Bomb Blast in Pakistan Mosque Kills 16

I see the "peaceful" Sunnis are up to their old tricks, killing infidels of various degrees.

It must be nice knowing that you are never wrong, and knowing that you never have to take responsibility for your actions because of the supposed words of an illiterate sociopathic pedophile jotted down by semi-literate politicians with an axe to grid a hundred years after the fact.

I wonder... ifMichael Jackson gets pissed, will Muslims start viewing him as the second coming of Mohammed?

Bob,

How do you know its not an act supported by US policy? Divide and rule bob divide and rule....if you have not had you indo-china history lesson try again. (try all sides of the argument) I also advise you to venture into the dirty cambodia war escapade to broaden you horizons concerning another type of war. One practiced without the slightest shade of consent by us, the governed, who pay for these interventions through our noses and send our kin to fight half way around the globe....invissible wars are waged more often than real ones...

arxos:

"... send our kin to fight half way around the globe ..."
You are indirectly representing yourself as a U.S. citizen, but your word choice and grammar make me wonder. What nationality are you?

"How do you know its not an act supported by US policy?"

Let us use something that seems to becoming more rare these days - logic.

First, this sectarian violence has been going on long before U.S. foreign policy was concerned with Pakistan. Second, spokesmen for some of the radical groups have admitted that their goal is to destabilize Musharraf's goverment. Even with no public admissions, this should be obvious to even the most casual observer.

He's already on a tightrope juggling his Islamic extremists and his ties to the West. That is pretty much why we gave him a "pass" on his recent nuclear secrets fiasco. Anything that would lead to destabilization IS NOT A GOOD THING - especially since Pakistan became a nuclear power.

And somewhat off topic, but what "dirty cambodia war escapade"?

jay

araxos,

Have you ever considered the possibility that I help make US policy?

Bob Owens:

"Have you ever considered the possibility that I help make US policy?

Posted by: Bob Owens at June 1, 2004 12:09 PM"

God, please make it so !!! :-)

Arxos:

So are you saying that the Khmer Rouge are supported by U.S. policy?

Arxos~ does this also include the Shining Path?

Arxos:

The Cambodian genocide of 1975-1979, in which approximately 1.7 million people lost their lives (21% of the country's population), was one of the worst human tragedies of the last century. As in Nazi Germany, and more recently in East Timor, Guatemala, Yugoslavia, and Rwanda, the Khmer Rouge regime headed by Pol Pot combined extremist ideology with ethnic animosity and a diabolical disregard for human life to produce repression, misery, and murder on a massive scale. In March 2003, the United Nations signed an agreement with Cambodia to establish a tribunal to bring the surviving senior Khmer Rouge leaders to justice.

In December 1994, the Cambodian Genocide Program (CGP) at Yale University won an initial grant of $499,000 from the Office of Cambodian Genocide Investigations, Bureau of East Asia and the Pacific, U.S. Department of State. In 1995-96 the Australian and Netherlands governments and the Henry Luce Foundation, Inc. provided complementary funding. In 1997, the State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor awarded the CGP another grant of $1 million, and in 1999, a further $150,000.

In January 1995, the CGP established the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam) in Phnom Penh, and immediately began the work of documenting the mass killings in Cambodia during the Democratic Kampuchea (DK) regime headed by Pol Pot between 1975 and 1979. Besides training and equipping the Cambodian staff of the Documentation Center, the CGP set out to

1) collect, study, and preserve all extant information about that period in Cambodian history,
2) make this information available to a court or tribunal willing to prosecute surviving Cambodian war criminals and genocide suspects, and
3) generate a critical, analytic understanding of genocide which can be marshaled in the prevention of political and ethnic violence against populations elsewhere in the world.

For nine years, the Cambodian Genocide Program has advanced these goals through a variety of activities which fall into four categories: documentation, preservation, research, and training.

The Cambodian Genocide Program began this work in 1994, an auspicious moment in the Cambodian political landscape, as certain obstacles which previously stood in the way of bringing closure to the genocide had been removed. After the end of the Cold War, the U.S. lifted its diplomatic and economic embargo on Cambodia, opening up the international flow of trade in ideas and information, as well as goods. The U.N. mission that oversaw democratic elections in Cambodia in 1993 resulted in the political isolation and outlawing of the Khmer Rouge, who remained armed, vocal, and to some, a credible political party. Finally, in 1994 the U.S. Congress passed the Cambodian Genocide Justice Act, committing the American government to the pursuit of justice for the victims of the genocide. With the Cambodian government and the international community now in harmony for the first time on the subject of the genocide, the Cambodian Genocide Program's agenda was not only well supported both within and outside Cambodia, but also very timely.

In 1997 the Cambodian Government requested United Nations assistance in achieving legal accountability for the crimes committed during the Khmer Rouge period. The next year the UN Secretary-General commissioned a legal advisory body, the Group of Experts on Cambodia, which called in 1999 for establishment of an international tribunal to judge the genocide and other Khmer Rouge crimes. After several years of negotiations with Cambodia on the nature of such a court, the UN withdrew from the process in February 2002, but then renewed its involvement by a resolution of the UN Third Committee in November 2002.

Harnessing resources which represent a quarter century of careful scholarship at a critical juncture in Cambodian and international politics, the Cambodian Genocide Program has integrated a vast range of source materials to illuminate the social and political environment in which over one fifth of all Cambodians died. The detailed picture of the Cambodian genocide which is emerging is not only comprehensive and exhaustively corroborated, but is also internationally accessible here to Cambodians, foreign scholars, prosecutors and jurists, especially in the CGP's Cambodian Genocide Data Bases, which include approximately 28,000 individual records. The CGP's website received 825,707 'hits' from November 11, 2001 to November 30, 2003, averaging approximately 7,700 per week.

Continued work by the CGP and its now independent offshoot, the Documentation Center of Cambodia, funded by the CGP from 1995 to 2001, has not only filled a substantial gap in the available scholarly resources on the Cambodian genocide, but will also serve as a significant prototype for the future study of genocidal activity. Not least, it was of great assistance to the UN Group of Experts on Cambodia, as it will be to any prospective international or national tribunal. The powerful tools that the CGP has assembled in the interests of documentation and justice, both in Cambodia and around the world, represent an unprecedented combination of scholarship, state-of-the-art technology, documentation and legal training, and international legal instruments to help bring closure to one of the worst human disasters of the 20th century. The comparative Genocide Studies Program, established at the Yale Center for International and Area Studies in January 1998, applies the CGP's experience, pursuing interdisciplinary research and documentation training on other modern tragedies, from the Holocaust to Rwanda to East Timor, and where appropriate, assists the victims' search for legal accountability.

CGW,

Don't get your hopes up. I merely meant that in the context that I vote in a democratic republic.

However, I wouldn't mind at all being able to work in this regard in an official capacity, were my talents needed.

Arxxos:

Wake up. It's not the 60's anymore! Times change. The single common thread that I detect among so-called 'progressives' is an absolute certainty in their moral superiority along with a deep distrust of their homeland America. Some of this is justifiably due to the lies of LBJ's Tonkin Gulf Incident that got us intop Vietnam, the Watergate scandal, and the assassinations of The Kennedys, Martin Luther King, etc. All bad. Most progressives have reacted to these events by creating a paradigm of reflexive opposition to'America'. This basic paradigm rules their thinking, just as the 'free-market' paradigm rules the thinking of many conservatives. My point is that one shgould regularly re-examine one's paradigm/premises.
Yes, the USA has done wrong things. But in the overall big picture we have done many more good things. I used to believe that the CIA, etc had subverted our government. This supposedly started with the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran and his replacement by the Shah. This CIA operation is always mentioned as the root cause of our troubles with Iran. I used to buy this argument until I learned some new facts. The CIA could never have orchestarted the public demonstrations against Mossadegh that eventually caused him to fall. These demonstrations came from the street, from many of the poor and simple people. Theyt demonstrated not because of the CIA, but, get this, because the mullahs had decided that Mossadegh's communist sympathies were a great threat to their culture. It was the mullahs that ousted Mossadegh! And when the Iranian Revolution occurred and our embassy was invaded, etc the Iranians paid a steep price for the mullah's new revolution. Teenage boys running across minefields carrying copies of the Koran in their war with Iraq, political tyranny and social rigidity, etc.
Arxxos, your view is completely one-sided and biased, You are not an independent free thinker. You are simply a mechanical mouthpiece for another ideological doctrine. Learn to think for yourself before spouting your mindless slogans.

Mike H

Cambodia was destabilized by unknown, illegal (undeclared war) of the US army in its quest against the Vietcong. The CIA's involvement is well documented in covert operations, installing and deposing government officials and leaders as it saw fit, involvement in the drugs and guns trade etc, to achieve its ends. That is what caused the rise of the kmer rouge, which due to unforeseen circumstances in Vietnam it could not topple.

In addition to this would anyone want to comment on what happened to that other great military dictator, which slaughtered great numbers of his people and US citizens for that matter, famously backed by the CIA and US government, publicly. There are people in the states whose relatives were killed in Argentina during the coup with compliance from CIA agents and other secret service men. Meanwhile General Pinochet is rich and fat as a pig, enjoying immunity in Western countries that have profited greatly from his regime. Nauseating double standards again.

TO ALL EUROPEANS this war is not against Islam but AGAINST EUROPE. EUROPE IS BEING SABOTAGED BY US POLICY WITH ECONOMIC DOMINATION AS THE DESIRED RESULT (MILITARY DOMINATION IS A FOREGONE CONCLUSION) THE LONG LASTING TRADE WAR CONSCERNING GMF (SINCE 1999) HAS ALREADY BEEN LOST TO THE US SIDE. IF A SUSTAINABLE COMMON FRONT IS NOT FORMED EUROPEAN STATES WILL CRUBLE ONE AFTER THE OTHER. BRITAIN IS ALREADY CLOSE TO BECOMING THE NEXT US STATE IDEOLOGICALLY AS WELL AS CULTURALLY.

Similarly to Cambodia by supporting the represive corrupt regime of the shah in iran (the US errand boy in the region) US policy caused an extremist revoloution such as that of the Mullahs stirred by popular resentment towards this US backed government of elites, which brutally suppressed all dissent while simultaniously kept the country open for foreign commercial interests.

nice rant.

got facts?

Arxos:

If you live in America and from your comments it appears you do. You need to stop taking everything you read in those underground bookstores for granite that you find off of every major campus or places like Hate Ashbury.

You yourself stated; that one should look at all sides for the truth, so why don`t you take your own advice. I myself use to get caught up reading those underground books until I found them to be full of way to many inconsistencies, and way to many made up stories and lies.

Bob,
Facts for Cambodia’s dirty war in 'my war with the CIA: the memoirs of prince Norodom Sihanouk' as related to Wilfred Burchett

Another book for an unknown dirty war is 'the kapetanios: partisans and civil war in greece,1943-45' Dominique Eudes. A horrid civil war instigated by British meddling and then continued by the US when Britain could not pick up the bill.

Maybe you should also read Winston Churchill memoirs to fully grasp were and when the US lost its innocence if it ever had one.

These and General Pinochet's case are interesting examples of tactics used by the world's strongest power to force smaller nations away from their chosen policies. IMPERIALISM HAS MANY GUISES.

ignorance and stupidity are just two of them...

Arxos - Your hypocrisy knows no bounds. You are overlooking the Muslim imperialism that began with the Prophet and is continuing throughout the world, hoping to return to the glory days of the Caliphate.

This is typical taqiyya and kitman: to disegard one's sins and make the other guy look bad.

I am well aware of the sins of the United States and those of the West, but, just one, I'd love to hear you admit that Islam has committed one. Of course you won't, because telling the truth would be un-Islamic, apostasy.

Arxos:

You know of course that the Australian born Wilfred Burchett was clearly Identified as a KGB agent of the Soviet Union by the United States congress-- Your research does show that of course.

arxos:

In all of your latest postings on multiple threads I noticed that you've resorted to shouting - kind of like the immature ego that thinks that talking more loudly than others will solidify his point.

Since you are in Europe and are woefully ignorant of the extent of the Islamic Threat - either by choice (sheer obstinacy) or through some manifestation of perverse psychology, since you obviously have had the opportunity to inform yourself as to its stated agenda - answer just two questions for me, and please, spare me the omnipresent diatribe. One: When the time comes (and it most assuredly will) what will you do - convert or die? Second: At such time, surely you don't expect the U.S. or anyone else outside of your much-vaunted Europe to save your sorry @ss, do you?

arxos,

Facism has many guises. Islam is the current one. If you are in Europe you should find out which direction to pray, because Europe is about to get its second dose of facist rule in the last 100 years. Don't come crying to the states this time.

cheers...

arxos wrote:
"How do you know its not an act supported by US policy"

Arxos is obviously completely ignorant of danger of Jihadi ideology and indulges in conspiracy theory. I invite him to read about Pakistani groups like Tareek e Jafaria, Sipah e sahaba, Lashkar e janghvi, and Lashkar - e- tayyaba who are involved in this mayhem.
Threat due to jihad is not an imagined one. Any discussion on history of imperialism must involve Europe's greed in Asia, Africa and South America but that is a digression for the topic on hand nor is it a threat of the modern day. 'Moderate' muslims and other people with a leftist world view can indulge in conspiracy theories about involvement of America and Jews (or in Pakistan's case - hindus ) when Jihadis cause mayhem. This will only postpone the eventual confrontation with Jihadis and Jihadi ideology and in the end will cause even greater pain for everybody involved. This is a ticking time bomb and if reforms in Islam do not occur soon to confront the Jihadis, Islamic terrorism will precipitate the greatest war of our times.
Not a desirable scenario for anyone involved.
The world will try everything from diluting the Jihadi threat, to pacifism, to ignoring the threat, to blaming America before finally confronting it. But Jihad is not an imagined threat nor are those speaking against it necessarily prejudiced.

naresh c:

Excellent post.

Arxos, please. Wilfred Burchet was a Communist hack of the most shameless Stalinist mold for whom Mao and his minions could do no wrong, and the murder of millions in the names of the Dialectic and Historical Necessity was simply making omelettes. He also may even have aided the North Korean and Chinese interrogations of captured UN personnel in the Korean War (great job for a journalist, no?).

As for US support for the Pol Pot faction of the KR, it wasn't. We passively acquiesced in a deal by which Thailand allowed China to ship arms to Pol Pot's men through Thai territory. The rationale of the Thai government was simple: shiny new Soviet-supplied Viet armor was parked sixty miles from downtown Bangkok, Pol Pot was making Viet Nam bleed, and the USA was headed by Jimmy Carter (aka the Grinning Gargoyle).

Also, don't think Viet Nam and Hun Sen "saved" Cambodia. Before his falling out with his cousin Pol Pot, Hun Sen and his merry men were just as eager to shoot or brain peasants who wanted to keep the family water buffalo and anyone with glasses.

One reason Pol Pothead was able to keep a guerrilla movement going was because every Cambodian peasant was raised on tales of how the Viets, when conquering Khmer Krom (the Mekong Delta) from the Cambodians back in the 18th century, they'd bury three Cambodian prisoners up to their necks in order to make a hearth on which the Viet commander could boil his tea. Hence, the peasantry of western Cambodia was prepared to rally to anyone who would was willing to kill a few "Yuon" (an ancient Khmer epithet for Viets, meaning "savages").

Norodom Sihanouk, who willingly let himself be used by Pol Pot's KR as a propaganda figure even when they were murdering the very peasants who worshipped him as a tevarat (god-king), is a fine one to whine about people who aided Pol Pot. The same man stayed safe from the ravages of war as a guest of North Korea.

Arxos, did you know that other people had histories going long before "we" got involved?

Arxos, re the Greek civil war of the 1940's, the Greek intelligentsia hated America for denying them the wonders of belonging to the Stalinist fraternity, and hates us still more for intervening to stop the slaughter of Bosniaks and Kosova Shkiptars simply for being (realtively lax) Muslims. All I can say is that the Greek intelligentsia richly deserves another 500 years of the Tourkokratia.