Bashar Assad
More on Syria's attempts to placate their restive and growing radical Muslim population. From AP, with thanks to Miriam:
DAMASCUS, Syria (AP) - Syrian President Bashar Assad on Thursday challenged the basis of U.S. sanctions on his country and said he would not expel Palestinian militant groups as demanded by the United States. Assad disputed the case the Bush administration had made to impose the embargo, saying Syria does not have weapons of mass destruction and there is no evidence of foreign fighters crossing the border from Syria to Iraq."We have always asked the administration to give us one passport or one name or evidence of that (border infiltration) happening. So far, we have not had that happen," Assad told a group of American editors. ...
President Bush imposed the sanctions Tuesday. They ban all U.S. exports to Syria except food and medicine and they forbid direct flights between Syria and the United States. The penalties came as a response to allegations that Syria was supporting terrorism and undermining U.S. efforts in neighboring Iraq. Bush signed the order under a law that Congress passed by an overwhelming vote late last year.
furtther proof that all muslim countries bat for the same team.What further proof does the UN need.
When are we (America) going to stop playing games with imbeciles (Syria Et Al)? It is like dealing with spoiled children, only these spoiled children play with the deadliest of weapons!
The facts or the truth are of no concern when dealing with silly children that think they can create facts then stand up and lie to your face and think you have to believe them!
Deal with them as you would deal with any spoiled child...Give them a time out and if that does not work, ground them, taking away any power they might use against you, as well as any support, confine them and let nature take its course...If they persist in the negative behaviors, Get out the strap and make sure they (and all other spoiled children in the vicinity) know what brought the whooping on, then Whoop away. ( I know what your are thinking...Why is America the parent? Because we are the only ones ACTING like Parents!...
It is about time we did something and I for one think the heavier sanctions should extend to all Middle Eastern countries/Kingdoms that allow (even support) Anti-American terrorists groups to exist and even prosper.
Opinions are one thing. Anyone, anywhere on this planet is more than welcome to hate me...However, they can not lie about or slander me. They can not destroy my property or spit in my face or harm/kill me or incite others to harm/kill me.
The policy should be America helps FRIENDS...NOT enemies!! America Subdues enemies! Remember "the land of the BRAVE?"
Which brings me to Iraq...We went to Iraq to nullify a terrorist...No apologies given or required...We should continue West all the way to the Sea and beyond! I believe we would not have to go too far before these barbarians change their tunes and tactics...
PS The UN is looking strangely like a spoiled child as well....Stealing cookies from the Oil for Food jar and then denying it when they get caught with their hands in the cookie jar??
The Alawite military dictatorship in Syria can be reminded, by the American government, that the Alawis (Alevis in Turkey) make up 12% of the population, that other Muslims do not regard them as real Muslims, and that things will go very hard for them indeed if Syrian non-Alawis ever manage to seize power. We have many ways to destabilize and weaken the Alawi dictatorship. They are betting we won't really do it. But why should we care if the Alawi military caste is butchered? What we care about is keeping Syria weak enough -- that is, deprived of major weaponry -- so that such weaponry can not harm Infidel states (Israel) or peoples (the Christians of Lebanon, constrained by the 40,000 Syrian troops in Lebanon), or fall into hands even worse than those of Mustafa Tlas et al.
The Alawites should be made to understand that they can stay in power in Syria itself -- we really don't give a damn -- if they get out of Lebanon (and the Taif Agreement, formally forcing the Maronites to call Lebanon an "Arab state" should be ripped up), give up supporting Hezbollah, and forget about the Golan Heights (no, they will never forget, but they had better stop talking about it). Otherwise, we will wekan the regime in a thousand ways, making clear that we will allow the Muslims, the real Muslims, the Muslims who do not relish the worship of Mary (Miriam) by the heterodox Alawites, to wreak their vengeance on the Alawites. It won't be pleasant. Let the Syrian rulers think hard about this: giving up WMD programs, getting out of Lebanon, ending support for Hezbollah, in exchange for being allowed to live and to continue to rule in Syria. You know, you Alawis, what real Muslims can do if they get mad -- don't you?
How do you reject a unilateral decision?
The biggest mistake made in this conflict was not going into syria at the same time. It is a staging area for the jihadists. Hey when you go shopping most folk pick up their beer at the same time, it saves a trip, many lives, and mucho money. Until people understand that the lines of freedom andsubject oppression are clear as a bell ,we are doomed. The media has become a puppet of evil, please see jennin , global news canada.
Wake up Syria these are the same jackals who are snatching body parts for negotiations, no debate,
you are wrong and if you do not wake soon expect the cleansing operation to expand. p.s. speak up good people of the book. Abandon saudi and syrian political tripe. Get back to the brotherhood for you are designing the end and children do not deserve this.
Syrian Crimes Info: Syria, the MONSTER
_____________________________________________________________________
Dear President Bush,
Thank you very much for starting -- better late than never & better little than nothing -- sanctions on Syria the Monster, the Brutal Occupier of Lebanon, the backers of Terror Homicide & Genocide Bombers into Iraq, the Vicious Persecutor of Kurdish minority & others.
We appreciate your sound voice, humane heart and straight logic in rejecting Syrian typical 'all traditional' lame excuses of supporting "freedom fighters," there's nothing "freedom fighting" about aiming at rescue workers in Iraq, obtaining Sadistic Saddam's most dangerous WMD, oppression on Lebanese unarmed Civilians, persecuting, massacring & ethnic cleansing the poor Kurds or backing, sheltering and even pushing Genocide bombers on Israeli babies.
I call on you as President of the USA to keep on the pressure on Syrian leaders.
The United States must live up to its commitment to prevent global terrorism and tyranny.
An enormous potential of peace, human rights and stability is there to be harvested once we have decided to really crack on and ultimately reduce Syrian terrorism and brutality. If we fail to restraint this Monster, future generations will not forgive us.
President Bush, the situation is clear.
Sincerely,
X
'palestinians' = LIES!
And now he says there is no such group or organization as Al-queda.
Check out:
http://www.memri.org/bin/latestnews.cgi?ID=SD71404
What we know as dishonesty does not exist in a muslim country. Not telling the truth is perfectly fine because they are looking at it two fold; one, misinform the west, and two, brainwash our own people.
What is he going to tell his people when they find out that his beautiful wife is part black african?
http://www.nerra.com/broadsword/tomes/000230.html
good rant
If you click on the link below, it will take you to a detailed letter which I have sent to the Canadian Foreign Minister, Bill Graham. The letter discusses the following questions:
What does Jihad really mean?
Is there a global jihad?
How do Turkey and Singapore regulate Islam?
http://boston.indymedia.org/newswire/index.php
I apologize to all - the link above does not work. I posted the article but I cannot find it. Maybe they don't like me over there at Indymedia. I will start my own blog.
Guys excuse me but the palestinian people are a people who have no homeland-because of occupation-and they have been denied their basic democratic rights. Their occupied lands have been surrounded and detrimentaly impoverished creating still more confusion and resentment. I seem to recall that the Marshall plan was a sound way of pacification and fail to see the logic behind any policy of escalation which inevitably brings more tension-conflict. Surely politicians must know this.
Arxos:
"Guys excuse me but the palestinian people are a people who have no homeland-because of occupation-and they have been denied their basic democratic rights."
You left out part of that sentence: "...by the governments of Egypt and Jordan."
You ARE aware, I hope, that there is not now, and never has been, a nation by the name of Palestine? And that the people who refer to themselves as "Palestinians" are actually Egyptian or Jordanian nationals who have prevented from resettling in their own home countries?
Save the PLO-funded propaganda, please. Nobody here is interested in it.
Arxos The problem with your comment is that you may read the liberal newspaper but you do not study history.
History and archiology prove that Isreal existed and that this was their land. They were a country that had goverment, heritage, currency, kings and were a recognized country even by their enemies.
Palestinians (which don't exist) cannot state even one of those items. Show me in history a Palestinian goverment, heritage, currency, king, or any country that ever recognized them in history. Show me battles or armies that they ever had.
You will find not one of the above items.
As LOBO91 pointed out they are individuals expelled from Egypt and Jordan. Read Jordanian history and find out what they did with the people that they did not want, you will find the creation of these people. The creation of these people came into existance since World War II.
Now go to Jordan and Egypt and complain to them about taking back their own people.
i refer to palestinians as jordyptians since jordan and egypt are there ancestral homes try using it
"We have always asked the administration to give us one passport or one name or evidence of that (border infiltration) happening. So far, we have not had that happen,"
Does this guy think that the terrorists are carrying their own passports? that they are using their own names? that the entire border can be watched at one time?
Wonder why he looks so western? Usually the leaders of those countries appear in military uniform or some flowing robe...he is even shaved and groomed...
Alaska,
I would just like to point out that wheather the palestinian people are or are not of native origin to that particular region they have been settled there long before the creation of the israeli state and even if that was not the case they should not be denied basic freeedoms enjoyed by us in the 'enlightened' west. Refering to your argument of Israel's long heritage and claim to the region I would counterpropose that we hand back North America to the the Indians...hold on where did they dissapear to?
Hey, there were many 'whites' who abhorred the natives treatment by the self righteous parties of the day.
More recent govts, agencies and individuals have admitted mistakes were made. (Does being a muslim means never having to say you're sorry - or responsible?)
The American Indians are still here, treated far better than any equivalent people found in any muslim lands. We dont force them to wear distinctive hats, belts, stars or colours as the Sharia demands.
The Indians call themselves "The Six Nations". Thats what we call them too. Contrast that statement with the refusal of muslims to recognize Israel, the Kurdish nation, respect any non-muslim people, or even other muslim sects.
Yes, we're not perfect, but many of us are willing to change, (visibly, vocally and honestly), if it means a better standard of living for ourselves, descendants, and our peaceful friend and neighbors.
I dont see the moral equalivency from any Muslim religious leader.
I commend the Syrian govenment on being so polite and orderly while in line at the woodshed. We welcome the opportunity to help them, in good time, understand their place in the world. Of course, the nature of the lesson will be of their choosing.
Peace through superior firepower.
There are several arguments to be made to Arxos. The first is that, as a matter of elementary justice, it did not seem wrong -- it seemed absolutely right -- that the Jews, who have been the most persecuted tribe in human history, were granted, by the Palestine Mandate, two quite modest demands. The first was that they simply be "allowed" to immigrate to the area under the Mandatory authority. This originally included both eastern and western "Palestine" (the phrase is in quotations, because it only had meaning within Western Christendom, not to Muslims, for whom it was never a single unit). As it happens, for reasons of realpolitik, the British decided to prevent the application of the Mandate provisions to all of "eastern Palestine," which became the Emirate of Transjordan, and then, in 1946, the Kingdom of Jordan.
Second, that area which we, but not the Muslims, know as "Palestine," had undergone centuries of population decline and increasing desolation of the land. So many people visited the Holy Land, and left testimonies to this: Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Chateaubriand, Lamartine, and the celebrated French observer, Volney. Most of the relevant quotes can easily be found: one source might be Katz' "Battleground." The total population of Jerusalem in 1850 was 15,000. The total settled population of "western" Palestine at mid-19th century (Beduin, who moved from Egypt to Saudi Arabia to Jordan, can not be described as "settled" nor their numbers be ascribed to any particular place; in any case, there were very few of them) could not have been more than 100,000 or so. But by the end of the century the population had increased -- though that population was never "Arab" alone; there were Circassians, Chechens, Ethiopians, Armenians, Turks, Europeans of every variety, as well as Arabs.
Now, one wonders why the population began to increase. As is known, Arab migration to that area increased dramatically with the arrival of Jews who brought new methods of cultivation, and were willing to work to reclaim the land. The best book on this astounding land reclamation, by the way, is by Walter Clay Lowdermilk, from Liberty, North Carolina -- "Palestine: Land of Promise." More Arabs came to "Palestine" under the Mandate than did Jews, though the Palestine Mandate was set up by the League of Nations for the express purporse of facilitating "Jewish migration" and encouraging "close Jewish settlement on then land."
But there was another source of Arab immigrants -- who, like those who arrived from various Arab countries from 1918 to 1948, virtually unhindered, because so many were illegal and impossible to stop (unlike the Jews, who simply arrived at ports, where British soldiers carefully vetted them)--and that has been ignored. These Muslim immmigrants -- many were not Arab, came from various places. Some came from Algeria, the defeated troops of Abd el Kader. Some came from the Muslim communities of Europe who, once the Ottoman tide had receded, were unwilling to live under non-Muslim rule. The Ottomans took thousands of them -- they were used, like the Seljuks with their "surgan" system befor them -- in moving whole populations around their empire. For example, after the Bulgarian atrocities against the Christians in 1876, which so aroused Gladstone and the rest of Christian Europe (there are echoes of it, too, in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, with Vronsky), and then, in 1877-1878, the final withdrawal of Ottoman authority, Muslims in Bulgaria were taken, wholesale, out of the area, so that they would not have to live under Christians, and put in what was the emptiest part of the Ottoman Empire that was inhabitable -- in the vilayets which made up what we in the West, following the Romans called "Palestine." And there are many other examples of such movement, giving the lie completely to the idea that the "Palestinian" Arabs are in any significant sense the descendants of those who "tilled the soul from time immemorial." It is nonsense.
But what is most important is that while the facts, if learned, do have an effect on some commentators, on the Muslim Arabs themselves, who have made up an entire mythological history for "Palestine," are immune to appeals to real history. Why? For to Muslims, the history of non-Muslims is essentially irrelevant. What the Zoroastrians did in Sassanid Persia does not matter. What the Christians did in Mesopotamia or Syria is irrelevant. What the great and glorious empire of Byzantium was does not matter. Islam, and only Islam, matters.
While those who take the trouble to learn about the actual, as opposed to the made-up, history, of that area called "Palestine" (a toponym, by the way, employed by the Romans in order to deliberately efface the toponym "Judea" so as to sever the Jewish connection to the land) may have their minds changed, that is not true for Muslims.
For them, it does not matter that the population of the area was so insignificant. It does not matter that the Jewish immigrants paid for every single acre or dunam of private land they acquired. It does not matter that the phrase "Palestinian people" was never used until after the 1967 War, and that it began to be used quite deliberately (see the remarks of Zuheir Mohsen, the head of the terrorist group As Saiqa, on why the phrase "Palestinian people" began to be used -- you can find it in an interview he gave to James Dorsey for the Dutch newspaper "Der Trouw") to win over others. By inventing a "Palestinian people" this allowed for the idea that the demands of the Muslim Arabs -- the demand, rooted in Islam, that NO Infidel sovereign state could exist where there had once been Islamic rule (the same applies to Spain -- of course, this is only a question of prioritizing conquest, for ultimately, the entire world must be conquered for Islam, and all non-Muslims subjugated to the Muslism, for "Islam must dominate and cannot be dominated" as Muhammad and all of his followers believe).
That is why it is absurd for Israel's leaders to engage in negotiations and work for treaties. There is no "solution" to the Arab war on Isael; or rather, the only solution is deterrence. Muslims can offer Israel only a "treaty of truce" not a genuine peace treaty. Muslim jurisprudence is clear. No permanent peace treaty can be made with Infidels. Muslims must, as soon as they become powerful enough, attack any Infidel state in dar al-Harb, no matter what treaties the Muslims may have made with them in order to buy time.
Pacta sunt servanda -- the Western notion that "treaties are to be obeyed" -- see Vittoria, Suarez, Grotius, and a hundred others to contributed to the slow development of public international law in the West, see Visscher, or Lauterpacht, or Julius Stone -- is simply not observed in Islam. Islam's law was fixed more than a millennium ago. It cannot be changed.
That is why the "two-state-solution" is possibly the most idiotic phrase one can hear. It shows no understanding of Islamic doctrines, and is of course a mortal danger to Israel. But more than that, in the endless fight to keep Islam from taking over, not so much through terrorism but through subversion and conversion of Infidels (mainly through migration of Muslims to the dar al-Harb)it is important that the American and European leaders be absolutely clear as to why this phrase is false, and dangerous -- and not just, not even mainly, for Israel.