Awww, now I try not to hang out with pasty-faced geeks, but sometimes you takes what you can gets.
Posted on 09/21/2004 8:24:29 PM PDT by GIJoel
Putin: Ally or Terrorist? by William F. Jasper
Counting Vladimir Putin as an ally against terrorism ignores his career in the murderous KGB/FSB and his ongoing support for terrorist regimes and organizations.
‘‘Lena Goncharuk, aged 38, said that she was the only one to survive out of a group of six who were ordered out of the cellar where they had been hiding and shot at point blank range. Resting in her hospital bed, her voice barely rising above a whisper, she said she had survived only by pretending to be dead." So reported Paul Wood from the Chechen border for The Independent of London on February 6, 2000, as "triumphant" Russian troops occupied Grozny, the capital of Chechnya. Wood’s article, entitled "Chechnya’s civilians put to the sword," continued with Mrs. Goncharuk’s story:
"They [the Russian soldiers] were asking for cigarettes, then they asked, ‘Do you have a radio,’ and they said, ‘Give it to us,’" she said, explaining that the four women and two men were sent back down into the cellar after handing over their valuables.
"We hadn’t even sat down," she went on, "then they began throwing grenades into the cellar and shooting. We all were crying and suffocating, the smell was unbearable. We were crying out, we could not see anything but they continued to shoot.
"We said, ‘Guys what are you doing? We are civilians.’ They stopped shooting and they said to come out of the cellar. Our legs and heads were wounded and we could hardly move but we got up, supporting each other.
"The first out were two Russian women, Luda and Natasha. We were standing inside the garage over the cellar and they started shooting at point blank range. The others were twisting in pain.... Natasha was lying dead already....
"There was one old man with us. His head was covered in blood.... Then they started firing again.
"If I had looked up I would have been shot. I opened my eye just a little bit, all I saw was the muzzles of their guns and their boots."
Putin’s "Liberation"
Two hospital beds down from Lena Goncharuk was another victim of the Russian "liberation." Unlike Goncharuk, Hedi Makhauri, a 40-year-old Chechen mother, had not been trapped inside besieged Grozny; along with tens of thousands of other refugees, she had fled to neighboring Ingushetia.
With Russian troops establishing themselves in the capital, and the Russian bombing and shelling apparently over, she had thought it safe to go back and check on her house. Paul Wood’s report briefly recounts her ordeal:
"They said it was a liberated area," she said, frail and thin, clutching her hospital sheet to her chin, telling us that when she got to her street, she and two other Chechen women saw Russian soldiers loading stolen goods from the houses into one of their armoured vehicles.
"They took us to the armoured vehicle and they said to go inside. We were afraid as they put blindfolds on us. We said, ‘Why, we are not criminals, we have just come to see our houses.’ They said it was orders.
"They said they would take us to the police headquarters, but they just took us around the corner. It was just ruins all around. Me and my neighbour were clutching each other’s hand. We said: ‘Why are you taking us here, there are no police here.’ They said: ‘Just wait, they will come.’
"The other woman said, ‘Take whatever you want, we have children, just don’t kill us.’ They made us go into one little room. They just shot her in the head. She didn’t even have time to say, ‘Let me go.’ They just shot her. Hedi said that the Russian soldiers were tugging at the gold ring on her finger.
"It slipped off just as they decided to get a knife to sever her finger and the ring along with it. They also took her ear-rings and her money, 400 roubles, about £8.
"Then they put an old mattress over her body, poured petrol on, and lit it. The mattress was wet and did not catch light, only smouldered as they walked away. If I cried they would have killed me," she said.
"They said it was a liberated area"? Where did Hedi Makhauri and many others less fortunate than her get such calamitous disinformation? Why, from no less an authority than Vladimir Putin, then the acting president of Russia. Mr. Putin appeared on Russian national television on Sunday, February 6, 2000, to announce that the last stronghold of the Chechen "terrorists" in Grozny had been taken and the Russian flag had been hoisted over the smoldering ruins of the capital. "Thus, we can say that the operation to liberate Grozny is over," declared Putin.
The seven-year campaign of genocide against Chechnya has been largely invisible to the outside world. The Russian armed forces and security services have successfully kept most of the Western media and humanitarian-aid organizations out, while, at the same time, preventing refugees from escaping with eye-witness details of the brutal subjugation. "Let us call it by its real name," wrote Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby on October 28, 1999. "What Russia is committing in Chechnya is the mass murder of civilians.... And not only is the West failing to rise up against his [Putin’s] bloodbath, it is actively helping to finance it," directly through U.S. foreign aid to the Russian government, as well as indirectly via the U.S. taxpayer-funded International Monetary Fund.
Convergence Choir
Tragically, far too few of Mr. Jacoby’s colleagues in the Western media have shared his outrage over the ongoing slaughter in Chechnya; the coverage of Putin’s campaign of terror against Chechen civilians has been sporadic and the condemnations tepid. Since the September 11th terrorist attacks, criticism of the Chechen pogrom has all but evaporated, as the Bush administration has rushed to embrace Russia as our valued "ally" in the war on terrorism.
New York Times correspondent Bill Keller typified this response in an October 6th article, in which he stated: "We need the Russians now, as we needed Stalin once, and if that means our president pulls a punch on the subject of the indiscriminate civil carnage in Chechnya, I can live with that; the punch had no muscle behind it anyway." Mr. Keller and other pragmatists of his ilk can apparently "live with" patently immoral policies like genocide, turning a blind eye to the unpleasant bloodletting as long as the perpetrator advances the globalist agenda of East-West convergence.
On November 23rd, the Times offered an even more startling re-evaluation of Russia as NATO’s new partner in the war on terrorism. Aleksandr Rahr, a scholar at the German Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in Berlin, told the Times: "What changed radically on September 11th was the complete disappearance of Russia as a threat to Europe. It’s completely gone." The German CFR is a sister to the American CFR, this country’s "ruling establishment," and Mr. Rahr was trilling the same convergence theme as his U.S. counterparts. Mr. Rahr, along with other European and American CFR one-worlders, advocates a full, lusty embrace of Russia against our new common enemy.
One of the most enthusiastic advocates of this policy of NATO-Russia embrace is none other than Lord Robertson, the current NATO chief. "We sense very strong indications from President Putin in recent weeks that he wants to change the way that Russia does business," the November 23rd New York Times quoted Robertson as saying. "We take that at face value and we will work on that basis," he continued. "The Russian response to the terrible attacks on the United States," he said, "has … been the reaction of a real and genuine friend." "In the past," said Robertson, "we were divided by walls and fences and by ideology and by armies. Today the threats to the Russian people are very similar, if not exactly the same as, the threats to the people in the NATO countries and the West."
Does Lord Robertson, the head of the West’s military alliance, truly buy the Kremlin line that the pounding of Chechen cities and villages into rubble, the rampant slaughter of civilians, and the driving of hundreds of thousands of refugees into camps, neighboring provinces, and foreign exile are the same as fighting terrorists who carry out acts like the 9-11 Black Tuesday attack? Whether or not he truly believes it, Robertson is definitely retailing that line with a passion. "To utter such nonsense, a top Western official has to be either a closet Communist or one of Lenin’s ‘useful idiots,’" says Christopher Story, editor and publisher of the authoritative London-based Soviet Analyst.
One of the most reliable analysts of Russian affairs and a keen observer of British power politics, Mr. Story clearly believes Robertson to be of the former category. "Look, Robertson was well known in Britain as a former Communist trade union agitator when Tony Blair picked him to be secretary of state for defense," Story told The New American. "Blair is to the left of Clinton and has been clear over in the Kremlin camp all along. The September 11th attacks have given him the opportunity to advance his pro-Moscow agenda while appearing to be pro-military, pro-American, and anti-terrorist." Story points out that when a member of parliament queried the British Fabian Socialist Society concerning charges that certain members of the Blair cabinet were members of the socialist group, the secretary of the Fabian Society publicly confirmed that 20 of Blair’s 23 cabinet officials were indeed members in good standing with the organization. For over a century, notes Story, the Fabians have played a crucial role in implementing Marxist-Leninist policies in the British Commonwealth.
"Lord Robertson the former Communist is quite obviously a continuing covert Communist who is enthusiastically implementing the continuing Soviet strategy against the West — from the highest office in NATO, no less," warns Story. "What makes this even more troubling is that Robertson was appointed NATO secretary-general following Javier Solana, a ‘former’ Spanish Communist, who shared the same love affair with Moscow. Solana has now been transferred to a key position within the European Commission of the EU [European Union], where he and his fellow radicals are working in concert with Robertson, Blair, Germany’s Joschka Fischer, Italy’s Romano Prodi, and other subversives to convert NATO and the EU completely into an oppressive Soviet collective."
The Russians have always been master chess players, reminds Story, and they have been playing the terrorist gambit very successfully. "If the people of the West do not wake up soon to this fact, we will soon be in checkmate," he warns.
Covert Strategy, Deadly Deception
The Russian war against Chechnya is, of course, central to the current U.S.-Russian embrace as allies in the war against terrorism. For the Russians and their CFR apologists in the U.S., it provides an important test of the American public’s gullibility: Can the slaughter in Chechnya credibly be equated to our current war against Osama bin Laden? After all, as the CFR’s Mr. Rahr claims, the Russian threat is "completely gone," and we’re both fighting against Islamic extremists, right? Or as Lord Robertson put it, we both face "very similar, if not exactly the same" threats.
The chess pieces were being positioned to produce American acceptance of this preposterous notion long before the suicide attacks of September 11, 2001. In December 1994, Boris Yeltsin ordered Russian troops, tanks, and air power into Chechnya to fight what he claimed were "terrorists" and "bandits." Soon the term "Islamic extremist" was also being applied to the Chechen opponents. For months the Russian army appeared pathetically inept, demoralized, barbaric, and incapable of subduing the Chechens. However, after grinding much of Chechnya under its tank tracks and killing 100,000 civilians, the Yeltsin regime negotiated an accord to withdraw Russian forces, while negotiations would continue toward a settlement of Chechnya’s status by the end of 2001.
The most penetrating (and what has also proven the most prophetic) analysis of the 1994-96 Russian-Chechnyan War was written in February 1995 as a memo from Soviet defector Anatoliy Golitsyn to CIA Acting Director William O. Studeman. Published in the 1995 edition of Golitsyn’s book The Perestroika Deception, the memo marshaled important evidence and observations supporting the contention that the Chechnyan War was being "deliberately staged largely for Western consumption by the Kremlin strategists in the pursuit of their objectives."
What hidden objectives could the Kremlin strategists advance by a controlled operation that showed the Russian military performing so poorly and the Russian military leaders quarreling amongst themselves? Mr. Golitsyn, himself a former elite KGB operative amongst the Kremlin strategists, listed many important objectives, including:
• The Russian military bungling was intended to "demonstrate that it can be discounted as a serious military adversary for the foreseeable future."
• This message was "intended to influence US Congressional debate on the subject of Russia’s military potential and the size of US forces required to maintain a balance with it."
• The message could "also be used as a pretext for deepening the partnership between the US and Russian armed forces by seeking American advice and help in ‘reforming,’ reorganizing and retraining the Russian army in order to enable it to serve a ‘democratic’ system."
• The Chechnyan events also "enabled the Russians to play especially on European fears of destabilization in Russia" and "injected a further boost to the European desire for partnership with the ‘democratic forces’ in Russia."
• This partnership would lead to "entry into European institutions" and then "East European and eventually Russian involvement in NATO."
As usual, Mr. Golitsyn’s cogent analysis has proven prescient as well; all of the above objectives, and others he mentioned, have been advanced on the Russian chessboard — to a frightful degree. And, as usual, Golitsyn’s warnings and analyses have been ignored and supressed by the CFR insiders dominating U.S. policy-making positions, Establishment think tanks, and the press. (See the sidebar.)
Russia’s New Front Man
Mr. Golitsyn suggested that the Chechnyan "crisis" might be "a possible planned prelude to a change of government," replacing the spent Yeltsin team with a new set of rotating faces. "Since an outright military or nationalist government [in Russia] might prejudice the flow of Western aid and the continued ‘cooperation’ with the West which furthers the strategists’ interests," he said, it is likely that the Kremlin strategists wielding the real power behind the scenes would replace Yeltsin with a team comprised of a tough new president and a "reformist" prime minister. "The President would be presented as a guarantee of Russian stability while the Prime Minister’s task would be to ensure the continued flow of Western aid and the continuation of cooperative operations."
Enter Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, the Russian "hero" of the Chechnyan pogrom. President Putin, the current player sitting in the Kremlin’s big chair, may seem in charge of moving the Russian pieces around the board, says Christopher Story, but he is merely the current front man for the covert Communist leadership collective that has continued to rule Russia since the Soviet Union’s supposed collapse. Mr. Story is perhaps the world’s leading proponent of Golitsyn’s thesis that the "Soviet collapse" was a controlled deception, planned many years in advance, for long-range strategic purposes.
Mr. Story, whose publications have closely tracked developments in Chechnya as well as the rise of Putin’s star, derides the government and media experts for falling all over themselves to come up with explanations for Putin’s meteoric rise. "Vladimir Putin has been a lifelong Communist and asset of Soviet intelligence," first of the KGB, and then of the GRU, Soviet military intelligence, he told The New American. "And the Chechnyan ‘crisis’ that raised him to the national and world stages has been completely an operation of the successor Russian intelligence services. If you follow the Russian-Chechnyan events and Putin’s career it’s very clear that he was hand-picked by the Kremlin strategists for his current role."
Shooting Putin to prominence was a spectacular string of 1999 apartment bombings in Moscow and other Russian cities that left hundreds dead. Yeltsin had appointed Putin prime minister, after serving a stint as head of the FSB, the current acronym for the KGB. Putin then strode on the scene vowing to bring the terrorists to justice. He quickly identified the perpetrators as Islamic extremists from Chechnya and soon launched a new massive invasion reducing Grozny to ashes and corpses. Heralded by the KGB/FSB-directed government organs and media as the strong man who had redeemed Russia’s honor from the ignominy of the 1994-1996 Chechnyan War and ended the terror bombings, Putin was elected "president" in March 2000.
USA Today reported on March 27, 2000 that Putin’s win "capped an incredible rise to power by a man who had never before stood for election." The Los Angeles Times reported that prior to his victory over the Chechens, "few thought the mousy, soft-spoken former spy could convince a majority of voters to elect him president."
Christopher Story has pointed out that Putin was able to solve the terrorist bombings "because they were very simply provocations perpetrated by covert Soviet intelligence operatives to provide Moscow with a pretext for an official re-entry into Chechnya. I say ‘official’ because Russia never really relinquished control when it supposedly left in 1996." Other analysts, investigators, and reporters around the world have reached some of the same conclusions. Many major mainstream media organs have acknowledged that the Putin regime has produced no evidence substantiating that Chechens were behind the Moscow bombings. Moreover, it has been fairly widely reported that strong evidence indicates that the FSB actually perpetrated the bombings. Many news groups have reported that after the fourth major bombing in September 1999, local police foiled a fifth bombing when they arrested terrorists planting explosives in another apartment complex. The terrorists turned out to be FSB agents.
According to Soviet Analyst, the Russians did not merely seize an opportunity (the 9-11 attacks) that happened to coincide with their long-range objectives; Putin and associates actually planned and carried out the terrorist deed using assets connected to bin Laden in Chechnya. The publication, which, like Anatoliy Golitsyn, can boast an uncanny accuracy on major Russian developments unmatched by the media-anointed Russian experts, has pointed out a number of important facts that support this theory. Among them:
• Land-locked Chechnya has long been one of the most completely controlled areas of the former Soviet Union, surrounded by Russia and Georgia, run by the faithful Communist Edward Shevardnadze. It is thus one of the safest venues to carry out a false Islamic revolt.
• The huge Soviet strategic military base and air base at Mozdok near Ingushetia has been using Chechnya as a "live warfare" laboratory and training ground, preparing for further strategic warfare in the region.
• The Chechen opposition has been completely controlled and compromised with false leadership, notably, with the likes of Djokhar Dudayev, a former Soviet air force general, accepted by Moscow as the representative voice of Chechen independence.
• The Russian armed forces and security services repeatedly released their controlled Chechen opposition, or allowed them to escape, to carry out repeated provocations.
• During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, an estimated 50,000 young Afghan males were removed from Afghanistan and transferred to terrorist training camps in Chechnya, Tajikistan, and elsewhere — to be filtered back in subsequent years as fighters in the ranks of the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and the Northern Alliance.
• Utilizing its client regimes in Iran, Sudan, Iraq, and elsewhere in the Middle East, Russia has supported the "Islamic" terror network while making it appear that it is itself under assault from "Muslim extremists."
As usual, says Christopher Story, the Communist strategists in Moscow have used the "principle of reversal," lying audaciously about the true situation in Chechnya. "Putin’s claims that Russia is under attack from bin Laden’s forces, just like the U.S., is a complete reversal of the truth," he says. In reality, he notes, "the evidence is far more persuasive that his al-Qaeda contacts in Chechnya and neighboring areas have been used to coordinate provocations that will provide the image of a common enemy." If this analysis is correct, and it appears to be, then the United States and the West have embraced as allies in the war on terrorism the engineers and perpetrators of the global terror offensive.
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Predictions of an Ex-KGB Agent by William F. Jasper
Soviet defector Anatoliy Golitsyn predicted the rise of a false Soviet reformer like Gorbachev, the removal of the Berlin Wall, the unification of Germany, and the restructuring of NATO.
In 1961, in a dramatic escape under cover of a blinding snow storm, a major in the Soviet KGB defected to the United States. He was no ordinary KGB agent; he was an elite officer working within the "inner KGB" — a super-secret strategic planning department that plotted long-term Soviet strategy against the West. He is probably the most important Soviet defector ever to have reached the West. His name is Anatoliy Golitsyn.
Golitsyn warned that KGB moles had penetrated the CIA and virtually all other Western intelligence services and that many defectors were actually double agents feeding strategic disinformation to the West. For more than four decades, Golitsyn has been providing methodical analysis of developments in the Soviet Union and of Russian initiatives and operations throughout the world that has proven uniquely accurate. He has been explaining patiently that the Communist strategists who ran the Soviet Union continue to run Russia today. Following Leninist strategic principles, they are engaged in a deadly long-term war against the West. Foremost among their objectives is to convince Western leaders that Soviet Communism has collapsed and represents no further threat to the world.
Golitsyn’s amazingly prophetic book, New Lies for Old, was published in 1984. His main predictions included details of the forthcoming false liberalization of the whole of Eastern Europe, followed by similar developments in the Soviet Union. He predicted the rise of a false Soviet reformer like Gorbachev, the removal of the Berlin Wall, the unification of Germany, and the restructuring (if not abolition) of NATO. He even went so far as to specify that a "Break with the Past" process would start in East Germany, with the opening of its borders — as it turned out, to neighboring Communist countries. That was very remarkable: Golitsyn knew that the process would start in East Germany, and it did.
Author Mark Riebling, in his important 1994 book entitled Wedge: The Secret War between the FBI and CIA, conducted a careful analysis of Golitsyn’s predictions in New Lies for Old. He found that out of a total of 148 predictions, 139 had been verified by 1993 — "an accuracy rating of 94%." No other Soviet expert even comes close. Golitsyn’s 1995 book, The Perestroika Deception, continuing in the same tradition, offers unparalleled information and insight. Our leaders continue ignoring his proven wisdom to our own great peril.
Now ATF or WOD types, they scare the bejeezus outta me.
As well they should. It's interesting how the GOP's federal police force has taken an ever-more menacing turn since Bush made some key partnering decisions before the dust of the Wall (which fell into the West immediately after folks like Putin had switched out entire cadres of East Berliners with "former Soviets" ) had even settled:
In 1989 edition of the National Drug Control Strategy, President Bush made it official:'We must be prepared to share our knowledge and our concern with the Soviet Union and Eastern European nations and be willing to engage them in cooperative counterdrug activities". (36)In this strategy document, there was no recognition of the role of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe countries in drug-trafficking and in creating the very sickness the strategy was designed to cure.Towards the end of 1989, the DEA made a formal proposal to the Soviets for the DEA to conduct 'advanced narcotics investigations' for about 30 anti-narcotics professionals from Soviet customs, the Ministry of Interior and the KGB. As one DEA official, Paul Higdon, explained: 'We're looking at them as policemen - these guys are cops with a mission similar to ours'. Not to be outdone, US Customs is proposing a formal information-sharing agreement, similar to the ones we have with most of our Western allies'
Hear No Evil -- Part II Case in point (for comparison purposes): Vladimir Meciar's Dawn Arrest
Case in point (for comparison purposes): Modesto Boy, 11, Shot By SWAT Team
The Elian Snatch and What It Could Mean for You.
Do I believe things have changed? You bet.
Fifteen years ago, the notion that we would turn to the Russians for help in handling the psycho-terrorizing and hot attack of Branch Davidians in Texas (over a poorly handled attempt to collect taxes) would have been unthinkable.
Fifteen years ago, folks might have wondered why Alger Hiss didn't win on appeal if someone like Yevgeny (Finkelstein) Primakov could be prime consultant to our nearly fully-evolved new Ministry of Information.
A lot has changed. But those appearances -- particularly among the New Russians -- I chalk up to the "saving graces of Western Materialism" do not cut it for me.
In fact, I think it a pretty poor joke indeed that the likes of Delay could tout such things as if a nation like ours -- which has exported nearly every vital element of our economy and reduced heretofore secure "family-style" lifelong loyal workers into triple minimum-wage slaves with big Yellow smiles at Wal-Mart or other environmentally-sensitive companies who've proven their Diversity and Sexual Equality bona fides in the courts and who lead the way in volunteering to tax internet sales or corral workers into HMOs -- is up to the task of evangelizing the world with our most famous bit of materialist scripture: "It's the Economy, Stupid."
ExSES, will stop with the practice of comparing a serious discussion of World Revolution to petty Leftist theories that George Bush was responsible for 9/11. Thank you.
" Islam and Sharia law developed seperately. One covered the religious sphere, the other the legal sphere. They are not the same thing. "
What are the separate developments?
Whoa partner ... 1948?
Are you sure you want to go there? I'm happy to but I don't think you're going to like it for two reasons:
(1) I'm going to lay out for you some of the history of the consciousness-raising that was a concerted effort (contest, in a way, if you figure in the Chicoms) of the Soviets who -- like their Corsican brother Mao -- were most interested in forming a "radical arc of Islam" which would serve to embroil the US, fudge our heretofore happy and most-profitable association with the Arabs and lever into position the collectivization of the ME soviet's economic and security systems.
(Having just finished doing the dirty work for the Russians -- for whom we rolled out a red carpet, mined on our own side, for good measure in Pristina -- where the Leninist objective of collectivized security/economy in Europe was concerned, we're now free to make good on our September 2000 promises to "re-organize" Afghanistan and serve as useful idiots in the confecting of a ME soviet on the same model as the EU.)
(2) You're going to open a can of worms best left closed on this board where the terrorist operations of non-Muslim religious fanatics are concerned.
After all, it would be wrong, would it not, to arbitrarily begin in 1948 just as all the hard work of decades past where political murder was concerned finally paid off ... landing the Soviet and Fascist-sponsored terrorists the cattle prod with which they would electrify the Muslim world, invoke perpetual revolution and embroil Uncle Sam with the brunt of Big Brother duties for a recalcitrant charge who has proven more than once he doesn't really need Big Brother's help (will box his ears, even, when he gets in the way) and picking his pocket or his brain on behalf of Sam's mortal enemies.
I don't have time at the moment to get into a lengthy discussion of Sharia law. For the time being let the following be a guidepost where Islam and Sharia part company. The following is taken from the "Roots of Islamic Terrorism" by Antero Leitzinger (of Eurasian Politician):
A Western mindset
"It is significant that anti-Americanism was first propagated as a major theme of Muslim fundamentalism by young men and women from Islamic countries who had spent time in the United States as students or workers." (Taheri, p. 206) These included the founding father of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Said Qutb, who had lived in the USA for two years around 1949/1950. The four pilots of September 11th, 2001, included one native German citizen, whose Moroccan father was no Islamist at all, a Lebanese of liberal background, and a United Arab Emirates' subject, both of whom had spent five years in Germany, and the Egyptian-born terrorist leader Muhammad Atta, who had immigrated into Germany nine years earlier.
Daniel Pipes' article "The Western Mind of Radical Islam" describes well, how so many Islamic terrorists actually adopted more ideas from contacts to western society than from their own traditions: "Fundamentalist leaders tend to be well acquainted with the West, having lived there, learned its languages, and studied its cultures. ... Indeed, the experience of living in the West often turns indifferent Muslims into fundamentalists. ... In contrast to this ostentatious familiarity with Western ways, fundamentalists are distant from their own culture. ... Having found Islam on their own as adults, many fundamentalists are ignorant of their own history and traditions." (http://www.danielpipes.org/articles/199512.shtml)
This became very obvious through the biographies of those who committed the suicide attacks of September 2001, and who were typically from wealthy families, liberally educated, and had lived many years in Hamburg, London, and America. Pipes takes notice of the fact that "fundamentalist Muslims" (or rather, "Islamists", as they care little of traditions and their true fundaments), have introduced distinctly Christian notions into their religion. He presents plenty of detailed examples, among others that "fundamentalists have turned Fridays into a Sabbath, something it had not previously been. ... Ignorant of the spirit underlying the Shari'a, fundamentalists enforce it along territorial, not personal lines..." (http://www.danielpipes.org/articles/199512.shtml), and so forth.
While original Islamic law had complex separate provisions for Jews and Christians, Islamists tend to regard them as intolerantly as non-Christians used to be regarded in pre-19th century Europe. Islamists also tend to confuse Islamic concepts (f. ex. regarding ritual purity, food prescriptions, etc.) with similar but not identical Christian concepts. A visible example is the uniform-like "Islamic head-scarf", which could be derived rather from prescriptions in the Epistle's of St. Paul than from interpretations of the Koran, or from traditional customs. There is also a curious tendency to threat apostates with death sentence (while the Koran forbids the use of force in matters of religion), and to prevent female followers from marrying Christian men, while men have always been allowed to marry Christian women, and the Koran explicitly orders the same marriage restrictions or exemptions equally for both sexes. Actually, it was the Christian Canon and laws (for example in Russia until the beginning of 20th century), that threatened an apostate with death penalty and prevented mixed marriages. When Christian societies found out, that such laws had no base in religion, Islamists took them over, although they had even fewer bases in Islam. For example, in the Malaysian state of Sabah, Muslim women were banned from mixed marriages only after the 1970s, when Islamism became a global fashion. Fundamentally anti-Islamic fashions and interpretations of religion were exported from Saudi Arabia globally since the 1970s, with heavy financial backing.
Pipes describes the way Islamists "have set up church-like structures. The trend began in Saudi Arabia, where the authorities built a raft of new institutions..., for example: the Secretary of the Muslim World League, the Secretary General of the Islamic Conference... The Islamic Republic of Iran soon followed the Saudi model and went beyond it..." (http://www.danielpipes.org/articles/199512.shtml)
A Pakistani Muslim scholar, Khalid Duran, warned already in 1978 about the Saudi-financed "political role of Islam": "The fundamentalism of the last half-century is a stranger to traditional Islam... People don't remember, but the Muslim Brotherhood grew up in Egypt in the 1930s as an imitation of European fascism, which was also in revolt against modernity. In Italy and Germany you had the brownshirts and the blackshirts. In Egypt you had the greenshirts, which was the Muslim Brotherhood. It failed in Europe but survived in Egypt and spread to other parts of the Islamic world." (Emerson, p. 171 and 172)
=== President Bush took President Putin out to his ranch and looked deep into his eyes and decided that Vladimir Vladimirovich could be his friend. Not good enough?
I'm more interested in the way his wife has described him to German banking friends as a "vampire."
Just because Putin's human and -- from the looks of some of his early pics -- wanted to be as cool as Vsiotsky doesn't mean he's the real deal. I chalk that sort of thing up with "Christ is my favorite philosopher" sorts of soundbites.
Actions speak louder than words. I still think Putin's in East Germany and Petersburg ought to be ringing in your ears especially.
==== We (Poles) were accused for many things but never that we are a Trojan Horse nation working for the secret KGB .
First, let me say I have immense respect and love for the Poles which was only deepened by my association on this board with dear CommiesOut and his likewise irascible compatriot Kosciusko.
That said ... "Solidarity" stinks to high heaven particularly for its appeal to Catholics.
The trouble with folks like the Poles (beyond the fact they manage to garner for themselves only the most badass enemies around, God bless them) is that they are a basically righteous and therefore Predictable people.
They were perfect, in other words, for the launch of Perestroika.
Awww, now I try not to hang out with pasty-faced geeks, but sometimes you takes what you can gets.
Lukasz wrote:
So is Poland a Trojan Horse nation working for the secret KGB?
We (Poles) were accused for many things but never that we are a Trojan Horse nation working for the secret KGB . Here on FR I can learn many interesting things about my country and nation. ROTFL
Dear GIJoel
Excuse me that I don’t write nothing more but you understand I have more important things to do in my secret agenda.
lol ... you know I have no problems with pasty-faced geeks. Never have.
What is that pic from? Looks very circus-circus.
We (Poles) were accused for many things but never that we are a Trojan Horse nation working for the secret KGB . Here on FR I can learn many interesting things about my country and nation. ROTFL
>>>
LOL.
Series though, do 'former' Communists have 'elected' positions in Polish High Office? Where have all the commies gone?
Pooty in Russia has centralized (or did he ever really decentralize?) and consolidated all power away from representative-leaning democracy now, after this horrible, senseless tragedy of satan's spawn in Beslan. His power grab, in my mind, rivals that of Abe Lincoln's during the War between the States here in America...
" Whoa partner ... 1948?
Are you sure you want to go there? I'm happy to but I don't think you're going to like it for two reasons: "
Yes, I want to go there. I want to go right back here:
" What, exactly, in the history of the FSB since its inception leads you to believe they are somehow beyond slaughtering children? "
What in the history of the moslems leads you to believe that they are above it?
You made a distinction about "recent" history, so I went with that. Is 1948 too recent? Not recent enough? Pick your own year and tell me what leads you to believe that moslems are not above slaughtering children. Moslems have been killing them for years in Israel.
I believe President Bush is what could be called a 'baby' Christian believer, but growing fast. He's certainly got great global connections, but I don't believe his discernment is infallible, nor do I not necessarily believe that he isn't looking at Putin's potential as a person to reform completely maybe. Of course, it could be a faith statement, saying things the way he hopes is the best interpretation. I personally think Putin is the same Communist 'vampire' he always was. Someone has sold us out, I'm wondering if before Nov. 2 might not be too late.
Maybe a converation about Muhammadan's butchering Christians by the boat load in Indonesia and the Sudan?! There is holy expansionism in the hearts of the Islamocommunists, America's mortal enemies, and Israel's mortal enemies. Not Europe, not Russia, not red Chicommies - NONE of them will come here to save us. They could, however, come as powder blue helmet occupying forces though, huh?
For those who could not bring themselves to read my post on Golitsyn's analysis of the phony 'renewel' of Poland, you really don't belong here. There are hundreds of easier-to-read and easier-to-understand posts elsewhere on the main page. If you find yourself unable to cope with the reading presented, I strongly suggest you go there in search of fairer climes...just a suggestion.
First you said " Islam and Sharia law developed seperately. One covered the religious sphere, the other the legal sphere. They are not the same thing. "
Now you say " I don't have time at the moment to get into a lengthy discussion of Sharia law. For the time being let the following be a guidepost where Islam and Sharia part company. "
Did Islam and Sharia develop separately or did they develop together, only to part comapany? Islam got its start around the 7th century but the partings you show from Sharia are all in the 20th. What is your actual premise?
I really hate to disagree with you, Apes (because you have displayed your honest heart over and over). It is true that Muslims at certain times and in certain societies have gone way, way too far. But let's face it, the Catholics did the same thing to Jews and Muslims, and on the Protestant side of the equation, Martin Luther advocated cutting the tongues out of Jews who refused to convert. And let's not forget how Catholics burned Protestants at the stake for sharing the Bible in the native language of people whose lands were under Catholic control. The list is endless, and so are the aberrations of all people who read their own preconceived passions into their respective religions.
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