Hi JohnM; Re: "In short, you cannot get from the assertion that Arafat lies, to an observation that something called "Arab culture" has no concept of truth. Hard to even type that."
This should be intrinsically obvious. A simple examination of Arabic words in English will lead to this inescapable conclusion. "Algebra", for example, is a technique used by pedants to assign poor grades to hard working athletes. God knows that "alcohol" has been a scourge of our society, and who invented that, along with early chemistry?
Everyone knows that accountants are liars almost as famous as lawyers, and what do they use? That's right, "arabic" numbers are in all those Enron documents. The Moslems have contributed "zero" (from arabic "sifr") to mathematics.
The real horror is that after mankind expands into space we're going to have to live around stars that were named by these same liars, who wasted their time recording the stars in almanacs: Aldebaran, Algol, Rigel, etc. We need to rename these with some good Anglo Saxon names.
-- Carl
P.S. And if the earth drifts into another ice age (presumably because of insufficient posts on the subject by Maurice Winn), we'll have the "albedo" to blame. Probably a plot by Saudi Arabia to improve its climate. |
