patrick.net

Frustrated terrorists aren't the most logical thinking people. They want to lash out as somebody and it's a lot easier to lash out as someone that doesn't have guns, body armor and tanks. The Taliban aren't much smarter, they sucide bombed a Mosque in Pakistan, killing scores of civilians. The locals are now banding together to fight them. What a way to win local support for your cause. While any religion can be twisted to benifit a cause, (think of Jones Town, Waco and the Crusades) the Islam seems particular venerable to extermism. I believe education is the key here, the less educated the population is, the more likely they are going to beleive what someone tells them. Critical thinking isn't an uneducated person's strong points. Actually I beleive anytime someone reads a religious book and interupts it for you, your placing yourself in a dangerous position. To blindly follow someone without question, and you have another Hitler or Stalin in the making. Absolute power corrupts. Actually i beleive all religions are scams but that just me.

Critical thinking isn’t an uneducated person’s strong points. Actually I beleive anytime someone reads a religious book and interupts it for you, your placing yourself in a dangerous position. To blindly follow someone without question, and you have another Hitler or Stalin in the making. Absolute power corrupts. Actually i beleive all religions are scams but that just me.

Critical thinking is the exact opposite of religion, IMHO. Yet you do sometimes find them both in the same brain somehow. There are scientists who are very skeptical and careful about science, but then willingly believe religious absurdities. So maybe education alone won't do it. There is some missing piece.

I totally agree letting others interpret religious books for you is a step towards fascism. And I think fascism begets religion too, like millions of Germans worshipped Hitler. Had Hitler won, today we would be calling him a prophet and it would be very risky to speak ill of him, exactly like it's risky to publicly point out Mohammed's nastier activities (rape, pedophila, theft, murder) even though they are official Islamic history. The only difference is that Mohammed won, while Hitler lost.

As the old saying goes, The winners Write History.

The only real problem I have with the history of the Holocaust is all you hear about is all the death and suffering 6 million Jewish people endured. You have almost nothing about the 5 million+ other people the died during the Holocaust. (gypsies, ethnic Poles, the Romani, Soviet civilians, Soviet prisoners of war, people with disabilities, gay men, and political and religious opponents). Oh, wait there not Jewish, guess they don't count.

A Palestinian beer managed to find its way to British store shelves this week from the Israeli-occupied West Bank despite onerous border checks, a distance of some 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometers) and a raging war in the region.

How it got here is a story of an unlikely bond between brewers in arms.

“My grandfather used to say, if you can make it succeed and happen in Palestine, you can succeed anywhere else in the world,” said Madees Khoury, brewmaster at Taybeh Brewing Co. and daughter and niece of the founders. “Because of these challenges and obstacles that we go through — it just makes you stronger.”

The narrative of Taybeh Brewing Co. is one of repeatedly defying the odds.

Start with the most basic fact: the company produces and sells a microbrew among a predominantly Muslim population that shuns alcohol for religious reasons.

That's true. Still, the Israelis did force most of them out of the land they've lived on for a long time.

It's wrong when Muslims do it as well.

I'm not holding any group to any different standard.

It's wrong when Muslims do it as well.

I'm not holding any group to any different standard.

Constantinople was only taken in 1452. So if Indians (~1500) can take back their land from "colonial powers", doesn't Greece have a claim on occupied Constantinople and the Asian ("Turkish") Aegean Coast?