Hamarana

Maybe I am just nuts but this feels like deja-vu.

Anyone else think this is getting like post WWII and the 50s and 60s?

Anyone else concerned about the sabre-rattling coming out of the USA?

Anyone else aware that in spite of the treaty which precluded future development of nuclear arms, there are still enough in Russia and the USA to destroy the world, oh, I dunno, maybe 3 times over?

I find it all rather bothersome.

Yes, its a little unexpected coming from me, but nonetheless, I felt it worth posting, because its a very serious issue, especially in Australia in the light of the arrest of one Dr Haneef who was associated it seems only by relationship with the bombing in Scotland. His second cousin was a part of it. There is no evidence of his involvement, but the federal police are finding some, anyway.

However: onward to this which I received in email today from a couple of different sources.

A man whose family was German aristocracy prior to World War II owned a number of large industries and estates. When asked how many German people were true Nazis, the answer he gave can guide our attitude toward fanaticism.

“Very few people were true Nazis “he said,” but many enjoyed the return of German pride, and many more were too busy to care. I was one of those who just thought the Nazis were a bunch of fools. So, the majority just sat back and let it all happen. Then, before we knew it, they owned us, and we had lost control, and the end of the world had come. My family lost everything. I ended up in a concentration camp and the Allies destroyed my factories.”

We are told again and again by “experts” and “talking heads” that Islam is the religion of peace, and that the vast majority of Muslims just want to live in peace.

Although this unqualified assertion may be true, it is entirely irrelevant. It is meaningless fluff, meant to make us feel better, and meant to somehow diminish the spectre of fanatics rampaging across the globe in the name of Islam. The fact is that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history.

It is the fanatics who march. It is the fanatics who wage any one of 50 shooting wars world-wide. It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups throughout Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent in an Islamic wave.

It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder, or honour kill. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque. It is the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of rape victims and homosexuals. The hard quantifiable fact is that the “peaceful majority” the “silent majority” is cowed and extraneous.

Communist Russia comprised Russians who just wanted to live in peace, yet the Russian Communists were responsible for the murder of about 20 million people. The peaceful majority were irrelevant.

China’s huge population, it was peaceful as well, but Chinese Communists managed to kill a staggering 70 million people.

The average Japanese individual prior to World War II was not a warmongering sadist. Yet, Japan murdered and slaughtered its way across South East Asia in an orgy of killing that included the systematic murder of 12 million Chinese civilians; most killed by sword, shovel and bayonet.

Who can forget Rwanda, which collapsed into butchery. Could it not be said that the majority of Rwandans were “peace loving”?

Don’t forget the killing fields of Cambodia

History lessons are often incredibly simple and blunt, yet for all our powers of reason we often miss the most basic and uncomplicated of points: Peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by their silence.

Peace-loving Muslims will become our enemy if they don’t speak up, because like my friend from Germany, they will awake one day and find that the fanatics own them, and the end of their world will have begun.

Peace-loving Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Cambodians, Serbs, Afgans, Iraqis, Palestinians, Somalis, Nigerians, Algerians, and many others have died because the peaceful majority did not speak up until it was too late.

As for us who watch it all unfold; we must pay attention to the only group that counts; the fanatics who threaten our way of life.

I’ve passed the email on. Its certainly something worth thinking about.

Oh really?

Mr Hicks says his introduction to Guantanamo was one of silent, disoriented dread. Injected with drugs, hooded, tightly bound and wearing goggles and ear muffs and the infamous orange overalls, he was thrown into one of the small, open-air cages of Camp X-Ray.

For weeks, he says, he and other prisoners were forbidden to talk and permitted to lie in only two positions – prone and looking up, or sitting looking straight down. No other movement was permitted other than at meal times, and any deviations from the edict, or muttered conversations, were met with savage beatings by the guards.

For our American readers, Hicks is an Australian boy who was imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay 5 years ago without charges being laid against him.

In a disturbing portrayal of his first few months in US custody, Mr Hicks relates how interrogators showed him a photo of a badly beaten Mr Habib, the Sydney man arrested in Pakistan in a sweep following the September 11 attacks.

The account says Mr Hicks was told that if he did not co-operate he would be “sent to Egypt” as well. Mr Hicks and Mr Habib knew one other from Afghanistan, but by then Mr Hicks had no idea of Mr Habib’s fate.

Mr Habib was abducted by the CIA and sent to Egypt, where he says he was subjected to electric shocks and simulated drowning, attacked by dogs and repeatedly beaten.

Habib, also Australian, was released in 2005.

Hooded and shackled, Mr Hicks was taken to USS Peleliu and then USS Bataan. Among his fellow prisoners was John Walker Lindh, a young American who fought with the Taliban.

As other prisoners were taken for interrogation, their screams clearly audible, Mr Hicks said he heard a US guard tell Lindh “this will not happen to you because you are an American”. Lindh was not sent to Guantanamo Bay nor required to face a military commission trial.

Lindh, an American with the Taliban, gets off. Hicks, an Australian captured at a taxi stand gets 5 years and more.

Fair? Brave? BAH!

Read the entire article here.

Well, they did it.

I wonder what will happen now. We have a country led by a very shrewd, calculating, dangerous man, which now has the capacity to develop a weapon which can be delivered by missile to anywhere in the world. We also have a country with millions of people who do not have enough food, thanks to ongoing sanctions by the rest of the planet.

Most of the western world is proposing new sanctions (lord knows what, I don’t think there’s much left), whilst China is a little reluctant (I guess if I was living in a country sharing a border with North Korea, I would be a bit nervous too). Some are saying there will now be a buildup of Nuclear arms in the region, with Japan and Taiwan likely to take that option (and others as well but those are the two I remember being mentioned).

Starving nations with nuke capacity are pretty scary. Starving nations with nuke capacity and a leader who seems quite incapable of working with the rest of the planet are even more scary.