Posted on 12/14/2006 3:15:09 PM PST by Tailgunner Joe
Harare, Zimbabwe (AHN) - Zimbabwe will not turn over former Former Former Ethiopian dictator Mengistu Haile Miriam, despite his conviction of genocide.
William Nhara, a spokesperson for President Robert Mugabe's government, says, "As a comrade of our struggle, Comrade Mengistu and his government played a key and commendable role during our struggle for independence and no one can dispute that."
"The judgment is an Ethiopian judgment and will not affect his status in Zimbabwe. As far as we know there is no extradition treaty between Harare and Addis Ababa."
Mengistu, who has been living in exile in Zimbabwe since he fell from power in 1991, was convicted of charges ranging from genocide, to imprisonment, homicide, and illegal confiscation of property.
Ethiopia's Federal High Court convicted Mengistu and 71 other defendants for their parts in the "Red Terror." According to the U.S. government, "The enormity of government-sponsored operations against suspected political opponents during the 'Red Terror' has defied accurate analysis and has made attempts at quantification of casualties irrelevant."
"Sources estimated that, during 1977-78, about 30,000 people had perished as a result of the Red Terror and harsh conditions in prisons, kebele jails, and concentration camps."
Monotheistic creator God, Heaven, Hell, Last Judgment -- downright unprecedented.
That leaves us only a couple of options - confront and defeat these types, isolate them or ourselves from the world, or replace that system - as the Spaniards did in the new world.
Might not be the best model there, sport.
The "nuke Mecca" epithet is simply shorthand for this realization.
You're saying that when people bray about how we should Nuke Mecca to Kill All the Üntermenschen, they're actually engaging in nuanced philosophical debate? Please.
And medieval anti-Semites and racists are held up today as paragons of Western thought. What's your point?
Incorrect. Khaldun recognized the ability of muslims to temporarily endure non-Islamic governments. He described the eventual overthrow of the Dar al Harb as a "religious duty" though, and wrote of the "universalism of the mission and (the obligation to) convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force." (The Muqaddimah) He by no means saw non-Islamic government as something tolerable or on equal footing with Islamic government, and openly advocated the establishment of the latter where it did not already exist.
Can you produce a prominent Christian thinker of the same era who didn't see the same duty to spread the Word, by war if necessary?
Very good. You've proven that you know how to google names!
You seem to rely heavily on Google. Not all of us do.
But what you've also inadvertently admitted is that the intellectual strain of islamic radicalism runs very deep through Islamic history - in fact it follows a succession over 600 years in the making.
In that Wahabbism sees itself as a Salafist movement, then yes, of course its adherents consider their philosophy rooted in the deep past.
May I take it by your scare quotes that you question whether Khaldun's advocacy of forceful conversion to Islam is indeed an extreme premise?
I was quoting your terms.
Your analogy is false. Pierce was a fringe writer with no significant or credible following in the western world. Taymiyya, Qutb, Sadr, Mawdudi, Wahhab, and other jihadi radicals all have significant followings among Islamic theologians, political figures, and, of course, terrorists.
Pierce's followers were the foremost terrorists in America in the 1990s.
The Robertson analogy is similarly false, as Robertson and his followers don't blow up busses, ambush conveys, or take and execute hostages. Sadr does. So did the terror cells spawned by Qutb and Mawduddi.
You're not familiar with Robertson's links to (and defense of, on religious grounds) Charles Taylor.
But Churchill is widely quoted (and widely quotable) whereas Powell is the darling of Britain's xenophobic racists almost exclusively. I find it odd that someone who choses such a screenname makes no effort to dissociate himself from that group.
My understanding is that the particular catchphrase he uses originated with Eric Clapton, not the BNP.
My understanding is that one need not coin a phrase to be responsible for uttering it.
Literalism has been in the Christian mainstream since the sola scriptura movement of Protestantism.
His influence is comparable to what Aquinas is to the Catholic Church, or St. Augustine to Christianity.
And what do Aquinas and St. Augustine say about infidels and war?
And as I indicated previously, the "radicals" of Islam like Qutb and Taymiyya took the already extreme premise of literalism, as found well inside the islamic "mainstream" of Ghazali, even further.
And the radicals of the South African National Party took the already extreme premise of biologially ordering humanity even further. Does that discredit the Western Civilization they claimed to be serving? Does it discredit Linnaeus?
There is evidence that al-Qa'ida is trying to recruit white, American-born men and women who don't have Muslim names. By your "logic", that would certainly justify excluding whites from the country, or at least major population centers, right?
Read the Koran. Islam IS proto-Nazism.
You keep bringing up Nazism. Why is that?
I'm not the opponent of the Constitution here, zimdog. You'd sooner see it abolished and replaced with Sharia than inconvenience a few people until the war is over.
Sure you are. What you propose violates the 1st, 4th, and 14th Amendments. And since your "war" seems to be against Muslims worldwide, it will "inconvenience" more than "a few people" and unless you plan on killing a billion people (something I don't put past you), such a war that won't be over anytime soon.
Conservatives seek to "conserve" something. What do you think that is in the United States? AMERICAN culture. We - conservatives - oppose the imposition on us by force, money, or a lack of assimilation of a culture alien to ours.
American culture entails a respect for the rule of law and the equality of all Americans. You cannot "conserve" American culture by destroying it, as you seem to want to do.
More guilt by association.... Yet you decry the guilt by association that is part and parcel with the side you have taken in this fight.
I'm just pointing out your hypocrisy. But remember, I'm not trying to put you in a concentration camp based on "guilt by association". Under your rules, that would be fine.
So do you group the Muslims with the Protestants? or with the Catholics and Jews?
And what does shorthand have to do with nuanced philosophical debate? Aren't these mutually exclusive??
You're the one who suggested that all this "Nuke the Üntermenschen" talk was shorthand for something. But if not for genocide, shorthand for what?
From your lips to God's ears...
first off the use of the term Üntermenschen is stupid, especially considering the close ties between muslims and the nazis during that period.
Except of course, the tens of thousands of Muslims who fought the Nazis in the Free French Army, fighting for freedom and decency against those who, like the Nuke Mecca Crowd, claimed to be defending Western Civilization.
Secondly is beyond stupid when one considers that it is the muslims - even the moderate ones - that consider the jews the Üntermenschen.
It would be beyond stupid, if it were true.
"Nuke Mecca" is shorthand for the realization that militant Islam is a philosophy that CANNOT BE NEGOTIATED WITH, IT MUST BE DEFEATED.
Sounds like shorthand for murdering innocent people.
The dishonesty you display by mischarecterizing other's arguments and attempting to steer things in a racial direction when it is not needed demonstrate that you are not interested in discussing this in good faith.
I said nothing about race, although I believe that the proponets of Nuking Mecca are, in most cases, racist. I stated (quite rightly) that the plan to incinerate hundreds of thousands of innocent people because of their faith demonstrates that the proponents of this plan believe these people are somehow less worthy of the right to life and liberty than other victims of terrorism, i.e. the Nuke Mecca Crowd believes that the people of Mecca (and often Muslims in general) deserve fewer basic human rights than non-Meccans (or non-Muslims) which is another way of saying they consider them to be sub-human.
I'm not seeing it as a racial issue any more than the Japanese-American internment that you defend were "a racial issue." The facts are clear: Al-Qa'ida is actively seeking recruits among American-born whites with Christian names just as Imperial Japan was actively seeking recruits among Japanese immigrants who were naturalized American citizens. You argue that the latter case justified sending all West Coast residents of Japanese descent to concentration camps. By that same logic, why shouldn't we intern all native-born white people with Christian names?
There is no real difference in goal between Mein Kampf and the Koran.
I'll just let this flag of idiocy flap in the breeze.
It does not. Anymore than the banning German and Japanese "patriotic" organizations did in WWII.
Shipping Americans off to concentration camps based on ethnic and/or religious background is not the same as banning groups expressly formed to give aid and comfort to declared enemy states.
All billion Muslims live in CONUS? Since when?
That's not what I said. Do you only want to kill the Muslims that live in the continental US?
Not when some "Americans" hold allegiance to a foreign power - the Ummah
The "Ummah" is not a state anymore than "Christiandom" is.
Once they have a larger percentage of the population, the violence will start in earnest - just as in Europe.
A similar argument was made against recognizing African Americans' civil rights in the 1960s. Europe is not the United States and the United States is not Europe. One reason why there is a Muslim underclass (with the accompanying underclass violence) in Europe is because European states generally afford fewer political rights to their immigrants and are generally more racist than Americans. Witness the BNP.
Your ideological friends would have me assume the position of dhimmi and "submit".
I am an American and I submit to no one.
Sorry, but I'm not willing to do that or see my country fall that way.
You left your country long ago, EPWR. Whether you are a legal American citizen or not, it is clear that you have nothing but disdain for our civilization, our laws, and our people.
So send Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to the concentration camp and let the next Tim McVeigh run free? Way to fight terrorism.
Truth hurts, doesn't it?
If you ever stumble across the truth, let me know how hard it hits you.
So, internment equals execution to you?
Not in general, but given your continued reluctance to denounce the idea of murdering innocent Muslims, I suspect that under your plan, it does.
That pretty much describes every mosque.
Only if you ignore the facts.
This is BS. If anything, Europe has bent over backwards even more for these "immigrants".
How many German citizens are of Turkish descent?
You defend the enemy of my civilization and have the gall to claim I'm the one doing that. I really don't think you qualify with the "our".
Between the two of us, I'm the only one to recognize the 14th Amendment and I'm the only one to recognize that all Americans are equal under the law no matter what their faith, and I'm the only one to recognize that we follow the rule of law, not of whim in America. You reject all these things. You reject what makes us great. You reject the patriot dream that sees beyond the years. You want to kidnap, imprison, and possible kill hundreds of thousands of Americans, so don't insult our intelligence by saying you're not at war with America.
Et tu quoque. It's an invalid form of argumentation to cite the alleged flaws of an alleged equivalent as justification or excuse for the original condemned act. And that's my point.
Can you produce a prominent Christian thinker of the same era who didn't see the same duty to spread the Word, by war if necessary?
As I said, et tu quoque. Besides, you seem to have lost your point in the previous discussion. You claimed wrongly that Khaldun tolerated non-Islamic governments. I quoted him directly showing otherwise. So either admit your error or move on.
In that Wahabbism sees itself as a Salafist movement, then yes, of course its adherents consider their philosophy rooted in the deep past.
Sure they do. But so do the Shi'a mahdists, the Hezbollah crowd, and just about every other single Islamic sect. Despite their often vast differences with each other, virtually all of them claim an intellectual and political succession going back to Mahomet himself.
Pierce's followers were the foremost terrorists in America in the 1990s.
Debatable at best, and more likely dubious as they dissipated into the fringes of society with no enduring impact or following. The most consequential of the 1990's terror groups within the U.S. itself are the very same ones that produced 9/11 a few years later.
For such a vocal opponent of Powell, you certainly haven't familiarized yourself with him very much. In fact the BNP crowd's knowledge of him is limited almost entirely to a media-inspired mis-truncation of a single line in a single speech he gave almost 40 years ago.
In reality Powell was a highly influential and multi-faceted thinker and political leader. He is a well regarded Greek scholar who penned the leading modern translation of Herodotus. He was also a widely published biographer of several historical subjects, and a well regarded poet whose collected works are still in print. And, of course, he wrote dozens of political tracts that have influenced subsequent Tories, among them Thatcher.
I find it odd that someone who choses such a screenname makes no effort to dissociate himself from that group.
And why should he? I don't believe he's ever claimed BNP membership. It is thus not incumbent upon him to disclaim it any more than I should expect you to disclaim association with CAIR, seeing as you seem to hold their viewpoints on Ellison.
And yet you'd be hard pressed to find a mainstream protestant theologian who espouses Levitical law public executions. Not so with the Mahometan faith, whose adherents not only espouse but carry out Quranic punishments in the same manner as Mahomet did back in the dark ages.
And what do Aquinas and St. Augustine say about infidels and war?
Augustine and Aquinas were two of the foremost proponents of a meticulously developed theory "Just War" that proscribes conditions of ethical conduct associated with military action. The "Just War" theory that emerges from their writings is in fact highly restrictive and attempts to limit its conduct rather than encourage it. Aquinas basically says that war is impermissible unless it meets three conditions, those being (1) legitimate sovereignty of the warring party, (2) justice in cause, such as defense against an unprovoked attack, and (3) rightful intention.
This contrasts significantly from the Mahometan faith, including its "moderate" adherents. Augustine and Aquinas built their theological examination of war around its deterrence and prevention by deeming its exercise in most cases to be fundamentally unjust. Mahometan thought, by contrasts, tends to treat warfare as a tool among many to be used for a dutied and coerced expansion of its theological and political domains.
And the radicals of the South African National Party took the already extreme premise of biologially ordering humanity even further.
Is that your answer to everything? You respond to every valid criticism of mahometan excesses perpetrated well within the mainstream of mahometan theology by digging up a completely unrelated sin by somebody else who is completely irrelevant to the present conversation, and then treat the original mahometan abuse is if it were magically negated by some sort of equal and opposite wrongdoing elsewhere.
Let islam stand on its own two feet, and when it can't do so we must condemn it in itself - not in relation to somebody else or some other perceived wrong from a different time or geography, but in itself and in its own right.
If something mahometan theology teaches is evil, then it is evil. Period. It is not rendered any less evil by some unrelated offense that South Africa or Pat Robertson or the KKK did, your recurring protestations otherwise notwithstanding.
The Forces Francaises Libres included some soldiers from French African colonial holdings, some of whom happened to also be muslims. Their participation in the FFL had no theological origin to it, and instead stemmed from the fact that the Nazis were running around North Africa seizing the land that these people lived on.
The reference to which you responded in the previous tu quoque was to the well documented support of Hitler by Muhammed Amin al Husseini, a leading mahometan cleric in Palestine who participated in the Holocaust for anti-semitic theological reasons.
Those theological reasons, of course, are the key distinction here. Muslim members of the FFL were fighting because their homes were under attack, and not for any theological reason. The fact that they were muslim was purely incidental. Al Husseini, by contrast, assisted in the Holocaust in his capacity as a mahometan cleric and for theological reasons stemming from his religious views. His hatred of the Jews was a direct product of his extremist theology.
And my point not that we should overlook their faults and biases because non-Muslim scholars of the same era also had faults and biases. Rather, my point was that they are held as "great thinkers and intellectual anchors" despite their faults and not because of them. The tectonics of history sublimate some aspects and emphasize others. It is important to recognize that. You seem to be holding medieval Muslim thinkers to a higher standard, which is fine, but cultural memory does not work in the same way. Ask random Americans if George Washington was a champion of American freedom and the overwhelming majority will say yes. Ask random Americans if slaveholders were champions of American freedom and the overwhelming majority will say no. Obviously, that aspect of Washington's life has been sublimated in popular memory by Washington's efforts to secure and preserve American independence, which rightly earned him the "Father of the Country" sobriquet. To suggest that "moderate Islam" is rotten at the core because ibn Khaldun held views that are today unpalatable is akin to suggesting that America is an amoral nation because Washington owned slaves. I merely meant to illustrate that Khaldun and Ghazali's views on scriptural literalism and the comparative validity of world religions were by and large consistent with political and religious thought in the wider world of Europe, North Africa, and western Asia. They may have been ahead of their time in other fields and other issues, but not these. You implore us to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
. You claimed wrongly that Khaldun tolerated non-Islamic governments. I quoted him directly showing otherwise.
I'll have to find and then dust of my copy of the Muqqadimah but for now let me note that the quote you gave was lifted from Khaldun's descriptive writings and given a prescriptive edge. A slightly fuller context shows that the topic was being discussed in terms of historical development of Islam vis-a-vis other faiths.
"In the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty because of the universalism of the mission and (the obligation to) convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force. The other religious groups did not have a universal mission, and the holy war was not a religious duty for them, save only for purposes of defense."
Sure they do. But so do the Shi'a mahdists, the Hezbollah crowd, and just about every other single Islamic sect. Despite their often vast differences with each other, virtually all of them claim an intellectual and political succession going back to Mahomet himself.
So then, why is it important that certain philosophies claim a 600+ year lineage?
Debatable at best, and more likely dubious as they dissipated into the fringes of society with no enduring impact or following.
I'd say OKC was an "enduring impact" wouldn't you?
The most consequential of the 1990's terror groups within the U.S. itself are the very same ones that produced 9/11 a few years later.
In retrospect, yes.
I have no truck with Powell here. I happen to notice that those who most loudly proclaim that he Was Right! tend to group themselves in the fascist fringes of the BNP, etc. I'm sorry if my observation isn't "PC".
And why should he? I don't believe he's ever claimed BNP membership. It is thus not incumbent upon him to disclaim it any more than I should expect you to disclaim association with CAIR, seeing as you seem to hold their viewpoints on Ellison.
I'm not saying that he should, just that I find it interesting that he doesn't, even while arguing for a policy of concentration camps that dovetails with BNP shouting points. Whether you or he or Enoch himself like it or not, "Enoch Powell was right" has been used by the BNP as as a publicly tolerable political shorthand for their xenophobia. Were a screen name like AllahuAkbar comment regularly in favor of scaling back the War on Terror or WhiteIsRight post frequently on American race relations, it may justifiably raise some eyebrows. Of course, maybe ENWR is a fervent believer in Enoch Powell's views on immigrant and also a strident anti-Fascist. Maybe AllahuAkbar choose the screenname just to irk another poster with a handle like AllahuAsghar, Maybe WhiteIsRight prefers that color for his browser's background. But while they certainly don't have to answer, it's not beyond us to inquire.
And for the record, I am not affiliated with CAIR in any way. My comments about Ellison (which do not pertain to this thread, as off-topic as it is) are from a purely Constitutional POV.
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