I heard Justin Bieber died years ago but the government covered it up because he's TOO BIG TO FAIL.Originally Posted by NighthawkNZ
Weekend cruiser
I heard Justin Bieber died years ago but the government covered it up because he's TOO BIG TO FAIL.
Forum whore
How many people exactly did you speak to about this? Just I've seen thousands of people in NY cheering the news of Usama's demise. Although I suppose that could just be 'rent-a-crowd'. Also the American forums are full of praise for his killing, with a very vocal minority claiming it was all a scam. None blaming the govt for not doing enough however.
Forum whore
Peter Osbourne of the Telegraph wrote and interesting piece....
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/pe...et-us-nowhere/
An elderly man of distinguished appearance approached me soon after I arrived in Abbottabad on the day of Osama bin Laden’s death. He spoke good English and said he was a lawyer. “Bin Laden will be remembered as good,” he told me, “and his message was an inspiration.”
Many Pakistanis, as well as hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world, wholeheartedly concur. We in the West very rarely ask why this should be. We just assume that admirers of bin Laden are ignorant or demented fanatics.
I don’t believe this is always true. More than that, I am certain that portraying bin Laden as some kind of one-dimensional monster is stupid. He wasn’t a power-hungry madman, still less the cartoon monster of pure evil caricatured in the United States and most of the British media and political class.
It is time we woke up. Bin Laden was a global leader who managed to pull together miscellaneous and shambolic groups into a coherent organisation and give them an ideology. This required very considerable leadership skills, along with charisma, self-sacrifice and courage. So if we are to make sense of what happened in northern Pakistan on Monday, we need to pay the terrorist mastermind more respect.
A set of very specific circumstances made possible his career. He was born into the age of Arab dictatorships, which dates roughly from the end of the Second World War. The British empire was being wound up, and replaced by something more malign. The United States, the new imperial power in the region, chose to govern by proxy through a series of ruthless autocrats. These leaders, however unpleasant, often relied on their allies in the West for financial, military, intelligence and of course moral support.
Western politicians, diplomats and businessmen quite liked this. They mingled easily with local elites – torturers can be very good company – and chose to overlook the wretched fate of those who challenged what were all too often corrupt and sometimes evil regimes. We either didn’t know or chose not to notice: an easy position to take when you weren’t the one being imprisoned, brutalised or murdered.
The premiership of Tony Blair contains many cases of this moral complacency. He accepted the hospitality of the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, during a series of luxurious holidays in Sharm El Sheikh. Perhaps the British ambassador in Cairo at the time, John Sawers (now head of MI6), chose not to brief his prime minister about the horrors of the Mubarak regime as the Blair family headed off to their Red Sea resort. Or perhaps Blair didn’t think it mattered.
It was Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s deputy and reportedly now his successor, who best articulated the logic of the situation. A doctor by profession, who claims to have been tortured in Egypt’s jails, al-Zawahiri grasped that it was pointless to challenge his national persecutors. The real problem, concluded Zawihiri, lay with their US sponsors.
Zawahiri’s insight was not unique. I have a friend, Mohamed Ali, who used to be an activist in Tunisia. Mr Ali’s twenties were dreadful. He was repeatedly tortured by the regime and on one occasion came close to death. Ultimately, he realised that further opposition was pointless, because his real opponent was not the loathsome Tunisian government, but its French sponsors and (through France) the European Union. So he cut his losses and fled to London, where he became a successful businessman.
Al-Zawahiri chose a darker route. He made the famous distinction between the “near enemy” (ie the local puppet regime, in his case Egypt) and the “far enemy” – the United States. He perceived that there was no real purpose in taking on Sadat or his successor Mubarak, and resolved to embark on a career of jihad against the US.
Far from being irrational or nihilistic, as everyone states, the logic of this decision is hard to challenge. Zawahiri made a terrible choice. This highly intelligent man has devoted his career to cold-blooded murder and the destruction of innocent human life. But defenders of bin Laden say this: the United States is solicitous of innocent life only when it comes to US citizens. Elsewhere, it is oblivious.
There have been too many moments during the decade-long hunt for bin Laden when there has appeared to be a horrible symmetry between al-Qaeda and the US. They have displayed an identical disregard for basic humanity: think of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay (still open despite President Obama’s pledge to close it) and the widespread slaughter of innocents (“collateral damage”) through the use of drone missiles.
Consider too the medievalism of the claim from President Obama that “justice has been done” after an unarmed man was shot dead, apparently in cold blood. Or the atavistic symbolism of the codename Geronimo, an Apache chief who fought for years to keep his tribal lands free from US control. All this from a country with such wonderful advantages: the rule of law, a tradition of liberty upheld by the sublime ideals of the Founding Fathers.
Here in Pakistan, there was a small but telling episode in January when Raymond Davis, an unregistered CIA man, shot dead two locals, reportedly in the back. The US claimed diplomatic immunity and, with the complicity of the Pakistan government, secured his acquittal and hustled him out of the country, blood money having been paid to the victims’ families.
So it is no surprise that a lawyer of distinguished appearance in Abbottabad should consider Osama bin Laden a more admirable and heroic figure than the dictators who have represented American and Western interests throughout the Muslim world. It is even less of a surprise that America is hated so venomously by many people here.
There have been thousands of homilies over the past few days about how Pakistan must change its ways, turn its face against terrorism etc etc. A much more urgent task is to reflect on what bin Laden’s career reveals about ourselves. The Arab Spring was a standing reproach to bin Laden and his friend Zawahiri. Popular movements, some inspired by fine ideals, appear to have done what al-Qaeda’s evil violence could not achieve, and swept away some of the Arab world’s dictators.
But we should be cautious. There have been Arab Springs before, and each time they have been sabotaged by the Western powers. In 1953 Britain and the US, terrified that the Iranian prime minister, Mohammed Mosaddegh, was about to nationalise his country’s oil fields, engineered the military coup that installed the Shah, an intervention that led to the revolution of 1979. In 1991, we refused to accept the result of the Algerian elections, plunging the country into a decade of civil war.
It is much too soon to be clear about the real story of the Arab revolutions. The early signs are mixed. We are helping the Libyan rebels, however clumsily. But the United States has smiled on an effective invasion of tiny Bahrain by Saudi Arabia, to suppress Shia protesters. If we make the wrong choice, by installing a fresh collection of client dictators, we do not just undermine democracy. We grant a fresh set of al-Qaeda leaders the moral legitimacy to pursue their hideous vendetta against the far enemy.
Aio ki te Aorangi
Whilst it doesn't excuse what he's done and the way he did it (and paid for). I had a feeling that was why he was doing it. I have mixed feelings about his passing... and that was a damn fine tribute
I didn't think!!! I experimented!!!
Forum whore
So some raggheads slit a couple of ordinary airline workers throats with box cutters and then cause the deaths of several thousand ordinary commuters and workers going about their daily business by flying 2 jets into buildings and crashing one into the ground. How does that make them freedom fighters or anything else but terrorists?
It is wankers like you that have turned NZ into the 'not as nice a place to live in anymore' that it has become since MMP was voted in. Fuck the one rule for maoris and another rule for everyone else and fuck the ongoing waitangi treaty dealings (it was a long long time ago you got some stuff now get over it and move on) and fuck seperate political parties for maoris too. The country isn't big enough for that sort of crap and is being ruined by those (like you I suspect) promoting it.
Hardcore Biker
I guess thats why you are in Oregon.
We don't need the Hone's but we sure as hell don't need the KKK.
Banditbandit you class OBL as being a freedom fighter, give me a break
Hitler was a freedom fighter as well. He sought to free his country from the crippling war reparations & revenge penalties that were inflicted on him by the victors of WW1, He sought to free his country the rampant inflation that reduced his country to total poverty, an inflation that lined the pockets of the Jewish financiers & bankers at the expense of the general population. He turned the country around, his legacy even in defeat was a country that become the economic powerhouse of Europe. Now there is a freedom fighter for you.
The above paragraph is a load of absolute tripe as is any assertion that OBL was a freedom fighter. OBL's vision of freedom did not include freedom of religion, womens rights gay rights,democracy, or any other rights that conflicted with those of a narrow focused Muslim fundamentalist. He was the equivalent of Pol Pot, just check out the Talibans view & record on freedom & human rights
The world is way better off without him.
Defend him & you defend Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mugabe & any other tin pot terrorist or dictator that comes to mind
troglodytam extraordinaire
Just like a lot don't subscribe to yours.
Aio ki te Aorangi
yup.
troglodytam extraordinaire
Doesn't stop you posting your shit though.
Aio ki te Aorangi
or you posting your gutter press either.
Forum whore
No KKK, that's stupid. Just people minding their own business, not pressing their ideas, ideals or beliefs on others and not counting on past events to line their pockets or furnish them with a living.
Buy the way, I liked the rest of your post.
troglodytam extraordinaire
Gutter press?? whats that matter truth hurts?
Aio ki te Aorangi
You seem to make enough of a song and dance about it, so I guess it must.
troglodytam extraordinaire
Oh well don't cry about itbetter people than you have been wrong also.
Good night
Aio ki te Aorangi
there's noone better than me. Have a pleasant fuckin slumber.Oh well don't cry about it
Good night
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