POLL: The repercussions of a US attack on Iraq

[hapaboy]

Fairplay, just to humor you I'm going to reply to your post, tedious though it may be.

Quote from fairplay:
Okay, if you need to know: Islam is the world's first religion which gave women rights. To this day catholic women eg cannot become priests, not by law, just because some men decided on that.

Is this the best you can come up with that Muslim women are treated as well as American/Western women?
Pathetic. You cannot deny that mistreatment of Muslim women (e.g., honor killing, rape, judicial corporal punishment, forced marriages, domestic violence), is widespread in many Muslim societies today, not to mention the forced wearing of a veil, exclusion from the most basic and menial of jobs, etc., etc. The list goes on and on. How can you refute that Western/American women have much greater freedoms, opportunities, and, let's be honest, much less fear for their lives and general well-being? And oh, Fairplay, how many Muslim clerics out there are women? Hmm?

The US election process is a joke, and you know it. Get real, man, those scenes of people holding poll papers up against the lamp to see which hole was punched are undignified! I still do not understand why this guy won and not the other guy. And you too cannot explain that miracle to me.

It's not a miracle, really, but trying to explain it to you would be a lost cause. It was an incredibly close election, and the appropriate process, flawed as it may have been, was followed to decide the winner. Bush could have won by a landslide and you would probably claim the election was rigged, as it usually is in your country.

Yes, the electoral process in most Asian countries is not up to standards, but that is because the rulers want it that way, not the people.

EXACTLY! So when are "the people" going to have enough and change the status quo? Or are you waiting for the US to come and free you?

No, I have not been to the US and unless I win big money, I never will be going there. But I have been to Australia.

So let me get this straight: You have never been to the US, but you have been to Australia. This somehow qualifies you to state that the US has "no culture"? Gee, I've never been to Spain, or Russia, or Myanmar. I guess those countries have no culture either, huh?

(Referring to Wild)

why do you concentrate on one guy who - you must admit that - shows you certain unpleasant truths!

I'm not concentrating on him at all. He's a mere distraction now, and a minor one at that. The only unpleasant truth he has revealed to me and this entire board, other than you, is what a jackass he is.

Maybe not to you in your cushy airconditioned comfort somewhere in the US!

So now I'm supposed to apologize that I have air conditioning? Should Americans apologize because they happen to have a higher standard of living than you? Don't blame us for living in a society that enables the individual to accomplish his or her dreams. To be honest, Fairplay, I think much of your discontent stems from a jealousy of the freedoms we enjoy and the standard of living we are able to achieve because of those freedoms. Perhaps it's not so much a political issue with you as it is a rich v.s. poor issue.

I said the time under President Suharto is rememberd by most people in Java as a time of peace. Despite corruption.

No Fairplay, this is what you said:

A few words on corrupt governments: sure, by your standards all Indonesian Presidents were "corrupt", but ask any of your Indonesian "friends": most of the Suharto era was a time of stability for the majority of the Javanese

You have obviously accepted corruption as part of Indonesian society, and see it as the price of stability. What a shame....then you refute that the US is less corrupt than yours! Your presidency has been openly corrupt for decades, as has your judiciary, military, police, corporate sector, etc. It would take pages and pages of Wild-like cutting and pasting to document how corrupt your society is. The difference is that when it happens in the US, it's considered a rarity. When it happens in your country, it is considered the norm.

On my favoring Malaysian-like capital punishment for drug dealers and smugglers, you say

Does that significantly reduce the drug problem in Malaysia? Why are there still people caught with drugs and not hanged?

Regular users are not hanged. You have to have been caught with a certain amount. And as for people still using drugs, there will always be drug users no matter what the penalty.
On my favoring the withholding of aid to a country until it cleans up its own act by cracking down on drug manufacturing and exporting, you say

You're a bullshitter, man, you have no idea, and your quick fix solutions are dangerously close to those of some fascist leaders' !

Why is it FASCIST for a country to demand a reasonable exchange of some kind for aid money? Should the US just give out billions of dollars and ask nothing in return? Would you give me a fortune just because I stuck my hand out and demanded it?

Take care of yourself Fairplay. I have to go now and increase the amount of lovely cold air emanating from my air conditioner. I'm sure you'll keep the hot air coming though...

 

[stu]

Quote from OPTIONAL777:



Their range of the weapons is irrelevant.

A breach of a contract is a breach of a contract.

UN officials said it did not immediately appear that the munitions were accounted for in Iraq's 12,000-page declaration of its arsenal last December 8, an omission that could represent a breach of security council resolutions.
A minor or a major infraction is yet an infraction. Do the crime, do the time.

Rationalization of the facts of a violation just shows the intention of Wild....and a minimization of the range of the weapons is a subtle attempt to support Saddam.

If there is a minor infraction by the Americans, in his mind it is front page news....and requires damnation and immediate action.

It is this kind of bias that is the hallmark of a small minded, closed minded thinker.

Typical of the costant propaganda machine known as Wild.

[WIld] adjective
(*wie-uld *w`/lde* \ old english, [*wi-old], \ old worn out) ( also known as a [Fairplay"not"] )

pronounced: p-a-r-r-o-t

definition:

1. serial fly poster on Elite Boards.
2. unable to think for ones self.
3. Posting marked by extreme lack of restraint or control
4. The systematic and continuous use of others words in place of own.
5. Unaware or concerned of any b.s. usually resident the text of others.
6. the continuous attempt to gain credence off the kudos of other people..
7. attention seeker.

Noun [ A Wild] : Unable to speak for oneself. (as in "you are a wild man, can't you say something for yourself?)

Adverb: in a wild-way :
To cut & paste in an uncontrolled and rampant manner

 

[goldenarm]

Good one, Stu! LMAO!!

 

[fairplay]

Oh my, Hapaboy, if I am not mistaken, this entire thread is on the repercussions of a US attack on Iraq, but, tedious as it may be, let me respond:

 

[TM_Direct]

The germans attempted and succeeded to a large degree with ethnic cleansing....The french handed over their Jews in order to save themselves.....My neighbor growing up had a tattoo on his arm because he had the audacity to be jewish in France , he was handed over....Ask former NY Mayor Ed Koch how he feels about the French....he has called for american boycotts of the French because of their roles in the atrocities of wwii and their over all cowardly ways.....By the way, The Germans are not any different now then before....Why do you think we have all those U.S troops still stationed in Europe? We know that they will march again....As far as Dresden...I feel we didn't do enough....we should have dropped some Atoms on them as well, but we are way too nice. One of the big reasons they were bombed like that was to let them and their people suffer the affects of war and to let them know we weren't screwing around anymore. You see, war is a bad thing ...there's only2 purposes of war: To break things and kill people...That's why everyone trys to avoid it....Except of course the Germans...and Saddam....if he cared for his people he would comply and or leave. They are also cowardly racist pigs who still have not been punished enough for the atrocities of ww2....It's ok though , they are going to get theres....The French too....That oil tanker attack in Yemen was just the begriming....On a sdie note, when ethnic clasnig was taking place in Europe in the 1990's in Yugoslavia and the surrounding countries, what did Europe do? They looked to the US...why couldn't they handle the problem? they didn't want to...Let the US come in with $$ and lives and do it. Cowards..By the way, when are the French and Germans and the rest of Europe going to pay back the money they borrowed form the US? And the reperarations? Just curious...Cheap Cowards

 

[TM_Direct]

www.theshredder.com


http://www.theshredder.com/archive/boycott.htm

 

[TM_Direct]

France Confronts the Holocaust

U.S.-France Analysis, December 2001

Jean-Marc Dreyfus, Institut d'Etudes Politiques, Paris


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On 8 November 2001, a New York judge threw out a legal suit filed in New York against the S.N.C.F., France's state-owned railway company. Filed in September 2000 by Holocaust survivors, the legal suit sought compensation for the company's role in transporting 76,000 French Jews to German labor and extermination camps under Vichy, the collaborationist government that ruled France during German occupation from 1940 to 1944. It was only the latest of a number of cases filed in US courts against French companies that profited from the plight of Jews during World War II. In December 1998, a court in Brooklyn New York opened a class action suit against seven major French banks (Banque Paribas, Credit Lyonnais, Societe Generale, Credit Commercial de France, Credit Agricole Indosuez, Natexis and Banque Nationale de Paris) as well as two American banks, JP Morgan and Chase Manhattan, for not opening their financial records on the war period to Jewish complainants. The case followed a similar suit filed in US courts against Swiss banks holding Holocaust-era assets.
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"The Mattéoli Commission embodies France's new political and public openness to facing the legacy of Vichy."

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In March 1997, the government of Alain Juppé responded to these growing concerns by creating a special task force, the Mattéoli Commission, to investigate allegations against French companies. Despite its apparent success, the Mattéoli Commission has come under criticism in the United States from the World Jewish Congress and other Jewish groups. In September 1999, two members of the Matteoli Commission, Claire Andrieu and Ady Steg (President of Alliance Israélite de France) testified before the US Congress' Committee on Banking and Finance in hearings about the location of Holocaust-era Jewish assets.1 The questioning was acrimonious, with witnesses, experts, and members of the congressional commission in effect accusing the French Jewish leadership of "collaborating" too closely with the French Government. As part of an out-of-court settlement, the French banks worked with the Mattéoli Commission to establish a $50 million fund to compensate victims of French banks under the Vichy regime. The agreement was signed in Washington D.C. in February 2001.

Remembering the Holocaust

Such accusations echo a long-standing American concern that the French have not come to terms with their role in the Holocaust. This criticism took root in the 1970s, when the American historian Robert Paxton showed in his 1972 book, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, that France's wartime Government enjoyed a certain degree of autonomy in its collaboration with the German occupation. Under the leadership of Marshall Pétain, the Vichy government initiated a rightist "National Revolution" that pursued France's own antisemitic policies. Negotiating with the German occupying forces, the French Government aided in the rounding up of Jews to be delivered to Nazi death camps. At the time of Paxton's book, France's antisemitic past had received little study or acknowledgement. Today, however, this situation has changed. Vichy is neither taboo nor forgotten in today's France; it is indeed an item of permanent news.
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See additional
research on France

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France over the past two decades has undertaken a heated public and political debate on the history of French antisemitism, the Vichy regime, and French collaboration in the Holocaust. The debate on French anti-Semitism was fueled arguably in 1990, when the ancient Jewish cemetary in Capentras, Provence, was desecrated by a group of five neo-Nazi youths. The recently buried body of Felix Germon was exhumed and impaled on a beach umbrella. Public response to the event was massive. A demonstration against antisemitism held in Paris brought out an estimated one million protestors–an enormous number for a country with only 60 million inhabitants.

The ensuing debate has focused in part on the issue of public access to historical documents on the Holocaust. On November 1991 Serge Klarsfeld, a French Nazi hunter and President of the organization "Sons and Daughters of the Jewish Deportees of France," claimed to have found the so-called "Jewish file" in the basement of the Veterans Ministry. This file, compiled by the Paris Police following the census of October 1940, was supposed to identify all Jews living in France. A commission of historians later found that the real file had actually been destroyed in 1948. But the case raised a question around public access to government documents on the Vichy regime.

The debate became heated in 1994, when the book Archives Interdite ("Closed Archives") by Sonia Combes accused the French government archival service of restricting public access to historical documents about Vichy and other difficult periods of French history.2 She proposed that a combination of insufficient funding and a specific effort to avoid scandal had combined to limit access to wartime archives. The debate on access to archives soon spread to the Algerian War, in which the French security services and army used torture on prisoners. Following a heated public discussion and the commissioning of several government reports, access to Vichy-period archives were eventually eased. A new law improving access to France's historic archives has been drafted, but not yet passed.

The Legacy of Vichy

 

[TM_Direct]

A series of high-profile trials also helped to raise public awareness of the French role in the Holocaust. Indeed the decade of the 1990s saw the first and perhaps last "crimes against humanity" trials for the persecution of Jews under Vichy. Klaus Barbie, former head of the Gestapo in Lyon, was put on trial in 1992. The prosecution showed that he was responsible for the arrest of Jewish children sheltered in a safe house in Izieux. All forty-four children were deported to Auschwitz. Paul Touvier, one of the leaders of the French Militia, was tried in Versailles in 1994 for organizing the killing of Jewish men in Rieux-la-Pape, near Lyon. Maurice Papon, the former Prefect of Bordeaux under Vichy, was tried in 1997-1998 for the deportation of 2,000 Jews.

While all of these cases were widely discussed, none received more attention than that of René Bousquet. Assasinated in 1993, before he could go to trial, Bousquet was accused of coordinating with the Gestapo to organize the largest round-up of Jews in Paris. In July 1942, 13,000 Jews were gathered at the Vel' d'Hiv' bicycle stadium in the 15th Arrondisement, from which they were shipped to French transit camps, and from there to Auschwitz. Part of the public's attention focused on the French justice system. The French press had reported Bousquet's role in the Vel' d'Hiv' round-up as early as 1978, but it took twelve years for French courts to take up the case filed by French Jewish organizations.

The French debate over wartime collaboration and resistance was embodied in the scandal that arose around François Mitterrand, French President from 1981 to 1995. In a 1994 biography of Mitterrand, A French Youth, author Pierre Péan described the president's support for Vichy and Marshall Pétain during the German occupation.3 The book revealed that Mitterrand had been both a civil servant in the Vichy regime and a leader of the French Resistance. Indeed he had held both positions at the same time for several months in 1943. (By 1944 he had become the head of RNPG, a Resistance group that helped to organize the prisoners' resistance networks.) As a politician, Mitterrand had always denied his participation in the Vichy regime. He was not insensitive to the Jewish suffering under Vichy. In 1993, he established a national day of commemoration for the persecution of Jews–it would be held on July 16, the day of the Vel' d'Hiv roundup. But he did not harshly condemn Vichy. He ordered, for example, that flowers be placed on Marshall Pétain's grave on Armistice Day, commemorating his service in World War I. His response to A French Youth embodied this ambivalence. On September 12, 1994, he gave a prime-time televised interview in which he tried to justify his past while also refusing to recognize his own personal responsibility.

A New Climate of Reconciliation

President Mitterrand was the last French politician to have actively served under Vichy, and with his death the public debate around Vichy has changed. President Jacques Chirac, elected in 1995, moved to recognize the responsibility of the French state for its treatment of Jews during the occupation. Prime Minister Jospin has similarly acknowledged the moral necessity of recognizing the role that the French state played. Together they have created a political environment that has made it easier for France to confront the challenges raised by the recent court cases.

The Mattéoli Commission embodies France's new political and public openness to facing the legacy of Vichy. With support from Chirac and Jospin, the Commission is non-partisan. It began by convening members, including historians, leaders of the Jewish community, and representatives of the administration, who hired 120 researchers, all paid by the French state. They produced 12 different reports on the Jewish experience during Vichy. An important outcome of this work, following the Commission's recommendations, has been the establishment of a Fondation de la Mémoire de la Shoah (Foundation for Remembrance), announced in April 2000. It is endowed with 2.4 billion francs ($342 million), the estimated total value of assets that have not yet been returned to their Jewish owners. It is now the largest charitable foundation in France. Part of the funds were contributed by French banks and insurance companies, part by the state-run Caisse des dépôts et consignations, and the rest by the government itself. The Foundation is headed by Simone Veil, a former Minister of Health, former president of the European Parliament, and an Auschwitz survivor. It has the goal of improving public knowledge of the persecution of Jews in France and raising the awareness on crimes against humanity.

Although some Americans remain skeptical of the role that the French state is playing in the reconciliation process, the majority of French Jews are satisfied with the work of the Mattéoli Commission. They feel that the French state has done a good job in letting historians conduct research with sufficient independence and time to arrive at a credible assessment of France's Vichy past. Numerous of them followed this trend and started to investigate their family's past: the Commission in charge of individual claims has received more than 7000 requests.

 

[fairplay]

What is your problem TM? The whole world is turning against the US like it was against Germany in the 1940s.

Don't always harp on that Jewish thing: yes, the holocaust was a horrible crime and all those who were involved in committing it should have died with the back to the wall and not in bed.

I do not want to get into that numbers game, but do you realise that the more the world population grows, the more there are crimes committed, sometimes on so-called "racial" grounds. Or religious, Or call it ethnic. How many people do you think died as a consequence of the partition of India after independence in 1947? More than in connection with WW2? And they died for "religious" reasons: hindus vs. moslems!

Sorry, I am fed up with this old badgering about other people being racist, I am not interested. For me there is only one race, the human race. And if you keep talking about some European leaders' past, you move this discussion away from the subject: "The repercussions of a US attack in Iraq"! That is the issue here.

Or do you really want to hear all those sob stories again on people who get bounced off planes in the US because they look suspiciously Arab?

 

[TM_Direct]

First of all, you came in late so go back and read posts about how we got into the europe discussion...In fact, you said it best yourself when you said " the whole world is against the U.S" in the war w/ Iraq...That's why im pointing out that i really don't care what Europe thinks because they are self serving, racist cowards? ...Secondly, I really don't know what plane bouncing has to do with this but Im sure it's connected somehow...good point?
Lastly, Can you tell me who in this "whole world against us" matters? Russia? France? China? Italy ( don't get me started onthose cowards either ) Saudi? Iran? Spain? who is it that really matters when it comes to MY best interest? name me a country that really matters? Now, after you name the country ask yourself: Have they EVER taken our side in an issue before? My point has been to point out that 95% of Europe are cowardly pigs who have wreaked havoc for century's on this earth and I don't care what they think. Thanks for the update on India's Hindu and Muslin war.....im starting to notice a pattern here....Can the muslims live in peace? They fight with Jews, hindus, christians, each other....just an observation