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Dr. Shawki Allam is the Grand Mufti of Egypt, the largest Arabic nation with a population of 80 million people, around 90% of whom are Muslims.

A Grand Mufti is "the highest official of religious law in a Sunni or Ibadi Muslim country. The Grand Mufti issues legal opinions and edicts, fatāwā, on interpretations of Islamic jurisprudence for private clients or to assist judges in deciding cases. The collected opinions of the Grand Mufti serve as a valuable source of information on the practical application of Islamic law as opposed to its abstract formulation ." (Wikipedia, italics mine)

Dr. Shawki Allam is clearly a very important figure of authority on religious matters in the Muslim world, and this is what he said about the Paris bombings:

I was as shocked as any sensible human being would have been when I learned about the senseless, heinous, appalling and cowardly act that took place in Paris at the weekend . This attack is shocking, and offends the conscience of every sane person, regardless of their religious identity. I wish to stress categorically and unequivocally our complete solidarity and unwavering support for the French people in their plight and their determination to combat terror.

...

Terrorist groups flagrantly use religion as a cloak to cover up for their cowardly acts of violence. Their ideological fallacy reveal their warped logic and ill-informed and unauthentic sources which they turn to in order to derive their justification for their insatiable desire for power, control and bloodshed. These ideologies of hate and terror must be challenged and rooted out.

...

Furthermore, and this is very important, is that none of these extremists have been educated in Islam in genuine centers of Islamic learning. They are, rather, products of troubled environments and have subscribed to distorted and misguided interpretations of Islam that have no basis in traditional Islamic doctrine.

Full text here: http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworl...w-grand-mufti-of-egypt-on-the-paris-attacks/

These are the words of one of the most senior Muslim clerics in the world. I attach greater importance to them than to the writings of anonymous internet posters who claim that terrorism is a direct and unavoidable consequence of Islam.

fG
 
You can blame the US and its allies for meddling without understanding the consequences.
They were quite happy shooting each other before the US poured petrol on the fires and as the regimes collapsed the extremists once kept under check quickly filled the void.

Who are these people that were happy shooting each other until the US interfered?

What the fuck are you talking about?

In 2003 the US launched an unprovoked attack of the Iraqi people. It tortured thousands of innocent people, killed thousands of innocents, destroyed an entire nation and unleashed ISIS.

And now we live with the aftermath of that illegal invasion and all those US crimes.

To not see it is to be deliberately ignorant and worthless.

I agree with what most of what you say and certainly the main points. The Middle East was sort of advancing in its own way but those repressive regimes at least kept a lid on the fanatics. Libya enjoyed a high standard of living and facilities, Iraq whom we put there had a good civil service. Your points regarding Iraq are not in dispute. While Saddam was not very pleasant to the Kurds, the US so called solution was a complete disaster and we are still seeing the fall out from this which could last for decades even the region was allowed to stabilize. As we see, with the void filled by the US and its former colonial allies, ISIS was running around almost at will like a wild dog off its leash. There is a war going on in Yemen and some conflicts erupting now and again in Sudan but if we got involved in these it would again be like pouring petrol on a few fires, something which the allies are good at doing.
 
Dr. Shawki Allam is the Grand Mufti of Egypt, the largest Arabic nation with a population of 80 million people, around 90% of whom are Muslims.

A Grand Mufti is "the highest official of religious law in a Sunni or Ibadi Muslim country. The Grand Mufti issues legal opinions and edicts, fatāwā, on interpretations of Islamic jurisprudence for private clients or to assist judges in deciding cases. The collected opinions of the Grand Mufti serve as a valuable source of information on the practical application of Islamic law as opposed to its abstract formulation ." (Wikipedia, italics mine)

Dr. Shawki Allam is clearly a very important figure of authority on religious matters in the Muslim world, and this is what he said about the Paris bombings:



Terrorist groups flagrantly use religion as a cloak to cover up for their cowardly acts of violence. Their ideological fallacy reveal their warped logic and ill-informed and unauthentic sources which they turn to in order to derive their justification for their insatiable desire for power, control and bloodshed. These ideologies of hate and terror must be challenged and rooted out.

...

Furthermore, and this is very important, is that none of these extremists have been educated in Islam in genuine centers of Islamic learning. They are, rather, products of troubled environments and have subscribed to distorted and misguided interpretations of Islam that have no basis in traditional Islamic doctrine.

Full text here: http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworl...w-grand-mufti-of-egypt-on-the-paris-attacks/

These are the words of one of the most senior Muslim clerics in the world. I attach greater importance to them than to the writings of anonymous internet posters who claim that terrorism is a direct and unavoidable consequence of Islam.

fG
ISIS kills a lot of Muslims too. In fact it kills more Muslims then it does non Muslims.
 
You can blame the US and its allies for meddling without understanding the consequences.
They were quite happy shooting each other before the US poured petrol on the fires and as the regimes collapsed the extremists once kept under check quickly filled the void.

Who are these people that were happy shooting each other until the US interfered?

What the fuck are you talking about?

In 2003 the US launched an unprovoked attack of the Iraqi people. It tortured thousands of innocent people, killed thousands of innocents, destroyed an entire nation and unleashed ISIS.

And now we live with the aftermath of that illegal invasion and all those US crimes.

To not see it is to be deliberately ignorant and worthless.
You mean to see it through your eyes don't you?
 
Who are these people that were happy shooting each other until the US interfered?

What the fuck are you talking about?

In 2003 the US launched an unprovoked attack of the Iraqi people. It tortured thousands of innocent people, killed thousands of innocents, destroyed an entire nation and unleashed ISIS.

And now we live with the aftermath of that illegal invasion and all those US crimes.

To not see it is to be deliberately ignorant and worthless.
You mean to see it through your eyes don't you?

The attacks were unprovoked. Iraq did not house Al Qaeda or any other elements, it suppressed them. It had no weapons of mass destruction. Allied servicemen and Iraqis died for a war that was founded on false information. We should also take into account the Oil for Food program which caused mass poverty and starvation in Iraq.

For simplicity I will use WIKI references cut and pasted directly from WIKI
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctions_against_Iraq#Estimates_of_deaths_due_to_sanctions

Estimates of deaths due to sanctions[edit]

Estimates of excess deaths during the sanctions vary widely, use different methodologies and cover different time-frames.[31][32][33] Some estimates include (some of them include effects of the Gulf War in the estimate):
Mohamed M. Ali, John Blacker, and Gareth Jones estimate between 400,000 and 500,000 excess under-5 deaths.[34]
UNICEF: 500,000 children (including sanctions, collateral effects of war). "[As of 1999] [c]hildren under 5 years of age are dying at more than twice the rate they were ten years ago." (As is customary, this report was based on a survey conducted in cooperation with the Iraqi government and by local authorities in the provinces not controlled by the Iraqi government)[35]
Former U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq Denis Halliday: "Two hundred thirty-nine thousand children 5 years old and under" as of 1998.[36]
"Probably ... 170,000 children", Project on Defense Alternatives, "The Wages of War", 20 October 2003[37]
350,000 excess deaths among children "even using conservative estimates", Slate Explainer, "Are 1 Million Children Dying in Iraq?", 9. October 2001.[38]
"Richard Garfield, a Columbia University nursing professor ... cited the figures 345,000-530,000 for the entire 1990-2002 period"[39] for sanctions-related excess deaths.[40]
Zaidi, S. and Fawzi, M. C. S., (1995) The Lancet British medical journal: 567,000 children.[41] A co-author (Zaidi) did a follow-up study in 1996, finding "much lower ... mortality rates ... for unknown reasons."[42]
Amatzia Baram, Director of the Center for Iraq Studies at the University of Haifa, reported almost no difference in the rate of Iraq’s population growth between 1977 and 1987 (35.8 percent) and between 1987 and 1997 (35.1 percent), suggesting that the sanctions-related death rate is lower than reported, while also stating "Every child who suffers from malnutrition as a result of the embargo is a tragedy".[43]
UN-sponsored surveys taken after the overthrow of Saddam's regime disproved any increase in Iraq's infant mortality rate under the sanctions regime.[44]

Infant and child death rates[edit]





Iraq's infant and child survival rates fell after sanctions were imposed.
A May 25, 2000 BBC article[45] reported that before Iraq sanctions were imposed by the UN in 1990, infant mortality had "fallen to 47 per 1,000 live births between 1984 and 1989. This compares to approximately 7 per 1,000 in the UK." The BBC article was reporting from a study of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, titled "Sanctions and childhood mortality in Iraq", that was published in the May 2000 Lancet medical journal.[46] The study concluded that in southern and central Iraq, infant mortality rate between 1994 and 1999 had risen to 108 per 1,000. Child mortality rate, which refers to children between the age of one and five years, also drastically inclined from 56 to 131 per 1,000.[45] In the autonomous northern region during the same period, infant mortality declined from 64 to 59 per 1000 and under-5 mortality fell from 80 to 72 per 1000, which was attributed to better food and resource allocation.

The Lancet publication[46] was the result of two separate surveys by UNICEF[31] between February and May 1999 in partnership with the local authorities and with technical support by the WHO. "The large sample sizes - nearly 24,000 households randomly selected from all governorates in the south and center of Iraq and 16,000 from the north - helped to ensure that the margin of error for child mortality in both surveys was low," UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy said.[31]

Moreover, in 2004, a new report made by Iraqi government don't show any increase in infant mortality and their statistics for the autonomous region of Iraq are the same as the statistics reported in the late 90s by the autonomous government.[47] A report made in 2007 arrive to the sames conclusions.[48]


While we need to be on high alert for terrorist activities we must also remember that a considerable amount of Iraqi men women and children died as a result of our own sanctions against Iraq. The figures vary.

The Western so called cure for Iraq in terms of sanctions and then regime change was far worse than what existed before. There is a case to suggest Bush, Blair et al be tried on charges of genocide.
 
Estimates of deaths due to sanctions[edit]


Big problem: Those sanction deaths were because Saddam was cheating on the sanctions--selling food for money to buy weapons and refusing to spend oil-for-food money in the first place in order to make his people suffer and the bleeding hearts to blame the sanctions rather than him. The real number of sanction deaths is far lower.

The Western so called cure for Iraq in terms of sanctions and then regime change was far worse than what existed before. There is a case to suggest Bush, Blair et al be tried on charges of genocide.

Because Saddam wanted his people to suffer.
 
Big problem: Those sanction deaths were because Saddam was cheating on the sanctions--selling food for money to buy weapons and refusing to spend oil-for-food money in the first place in order to make his people suffer and the bleeding hearts to blame the sanctions rather than him. The real number of sanction deaths is far lower.

The Western so called cure for Iraq in terms of sanctions and then regime change was far worse than what existed before. There is a case to suggest Bush, Blair et al be tried on charges of genocide.

Because Saddam wanted his people to suffer.

Saddam had plenty of weapons, I understand (and may be wrong) the Oil for food program provided 33 cents for each man woman and child.
Despite is barbarity before the invasion, Iraq much worse off then before.
The administering of this program by bureaucrats at best was a shambles.
Weapons, Iraq was flooded with weapons provided by the West. It gassed the Kurds with gas provided by Germany.
The reason for going to war was WMDs. What did we find? Nothing except the hardware we supplied to our former ally which was to invade Iraq.

If we are looking at the taking over of Iraq, the US acted sloppily. Instead of removing the entire army and putting many into opposition, it could have retained the army and civil services with its appointed puppet at the fore. You will find this in Sun Tze(it is best to capture an army intact) and also this is the way the former colonialists operated.

What do we have now? Lots of Saddams, Al Qaedas and ISL type groups at war on several fronts with our installed regimes struggling to keep onto what is remaining under its apparent control.

There is no evidence Saddam particularly wanted his people to suffer for something that was already causing this.
 
I've posted this before somewhere, but I totally agree that the invasion of Iraq by G W Bush and his minions of coalition of the willing, was most likely the biggest blunder of the century, perhaps since the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in WW2.

But I still stick with my claim that even if Bush didn't invade, ISIS would still have arisen, perhaps not in Iraq, but in neighbouring Syria.
 
I've posted this before somewhere, but I totally agree that the invasion of Iraq by G W Bush and his minions of coalition of the willing, was most likely the biggest blunder of the century, perhaps since the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in WW2.

But I still stick with my claim that even if Bush didn't invade, ISIS would still have arisen, perhaps not in Iraq, but in neighbouring Syria.

That's like saying you admit that Nibiru probably doesn't exist but you still think the Earth's biosphere will be destroyed by a cataclysmic event, maybe not on December 21, 2012 but perhaps in 2016.
 
Your deliberate and willful turning away from the facts sickens me.

You are the problem, no solution.
It doesn't alter the facts though does it?

You are right.

You ignoring facts won't change them.

Not seeing that the massive US invasion of Iraq is a major cause of current unrest, and the real immorality in all of this, is to be blind.
 
I've posted this before somewhere, but I totally agree that the invasion of Iraq by G W Bush and his minions of coalition of the willing, was most likely the biggest blunder of the century, perhaps since the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in WW2.

But I still stick with my claim that even if Bush didn't invade, ISIS would still have arisen, perhaps not in Iraq, but in neighbouring Syria.

The US action in destroying the control infrastructure of Iraq provided the perfect breeding ground for ISIS. This is because what we did in an unprovoked manner to Iraq we did to Libya and are trying to do to Syria. Now we have a worse situation which includes new players such as ISIS, Al Qaeda and other factions carving up caliphates wherever they can.
 
It doesn't alter the facts though does it?

You are right.

You ignoring facts won't change them.

Not seeing that the massive US invasion of Iraq is a major cause of current unrest, and the real immorality in all of this, is to be blind.
It's rare for me to agree with Untermensche but he is correct here. The US invasion of Iraq and it's stumbling occupation thereafter was probably the worst US foreign policy blunder in our history.
 
It doesn't alter the facts though does it?

You are right.

You ignoring facts won't change them.

Not seeing that the massive US invasion of Iraq is a major cause of current unrest, and the real immorality in all of this, is to be blind.

You don't think that Saddam is the root cause of the current unrest? He kept sectarian rivalries alive and well in order to have a stronger grip of the country. He made an effort to keeps wounds open and the butt-hurt strong. He, on purpose, created a stratified society where there was a pyramid of oppression. He made a majority of the Iraqis complicit in the rape of their own country. Made them feel complicit. This is of course standard fascist tactics. When the artificial network of structural oppression is removed there's a hell of a lot of butt-hurt that is finally allowed to be released. This is actually good. This is the key to why democracies are so successful. Dirty laundry is constantly aired and talked about. When a fascist regime falls all the butt-hurt is released in one big bang... all at once. This is what happened in Libya and what still is happening in Syria. It's often, but not always, messy.

After the fall of Saddam the Shia muslims (the majority) put in place policies that benefited the Shia communities at the expense of the Sunni communities. The Shia thought it was fair because Saddam had, during his entire reign, ploughed more money into the Sunni community that Shia. At the time of Saddam's fall the Sunni areas were way more affluent than the Shia areas. Some Shia areas had been kept desperately poor on purpose, on the brink of starvation.

Although solid arguments it breaks democracy. This line of reasoning leads to everybody just voting for whatever ethnic identity they have rather than following their ideologies. Bad leaders of unpopular parties will always get the votes from their ethnic group, and therefore never be removed. So it leads to corruption and mismanagement and the tyranny of the majority.

I don't think the invasion was necessarily a bad idea. Saddam needed to go. And when it did it would get messy. The invasion wasn't the problem. The problem was the occupation. The Bush administration clearly didn't have a plan. They just thought democracy was the magical sauce that would fix everything.

And it's not like there aren't examples in history of how to do it right. When we go from a dictatorship to a democracy it needs to be done in stages. Democracy needs to be implemented a little at a time. Only gradually expanding the franchise. This can be done in a variety of ways. But the important thing to keep in mind is to avoid full on democracy is one go. It almost never works. The fail rate is extremely high.

To take USA as an example. After the American revolution the central government was extremely weak... and broke. It couldn't really do much. For the average American the government was largely irrelevant. Only local elections mattered. As USA slowly got their act together the influence of the central government slowly asserted itself. When the time came a central power was strong enough for any dictator to bother with seizing power, democratic institutions were already well in place, to prevent such a coup. In Sweden and England the franchise was expanded slowly according to income. First only the wealthy could vote. Little by little the required wealth shrunk and shrunk until everybody had a vote. There was no upheaval or jolt to the system. Or we could do it like the French. Democracy for almost everybody (people who had property and weren't due to unfortunate circumstances women) over night and then utter and total carnage for about 100 years. Or as they did in Germany (= fascism).
 
Big problem: Those sanction deaths were because Saddam was cheating on the sanctions--selling food for money to buy weapons and refusing to spend oil-for-food money in the first place in order to make his people suffer and the bleeding hearts to blame the sanctions rather than him. The real number of sanction deaths is far lower.



Because Saddam wanted his people to suffer.

Saddam had plenty of weapons, I understand (and may be wrong) the Oil for food program provided 33 cents for each man woman and child.

He had plenty of some weapons. He didn't have other weapons he wanted.

And the exact amount of the oil-for-food dollars is irrelevant--that's only to import what wasn't produced locally, it wasn't the total of what people ate.

Despite is barbarity before the invasion, Iraq much worse off then before.

Agreed. Saddam kept a cap on the Islam-vs-Islam battles. Now they rage and are far worse for the people than Saddam was.

If we are looking at the taking over of Iraq, the US acted sloppily. Instead of removing the entire army and putting many into opposition, it could have retained the army and civil services with its appointed puppet at the fore. You will find this in Sun Tze(it is best to capture an army intact) and also this is the way the former colonialists operated.

The problem is that the army was not acceptable to the people at large--it was a tool of oppression of the majority. There were no good answers.

There is no evidence Saddam particularly wanted his people to suffer for something that was already causing this.

He wanted his people to suffer to make the sanctions look bad on the evening news to get them lifted. Suffering wasn't the goal, but merely a means to an end.
 
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