From: mathew <mathew@mantis.co.uk>
Newsgroups: alt.atheism.moderated
Subject: Re: The "civilized" west
Date: Fri, 14 Aug 92 10:25:56 BST
Distribution: world
Organization: Mantis Consultants, Cambridge. UK.

Bernt Budde <bug@arachne.udac.uu.se> writes:
> RBNXHS@rohvm1.bitnet writes:
> >We do not have to go a few hundred years as to the practices
> >of *civilized countries* of the west in state sponsored terrorism.
> >... Tripoly try to kill Gadaffy as an example...
> 
> This is the wrong newsgroup and excuse me for this (isn't this
> moderated? If so, it deserves to get cut)

I passed the article through as it contains a lot of information, and it is
in fact relevant.

In case you missed it, the point of the article was to explain why Moslems
feel that the West is being two-faced about the Rushdie business.  Moslems
consider state and religion to be the same thing.  If the USA can bump off an
enemy of the state like Gaddafi or Castro (or JFK?), why can't Iran do the
same thing and bump off an enemy of the state like Rushdie?

> A relevant discussion for this group would be different religions
> tendency to result in such behaviour, not state terrorism.

But that's the whole point.  For Moslems, state == religion.

>                                                        This
> discussion started with a critique of Islam as barbaric and
> primitive even for a religion.

I'd go along with that for Islam as *practiced*.  I reserve judgement on any
ideal theoretical Islam that people may know of.

>                                You are attacking comments I wrote
> saying that that kind of oppression wouldn't happen in the western
> countries with a list of what the west do to other countries for
> different reasons.

Oh, so murdering someone in another country, who has committed no crime
according to the laws of that country, is OK if you have a good reason?

In that case, who decides which are the good reasons?  Why are Iranian
reasons like "defending Islam against heretics" not as good as American
reasons like "defending capitalism against communists"?

> What you are complaining about for the first pages in your
> article, is that some western countries (USA and France,
> mostly?) aren't following their own laws (not to say, UN
> Human Rights) in handling people when having international
> "problems".

I'd say that's a pretty fair complaint myself.

> Laws about how to handle individuals are not applicable to
> groups or countries.

What exactly are you saying here?

>                                    Trying to kill Gadaffy is, of
> course, not a nice thing to do; quite an aggressive one, really.
> On the other hand, to be blunt, you shoot mad dogs too.

If there is a clear and succinct response to H. Siddiqui's complaints about
the West's hypocrisy it's "Two wrongs don't make a right".  Yet here you seem
to be saying that because Moslem countries are prepared to carry out
terrorist acts and murder their opponents, that somehow makes it OK for us to
do the same.

>                                                      If a
> country support terror organisations (which Libya did and
> probably does) and is an oil nation and in that way is quite
> immune to international trade sanctions, war is the only
> alternative.

There's nothing about an oil-producing nation which makes it inherently
immune to sanctions.  The problems are that (1) the USA and several other
countries squander far too much oil and are therefore way too dependent on it
and (2) the western countries cannot trust each other to carry out sanctions.

> > In the 1960s the Americans also conspired to kill Fidel Castro.
> 
> Yeah, USA behaviour in Latin and South America is quite dirty.
> Not that Castro is any better. They didn't like Soviet influence
> in their "back yard".

Ah, that must be one of those "good reasons".

> > All these simply because the tyrant in Baghdad has become too
> > uncontrolled (don't forget this was our friend whom we armed
> > to the teeth prior to his ill-advised aventure in Kuwait).
> 
> When a country, through it's own actions, obviously is at fault
> starting a war, the people in it is in the same boat as the
> leadership.

Oh, I see.  So presumably you think we should just leave the Yugoslavians to
die.  After all, the groups concerned were obviously at fault in starting the
war, and the people are in the same boat as the leadership, huh?

You talk as though Iraq was a liberal democracy.  How many Iraqis wanted
Saddam Hussein to go to war with the USA, I wonder?  Maybe it was a majority,
maybe they didn't realise what the inevitable result would be.  But to talk
as though it was a decision made by the people is foolish.

>                                           Could someone else
> comment on the '100 000 civilian dead' part? I haven't heard
> anything about that.

Perhaps you should read better newspapers.

Perhaps also we should try and draw the political discussion to a close, and
get back to the point:

Moslems equate church and state.  They can't understand why they're condemned
so strongly for trying to bump off an enemy of the state when every other
country is busy doing it.  That's the point I think H. Siddiqui was trying to
make.


mathew
-- 
"Even the most bizarre of the unions (probably that between a cat's gall
 stone and a single note 'G' from CNN's ident theme) managed to convey a
 sense of rampant impropriety."  -- 'Fortran Five', Simon G. Lawrence Leonard