Chretien didn’t blame America.
I’m too pissed off to write anything else.
We could change our policies tomorrow, and nobody on the ‘Arab Street’ would necessarily find out about it. They don’t even know about our many efforts to help Muslim nations in the past years.
Propaganda dressed up as faith and hatred disguised as patriotism, to name two. That and a total lack of fundamental freedoms mixed with the traditional contempt for the West about sums it up. You do see the inherent paradox in the last sentence, right? Last, but not least, Israel.
Other than ‘regime change’ on a grand scale, what else would make a substantive difference in the Middle East?
These questions you think are so deep have answers. The lefties don’t like the answers. Multiculturalism, meet Muslim extremists. Matter, meet antimatter.
[sub]P.S. You are the fucking idiot.[/sub]
I read Milo’s list of actions: “We shouldn’t have a single soldier in the Middle East. We should hate Jews. We should abandon Israel to the dogs. We are infidels.” as his presentation of the “leftist” argument. Such a presentation would be a strawman, as this is most emphatically not the “leftist” position.
However, upon your redirection milroyj, I see it was a summary of bin Laden’s position, which, while a bit garbled and less accurate than it should be, is not dishonest.
So I was wrong in making the “scarecrow” crack.
Yeh, yeh; we know the rest: Evil, meet Good; Up, meet Down; Black, meet White. Thanks for the moral clarity.
As a side note to the OP, it was the bleach-drinkers at Fox (Faux) News who really tied the headline to this one.
And that is really what happened here. Chretien (a less than eloquent speaker in either language) was trying to explain the reality that many of the entities under the lens post 9/11 have what they view as real beefs about the west. Our wealth is one of those, and perhaps there are steps we can take to minimize this.
It was the media parasites that decided that this equals “Canadian PM Blames US for September 11 Attacks”.
The outrage here shouldn’t be aimed at the Canadian PM or the lefties who try to be apologists for statements that Chretien never even made - save it for the press.
As a side note to the OP, it was the bleach-drinkers at Fox (Faux) News who really tied the headline to this one.
And that is really what happened here. Chretien (a less than eloquent speaker in either language) was trying to explain the reality that many of the entities under the lens post 9/11 have what they view as real beefs about the west. Our wealth is one of those, and perhaps there are steps we can take to minimize this.
It was the media parasites that decided that this equals “Canadian PM Blames US for September 11 Attacks”.
The outrage here shouldn’t be aimed at the Canadian PM or the lefties who try to be apologists for statements that Chretien never even made - save it for the press.
Milo and Beagle, surely you’re capable of seeing that there’s an issue behind why the views you’ve (to some degree) caricatured have so much resonance “over there”. They could all be simply “evil”, I suppose - that view has moral clarity, if not a usefulness or accuracy.
So why do you think so many people outside the industrialized parts of the world hate it so? Do you simply dismiss them all as evil, or at least deluded?
As a side note to the OP, it was the bleach-drinkers at Fox (Faux) News who really tied the headline to this one.
And that is really what happened here. Chretien (a less than eloquent speaker in either language) was trying to explain the reality that many of the entities under the lens post 9/11 have what they view as real beefs about the west. Our wealth is one of those, and perhaps there are steps we can take to minimize this.
It was the media parasites that decided that this equals “Canadian PM Blames US for September 11 Attacks”.
The outrage here shouldn’t be aimed at the Canadian PM or the lefties who try to be apologists for statements that Chretien never even made - save it for the press.
And I’d like to add the quote that preceeded the one in the OP - I think this goes a long way to explaining what Chretien was actually getting at.
“You know, you cannot exercise your powers to the point of humiliation for others. That is what the Western world – not only the Americans, the Western world – has to realize. Because they (the have-nots) are human beings too. There are long-term consequences if you don’t look hard at the reality in 10 or 20 (or) 30 years from now,”
But hey Obvious Guy I give you full points for creative ommission.
Nitpick : The crusades predate the Ottoman Empire
xeno (bolding mine):
Oh, I’m more than prepared to back up how my assessment of Bin Laden’s position is balls-on accurate. Are you prepared to show why it’s “garbled and less accurate than it should be?”
Elvis:
Admittedly, it’s frustrating to deal with. Because so much of it is rooted in racial hatred of Jews, a belief that Israel doesn’t even have a right to exist (could have sworn it was the U.N. that created it) and religious intolerance for anything other than Islam. In any other part of the world, a certain segment of our society considers such views as completely intolerable. In the Middle East, mysteriously, they don’t seem to.
The U.S. is seen as continually meddling in other nation’s affairs, when it is only pursuing its interests - as every other nation on the planet does.
And the U.S. is often expected to intervene. When Bush, early on in his presidency, took steps toward a position of “Israel and the Palestinians are big boys. Let them work out their own peace,” people on the left and around the world FREAKED.
Otherwise, the criticism is that the U.S. doesn’t do enough, or exploits people. Show me, and bet I can find evidence to counter the assertion.
So yeah, I stand by what I said earlier, that much of what the U.S. has to do to tone down anti-American sentiment in the world is provide accurate information to counter misinformation.