Discussion for article #231231
In 1980, we considered this such a good thing that we didn’t bother to report the actions of these freedom fighters. They were the equivalent of our founding fathers, after all.
This is what happens when a country makes no effort to keep heavy weaponry out of the hands of extremists. It’s an object lesson we’re cheerfully ignoring here at home, at our peril.
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This is why I don’t object to drones. If the number of potential civilian casualties is equal to or less that the number the targets have or will have killed then do it. It’s the mathematics of misery.
Since we’ve been droning Pakistan, has the Pakistani Taliban become weaker, or stronger?
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Any nincompoop who wants to paint all Muslims with the same brush (yes, I am talking to you, Bill Maher) just lost a couple of miles an hour off that fastball. I am pretty sure all those kids and teachers were Muslims.
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It’s helpful to try to understand views you don’t agree with, and I can understand how religious fundamentalists would oppose education. But attacking a school, killing children, why a person would think that was a good thing—that I don’t understand.
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There is no gOD.
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So, I assume you have a source for that? No, of course not. Because it was never reported.
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Surely you’re not suggesting that Christian extremists could convince themselves that Gawd will be well-pleased with them if they to slaughter children! I’m shocked, shocked by the very idea that anyone could believe such a thing, which has never happened at any time in the last two millenia millenium five hundred years century decade year fifteen minutes.
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What? to kill children?!
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I think Red was being somewhat unliteral with his comment. But the groups that make up the Taliban and the early al Qaeda are the same Mujahiddin Reagan funded, trained and armed against the Soviets in the 1980s and they were committing atrocities back then even if it wasn’t shooting up schools. But we ignored them just like we ignored the Contra’s atrocities in Nicaragua (Carter started supporting them, Reagan upped the game and called them Freedom Fighters, Bush completed it), or the death squads we trained and funded in Guatemala and El Salvador who murdered priests and nuns.
And this has all been reported, back then and now. Yet we as a country continued to fund the Mujahadin, Sandinistas and Salvadoran and Guatamalan governments that ran the death squads after we knew what they were doing. We also installed the Shah of Iran and continued to back him despite his terrible reign, then gave him a home after he was deposed, a direct cause for the Iranian revolution.
Since the 1890s we’ve known that governments (or in the case of banana republics, corporations) and insurgents have been committing atrocities with our money, support and arms and yet we not only continue backing them after the facts come out but find new horrors to support later.
It’s not partisan, because it’s been pretty much universal. We need to acknowledge this history, stop blaming one political faction or another, and just work towards never doing it again. It won’t be completely successful, but the less we do it the better the world and its people will be.
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“The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It’s over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now.” - Novelist J.G. Ballard.
It is getting harder and harder to condone any religion when people use its ideologies to justify the acts of killing anyone else, especially children. There are Christians here in the US who srongly believe in the use of deadly force to impose their faith onto others, or to cease the faith of others with differing views. If that is serving God’s will (any god), then leave me out of it. Thou shalt not kill. Unless, of course, you interpret God’s word’s differently. Religion is just a ruse to justify humanity’s lust for blood.
Yeah, but the gunmen were definitely Muslim, and they did this massacre because of Islam. I disagree with most things Maher is saying about Muslims, but this adds, not subtracts, to what Maher was saying.
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Which is why we had to invade Iraq in order to root out the Taliban in Afghanistan who were playing host to Saudis that planned and carried out 9-11.
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Bullshit.
The Taliban is a criminal enterprise set up and protected by the Pakistani ISI (secret service) that runs on Heroin Money, Protection Rackets, and Gun Running and always has.
It exploits a lunatic version of Fundamentalist Islam to JUSTIFY it’s barbarism not to guide it and the one thing it hates above all else is EDUCATION.
Ignorant people are easy to control with Religion and Violence. Educated people are not.
This is a mob hit protecting their profit margins hidden behind a thin veil of religion to send a message to the uneducated poor in the region to stay in line and not “rock the boat”.
To paint all Islam with this brush is to paint all Christians as fanatical murderers when one lunatic murders an abortion doctor or blows up a Federal Building.
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The Taliban didn’t exist then. The Muj =/= Taliban. Taliban came in the mid 1990s long after the war with the Soviets was over.
Muj contained factions from entirety of Afghanistan, including the groups that became the Northern Alliance and helped defeat the Taliban. Taliban is basically a Pashtun group, and since Pashtuns are in both southern Afghanistan and western Pakistan, it crosses the border.
Saying Reagan supported the Taliban is like saying Reagan fought against Putin.
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Saudi Wahabbi money, heavy weapons and religious education by fundamentalists. The political, military, judiciary and intelligences services in Pakistan are infiltrated by terrorists and terrorist symphathizers. It is a failed state.
What I cannot understand is how human beings can become so despicable as to indiscriminately kill so many innocents.
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“I have no problem as long as we achieve our objective.” ~ Dick Cheney
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