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Politics : America Under Siege: The End of Innocence -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Michael Watkins who wrote (8301)	10/22/2001 7:31:55 PM
From: Lola	Respond to of 27716

Well Bayer could sue the Canadian government ... but as you said "we are far too Canadian". Bayer would probably lose. Lola:)

To: Michael Watkins who wrote (8301)	10/22/2001 7:32:55 PM
From: Michael Watkins	Respond to of 27716

Right-wing myths about Islam indexonline.org The capacity for co-existence between Muslim, Christian and Jew is greatly underestimated - it is a tradition that has lasted a millenia. Awardwinning author William Dalrymple puts his own perspective on the Levant. Seidnaya is a Greek Orthodox convent in Syria, three hours walk from Damascus. The monastery sits on a great crag of rock overlooking the orchards and olive groves of the Damascene plain, more like a Crusader castle than a place of worship. A couple of years ago I arrived at the abbey church after eight o'clock on a cold winter's night. Two nuns in black veils were chanting from a lectern, while a priest, hidden behind the iconostasis, echoed their chants in a deep reverberating bass. The only light came from a few flickering lamps on gold chains. Inside the church, the congregation consisted almost entirely of heavily bearded Muslim men and their shrouded wives. As the priest circled the altar with his thurible, filling the sanctuary with great clouds of incense, the men bobbed up and down on their prayer mats as if in the middle of Friday prayers in a great mosque. Their women mouthed prayers from the shadows. A few, closely watching the Christian women, went up to the icons hanging from the pillars; they kissed them, then lit a candle and placed it in front of the image. At the end of the service I saw a Muslim couple approach one of the nuns. The woman was veiled - only her nose and mouth were visible through the black wraps; her husband, a burly man who wore his straggly beard without a moustache, looked remarkably like the wilder sort of Hezbollah commander. He handed a heavy tin of olive oil and a large plastic basin full of fresh bread to the nun as an offering, bowing his head shyly. It was an extraordinary sight, yet this was, of course, the old way: the Eastern Christians, the Jews and the Muslims have lived side by side in the Levant for nearly one and a half millennia and have only been able to do so due to a degree of mutual tolerance and shared customs unimaginable in the solidly Christian West. I have been thinking of Seidnaya a lot since the atrocity at the World Trade Center. Since then we have seen the right-wing 'quality press' and the tabloids forming an unholy alliance, united in virulent Islamophobia, as a hundred instant experts in Islam have popped up to offer their views on a religion few seem to have encountered in person. Conrad Black's Daily Telegraph has been the cheerleader of this tendency. It has printed a whole series of leaders and comment pieces denouncing Islam, while always being careful (like the anti-Semite who begins his sentence with "Some of my best friends are Jewish but...") to state that the Fundamentalists and Terrorists do not of course represent the views of 'decent Muslims'. [mw: this does not surprise me, I don't subscribe to any of his papers and am not sad to see him leave Canada. Its one of the few things that I agree with Jean Chretien on!. I am quite conservative myself and semi-active politically, but I could never subscribe to his views. Conservatism is not a synonym for intolerance, although unfortunately too many 'conservatives' make it so.] So we have seen Patrick Sookhdeo explain to Daily Telegraph readers that Islam is, uniquely, a "religion that sanctions all forms of violence" (which apart from anything else makes one wonder if Mr Sookdeo has ever read the Old Testament). Daniel Johnson has meanwhile been telling us that Islamic fundamentalists "dream of a world purged of unbelievers", while in The Times Michael Gove has been writing pieces almost every day warning of the danger from those fanatical Muslim hordes: "They are already there in their thousands. And they are not going to respect weakness any more than Lenin did". The image these writers are projecting of Islam is a ludicrously inaccurate and one-sided one. Anti-Muslim racism now seems to be replacing anti-Semitism as the principal Western expression of bigotry against 'the other': while the thugs of the thirties would terrorize the unfortunate East End Jews, their modern skinhead successors go 'Paki bashing'. Nor is it just a Western problem. Rabbi Meir Kahane in Israel said: "The Arabs are a cancer, cancer, cancer in the midst of us... let me become defence minister for two months and you will not have a single cockroach around here! I promise you a clean Israel! " Bal Thackeray in Bombay ranted: "I believe in constructive violence... these people must be kicked out. Even if a Hindu is giving shelter to these Muslims he also must be shot dead". The massacres of unarmed Muslims in Bosnia never led to a stream of pieces about the violence and repressive tendencies of Christianity. Equally the extraordinary size and diversity of the Islamic world should caution against lazy notions of a united, aggressive, repressive Islam acting in concert against "the Judeo-Christian West". Islam is no more cohesive than Christendom: neither is it a single, rational, antagonistic force. There is no such thing as 'the Muslim mind' - anti-democratic, terrorist, primaeval in its behaviour, or however else it is portrayed - any more than one can talk usefully of the rational, peace-loving Christian mind. Clumsy Western interference in the Islamic world almost always strengthens the hands of the fundamentalists and the conservatives against those who represent more liberal and enlightened interpretations of Islam. Already we are seeing Pakistan being pushed to the verge of an Islamic revolution. Insensitive rhetoric, like the use by President Bush of the word Crusade, can only aggrandise the Islamists, fatally weakening the secular states of the region. Most Muslim states would support a precise surgical assault on Bin Laden's al-Qaeda network; they would not put up with a major ground war in Afghanistan or Iraq.

To: Michael Watkins who wrote (8301)	10/23/2001 12:56:53 AM
From: Runner	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 27716

"The government is not in the business of breaking trade and intellectual property laws in order to get "its price". Of course you saw on National TV that $600.00 worth of Cipro costs $20.00 in India? And Bayer still makes a profit! Amazing. I would not cry too much for Bayer. Americans always pay too much for our drugs. And our Senior Citizens often die because the inflated American prices are too high. I am sure no one wants a lot of Americans to die for lack of "over priced" medicine? We have millions of aliens within our borders because of big business, and little business wanted cheap labor. And they did not want them to be traced easily, and that has bitten all Americans in the ass. Now we do not know who lives here among us in America. But we have cheap fruit and waiters and cooks and other jobs have been filled that were too hard or dirty for "us" to do. Some of you have your nannies and handy men. And we have a cancer among us that will be very expensive to root out. Its price has already been too much. 6,000 and counting....