Posted on 11/12/2002 8:50:00 AM PST by ppaul
Russia's media expressed has shock over a remark by Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Russia-EU summit in which he urged a Western reporter asking about the war in Chechnya to come to Moscow and "get circumcised".
Mr Putin's comments, made at a closing press conference of the Russia-EU summit in Brussels, were played by TVS television station and republished by several major Moscow newspapers and Internet sites.
The Kommersant business daily reports Mr Putin was asked a Danish reporter why Russia was using mine warfare in the separatist North Caucasus republic and exterminating Chechen civilians.
Reports say Mr Putin became infuriated by the question and launched an unprecedented defence of the three-year Chechen war that at one stage went off on a tangent.
"You, if I am not mistaken, represent an ally [of the US war on terror] and are therefore in danger," Mr Putin told the reporter, according to a transcript that appeared in the Vremya Novostei daily.
"They [the Chechens] talk about killing non-Muslims and if you are a Christian, you are in danger. And even if you are an atheist, you are in danger," Mr Putin is quoting as saying.
"If you decide to become a Muslim - even then you are not safe, because traditional Islam contradicts the conditions and goals that they [the Chechens rebels] set.
"But if you are prepared to become the most radical Islamist and prepared to get circumcised - I invite you to Moscow.
"We have specialists that deal with this problem. I suggest that you do such an operation that nothing grows out of you again," Mr Putin reportedly said.
Mr Putin is known for his tough talk that at times becomes interlaced with slang used by criminals and the military.
He launched the war in the predominantly Muslim Chechen republic in October 1999 by threatening to "waste [the Chechens] while they sit in their outhouses".
Russian media say a Kremlin aide explained to reporters after the Brussels press conference that Mr Putin was tired during the summit after a hectic working schedule.
The wide coverage given to Mr Putin's remarks appears unusual for a Russian media that has grown to carefully toe the Kremlin line in recent months.
Advice dismissed
Meanwhile, Mr Putin has brushed aside European advice on a peaceful solution to the Chechen conflict, saying it had to be solved by the Russian and Chechen people alone.
"Of course we listen to advice from our colleagues in Europe," Mr Putin told a news conference in Oslo after talks with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who said he hoped for a peaceful, political solution in Chechnya.
But he added: "It is an internal Russian problem to be solved between the Chechen people and the Russian federation."
Russia has scrapped plans for a partial military pullout from the southerly province since Chechen separatists took a Moscow theatre hostage last month.
The siege ended with the deaths of 128 hostages and 41 rebels.
"We don't want to turn up our noses and say that others' opinions are irrelevant," Mr Putin said.
But he added: "The problem is so complicated that no one can give really good advice."
Mr Putin said Europe had some good examples of conflict resolution but that other conflicts had rumbled on unsolved in other parts of Europe for hundreds of years.
Mr Putin has shown no sign of reining in the Russian military in Chechnya, where thousands of people have died in almost a decade of fighting.
Mr Putin has said a new constitution and elections offer the best prospects of a swift resolution.
"The political process on Chechnya must continue," Mr Schroeder said.
Mr Putin and Mr Schroeder met in Oslo because Mr Putin cancelled a planned visit to Germany last month during the theatre siege. Both men were, by coincidence, on visits to the Nordic nation.
Mr Schroeder and Mr Putin also said a UN resolution seeking to disarm Iraq offered a chance of peace.
Shortly afterwards, Iraq's parliament voted to reject the resolution while leaving the final decision to President Saddam Hussein.
Mr Putin said he hoped Arab countries would bring pressure on Iraq to comply.
Mr Putin said Moscow was keeping up contacts with Baghdad but that only Saddam knew what Iraq would finally decide.
Mr Schroeder reiterated on Monday that Germany would not take part in any US-led attacks on Iraq if Saddam failed to comply fully with the resolution.
Mr Schroeder won popularity before his re-election in September by ruling out sending troops.
I can't believe what you wrote here. You just equated Radical Islamic Terrorists to the Pope. Please explain this comparison.
Bush does NOT get it. He always calls Islam the religion of peace. Either that, or, not wanting to offend millions of Muslims, he's being diplomatic. I hope it's the latter.
How do you know when someone loves you?
Since these few non-practicing muslims no longer are supporting the fundamentals of their religion they would be what we call "Christians" who no longer support the beliefs and practices of the Bible: Christians in Name Only
I would say those people are Muslims in Name Only, thus no longer muslim, and thus no longer a threat to me.
Ann did tell me that all swarthy guys must post photos!
August 7, 2002
Every generation is tested by great evil
It would appear that every generation confronts a major moral test. A great evil presents itself as a good, and the world that is not victimized by that evil is tested: Can it recognize the evil and confront it?
The pattern is eerily and depressingly repetitive.
1. The evil takes hold.
2. The evil has myriad defenders even among otherwise decent people.
3. The evil is vanquished after destroying an uncountable number of lives.
4. After the evil is vanquished, there is virtually unanimous agreement that it was indeed evil.
We can identify four examples that have confronted Americans and other Westerners in the last two centuries.
One was slavery and racism. A great number of Americans and others saw little wrong with slavery. How did even some otherwise decent people defend such an obvious evil? They believed that skin color determined a person's worth and destiny. To almost all Americans today, including the children of those who believed in racism, this belief is as bizarre as it is evil.
A second example was Communism. Many people living in free societies actually believed that Communism was a moral good. No matter how many millions of innocent people Communist regimes murdered, no matter how much Communism deprived people of elementary human rights, many people living outside Communism could not call it evil. Recall the uproar President Ronald Reagan provoked when he labeled the Soviet Union an "evil empire." Yet, within just a few years of Communism's fall, it was hard to find any Westerner -- outside of universities where Communism had always had its greatest support -- who did not routinely call Communism evil.
A third example was Nazism. As difficult as it is to imagine now, even Nazism had many admirers in free countries. These people saw the economic turnaround made by Germany under Hitler and either ignored, belittled or sympathized with its totalitarianism and antisemitism. Because Nazism only held power for 12 years, as opposed to Communism's much longer history, it had little time to engender the widespread support that Communism did. Nazism was finally vanquished, but only after murdering two out of every three Jews in Europe and many millions of other innocents. And since its fall, Nazism has almost universally become synonymous with evil.
The fourth example is taking place at this moment, and it precisely repeats the pattern of the other three. There is a great evil, and many in the West either defend it or excuse its totalitarianism and antisemitism. It is Islamic extremism. Afghanistan, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Palestinian society have created totalitarian regimes that, in each or all cases, have terribly oppressed women; enslaved and slaughtered a million blacks who refuse to be subjugated to Islamic totalitarianism; use religious police to whip men who drink alcohol; torture Christians who live or work there; have developed a unique theology of cruelty in which God is depicted as a provider of scores of young women to all Muslims who blow themselves up while murdering Jews and Americans; and, like Nazism, it has made Jew-hatred its centerpiece. And throughout much of the Muslim Middle East, girls are murdered by fathers and brothers in "honor killings" if they are so much as perceived as having spent time with a male unapproved by the family.
It should not be difficult to call all this evil, but just as with the previous evils, many Western voices not only defend these regimes and doctrines, they reserve their condemnations only for those who oppose the evil. Apologists like best-selling author Karen Armstrong, the professors of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA), professors in other fields, the leftist European and American press -- all these deny Islamic evils. Just as their predecessors blamed America for the Cold War with Communism, and dismissed anti-Communists as "war mongers" and "fascists," today's deniers of evil blame America and Israel for Islamic terror and label terror's opponents "bigots," "Islamophobes" and, of course, "war mongers."
Hopefully, this particular evil will be eradicated before it slaughters even more innocents. But the history of evil offers little optimism. Instead we are once again subjected to the spectacle of people living in splendor apologizing for the greatest cruelty of their time. When you see this, you understand why God "regretted that he made man on earth."
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