Well, that picture isn't, but those numbers from that "mainstream press", up there, should be refutation enough ...
Two charming articles on the demonstrations and what they say about Britain that you may both enjoy:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=%2Fnews%2F2003%2F11%2F21%2Fnprot21.xml
A millionaire marcher among the anarchists
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,1091397,00.html
Bush widens the Great British divide
Just goes to show that the numbers game is useless when it becomes impossible to do a head count - like in the hundreds of thousands, because one can find different numbers showing high or low in media about the same incident. So which one does one end up believing?
timberlandko wrote:Quote:Scotland Yard officials estimated the crowd at 70,000 while demonstration leaders claimed twice that number.
Crowd sizes are notoriously difficult to estimate with precision, but I tend to go with police estimates, at least in democracies.
Timber, if you take the trouble to look up for a moment you'll see that
Scotland Yard updated its estimations in the course of the day: from 30,000 to 70,000 to, eventually, 110,000.
Yes? Thanks.
Well, timber, I really think - let it be 150,000 or some tenthousand more or a feww thousand less:
it was a demonstration on a normal working day with an superb attendance (without students,, teachers, professors, who were 'forced' to stay in their schools, colleges) ... and it was more than just difficult to get to to London city (there has been a state visit, as you perhaps remember).
Gelisgesti wrote:This picture is proof that the numbers were in the hundreds of thousands
If that works for you, well, that works for you. I apparently don't get the same reading.
And, yeah, I know the official estimate is 70-110K. And yeah, I know it was on a weekday. Gather enough straw, and you can make a dog out of it.
Timber, one of us has no sense of humor...
Only Republican dogs are made out of straw.
Walter, Love that straw dog.
I'm sure we both are well possessed of sense of humor Gel. Perhaps sometimes, however, we both "outsubtle" one another :wink:
Shall we just agree there was a big demonstration, and that Bush was moved around so he saw none of it? He probably got his campaign material, although using the Queen in that way was pretty despicable. And destroying the lawns and upsetting the flamingos wasn't a very clever thing to do either. As I said a week ago, George W should have stayed home.
The biggest laugh for me was the official welcome at the front of Buckingham Palace. W and the Queen had been chatting inside, then he goes out the back door, gets into the W mobile, which takes him via a side gate to the front of Buck house (a distance of about 100 metres entirely within the palace grounds) where surprise surprise, Mrs Saxe Coburg Gotha Windsor is there to meet him. "Welcome Mr President, I do hope you had a pleasant trip from Our Back Door to Our Front Door!"
Now to more serious stuff
A few pages back I asked if anyone knew what these religious terrorists wanted in return for not killing us. Well according to a statement from the Jihad al Qaida Operation Islamic Iron Hammer, (whoever said they haven't got a sense of humour?) the cars of death will continue until:
1 Prisoners to go free from Guantanamo.
2 The war on Islam (in the name of War on Terror) stops.
3 Islamic lands are purified of Jewish and American "filth".
4 America allows the establishment of an Islamic caliphate.
Most of this is impossible from the West's point of view. But note however that they don't want to force Islam on the West, just the West to stop interfering with Muslim affairs. That basic demand of itself is not unreasonable. I seem to remember America getting somewhat touchy about the Communist influence on its own domestic affairs.
Can there ever be a meeting of minds here? There could. It would mean on our side abandoning the experiment known as Israel, and acknowledging that the Arabs control the oil. On their side it would mean guaranteeing the security of all the people of the land of Palestine, and access to oil for all who wanted it. Will it ever happen? Will it ****. Expect many more cars of death.
Steve would in an earlier age likely have applauded Prime Minister Chamberlain's securing of "Peace in our time" with Hitler at Munich at the 'reasonable price' of abandoning the interest of the Czechs - a 'people in a far off land of whom we know little' were Chamberlain's approximate words.
What is the meaning of the phrase "America allows the establishment of an Islamic Caliphate"?? Certainly it is not in our power to do such a thing. There is a decided lack of unity in the Moslem world, and what is meant by a caliphate by Sunnis would certainly be rejected by Shiites. Certainly the secular government od Turkey, which since Ataturk had dedicated itself to the suppression of retrograde political Islam might be expected to have something to say in the matter. The 25% of the population of Egypt who are Coptic Christians may have an opinion as well.
As for purging the Middle East of "Jewish filth", the word choice alone ells us much about the world view of the speaker. Zionism was the result of purely European persecution of its Jews. The Jews of Israel are the children of Europeans who fled murderous genocide in the hearts of some Europeans and general indifference to their fate on the part of others. This is an European created problem and it offends common sense to see the hypocrisy of Europeans to its consequences today.
Blatham, I think or at least I hope that the charge of anti-Semitism is losing its power to silence. If the IDF smashes up houses and kills protestors in the process, I object not because I'm an anti-Semite but because I'm anti smashing-up-houses-and-killing-protestors. Who said "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel"? Well those who call their detractors both treacherous AND by extension anti-Semitic are worse.
George
By all means, you really should read a post, before you answer to it:
Steve wrote:
Quote:
Well according to a statement from the Jihad al Qaida Operation Islamic Iron Hammer, (whoever said they haven't got a sense of humour?) the cars of death will continue until:
.......
Quote:What is meant by the phrase "America allows the establishment of an Islamic Caliphate".
Point 4 reads in full
"For America to stop interfering between us and the tyrannical governments which rule Muslims and for us to set up an Islamic caliphate (state)."
I abbreviated it. Hope that’s clear.
As for supporting Chamberlain, I have no idea how I would have felt. If someone told me that war with Hitler had been avoided, I might well have thought "thank God- I'm going to live". A perfectly understandable reaction. Or I might have thought it a despicable bourgeois capitalist plot to destroy people's revolution in Russia. My father's reaction was to volunteer for the RAF, so perhaps I might have done that.
No one can foresee the future, except those using hindsight.
While Anti-Semitism was but a mob-pleaser co-opted to provide Nazism with cheaply won domestic popularity, it does seem, IMO, to be at least one of the chief, if not the prime, drivers of the current Islamist militancy. Why is it that the Egyptians, Syrians, Jordanians, and Lebanese are more inclined to provide moral and material support to "Palestinian Refugees", and their "Resistance", many (though of course not all) of whom are in fact ethnically Egyptian, Syrian, Jordanian, and Lebanese of not much more than a generation's remove, than to offer them mediation, territory or citizenship? Why is it that prominent among stated Islamist goals is the eradication of Jews and The Jewish State, and opposition to those who support The Jewish State? Difficult questions, and not meant at all to diminish Israeli institutional complicity in the unending spiral of violence, which belligerence and intransigence is but fuel to the fire.
