bud

it's interesting that you compare hasbara bots to terrorists. however, i have never once defended terrorists while you regularly apologize for, try to justify and propagate for the zionist regime. it's easy to win debates with you, because the truth is on my side.

what? you 'assume' that u.s. gave saddam chemical weapons during its war with iran because they wanted saddam to use them for animal production? how stupid do you think people are? you expect people to take you seriously with the garbage you say? here is more information on u.s.' backing of saddam's use of chemical weapons against the kurds and iranians: In 1984, Iran introduced a draft resolution to the United Nations Security Council, citing the Geneva Protocol of 1925, condemning Saddam Hussein's use of chemical weapons on the battlefield. In response, the United States instructed its delegate at the UN to lobby friendly representatives in support of a motion to take "no decision" on the use of chemical munitions by Iraq.

stop trying to play dumb for the u.s. it looks kind of pathetic. facts remain, the u.s. had a huge part in backing saddam. so why try to tippy toe around the truth: On February 9th, 1994, Senator Riegle delivered a report -commonly known at the Riegle Report- in which it was stated that "pathogenic (meaning 'disease producing'), toxigenic (meaning 'poisonous'), and other biological research materials were exported to Iraq pursuant to application and licensing by the U.S. Department of Commerce." It added: "These exported biological materials were not attenuated or weakened and were capable of reproduction." The report then detailed 70 shipments (including Bacillus anthracis) from the United States to Iraqi government agencies over three years, concluding "It was later learned that these microorganisms exported by the United States were identical to those the UN inspectors found and recovered from the Iraqi biological warfare program.

you pressed reply, but failed to respond. typical DoP. when faced with the truth and facts. tell me when you're able to respond to this: really? for a guy with a bachelor in wikipedia, i'm surprised you missed most of the information on 'western backed' iraq. what about: Howard Teicher served on the National Security Council as director of Political-Military Affairs. He accompanied Rumsfeld to Baghdad in 1983. According to his 1995 affidavit and separate interviews with former Reagan and Bush administration officials, the Central Intelligence Agency secretly directed armaments and hi-tech components to Iraq through false fronts and friendly third parties such as Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Kuwait, and they quietly encouraged rogue arms dealers and other private military companies to do the same or this: According to retired Army Colonel W. Patrick Lang, senior defense intelligence officer for the United States Defense Intelligence Agency at the time, "the use of gas on the battlefield by the Iraqis was not a matter of deep strategic concern" to Reagan and his aides, because they "were desperate to make sure that Iraq did not lose." Lang disclosed that more than 60 officers of the Defense Intelligence Agency were secretly providing detailed information on Iranian deployments. He cautioned that the DIA "would have never accepted the use of chemical weapons against civilians, but the use against military objectives was seen as inevitable in the Iraqi struggle for survival." Despite this claim, the Reagan administration did not stop aiding Iraq after receiving reports affirming the use of poison gas on Kurdish civilians. and this: Iraqi military personnel received various types of guidance from their American counterparts on U.S. soil. According to Roque Gonzalez, an ex-Special Forces officer with multilingual expertise, Saddam's elite troops received instruction in unconventional warfare at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. "The idea was that, in the event of an Iranian victory, the Iraqi soldiers would be able to wage a guerrilla struggle against the occupying Iranian force" and this: The United States assisted Iraq through a military aid program known as "Bear Spares", whereby the U.S. military "made sure that spare parts and ammunition for Soviet or Soviet-style weaponry were available to countries which sought to reduce their dependence on the Soviets for defense needs." back to the chemical weapons: On February 9th, 1994, Senator Riegle delivered a report -commonly known at the Riegle Report- in which it was stated that "pathogenic (meaning 'disease producing'), toxigenic (meaning 'poisonous'), and other biological research materials were exported to Iraq pursuant to application and licensing by the U.S. Department of Commerce." The executive branch of our government approved 771 different export licenses for sale of dual-use technology to Iraq. how about some diplomacy: In 1984, Iran introduced a draft resolution to the United Nations Security Council, citing the Geneva Protocol of 1925, condemning Saddam Hussein's use of chemical weapons on the battlefield. In response, the United States instructed its delegate at the UN to lobby friendly representatives in support of a motion to take "no decision" on the use of chemical munitions by Iraq. If backing to obstruct the resolution could be won, then the U.S. delegation were to proceed and vote in favour of taking zero action; if support were not forthcoming, the U.S. delegate were to refrain from voting altogether.

sure it does. people have been standing up for the palestinians' human rights for a long time just like they did for those effected by the apartheid regime in south africa. it's not a flavour of the day as you like to suggest. 65 UN resolutions confirms WHAT you said? your comment has no meaning. all you're doing is fluffing yourself with hot air. really? all i have are several human rights organization, UN reports, rulings by the international court of justice, opinions by people such as desmond tutu and more who support what i say, but you tell me i have nothing? what do you have? you are a hasbara bot. you've admitted to being a zionist and a supporter of a regime who violates human rights. you are unable to criticize the israeli government and more often than not, you try to justify and excuse their actions. you try to spin and spread misinformation in order to deflect criticism of israel. just like what you did in this thread; you tried to downplay human rights organizations' repeated criticism of israel's treatment of palestinians. you are a hasbara bot archetype.

oh no. there you go again, denying and trying to dismiss the truth. don't you get sick of yourself? can you, for once, just admit that you were wrong instead of making me repeat the obvious? i gave the comments and opinions from officials who were involved and those who investigated and reported on u.s.' role in helping saddam. like someone who was on the national security council and the director of political-military affairs. he actually accompanied rumsfeld to baghdad when he met saddam in 1983. there are also affidavits from former reagan/bush admin officials. i gave comments by colonel patrick lang, a senior defense intelligence officer in regards to the use of gas and u.s.' involvement allowing them to happen and even blocking the u.n. from investigating them further, because guess what? people would be like, "whoa, u.s. gave them these chemical weapons and they allowed it to happen instead of stopping them." seriously buddy, grow some balls and be truthful, instead of what you're doing now.

i did, and you called supporting palestinians 'flavour of the day' and the people misguided and ignorant by choice. why don't YOU read what you actually said. well, there you have it. another american woman comment that has 0 substance. but as long as she presses reply and types something. totally. many hasbara bots consider human rights organizations, desmond tutu, and reality as one-sided and/or exaggerated.

these groups of muslims are looking to censor freedom of expression because they don't believe everything should be covered by free speech. some jews in europe actually succeeded in pushing to censor freedom of expression because they don't believe everything should be covered by free speech. Laws against Holocaust denial are european countries irresponsible for allowing jews who subscribe to a set of values antithetical to the western values of freedom to live in their countries?

either get rid of all of them or allow all of them to stay. i don't recall toews ever doing anything right. "The minister strongly supports the freedom of religion for all Canadians, including prisoners,” the email states. “However, the government … is not in the business of picking and choosing which religions will be given preferential status through government funding. The minister has concluded … chaplains employed by Corrections Canada must provide services to inmates of all faiths." link

heh. i wonder if you'd call the struggle against apartheid south africa the 'flavour of the day'. facts, meaning international law? how many times has israel violated international law again? would you consider the ruling of the international court of justice on israel's occupation and east jerusalem as fact or are they made up? are the 65 UN resolutions documenting israel's violations made up? would you consider the opinions by expert human rights organizations (such as amnesty, HRW, betslem and red cross) as facts or are they made up?

answer: The Free Gaza Movement is a coalition of human rights activists and pro-Palestinian groups formed to challenge the Israeli-Egyptian blockade imposed on the Gaza Strip by sailing humanitarian aid ships to Gaza. The group has more than 70 endorsers, including Desmond Tutu and Noam Chomsky. The organizations participating in the Free Gaza Movement include the International Solidarity Movement.[3] The activists participating in the effort include Jeff Halper, Hedy Epstein, Lauren Booth, and members of various Christian, Jewish, and Muslim religious organizations. Israeli intelligence agencies say that it also includes Islamist organizations that pose a security threat to the Jewish state.

eh? you said: the u.s. and the rest of 'west' did a lot more than what you said and i listed a few of the things that they did in order to back saddam. so contrary to what you said, it's not a 'tad of a stretch'. you shared misinformation and i called you on it.

omg. that was so awesome.

really? for a guy with a bachelor in wikipedia, i'm surprised you missed most of the information on 'western backed' iraq. what about: Howard Teicher served on the National Security Council as director of Political-Military Affairs. He accompanied Rumsfeld to Baghdad in 1983. According to his 1995 affidavit and separate interviews with former Reagan and Bush administration officials, the Central Intelligence Agency secretly directed armaments and hi-tech components to Iraq through false fronts and friendly third parties such as Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Kuwait, and they quietly encouraged rogue arms dealers and other private military companies to do the same or this: According to retired Army Colonel W. Patrick Lang, senior defense intelligence officer for the United States Defense Intelligence Agency at the time, "the use of gas on the battlefield by the Iraqis was not a matter of deep strategic concern" to Reagan and his aides, because they "were desperate to make sure that Iraq did not lose." Lang disclosed that more than 60 officers of the Defense Intelligence Agency were secretly providing detailed information on Iranian deployments. He cautioned that the DIA "would have never accepted the use of chemical weapons against civilians, but the use against military objectives was seen as inevitable in the Iraqi struggle for survival." Despite this claim, the Reagan administration did not stop aiding Iraq after receiving reports affirming the use of poison gas on Kurdish civilians. and this: Iraqi military personnel received various types of guidance from their American counterparts on U.S. soil. According to Roque Gonzalez, an ex-Special Forces officer with multilingual expertise, Saddam's elite troops received instruction in unconventional warfare at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. "The idea was that, in the event of an Iranian victory, the Iraqi soldiers would be able to wage a guerrilla struggle against the occupying Iranian force" and this: The United States assisted Iraq through a military aid program known as "Bear Spares", whereby the U.S. military "made sure that spare parts and ammunition for Soviet or Soviet-style weaponry were available to countries which sought to reduce their dependence on the Soviets for defense needs." back to the chemical weapons: On February 9th, 1994, Senator Riegle delivered a report -commonly known at the Riegle Report- in which it was stated that "pathogenic (meaning 'disease producing'), toxigenic (meaning 'poisonous'), and other biological research materials were exported to Iraq pursuant to application and licensing by the U.S. Department of Commerce." The executive branch of our government approved 771 different export licenses for sale of dual-use technology to Iraq. how about some diplomacy: In 1984, Iran introduced a draft resolution to the United Nations Security Council, citing the Geneva Protocol of 1925, condemning Saddam Hussein's use of chemical weapons on the battlefield. In response, the United States instructed its delegate at the UN to lobby friendly representatives in support of a motion to take "no decision" on the use of chemical munitions by Iraq. If backing to obstruct the resolution could be won, then the U.S. delegation were to proceed and vote in favour of taking zero action; if support were not forthcoming, the U.S. delegate were to refrain from voting altogether.

it's nice to see so many experts such as peeves, DoP and kraychik giving us their opinion on how iran should be attacked because they're crrrrrrraaaaaazy, but i thought i'd throw in another person into the mix of u.s. and israeli experts who disagree with our resident experts and share his thoughts on an attack on iran: Painting a picture of internal political dysfunction in a dangerous world, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates warned Wednesday night that a U.S. or Israeli attack on Iran would have disastrous consequences. Neither the United States nor Israel is capable of wiping out Iran's nuclear capability, he said, and "such an attack would make a nuclear-armed Iran inevitable. They would just bury the program deeper and make it more covert." Iran could respond by disrupting world oil traffic and launching a wave of terrorism across the region, Gates said. "The results of an American or Israeli military strike on Iran could, in my view, prove catastrophic, haunting us for generations in that part of the world." sounds like gates, who ran the pentagon under both bush and obama, and who also served as the director of cia in the 90's, is in bed with ahmadinejad. we should instead take the opinions of the resident iran/war experts.

some wonderful points made on islamophobia and free speech by christian christensen: #1: Islamophobia is an irrational fear of Islam, but radical Islam is, for example, anti-feminism and anti-gay. So, to fear the spread is not irrational, and, thus, not Islamophobic. I’ve heard this one a lot. The problem is that this statement takes as a point of departure that Islamophobia is all about an opposition to radical, fundamentalist Islam. It isn’t. If fear of radical Islam were the same as “Islamophobia” then a lot of secular Muslims in Turkey could (ironically) be classified as Islamophobic. They are not, however, because Islamophobia is an irrational fear of Islam and Muslims in general, not just extremists, and rooted in crude stereotypes by which all Muslims are lumped together as some kind of uniform mass. There are plenty of anti-feminist, anti-gay elements within Christianity, for example, but those elements are rarely portrayed as representative of Christians as a whole. The problem is that it is the radical fundamentalist image of the Muslim which is usually used as the “default” image for all Muslims. This is what I have called the “hegemony of Islam” perspective whereby, in terms of identity, being a Muslim is seen as trumping all other factors: be they economics, education, gender, family history, and so on. In other words, in this stereotypical view, if you are a Muslim, your identity is subservient to your religious identification, with all other influencing factors a distant second. This faulty logic is applied to all Muslims, whether fundamentalist or not. That’s Islamophobia. #2: Criticizing the very making of “Innocence of Muslims” and/or the Muhammad cartoons has a chilling effect on free speech, and is a form of soft censorship. According to this line of thinking, “Innocence of Muslims” and the Muhammad cartoons are protected by free speech, but to criticize their making and/or content is somehow borderline censorship. No. To critique the manner in which free speech is exercised is in no way the same thing as saying that the right should be revoked or the speech banned. To use another example: I am opposed to the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. I am also opposed to any bans on protesting against these occupations. If, however, anti-war protesters decided to stage a protest at the funeral of a soldier killed in the war, and did so with placards saying that the solder deserved to die, then I would question both the mode and content of their free speech. That does not mean I would want to ban either their right to gather or their right to speech. It just means that I am exercising my right to free speech to question how others have exercised that same right. That’s how, not if. The interplay is actually the crystallization of free speech in action. The same goes for the anti-Islam film and cartoons. If you want to make an inflammatory film/carton during a time of crisis: fine. But don’t then be surprised if others exercise their rights in response. #3: Muslim fundamentalists do not respect the values of free speech: look at what happened to Theo Van Gogh and Salman Rushdie. Why should we worry about their being offended? This goes back to the point I made earlier: no-one who opposes Islamophobia is worried about the feelings of small numbers of unrepresentative, violent extremists. To bring up Theo Van Gogh or Salman Rushdie is to suggest that most Muslims were/are somehow in favor of Van Gogh’s murder, or the fatwah against Rushdie. If anyone has any solid evidence to support those extremely broad suggestions, I have yet to see it. It is also a very convenient strategy: to bring up Van Gogh when discussing Islamophobia as it is so emotive. Is the suggestion that the vast majority Muslims are simply unable of being offended without an accompanying desire to kill the person(s) who offended them? Yes, his murder was a terrible crime, but who has ever said that murder is an acceptable by-product of opposing Islamophobic words and pictures? Few, if any. #4: Free speech is part of democratic society, and so these riots proved that many predominantly Muslim countries are not ready for democracy. This would be a great argument were not so utterly de-contextualized. The basis of this line of reasoning is that free speech is a beloved component of European and North American socio-political reality. People in these regions can speak their minds without fear of reprisal, unlike countries in, for example, the “Middle East” where religious dissent is met with violence or death. Let’s not be naïve here: many regimes in predominantly Muslim nations are incredibly violent and repressive, and their commitment to freedom of speech (as well as freedom of assembly and fundamental human rights) is close to zero. But if you think that this type of repression is relegated to the “Muslim world” then I would suggest brushing up on post-war South American dictatorships (start with Chile); or the recent history of the Balkans. And, closer to home (for me, at least), it would be worth having a chat about actual tolerance for freedom of speech in the United States with Americans who dared to utter some uncomfortable truths about US geo-politics on September 12, 2001. Saudi Arabia is often held up as the poster-child for free speech repression in the name of Islam. Is that the same Sharia-loving, free-speech hating Saudi Arabia, staunch US and UK ally, who in 2010 purchased $60 billion in US arms and whose leader was warmly welcomed by the Queen at Buckingham palace in 2007? The one and same. #5: Why should progressives spend time defending a religious group when there are far more pressing issues (such as poverty, gender inequality, etc.)? I don’t think of opposing Islamophobia as defending Islam any more that I consider opposing anti-Semitism as some kind of de facto support for Judaism. Opposing Islamophobia is about opposing knee-jerk discrimination and xenophobia, dressed up as concern for “rights” (rights I rarely see addressed in other contexts) using vulgar stereotypes and crude generalizations. Finally, it is worth considering more precisely the role that poverty and inequality have played in the current unrest. While films, cartoons and religious fervor are held up as the main causes of the riots, I would suspect that a number of other factors have played into these events. If, however, we ignore these other factors in favor of the simple answer — “Muslim Rage” — then we contribute to an environment in which Islamophiobia, and thus discrimination, will thrive.

sad to see that many americans and even canadians who have become the enablers and apologists for tyranny and mass murder. they condemn the nazis and the suicide bombers who attack civilians while celebrating mercenaries and torturers and try to explain away and even cheer unspeakable crimes such as the atomic bombs that were dropped on japan.

all of this goes with what most experts say: the iranian regime is a rational one. ahmadinejad's comment is rational and believable: In the Washington Post today, Richard Cohen expresses surprise that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is "starting to make some sense" and "wax rationally". Cohen specifically cites this statement from the Iranian president last week: "Let's even imagine that we have an atomic weapon, a nuclear weapon. What would we do with it? What intelligent person would fight 5,000 American bombs with one bomb?"

ugh. why would you do that?

he's excited about his team. let him be.

each of those guys should wear uniforms like nascar drivers do and the logos of all the corporations who give them millions should be pasted on their uniforms.

romney reminds me of buzz lightyear. it's mostly the voice and the calculated, somewhat artificial style of talking. although, he did seem more human tonight. From Al Gore’s loud sighing to Jimmy Carter saying he consulted his 12-year-old daughter on nuclear proliferation, presidential debates are full of memorable moments. But despite the fanfare that surrounds each election cycle’s televised events, historical data shows the debates are rarely game changers. link

nice to see kraychik getting a chance to learn a thing or two.

people can learn a thing or two about your moral standard. especially those uncivilized people.

good pick up about the statistics. since the same study was repeated by other outlets like the independent and LA times, i didn't look deep into the information provided. perhaps their 1 in 50 statistic, included those who have been maimed and injured as well. regardless, i have no intention of posting false information and welcome any correction.