Hobit - Obviously, I have come to the conclusion that there are people on this earth who are real losers when it comes to being people. Too many people here who are interesting and knowledgeable - therefore, a waste of time to try to dicourse with idiots. Although, on consideration, that may be too kind a term for this person. I suggest you wave your wand and say "begone." Let him disappear into the mists he came from.
Please! I'm waving my wand, Mamaj.
What a terrific background, Hobit! Please add more sometime...
hobitbob, it matters not to me in a Political discussions what your heritage is - we are as one. In the personal area, I love rich heritage and admire your mother and father for what they have accomplished. In life, you are as me - raised in America, an American. You are my brother (not that non Americans are not my brothers, they are also)- thanks for sharing.
As to jerks, they are all over America, the Continent, the World. It appears to me you have a good outlook on life
I have ignored certain jerks for a long, long time. If they aren't fed, they dry up and blow away - they must feed on hate! Self generated for sure, but they need a seed to sprout.
What a sad story----had all that befallen me I would probably also be bitter, paranoid and twisted with hatred.
The only thing missing is being raised in a Madrassa school. I guess hating symbols of America came natural though since you are Lybian. I think it quite natural for you to strike out at me on this forum since I am the most vocal supporter of America.
Nice story though---it really appealed to Tartarin, Mamaj and BillW but then that's understandable.
That was a nice touch--the bit about----" I really try to turn the other cheek"-----Is that why you attacked me immediately when I started talking about being proud of this country? Surely you remember the night about 2 weeks back when the moderators reamed you out for using such foul language and that post was deleted. Yes --- that one. You lost your temper but you really didn't care because you wanted to test the moderators didn't you'
BTW----Being a citizen of the US is NOT a pre-requisite to enlisted service in the US Army---check it out.
Thing of it is your story is safe because no one can really check it out but then you know that don't you?
You've been at this game before on Abuzz.
A: I have no idea what abuzz is (unless it involves Guiness
).
B: Didn't get "reamed," actually, I was told that you went out of your way to provoke people, and that it wasn't worth arguing with you.
I did think your post on the "What do you give back" thread was pure jingoistic brain-off-full-speed-ahead nonsense.
I'm, curious what part of my story did you find sad?
BTW: when are you going to answer my questions: 1-Should the US be held responsible for supporting totalitarian regeimes?
2-Since the UK and the Chinese were in conflict with the Axis powers long before the US, do they not deserve greater appreciation?
3-How are the actions of John Ashcroft an example of "democracy at its finest," as you called them?
1-Should the US be held responsible for supporting totalitarian regeimes?
That's the same as asking a drunk when he intends to stop beating his wife---not worth an answer.
2-Since the UK and the Chinese were in conflict with the Axis powers long before the US, do they not deserve greater appreciation?
I really appreciate both the Chinese and the Brits---I love GOOD chinese food and Tony Blair is a great PM
3-How are the actions of John Ashcroft an example of "democracy at its finest," as you called them?
It's self evident and you'd know that if you didn't have so much poison in your brain.
"I did think your post on the "What do you give back" thread was pure jingoistic brain-off-full-speed-ahead nonsense".
If you thought that why did you fly into a rage and lose your cool?
If you keep this up you're going to "Make my day".
Again, you didn't answer my questions. In fact, if the Chinese deserve greater thanks, why did the PRC get the permanent seat on UNSC, and not Taiwan, which was the actual government that fought Japan? I have not been able to find an answer for this, can anyone point me in the proper direction?
As for making percy's day, my dominatrix friend says he
still[/i] owes me $500.00 for that session.
perception wrote:1-Should the US be held responsible for supporting totalitarian regeimes?
That's the same as asking a drunk when he intends to stop beating his wife---not worth an answer.
Above, you posted that the world owes the US a debt of gratitude for saving it from totalitarianism. If that is the case, then how do you explain/excuse the US' support of the totalitarian regimes I mentioned earlier?
perception wrote:2-Since the UK and the Chinese were in conflict with the Axis powers long before the US, do they not deserve greater appreciation?
I really appreciate both the Chinese and the Brits---I love GOOD chinese food and Tony Blair is a great PM
I too love Chinese food (especially things with lots'ohot oil!), but you didn't answer the question. Why, since Britain played a role at least as major as that of the US in WWII, do they not receive equal recognition in the US?
perception wrote:3-How are the actions of John Ashcroft an example of "democracy at its finest," as you called them?
It's self evident and you'd know that if you didn't have so much poison in your brain.
Ignoring the statement that damages your credibility, given the fact that Ashcroft has suppoerted measures that are counter to those in the Bill of Rights, part of teh document that defines our particular democracy, I reaaly do not understand your position. I am eagerly awaiting teh reasons you have to justify your opinion.
Darn it, the posting function is lewinskying again...double post.
Fuggedbahtit, Hobit. The guy clearly doesn't know the answers.
Ho--Hum----You really are boring--worse than a broken record. Maybe with a good nights sleep you can at least be entertaining tomorrow ---- please try. I' m going to give you a good night kiss ----- with the bottom of my shoe on your Avatar--nighty night
Why do you suppose he keeps coming back? Hobit - abuzz is another forum a lot of us were on. Then some perceptions starting ruining the place, so here we are - some of us under the same names, others having taken different ones.
Wand waving madly, Tart. A bas perception.
I found Perception's response to Hobit's bio so shocking that I wrote a note to a moderator and Craven and then decided not to send it. My reason? There are other forums out there, very similar (using the same software!) to A2K, not crud-free, but not redolent of the kind of dirty-armpit racism I've seen here. I am using them more and more.
I think Perception has sunk very very low. I think he may be the cause of some defections, mine among them. I think the administrators should take a hard look at their TOS and wonder whether it covers all the bases. Persistent and gross personal nastiness which avoids bad language is far worse than occasional anger + ************ stuff. A2K admin have been, in my view, surprisingly unperceptive.
I think he is so full of hatred he can not see how backward and red-neck he is. I feel sorry that such a one who has obviously decided they will live such a lowlife exists. But, it is America and freedom still rings - therefore, I put up with it. There are many such who live in my area and unfortunately, answer No. 1 is a favorite pastime.
BTW, moderators allow him to get away with murder - all the time; but myopic thinking prevents memories..............
I have been asked in the past to not lower myself to his standard, and try - most times achieving a just end
Tartarin
It could be that the moderators recognize who the REAL flame warriors are. You really should talk to your sleeper cell leader----he/she is nearly out of control
The other thing, Tart, is that he operates on only a few cells. So everything from him is pseudo in one way or another. I wonder if he's waiting to find an avatar that's all mouth?
Bernard-Henri Levy's (BHL) new book, "Who Killed Daniel Pearl?", is mentioned in Adam Gopnik's article in the 9/1 New Yorker "The Anti-Anti-Americans". The book, Gopnik writes, is an inquiry into the murder of Pearl in Pakistan last year and will be published next month in the US:
Quote:"Unapologetically personal, the book recounts BHL's own investigation in Pakistan and India.... It attempts.. to paint a character portrait of the man who did kill Danny Pearl, or, at least, arranged his kidnaping: Omar Sheikh, the Islamist who was convicted in Pakistan last year. Like Mohammed Atta, he turns out not to be a barefoot wild-eyed Mahdi but a child of the West, London-raised and educated -- the New Naipaulian Man, lost between two cultures, enraged at the West and mesmerized by a fantasy of Islam, only now armed with a total ideology and an A-bomb.
"On a third level, 'Who Killed Daniel Pearl?' is a demonstration piece, a deliberate embrace by a French intellectual of an American journalist, and a book tht insists that the death of an American journalist (and one who worked for the WSJ, at that) was as important for France as for America. BHL's purely political, or forensic, conclusion is that it is naive to speak of Al Qaeda as an independent terrorist organization. At most a band of Yemenis and Saudis, the Al Qaeda of American imagination and fears -- the octopus of terrorism capable of bringing tall building down in a single morning -- is largely controlled by the Pakistani secret service, he says, and he concludes that Pearl was kidnapped and murdered with its knowledge. Pearl was killed, BHL believes, because he had come to understand too much about all of this, and particularly about 'the great taboo': that the Pakistani atomic bomb was built and is controlled by radical Islamists who intend to use it someday. (He writes that Sheikh Mubarak Gilani, the cleric whom Pearl had set out to interview when he was kidnapped, far from being a minor figure, is one of Osama bin Laden's mentors and tutors and has a network in place in the US. John Allen Muhammad, the Washington sniper, Levy claims, in details that if not unknown, is unpublicized in the US, had transferred from the Nation of Islam to Gilani's sect shortly before he began his killing spree.
"The essential conclusion of this central Parisian thinker and writer is, therefore, not that the American government ought to be more conciliatory toward the Islamic fundamentalists but that our analysis of the situation and its risks is not nearly radical enough. 'I am strongly anti-anti-American, but I opposed the war in Iraq, because of what I'd seen in Pakistan,' Levy said. ' Iraq was a false target, a mistaken target. Saddam, yes, is a terrible butcher, and we can only be glad that he is gone. But he is a twentieth-century butcher -- an old-fashioned secular tyrant who made an easy but irrelevant target. His boasting about having weapons of mas destruction and then being unable to really build them or keep them is typical -- he's just a gangster, who lived by fear and for money. Saddam has almost nothing to do with the real threat. We were attacking an Iraq that was already largely disarmed. Meanwhile, in some Pakistani bazaar someone, as we speak, is trading a Russian miniaturized nuclear weapon....
"...The real issue, which the Americans don't see, is that the Arab Islamist threat is party manageable," he went on. 'One can see solutions, if not easy ones, to the Israeli-Palestinian question, to the Saudi problem. The ASIAN Islamist threat, though, is of an entirely different dimension. There are far more people, they are far more desperate, and they have a tradition of national action. And they have a bomb. Even North Korea is less dangerous than Pakistan -- a Stalinist country with a defunct ideology and a bomb is infinitely less dangerous than a country with a bomb and a new ideology in the full vigor of its first birth. That is the real nexus of terrorism, and fussing in the desert doesn't even begin to address it.'"
Fussing in the desert! I think BHL has a point. We have carefully avoided Pakistan and there are reasons for that. I'd like to know all about it, wouldn't you?
That article caught my attention in much the same way as when you suddenly become aware there is a snake just beyond striking distance just waiting for you to come closer. So I searched and found this:Editor's Pick
Listen to this report
"Who Killed Daniel Pearl"
Produced on 08/29/03
The killing of American journalist Daniel Pearl early last year stunned much of the world. Kidnapped while on assignment in Karachi, Pearl was beheaded. The members of a radical Islamic group in Pakistan who kidnapped him claimed Pearl was a member of the Israeli intelligence service. Pakistani police eventually arrested the supposed ringleader, but many questions remained not just about who was really involved in the killing, but why. The French writer Bernard Henri Levy took on those questions in his book, "Who Killed Daniel Pearl." The book was a best-seller in France. Now it's slated for release in the United States. The World's Andrew Sussman has the story.
In France, Bernard Henri Levy is universally known as BHL. And BHL is an icon.
A vaunted intellect, he has also appeared in a lavish spread in Vanity Fair with his actress wife. Famed for his, now greying, long black hair and open white shirts he has been called equal parts Rimbaud, the French poet, and Rambo, the bigger than life man of action. But when BHL speaks, people listen. His near obsession with the death of Daniel Pearl has now been shared with thousands of French readers. For Levy, his year-long odyssey to try and retrace the journalist's footsteps began with the terrifying video of Daniel Pearl's beheading.
BHL: I would say first the very event, the very image, this unprecedented event of a man, of a Jew, of an American, killed in this way, and shown in a video image. There was this very enigmatic will to show the crime, to put it all over the world, through the web and so on, I wanted to understand that.
Understanding that, or at least trying to, took Levy from Karachi to Dubai, from talks with Pearl's parents in Los Angeles to interviews in dark places with those who knew the supposed mastermind behind Pearl's death, Omar Sheik. Levy's contacts are impressive, as is his familiarity with the region. He's no ordinary writer, he was Jacques Chirac's special envoy to Afghanistan. He learned of Daniel Pearl's death while chatting with Afghan leader Hamid Karzai. Levy was determined to go everywhere Daniel Pearl went, to follow his story. The more he found out, the more he says he was drawn to the slain American journalist:
BHL: I am so different, of course, I'm French, he's American, I am fifteen years older than he is. I'm so different. But when you put yourself in the shoes of a another man, when you try to go inside the head or the mind of this admirable man, you cannot but identify a little yourself of course, this feeling, sympathising, feeling an empathy, you cannot avoid it.
At times, "Who Killed Daniel Pearl," is as much imagination, as investigation. Levy writes of Pearl's final thoughts. He writes of the exact moment when he believes Pearl realizes he's to be killed. It is a portrait the French writer says he felt he could paint:
BHL: I don't want to be arrogant of course, you never know a man when he's living, and even less when he's dead. And it would be completely arrogant to pretend the contrary. But let's say that I feel now a sort of brotherhood with him, this is sure. Let's say that I made such a long trip with him, in Pakistan, outside of Pakistan, I spent so much time to imagine how he reacted in this or that circumstance, that maybe I know two or three things about him, yeah.
At times, the book has a cinematic quality. Parts read like a thriller. But that does not diminish the genuinely explosive nature of it's conclusions. Levy believes Pearl was killed because he knew too much. Pearl was on the trail of a mysterious figure named Mubarak Ali Shah Gilani. Levy calls Gilani a guru of Osama Bin Laden, with a past in America.
Levy believes Pearl had uncovered links between radical Islamic groups and Pakistani intelligence operatives, and that Omar Sheik, the alleged brains behind the Pearl killing, was actually a Pakistani agent. He charges that Pakistani government operatives are supplying Al-Qaeda with weapons of mass destruction, that they are providing nuclear secrets to Iran and North Korea. Again and again, Pakistan's intentions are called into question. The White House calls Pakistani leader Pervez Musharref an ally in the war on terrorism, but Levy says Mushareff has yet to come clean on many things, including the death of Daniel Pearl:
BHL: When I see that President Mushareff says a few days after the kidnapping that Daniel Pearl was over-intrusive, when I see him saying a few months after, that it is an old story. And when I hear him, when he's in Paris, in July, and when he's asked about my book, about the book of a Frenchman who just did seriously, honestly, when I hear him answer that it is bullshit, that I am paid by I don't know what CUT, I don't know what, I fear to know. When I see that and when I hear that, I have a very bad impression.
What kind of impression American readers will have of Bernard Henri Levy, and "Who Killed Daniel Pearl," is difficult to say. It is a serious investigative work, a tribute to an American journalist by a French writer and troubling political indictment. It is also a book about Levy. It refers to previous works, to his experiences in Bosnia and Bangladesh. In France, Levy has already taken some heat for his frequent use of the first person. But he rejects charges that he is too present in his latest work. It was the only way to tell the tale Levy says. He adds that, throughout his year-long investigation, he was driven by one thing: the memory Daniel Pearl in that final video.
BHL: The image of Danny never left me, the last image I mean, the image of his throat being slit. The image of his martyrdom constantly in my mind, of course, it did not quit me one second during all this year.
What had struck Levy initially as a hugely important political act also became something more personal for the author, the killing of a man he had grown to admire. The English-language version of "Who Killed Daniel Pearl" will be published in the U.S. next week.
For the World, I'm Andrew Sussman, Paris.
Tart, we have carefully avoided several other places, too, but they don't appear to be making any efforts to be friendly right now. pakistan wants the US out, and says it will not contribute troops. Saudi Arabia, along with the rest of the Arab nations, does not recognize the puppet Iraqi Council. Nor does the UN. In turn, the Council itself said it will not welcome Turkish troops (for long-standing reasons) although the US is still requesting this of Turkey.
When I first started reading about the PNAC and peripheral stuff, one of the things that stuck out was the assumption that we would have the full and willing cooperation and recognition from the Arab world. But those are the same people who never thought interpretors were necessary.
We are in a terrible mess, and I don't think we've seen the beginning of it yet. Sooner or later, the terrorism buzz word is going to fade as people start looking at the actual cost and non-results.
