Show me where my statement about reprisals was limited to a particular time period or a particular means of reprisal. Otherwise you are the one who is dishonest.
…you said “after the war” in your first post.
Actually, Truman was a smart man. In terms of brainpower, he was right up there with Jefferson. He was also quite the accomplished pianist. I highly recommend that you read David McCullough’s biography Truman.
While I don’t necessarily agree with Tancredo’s comments, it’s been pretty well established, I think, that at least some members of the Saudi family have ties to AQ, and the royal family doesn’t seem to want to do much to counter the hatemongers within their borders. Let’s not forget that the majority of the hijackers on 9/11 were Saudis. So to simply claim that nuking Mecca would be striking at a nation which has nothing to do with terrorism, is incorrect.
Now, ideally, we’d use diplomatic channels to encourage the Saudis to clean up their act. However, given that this administration knows as much about diplomacy as I do about how it feels to have a prolapsed uterus, and is close buddies with the Saudi family, the odds of that happening are nonexistant.
The Hebrew Exodus from Egypt is probably in a history book somewhere. Several, in fact, to my personal knowledge. That doesn’t mean it ever happened. (We can be fairly sure it didn’t.)
There’s a huge difference. We used the threat of nuclear weapons as a deterrent against the Soviet Union - a country. If Tancredo has said “if the Saudis attack America, we’ll bomb Mecca in retaliation” I might have argued that it was a bad idea but not a crazy one. But terrorists are not a country or a religion. Tancredo’s idea is like saying that if somebody robs a bank, we should go shoot the priest back in his hometown.
Gladiadelmarre, the thing about a message board format is all the posts you’ve made are still there for anyone to read. You should at least wait until the second page to deny writing the things you posted on the first page.
I say that we threaten that if there is another terrorist attack on the USA, that we will bomb Mecca…with Tancredo.
(For the intelligence impared, I mean We will drop Tancredo out of an airplane directly over Mecca without a parachute.)
There is one (more) flaw in this plan of Tom’s. Isn’t he providing an incentive for American terrorism to people who want Mecca destroyed? Since we’ve already brought up Nazis in this thread, can I safely accuse a few Zionists or white supremacists of wanting to nuke Mecca? They could do a teeny, tiny false flag operation in the U.S., maybe hit someplace that they knew Tancredo’s wife would be… and then POW! no more Mecca. Victory all around!
Chuck Palahniuk, in his book Haunted, has a remarkable short story about a group of people who thought like Tancredo, but on a larger scale. For a long time I thought Palahniuk was right – the only way to stop religious violence was to nuke the Vatican, Jerusalem, Mecca, Medina, and right on down the list to the major holy sites of every religion that’s ever been part of a war. Wipe them off the map and start fresh.
I’ve aged a little since then, and I’m pretty sure it’s a bad idea. It’s tempting in its simplicity which is precisely what makes me think that it’s probably evil. There will probably not be peace between Israel and Palestine until one or both are wiped out, but for any third party to do the wiping is still unequivocally bad.
Has anyone said that Saudi Arabia has nothing to do with terrorism? Or has the point been made that the nation of Saudi Arabia is purportedly an ally?
(And even if Saudi Arabia openly switched to support for al Qaida and their ilk, bombing Mecca and Medina would remain an incredibly foolish thing to do. Neither city has any ,ilitary significance, but the religious significance extends to roughly one in six people across the whole world. It would be like bombing Lourdes to punish France without considering that you would alienate a lot of Catholics across the whole world. How many enemies do we wish to create for the sake of showing how tough (and stupid) we are?)
I interpreted some of the comments made that if terrorists attacked the US going after Saudi Arabia would be the wrong thing to do, since they would have had “nothing” to do with the attack, even though it is possible that they (or powerful elements within their country) could do so. Perhaps I over reached in my interpretation.
I don’t believe I advocated bombing Mecca and Medina under any circumstances.
This gave me a chuckle:
What a clown.
Yeah, you’re gonna fit in great here.
What’s the point? The Romans’ destruction of the Jerusalem Temple did not destroy Judaism, and nuking Mecca would not destroy Islam.
Anyone who thinks that vaporizing enormous numbers of innocent civilians, including women and children that in those societies have about zero input into the political process, is a good “retaliation” for the acts of a small group of extremists and/or a completely different country is beyond a monster. It’s utterly amazing that this guy seems likely to just get off with this comment as if it were an everyday gaffe.
What do you mean, “cite?” My local library is my cite!
it’s gotta be in there somewhere
He’s talking about (hypothetical) violent, xenophobic extremists. Rationality would not likely be their strong suit.
It needn’t be that bad, if we gave them a few days’ advance warning to evacuate the city, and if we did not strike during the pilgrimage season. Of course, it still would be a very, very bad idea.
Does Saudi Arabia have the infrastructure, or even the will, to evacute an entire city like that? Between the people who couldn’t get out in time, the people who would be killed during the panic to escape, the people who would die in the refugee camps (that would likely be around for years and years after the bombing), and the people who would die because they tried to rebuild the city before the radiation had cleared, I think we’re looking at a death toll scarcely lower than if we just dropped the bomb out of the clear blue sky.
I was just wondering if this Tancredo statement about nuking Mecca and Medina will create a backlash against the West, similar to the extent that the Danish cartoons about the Prophet Mohammed or the granting of a knighthood to Rushdie did?
Could this cause new unrest all by itself or will it be looked on (by the Islamic terrorists) as another in a series of assaults on Islam?
I’m not particularly obsessed with Islam, nor do I advocate bombing Mecca, Medina, or any population center, for that matter. But I keep seeing it asserted that “Many…are actively opposing al Qaida and its related terrorist groups.”
While I don’t doubt that it’s true to some extent, I’d like to learn more about this opposition. I see almost nothing of it in the news here in America, and the evidence of it in international affairs seems to be indirect, oblique , buried, or missing. But I am assured it’s real.
When I dare to talk face-to-face with actual faithful Muslims here in America, their criticism of al Qaida seems muted and perfunctory…and these are the ones who do not support it. When I read news articles about imams here and in Britain making pronouncements, they do not often sound like ringing condemnations of extremism. Perhaps my news is filtered.
Where can I learn more about the great sustained effort the rest of Islam is making against extremists?
Sailboat