Tuesday that Palestinian suicide bombers are a symptom of despair.
"As long as young people feel they have got no hope but to blow themselves up you are never going to make progress," said Blair, who appeared with Jordan's Queen Rania to support a $750,000 charity appeal for Medical Aid for Palestinians.
The event came hours after another suicide attack in Israel, which killed 20 people including the bomber.
"Today's events are a clear reminder that both sides of the conflict are suffering. It is also clear that the suffering cannot continue," Queen Rania said.
"The one sure way for hope for both peoples is to have a political solution that will bring about the end of occupation for Palestinians and security for Israelis and for the people of the region.
"Delaying the political peace process inevitably exposes more innocent civilians on both sides to grave danger."
Cherie Blair's remark was criticized by Michael Ancram, a senior member of the opposition Conservative Party.
"These words will cause massive offense to the families of schoolchildren and others whose lives were brutally and criminally ended this morning," he said.
The prime minister's office disagreed.
"What Mrs. Blair was saying is a statement of the obvious. There is a consensus that many Palestinians feel they have no hope," said a spokesman for Blair, speaking on condition of anonymity.
"She is not seeking to justify the actions of Palestinian suicide bombers in any way.
"The prime minister has said many similar things himself -- mainly that you have to give hope to people through a political process while at the same time ensuring security for the people of Israel."
Medical Aid for Palestinians, www.map-uk.org
©2002 Associated Press
Normal humans have a built-in survival instinct, no matter what race or ethnic background. Suicide bombers have a mental illness caused by some type of psychiatric manipulation. What is really enlightening is the parents and officials that support this practice. There has to be some sort of evil indoctrination that is making these people so insane.
She must be your sort, then.
Here's just one example of despair. During slavery, Black Americans' despair could not have been deeper. They were forcibly taken from their land, endured a harrowing middle passage, were separated from their loved ones, were forced to work, were absolutely and totally humiliated. If anyone had reason to despair, Ms. Blair, that was them. However, you never heard of them savagely killing off their children en masse to demonstrate their despair to the world.
Oh and I'm sure there are many, many more examples of people throughout the ages, who have overcome incredible challenges.
Not to mention grave yards.
Uhhh, why do they need medical aid? Hellllo? They blowed themselves up real good.
I think these are called "Madrassas".
Anger at Cherie 'sympathy' for suicide bombersBy George Jones and Anton La Guardia
Downing Street apologised last night after Cherie Blair appeared to show sympathy for Palestinian suicide bombers, hours after the latest outrage in Jerusalem.
The Prime Minister’s wife caused a diplomatic and political row with comments she made at a charity event for medical aid for Palestinians.
Speaking to reporters after appearing with Queen Rania of Jordan, she said: “As long as young people feel they have got no hope but to blow themselves up you are never going to make progress.”
The row fuelled the controversy over the increasingly political role that Mrs Blair, a lawyer specialising in human rights, is playing as the Prime Minister’s wife.
Initially, Downing Street and Tony Blair sought to play down the significance of her comments, insisting that she was not supporting the suicide bombers.
But officials made an apology after the Israeli Embassy in London issued a strongly worded statement expressing “regret” over Mrs Blair’s comments.
The embassy said: “No political grievance or circumstance can justify the wilful targeting of civilians for political gain, nor can those who glorify and encourage such atrocities, teaching and preaching hatred and violence, be absolved of their responsibility for this terrible phenomenon.”
One senior official in Jerusalem said: “This is justification for terror. The suicide bombers are not doing it out of desperation. They are doing it because they are being cynically recruited with the promise of money and heaven.”
Michael Ancram, Conservative foreign affairs spokesman, said her remarks were “most unfortunate” and would cause massive offence to the families of those killed.
Ned Temko, editor of the Jewish Chronicle, said while Mrs Blair did not set out publicly to endorse terror “there is a dangerously narrow line between suggesting there can be some sort of rational explanation for the deliberate targeting of men, women and children in buses and restaurants and justifying it”.
Mrs Blair had been fulfilling a long-standing engagement to visit the offices in Islington, north London, of the charity Medical Aid for Palestinians to launch a £500,000 appeal.
She made the comments after she and Queen Rania were questioned by reporters about whether they believed the charity’s efforts to raise money would be hindered by the latest suicide bombing.
Queen Rania said yesterday’s events were a clear reminder that both sides of the conflict were suffering. “It is also clear that the suffering cannot continue.
“The one sure way for hope for both peoples is to have a political solution that will bring about the end of occupation for Palestinians and security for Israelis and for the people of the region.
“Delaying the political peace process inevitably exposes more innocent civilians on both sides to grave danger,” she said.
Mrs Blair was asked if she agreed. She replied: “Yes, I agree.” But she then went further, adding: “As long as young people feel they have got no hope but to blow themselves up you are never going to make progress.”
She did not preface her remarks with a condemnation of the bombing, although Downing Street later argued that she had associated herself with Queen Rania’s comments.
Mrs Blair’s remarks were in sharp contrast to the condemnation issued a few hours earlier by Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary. He said the detonation of a bomb on a bus carrying schoolchildren was “an act of evil beyond words”.
Nothing could ever justify the use of terror against innocent civilians to advance a political cause, he added.
A clearly embarrassed Mr Blair was forced to spend much of a brief public appearance at No 10 with Jose Maria Aznar, the Spanish prime minister, defending his wife.
He urged people not to “misdescribe her sentiments”. Everyone felt nothing but the deepest sympathy for the people who had lost their lives, and terrorism offered absolutely no way out, he said.
The hopes for the future lay in the political process taking the place of the extremists, the terrorists and the suicide bombers. “And I am sure that is what Cherie was saying.”
At yesterday’s regular briefing for political correspondents, Mr Blair’s official spokesman denied that the charity event had been political.
Downing Street said later that if any offence had been taken from the interpretation of her comments then Mrs Blair was “obviously sorry”.
“None was intended and it goes without saying that she condemns the atrocity today in the strongest possible terms.
“She did not, and never would she ever, condone suicide bombers or say they had no choice. She fully agrees with the statement issued by Queen Rania at the event that ‘the killing of innocent civilians is not acceptable irrespective of perpetrator or victim’.”
Yesterday’s row has highlighted the increasingly high profile adopted by Mrs Blair. She has campaigned on a number of issues including breast cancer, employment rights and the plight of women under the Taliban.
Earlier this year she chaired a series of seminars in Downing Street prompting one Liberal Democrat MP to warn that she had become a “super-minister without portfolio”.
© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2002.
It' all for very vile reasons..... they get to kill the Jews they hate and get laid for eternity by allahs whores..... nothing noble in that cause.
Chris Matthews was all over Tom Delay on the hardball show tonight defending the palestinians!
Looking for people that may have seen the show over here:
Alert: Anybody Seen Chris Matthews, Tom Delay tonight? Matthews thinks Ted Turner is right!
Too bad that the majority of FR posters don't love terrorists as much as the inhabitants of #10, or certain pariah posters running their mouths on islam online, eh, Mr. Jones?
How is someone in college working on a Master's degree hopeless or full of despair?
Well then by all means sign her up! (;
A semi-western or semi-modern new culture looks like an assault upon a tattered tradition. .. adherence to a radical Islamist [or other religious] network provides a sense of cultural security, a new community, and some degree of social support— modest, but still better than anything the state can provide.Poverty is recast as religious simplicity and austerity. Perhaps, even more important, belief provides a measure of pride: a reason to keep a stiff back amid continual humiliations and temptations. In the blaring, stinking, violent world of the modern "Third World" Muslim city, the architecture and aesthetic mood of the mosque is the only oasis, not only of beauty but of an ordered and coherent culture and guide to living
In the same vein, Zaharia noted that "radical Islam has risen on the backs of failed states that have not improved the lots of their people. It festers in societies where contact with the west has produced more chaos than growth and more uncertainty than wealth. It is, in a sense, the result of failed and incomplete modernization"
More specifically, the "Afghan Arabs" who make up a disproportionate number of the al-Qaeda network have been cut loose or expelled from their traditional world. Fouad Ajami described them as "insurrectionists, caught in no-man's-land, on the run from their homelands but never at home in the west." Yet only in the west could they hide and nurse resentments against the west for the misery of transitional life at home. . .
Or, to use a more recent distinction apparently first made by the nineteenth-century German philosopher Schelling, but more extensively used by Eric Voegelin, it is a disease of the spirit, a pneumatopathology or a pneumopathology, not a mental disease, a psychopathology, that afflicted human beings who saw themselves as specially chosen by God— or even as gods themselves.
As we discuss below, current pneumopathologies among terrorists are similar to those considered by Hobbes, and have led otherwise sane people to claim divine inspiration or inspiration from other sources, some of them occult, and all of them hidden to the world of common sense.
The plainly disturbed see themselves as political saviours; the mildly disordered may be content to profess the one and only truth. All of them, however, can flourish in the context of a past and a tradition that is dead. All can see themselves at the beginning of new and unaccommodating things, where the temptation of violence has perhaps its greatest appeal.
In this context, violence is to be understood not as Hannah Arendt has argued , as a pragmatic mode of human activity, so much as a magic instrument able to transfigure reality. Normal people living in a shared, commonsensical world do not believe in magic, whether violent or not; typically, therefore, an aspect of pneumopathological consciousness involves the construction of an imaginative "second reality" where terrorism can have its intended and magical effects
. Here one finds something like the following profile: an individual, usually an intellectual, with an active, practical personality, experiences great guilt at the misery and evil in a society or perhaps in the world at large.
Such a consciousness desires reform, but finds that legitimate channels of constructive activity for one reason or another appear to be closed; the way beyond this evident impasse seems to him (and terrorists are overwhelmingly male) to lie in action that the actor anticipates will entail sacrifice on his part, particularly if the individual is gifted with great moral sensitivity.
This is why, as Hoffman observed, "the terrorist is fundamentally an altruist: he believes that he is serving a 'good' cause designed to achieve a greater good for a wider constituency— whether real or imagined— which the terrorist and his organization purport to represent" (Hoffman, 1998, p. 43). Or in the words of Walter Laqueur, "traditional terrorism rests on the heroic gesture, on the willingness to sacrifice one's own life as proof of one's idealism" (Laqueur, 1996, p. 31). It is important to distinguish, however, the refusal to separate what is real from what is imagined, which is the distinguishing attribute of a pneumopath, from an inability to do so, which is the mark of an ordinary psychopath. . .
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