Zarqawi group militants holding three Turks hostage in Iraq

[kcvl]

Claiming they will BEHEAD them.

[a_Turk]

Related to the old Reagan "Turst but Verify" in reference to the US.

Our trust in the US had pretty much eroded by the turn of the century.

[cake_crumb]

Case in point: Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. His favorite hobbies are lap dances in nudie bars, mixed drinks and playing religious leader in order to recruit bomb fodder.

[cake_crumb]

"Our trust in the US had pretty much eroded by the turn of the century."

The turn of which century?

[a_Turk]

four years ago.

[wtc911]

"Muslims should be taking Jews and Christians as friends, at least should "tolerate" them."??????

Tolerate us? How about KMA.

[wtc911]

Not very tolerant of you, Kind of like "moderate, democratic" turkey's attitude toward Christian churches.

[FITZ]

But in a religion that allows for large harems with 4 wives each and as many concubines as one can afford to buy and desires, would that be viewed as wrong? The Muslim men at the college I went to were all like that --- they'd bring home the kind of girls they had to have picked up in bars so I always thought the purity part must just be for the women.

[reg45]

it has been hundreds of centuries since Turkish tribes coming to settle in Anatolia accepted Islam. They were pagans before that.

Two major errors in as many sentences.

1. hundreds of centuries - Islam is less than fourteen centuries old and even so it took almost one century for Islamic armies to conquer Anatolia. Therefore thirteen centuries at best.
2. pagans before that - most were Byzantine Christians, Jews or Zoroastrians - not pagans.

Your credibility has been shot in the foot.

[a_Turk]

LOL! He should know better than to mess with a Turkish woman, that ornary old cuss!

[a_Turk]

Ok, so she made a mistake with the century thing. How do you say century in Turkish? Huh?

But the Turkish tribes wandering the central asian steppes were for the most part pagans, similar to the native American tribes. Also similar to what the Europeans were with their druids back in the day.

So by saying that the Turks were byzantines, you screwed the pooch much worse, since it's your native tongue you're using.. Pity.

[a_Turk]

Teh-heee! You beat me to it!!!

[WVNan]

Superflu is a woman?! LOL. No wonder some of these guys are getting whacked.

[R. Scott]

Maybe we’ll be nice enough to allow the Turkish military into Iraq - but away from the Kurd areas? I hear they can be just as “nice” as the S. Koreans.

[FITZ]

I personally believe that the religion of Islam has many problems in itself and should be reformed, somehow. I despise the fundamentalists and terrorists, Arab or Turkish.

I agree with that --- obviously many people who call themselves "muslim" are just muslim because their parents were and their grandparents were and so on --- not because they sat down and studied the life of Jesus and the life of Mohammed and then decided to follow Mohammed. In the case of Persians, their ancestors became muslims because the Arabs slapped a high tax on them if they didn't and it was easier to submit than it was to resist.

Of course many Jews and Christians call themselves that for the same reason --- they were born into families that are that and whether or not they follow the beliefs, they still call themselves that.

There is more of a problem with people who get serious about the Koran than there is with people who get serious about the Bible --- and Mohammed led a very different life than Abraham or Jesus did. But again for many faith isn't a choice they made, it's just something they don't make a conscious decision to keep or discard.

[cake_crumb]

We discussed this before. When we discussed it before, you asked if President Bush was more likely to honor an agreement made between Turkey and the US. I told you he is. That has not changed.

I explained to you that our particular system of government made it possible for a dishonest leader not to honor an agreement, and leave it to posterity to sort out the resulting mess. Clinton was such a leader. I further explained that if Bush were to win a second term, the agreement would indeed be honored...a fact which, understandably, you balked at as being too equivocal.

Nonetheless, it's true: President Bush will honor his agreements. He is not Clinton. While his father made some of those agreements that Clinton reneged on and would have made sure they were carried out during the second term which he didn't win, GW Bush is not his father either.

We in the US have a hard time understanding those who look at a country, a pile of dirt and rock, as a sentient being rather than assessing the merits of each individual leader, which is what we do. That's what third party analyses of our politics look like to us. In the Old World, the people seem to have become so obsessed with looking for the forest that they've forgotten the individual trees which make it up.