“Islamic holy city” seems to mean the city is home to a pilgrimage shrine, but it may be specific to SOME set of Muslims – Sunni, Shiite, Wahabbi, Alawwite, Sufi, Druze, etc. and it includes places that are or were the seat or birthplace of a school/sect, the birth/burial place of major imam/saint, the site of historic events in the lives of a imams/saints, and so on.
Imagine if we used the term “Christian Holy City” as a catch-all that included everywhere there is a major shrine of a denomination that can be called “christian” or that had historic or academic significance to a substantial denomination or that is a pilgrimage site.
(/hj)
Good catch. However, seeing as how no other candidate has expressed support for the idea of nuking Mecca in any circumstance, I stand by my statement that the OP’s boss will probably support Tancredo on his position.
While this can be true in rare isolated cases, it’s flat fucking wrong when it’s applied to society as a whole. Killing in response to killing is the whole damn problem in the Mid-East.
There are a lotta good arguments against retributional death (e.g. the death penalty), but one of the best ones is simply that the truly civilized societies are beyond the notion that justice is best served if the punishment meted out exactly matches the crime. The eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth, blood-for-blood stuff comes from ancient, tribal societies. And it doesn’t work in a multi-ethnic world.
But what we try to do as justice now (in our better moments, anyway) is punishment as an abstraction. When somebody breaks the law, we take away their time. Sentences are for months or years or decades, and the guilty are imprisoned away from the world they were in. For something as horrible as murder, we take so much of their time that it lasts the rest of their lives.
This is vastly different than blood for blood, the heated choice, the province of barbarism. To stop endless cycles of violence, you need to bypass that primitive monkey desire for revenge and overlay it with a veneer of abstract rationalism. We cool our heads and start a process, a trial against the accused to determine whether the person we have in custody is actually the guilty party. And then it’s even better to keep that person alive just in case somebody fucked up, which happens all the time.
Innocents aren’t saved when you kill the guilty as a matter of policy. It might look good in theory that a crime so horrible as murder deserves a penalty that matches, but that just reinforces the standard that blood must pay for blood, and when things start to get crazy (like when we lose 3,000 people in one day), we just want blood and it no longer matters who has to die to satisfy our thirst. So we indiscrimitely kill a bunch more of them, which creates a whole new generation of grieving families who don’t care which of us they kill to pay back the blood debt. And so on and so on.
We would save countless more innocent lives in the future if we moved away from the idea/ideal of responding to death with death.
Yes, I find it baffling that six years later, many Americans seem to have acquiesced to the continued existence of Osama bin Laden. Why isn’t this guy dead?
Pfft. Our President said he wanted bin Laden “dead or alive.” Well, he’s one of those two. Problem solved.
(I agree, and I remain disgusted that the rhetoric of justice and revenge has fallen by the wayside. And now a new survey indicates that ObL is more popular in Pakistan than Musharraf. Ghod, whutta clusterfuck that is, and all because we decided he wasn’t worth pursuing into Pakistan.)
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I wouldn’t be surprised. While I don’t in-the-flesh know people who think we should nuke the ME, I get in arguments on other boards with people who do. There are people out there who would cheerfully nuke people by the billions given the chance; all of Islam and all of China, for starters. Commies and Islamofascists, don’t you know. I also recall a discussion on another board about some loony blogger that was ranting about how Bush should have killed off all the Iraqis and replaced them with Americans; obviously not a common view, but such people do exist.
There probably are boards out there that focus on how great it would be to kill/nuke/whatever everyone in the ME.
Imagine if the muslim world had employed the same logic - bomb our cities and we’ll nuke the fuck out of you (if the capacity was available) - America would be glass by now.
Now I can see why some people are so nervous about Iran getting The Bomb… there’s a danger they’ll use the same argument and start picking off US cities until y’all give up GWB.
Because in 1999 Musharraf seized power in a coup and exiled the democratically elected Prime Minister. After the 9/11 attacks he declared his support for the war on terror and Bush has accepted that support in a big way.
US interests would have been much better served in the long-term by refusing to recognize the illegal government, and using it’s influence to have the legitimate government restored.
Bush took the short-sighted and easy route. Pakistan is now one of the most corrupt countries in the world, and the traditionally moderate population is being driven into the arms of extremists out of desperation.
The current issue of National Geographic has an interesting article on this. Well worth a read.
Like some of us have been saying for years. The first nuclear-armed fundamentalist Islamic state will be Pakistan. And as usual, by our short-sighted attitude of clasping to our breasts the nearest dictator we can wrap our arms around, we are helping the process along. Never mind that western approval is becoming the kiss of death.
Lex Talionis or Law of Retribution (encpsulated in Exodus 21 as “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, etc.”), is actually the result of an increase in civilization and a movement away from tribalism.
Prior to the Lex Talionis, many tribal cultures practiced emotional revenge in which injury was met with much harsher injury, (one supposes that the goal, beyond simply expressing rage, was to deter others from iflicting similar injury). This notion is also reflected in the Bible in the story of Lamech, in Genesis 4. When Cain despaired that he would be slain for his murder, God put a mark on him and protected him with a declaration that any who slew him would suffer sevenfold vengeance. Later, Lamech declared
The Lex Talionis was not established in Exodus (or by Hammurabi) or others proposed by different authorites, but appears to be simply a sign of increasing civilization where people who needed to live together could not afford to have whole clans wiped out in retaliatory warfare, therefore laws were created that said that the judgment for an injury could be no worse than that injury.
While we see it as bloody and cruel, it was a step up from slaying a man for wounding another.
While I do agree with the gist of your post (indiscriminate vengeance begets more of same) a sense of “proportionality” is certainly in order. Saying that if a man commits murder then he must be put to death is a far cry from “One of your clan killed one of my clan, so 10 of you must die!”
The legal procedures we have established here in the U.S. takes most of the venom or “passion” out of the sentence of death; it’s not like a lynch mob, or firebombing, in retaliation. And I’m talking legal trials in courts-of-law, not Black Book assassination ops.
Assuming, of course, that you can catch said killer(s) and put them on trial, instead of trying to sort through the rubble of their suicide attack for their charred remains.
Or sort through the rubble of their home after a laser-guided bomb blew it, and every houseful of people around it, to smithereens, in an attempt to “neutralize an ongoing terrorist threat.”
