I responded because your post was annoying
as to this "You describe the ME as a horrible place where people simply want to kill each other. You've obviously have never been to the ME. You get most of your information from Fox news...come on admit it. The people of the middle east want the same things that you and your family want...peace."
let's just look at some of the events of the last 50 years in that region:
On October 26, 1954, an assassination attempt against Nasser failed. In December six members of the Muslim Brotherhood were hanged for their alleged roles in the plot.
In September, 1955, Egypt's Nasser purchased $200 million worth of Soviet made arms from Czechoslovakia
Also in 1955, civil war broke out in the Sudan between the mostly Muslim north and the mostly Christian and animist south.
On October 29, 1956, the second Arab-Israeli War (also referred to as "The Suez War") broke out with Israel, Great Britain, and France arrayed against Egypt and aiming to depose Nasser.
On July 25, 1957, the Bey of Tunis was deposed bringing monarchy to an end in Tunisia.
On July 14, 1958, a military coup led by Gen. Abd al-Kareem Qasim overthrew the monarchy in Iraq. King Faisal II, who had reigned from 1953 - 1958, the crown prince, and Nuri al-Said were all executed.
In 1958, the first Lebanese civil war erupted between Muslim and Christian groups
In 1958, there was a military coup in the Sudan.
On October 7 1959, a Ba'athist assassination team, including Saddam Hussein, wounded but failed to kill Qasim (Qasim would not be so lucky the next in 1963). Saddam was exiled to Egypt until 1963.
On May 27, 1960 in Turkey, the military staged a coup
In September 1961 , a coup by right wing military officers reestablished Syrian independence from Egypt
In September, 1962, a Yemeni army coup deposed the imam (N. Yemen). Civil war broke out.
In 1962, Egyptian agents failed in a bid to assassinate Jordan's King Hussein (they had tried and failed in 1960, too).
In March 1963, Ba'ath Party members in the Syrian army, including Hafez al-Asad, seized power
In Iraq on February 8-9, 1963, Ba'athists overthrew General Abd al-Karim Qasim and executed him. There was a Ba'athist reign of terror against the Kurds.
From August 20- 25, 1963, Israeli and Syrian forces battled in the DMZ north of the Sea of Galilee. A UN ceasefire brought hostilities to a halt.
1964 The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was founded in Cairo.
In 1964, the reign of King Faisal began in Saudi Arabia and ended in 1975 when he was assassinated
On June 19, 1965, Algeria's leader, Ahmed Ben Bella was forced out in a coup by Hawari Boumedienne backed up by the army.
In 1965, India attacked Pakistan in their ongoing dispute over Kashmir.
1966 On February 23, Syria's ruling Ba'ath Party staged an internal purge led by Hafez al-Asad who became the new minister of defense.
Egyptian Islamist writer Sayyid Qutb was hanged by the Nasser regime on August 29, 1966.
Also in 1966, Michel Aflaq and Salah al-Din al-Bitar, co-founders of the Ba'ath Party, were purged by the Ba'athist regime in Syria and went into exile.
1967 The Third Arab-Israeli War broke out on June 5.
1967, Egypt's Nasser withdrew from (North) Yemen (where Egypt had become embroiled in a futile effort to prop up a revolutionary regime since 1962).
On July 23, 1968, the PLO hijacked an El AL flight from Rome to Lod.
In 1968, Marxists took control in South Yemen. In 1968, there were two bloodless military coups in Iraq. Saddam Hussein emerged as strong man at the head of Ba'ath ("renaissance") Party.
in 1969, Col. Muamar Qaddafi led a successful coup against the monarchy of Libya.
1970 In the late spring, PLO guerrillas were suspected to have been behind a June 9 plot to assassinate Jordanian King Hussein. Palestinians constituted more than half the population of Jordan
Then, between September 7 and 9, four commercial airliners (one Swiss, two American, and one British) were hijacked by Palestinian guerrillas in Jordan, and the passengers and crews held hostage.
On March 12, 1971, the Turkish army deposed Prime Minister Demirel claiming his government was unable to maintain law and order. Martial law was imposed and civil liberties were curtailed.
In 1971, civil war broke out between East and West Pakistan
On July 17, 1973 in Afghanistan, former Prime Minister Sardar Mohammed Daud deposed his cousin and brother-in-law King Zahir Shah who had ruled since 1933.
October 6 - 24, 1973: The Fourth Arab-Israeli War.
Afghanistan's constitutional monarchy was overthrown in 1974. The country began a gradual slide into chaos
In 1974, a group called the Islamic Liberation Organization attempted a coup d'état in Egypt
in 1974, Turkey invaded Cyprus
In 1975, Lebanon erupted in civil war that lasted until 1989.
1976 Palestinian commandos hijacked an Air France airliner bound from Tel Aviv to Paris, and diverted it to Uganda, landing at Entebbe
In August, 1976, Syria intervened in Lebanon's civil war.
In Pakistan on July 5, 1977, martial law was imposed by General Zia-ul-Haq who overthrew Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto
In April, 1978, a communist coup took place in Afghanistan
1979 Revolution broke out in Iran
On April 4, 1979, former Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto of Pakistan was executed by the military government of General Zia al-Haq.
On November 4, 1979, the American embassy in Tehran was seized by Iranian students
On November 20, 1979, several hundred dissident Wahhabis led by Juhayman al-Utaybi seized and briefly held the Grand Mosque in Mecca. Saudi Arabia executed sixty three of the conspirators following what was seen as a direct challenge to Saudi authority over the holiest mosque in Islam.
On September 12, 1980, the Turkish military carried out a coup d'état
On September 22, 1980, Iraq invaded Iran initiating the Gulf Wars period.
On October 6, 1981, during the annual holiday parade (see 1973 War) Sadat was assassinated by radical Muslim fundamentalists
1982 In February, Syrian government troops and tanks led by Rifaat al-Asad (the President's brother) crushed an uprising in the central Syrian city of Hama
in 1982 2,500 Islamists suspected of plotting the overthrow of the Egyptian government were in jail along with most of the 1,600 arrested by President Anwar Sadat in the security sweep shortly before his assassination in 1981
On April 6, 1985, there was an army coup in the Sudan. Numeiri, who had been president since 1971, was ousted.
On September 25, 1985, PLO commandos murdered Israeli citizens in Cyprus.
On October 7, 1985, Palestinian commandos led by Muhammad ("Abu") Abbas hijacked the cruise ship Achille Lauro killing a handicapped American passenger, Leon Klinghoffer
Later that fall, Palestinian commandos from the Abu Nidal cell killed nineteen passengers in attacks on airports in Vienna and Rome.
On April 17, a 32 year old Jordanian, Nizar Hindawi, was arrested in London for planting a bomb in the suitcase of his pregnant Irish girlfriend who had planned to take an El Al flight to Israel
1987 Iranian troops besieged Basra
In May 1987, an Iraqi fighter mistakenly attacked the U.S. frigate Stark, launching a missile that killed 17 U.S. sailors
On July 31, 1987, tensions between Shiite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia, especially acute since the Iranian revolution, led to a riot during the hajj ("pilgrimage") that left more than 400 dead
On November 7, 1987, the aged President of Tunisia, Habib Bourguiba, was deposed by his prime minister, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali
1988 On March 17, 1988, upwards of 5,000 residents of the Kurdish town of Halabja in northern Iraq near the border of Iran died from a gas attack carried out by Saddam Hussein's forces
In March 1988, PLO commandos attacked an Israeli commuter bus in the Negev desert killing five Israelis
On December 21, 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 was blown out of the sky over Lockerbie, Scotland by a bomb on board killing all 258 passengers and crew. The bomb was believed to have been planted in Frankfurt, and set to go off en route between London and New York. An Iranian group claimed responsibility
On February 14, 1989, Iran's spiritual leader Ayatollah Khomeni issued a fatwa (Islamic legal "opinion") calling on Muslims to execute London-based writer Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses, and his publishers at Viking Penguin
In April 1989, riots erupted in Jordan
On October 16 1989, riots broke out in East Jerusalem in response to provocations by Orthodox Jews who attempted to lay a cornerstone for the new temple at the Haram
es-Sharif
On November 24, 1989, radical Palestinian university professor and member of the Muslim Brotherhood Abdullah Azzam was assassinated by unknown assailants in Afghanistan
1990 On February 4, assailants armed with rifles and grenades attacked an Israeli tour bus en route from Rafa to Cairo killing 8 and wounding 17.
On August 2, 1990, Saddam Hussein's Iraqi troops occupied Kuwait and massed along the border between Kuwait and Saudi Arabia
On October 8, 1990, riots broke out on the Temple Mount as Palestinians rained stones down upon Jews at the Western Wall observing the feast of Sukkot
On October 21, a deranged 19 year old Palestinian, Omar Abu Sirhan, stabbed to death three Jews in Jerusalem in retaliation for the Temple Mount killings.
Also in December, nearly 100 people were killed in Muslim-Hindu rioting in the Indian cities of Aligarh and Hyderabad
On February 24, 1991, the U.S. initiated a ground assault to drive Iraqi troops out of Kuwait. Kuwait was liberated three days later on the February 27.
in 1992 in Egypt, violent confrontations between Coptic Christians and Islamist members of al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya ("the Islamic group"), who wanted to overthrow the regime and replace it with "Islamic" rule, spilled over into pitched battles with police. In June, outspoken Egyptian intellectual Farag Foda had been assassinated by Muslim extremists in Cairo. By the end of the year, extremists had begun targeting tourists in an attempt to cripple one of the pillars of the Egyptian economy and bring the government to its knees.
On December 6, 1992 in Ayodhya, India, in the worst violence India had seen since Partition in 1947, a mob of three hundred thousand nationalist Hindus destroyed the Babri Masjid (mosque),
In March 1993, the World Trade Center was bombed by a militant Arab group
From March 12 -19, 1993, India was torn by riots in Bombay and Calcutta in the aftermath of the destruction of the Babri Masjid (mosque) in Ayodhya by Hindu nationalists. 1,200 were killed.
On June 26, 1993, U.S. President Clinton ordered a missile attack (23 Tomahawk missiles) on Iraqi intelligence headquarters in Baghdad in retaliation for an alleged plot by Iraqi agents to assassinate former President George Bush as he visited Kuwait in April.
On October 4, a Palestinian drove a booby trapped car filled with explosives into an Israeli bus in the West Bank wounding 29.
On November 17 (al-Juma al-Aswad - "Black Friday"), PNA police killed 14 HAMAS followers and wounded 100 in a shootout at a Gaza mosque.
In October, France suffered the eighth in a wave of bomb attacks since July (most of them in Paris) which had killed seven and wounded over one hundred. Claims of responsibility came from Algerian Islamist militants.
On October 26, Islamic Jihad founder Fathi Shaqaqi was gunned down in Malta
in November, 1995, seven people were killed (five Americans and two Indians) and 60 injured in an explosion at a car park near a U.S.- run military training center in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
1996 On January 5, Yahya Ayyash, known as "The Engineer" and believed to be the mastermind behind a wave of Islamic suicide bombings against Israel, was killed in the Gaza Strip when his cell phone blew up.
In 1996, reports from Afghanistan indicated that the Taliban, a Muslim revivalist student movement that controlled one third of the country, had unleashed a reign of terror on Herat and other areas
On May 31, Saudi Arabia beheaded four men found guilty of the November, 1995 bomb attack in Riyadh. Their confessions included claims that they had been members of Afghan mujihadeen militias which had fought in the insurgency
Also in May, 1996, a bloodless coup took place in Qatar. Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, 46 years old, seized power from his conservative father.
On June 26, 1996, a massive truck bomb exploded outside a U.S. military dormitory in Dharan, Saudi Arabia killing nineteen Americans and wounding several hundred others.
In August, riots occurred in Jordan
On September 26, 1996, Afghanistan's Taliban Islamic militia took control of the capital Kabul and declared it would enforce an Islamic system in the country.
On June 18, 1997 in Turkey, the Erbakan government was forced out of office by the army (which had a history of intervening in the civil political life of the country
On July 27, three months after the Taliban appeared to be cementing their control over the last remaining pockets of resistance to their Islamist regime in Afghanistan, they suffered a series of defeats and fell back along a battle front just north of the capital, Kabul.
In Algeria on August 28, 1997, at least 300 citizens of the village of Rais, south of Algiers, were massacred by attackers who slit their throats, decapitated many of them leaving the heads on doorsteps, and then burned their bodies.
On November 17, fifty eight foreign tourists were massacred by a band of six militants claiming to be members of the Jamaat al-Islamiyya ("The Islamic Group") as well as Jihad Talaat Al Fath ("Holy War of the Vanguard of the Conquest"), a combination of "Talaa Al Fath" and its parent group "Jihad." The incident took place at the Temple of Hatshepsut in Luxor, Egypt.
In Afghanistan in 1998, the ruling Taliban Muslim militia banned kite flying and television. Home schooling for girls older than eight years old was decreed illegal. Women and girls were forbidden to study, work, receive medical care, or leave their homes.
On August 21, 1998, dozens of United States Tomahawk Cruise Missiles destroyed a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan (believed to be manufacturing chemicals used in nerve gas), and alleged terrorist training camps in Afghanistan.
in August, 1998, Afghanistan's Taliban carried out a massacre of Shiites in and around Hazara. The U.N. estimated 5,000 - 6,000 were killed.
in May, 1999, India and Pakistan began a new round of hostilities in their fifteen year old border war over Kashmir.
In August of 1999, Islamic Wahhabi militants took over parts of the Russian province of Dagestan and declared the region an "Islamic state."
2000 On January 2, fighting broke out between Muslims and Christians in the mostly Christian Egyptian village of Kosheh. Twenty two were killed, most of them Coptic Christians.
~peace loving? where do YOU get your info from? |
