Scotty

I think i means if a western politician drives a big car that's the same as an Islamist deliberately targeting a bus load of children and killing them all.

The West does not commit acts of terrorism. I realize some like to bend the english language into pretzels to try and excuse Islamist violence, but the incidental and accidental deaths attributed to western political or military moves is not akin to terrorism.

Only Ironman and 24 actually count. Syriana has good Arabs and bad Arabs, as well as evil Americans and good Americans. It's not really about terrorism. Zero Dark Thirty is not a fictional movie (ostensibly) So tone movie and one tv show which have shown arabs as terrorists at one point or other (Ironman's sequels featured Americans as the enemy)

Okay, fine. But if you want to talk about the failings of Israel shouldn't we have a yardstick to measure how bad those failings are? If Israel is a racist state or has racist laws what are we using as a yardstick? If we are condemning them for human rights violations, where along the bell curve would they sit as compared to everyone else? Are we comparing them to other states in that general area? If not, why not? Whose standards are we using?

Only possession of child porn is illegal in Canada. A variety of things are obscene for distribution, including, I believe, BDSM, whether consensual or not. Which makes me wonder how all those bookstores can sell 50 Shades of Gray and similar crap.

I don't think you can reference movies more than 30 years old in response to someone saying Hollywood avoids (note present tense) portraying Arabs/Muslims as terrorists.

Cuz we haven't had a Queen for a long time now.....

Some little girl on the news said she would have preferred Kyle. THAT would have been funny.

China breaks international laws all the time, so does Russia and Iran and North Korea and many others. So does the US, on occasion. All the major powers break international law whenever they feel it's in their interest to do so. I have never figured out why people get so exorcised about little Israel. What it's doing, given the circumstances in which it finds itself, isn't a tithe on what so many others do. And yet nobody protests against them.

Well, one anyway. I'm simply pondering the continuous attention given to a relatively small country with a spotty, but far from horrible human rights record given the lack of concern for all the much larger nations with much worse human rights records. What is the reason for all this attention? Why do you care so much?

Are you saying corruption and misuse of funds is not a serious issue among local band councils?

Apparently the death toll in Syria has passed 100,000. Interesting how none of those so desperately anguished about Israel seems to care much.

All three are getting more restrictive and conservatively Muslim by the year.

No, he has a point. Hollywood does shy away from the obvious. Everyone knows that if any group is going to attack the White House it's either going to be some kind of redneck cracker militia or Muslims. Most terrorism is committed by Muslims, but Hollywood goes out of its way to find a reason why Eurotrash will do it instead.

The validity of the quotas or targets depends on the intelligence of those who set them, and the tools they made use of in determining how many cases would, on average, be able to be dismissed by a careful perusal of the facts. Given the institution involved I'm not very confident the quotas were reasonable. And how is it everyone gets ticked off when they hear cops have a quota to write traffic tickets but are making excuses for this kind of a quota. As someone said above, a lot of these things have a certain amount of gray space allowing a reasonable person to make an interpretation over the legitimacy of the claim. If you're facing a hard quota the chances are you're going to exercise that discretion to cut people off, even unfairly, even over a minor technicality, where a reasonable person would let it slide.

And drive up housing prices, and drive down wages, and the increased population results in paving over farmland and forests in order to build more subdivisions, greater pollution, and an increasing demand for government services, which in turn drives up taxes.

That is inarguable.

It would be impossible to prove one way or another given the lack of statistics, and the fear most women have of reporting violence, much less sexual violence. Also, violence against family members is either legal or simply ignored in many Muslim states. Marital rape, for example, is not a crime in most Muslim countries. But given the nature of the cultures involved and the lack of laws enforcement violence is certainly there in a larger proportion than in western nations.

I'm sure there are some moderate elements within UAE society. I'm equally sure they are enormously outweighed by the more tradition minded who see the laws expounded in the Koran as the word of God and who wish to live their lives by it. You won't find a majority in many Muslim countries willing to go against the laws of the Koran. Regardless of how brutal or barbaric those laws are. Many Arab countries still have laws on the books which say that if a rapist is willing to marry his victim there won't be any punishment. Egypt had such a law until recently, but it hardly matters as Rape, while not legal in Egypt, might as well be.

Rather understandable given how crowded the lower mainland is and the high prices of land. Mind you, most of our urban centres are quite crowded enough and don't need more people.

That's not even close to being in the neighborhood of anything approaching reality.

Hey buddy, I think you posted under the wrong pseudonym. You're supposed to be a far left socialist would-be teacher under this one, remember? Rah-rah unions?

Dubai. It invokes images of a much more moderate Arab Muslim state than the ones which give us so much trouble. It's not one of those crazed fundamentalist places like Sudan or Iran. It has tall, gleaming skyscrapers and a more relaxed attitude towards religion. Well, not really. A Norwegian woman who made the mistake of going there was raped. Then she compounded her mistake by reporting it to the authorities. Little did she realize Dubai was, like many Muslim states, still stuck in a time warp. It seems in order to prove rape four adult males must testify to that effect, or the rapist must confess. Barring that happening, the woman does by reporting it is confess to having sex outside marriage. So she was convicted of that and tossed into jail. Dubai is part of the UAE, again, an entity with a more benign reputation in the West (probably because it's paid some very high priced public relations agencies a lot of money). Recently, a British man was jailed for four years because on entering the country the authorities discovered a 0.003 gram trace of cannabis stuck to the bottom of his shoe. People travel to Dubai and other UAE states believing their gleaming towers and reputation for 'modern' attitudes mean they're something like the West. But all it seems to show is there are no moderate Muslim states. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-23381448

Cite, please.

And how does that mean I have to pay money to the survivors of this train wreck? If a guy's house burns down two streets over he doesn't come to me expecting money. If a guy loses his parents in a car wreck on the next block he doesn't expect me to compensate him. Lots of people died in accidents last week. The government is probably not compensating any of their relatives.