[PurpleXVI]

What radical imams are you talking about, man? The first quote is from a professor in Michigan and the other is from MEMRI, an institute located in Washington DC.

Information on MEMRI that may interest you:

MEMRI was founded in 1998 by its president Yigal Carmon, a retired colonel from Israeli military intelligence, and the academic Dr. Meyrav Wurmser.

Sounds like a guy who'll just LOVE the Arabs, doesn't he?

And now here's just a bit of criticism...

Brian Whitaker, the Middle East editor for the UK Guardian newspaper wrote that "the stories selected by Memri for translation follow a familiar pattern: either they reflect badly on the character of Arabs or they in some way further the political agenda of Israel," that MEMRI's "tweaks, cuts and mistranslations always seem to point in the same political direction". Ibrahim Hooper, a director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, stated in the Washington Times that "MEMRI's intent is to find the worst possible quotes from the Muslim world and disseminate them as widely as possible." Hussein Ibish, a spokesman for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee comments that "There is of course some horrific stuff in the Arab press, but one tends to forget that the American press can also be very nasty. MEMRI performs a useful function but unfortunately they have a pro-Israel, right-wing agenda." William Rugh, former US ambassador to the United Arab Emirates and Yemen, describes MEMRI as a service which "does not present a balanced or complete picture of the Arab print media. ...Quotes are selected to portray Arabs as preaching hatred against Jews and westerners, praising violence and refusing any peaceful settlement of the Palestinian issue." Ken Livingstone, former British MP and the current Mayor of London, has accused MEMRI of "outright distortion". In the foreword to a report he commissioned to explain his reasons for meeting with controversial Muslim scholar Yusuf al-Qaradawi, he states his opinion that MEMRI "tend to portray Islam in a very negative light."

One of your own former ambassadors? And something tells me he'd know the area and situation better than most of us.

It might also be worth noting that he's still talking about eliminating the REGIME. Not the people. It's one thing to say that he hopes for another government, it's another thing to say he wants to bathe in the blood of Jewish babies.

As for the WMD's, the fact is that the government report doesn't make sense. Why didn't the US government not use them to counter their bashers? Why was it classified for so long? Why didn't the Iraqis use the shells against the US invaders?

It's hard to find any serious information on the lifetime of mustard gas, but I have found a few quotes stating that it decays "days or weeks" after release, which suggests that these could easily have been a bunch of ancient, damaged and useless shells only containing remnants of mustard gas. Would you please reply to my actual criticism, though, rather than dismissing my arguments as "outright dismissal"? Why must everything we say against the US GOVERNMENT be US-bashing? I'm not bashing the country, I'm not bashing the people, I'm bashing the government and it's policies. Please stop dismissing our arguments and try to counter them instead.

Oh, yeah, and "regional approval." If there was "regional approval," then why are regimes in the area apparently feeding weapons to the insurgents? Why, in fact, do all of the local regimes appear to not be helping the US at all? Look at Palestine, the Saudis are stepping in to try and help make peace, etc. why is no one stepping in from the outside to talk to the Shi'ite and Sunni sectarian militias in Iraq?

And if the "regional approval" gave justification, why did the Bush government feel it necessary to lie about their reasons? To lie about their justification? Why, in fact, did their justifaction change about once a week? WMD's, "for the sake of the Iraqi people" and too many other pieces of useless rhetoric for me to remember. Why did Bush refuse to engage in a live TV debate with Saddam if he knew his arguments were superior? Was he afraid of an assassination attempt? Everyone knew that Saddam's ass would be paste if he tried something like that, not to mention the poor bastard was too clever and self-interested to commit suicide like that.

Speaking of that, Saddam could not possibly have hoped to keep out the US in case of an invasion, they'd already gotten in once before and it wasn't as though his defenses had improved much. If he DID have WMD's that weren't just in some forgotten bunker somewhere, why didn't he just destroy them and remove the US justification for invading? There are all sorts of logical holes in this scenario. The WMD's weren't used, either, and you even point out how...

Any conventional weapon would suffice to deliver it.

It wasn't as though using WMD's against the US troops could have made them treat him worse once they caught him. He knew that the US was going to see him hanging, shot, zapped or injected with something very bad for his health.

[ 02-13-2007, 07:25 AM: Message edited by: PurpleXVI ]