I just want to why and some facts....

iVillage Member
Registered: 04-10-2003
I just want to why and some facts....
13
Wed, 05-12-2004 - 6:51pm
All this going on makes me feel so phyiscally sick. But i'm curisous and I feel stupid for not knowing but I will ask anyway. Why does the al-qada hate americans? What do they stand for? I figure they dont have the same religous views as us, but what are they? My main question is why they hate us so much? Sorry I know I probably sound stupid but I just want to know these things.

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iVillage Member
Registered: 07-25-2003
Wed, 05-12-2004 - 8:35pm
Thanks to the media & entertainment industries, they believe Western society is corrupt and perverted. We are also a staunch ally of Israel, which is the only country they hate more than the US, and have had alliances with various Middle Eastern regimes over the years which for one reason or another, Al Queda doesn't approve of.

They want to impose sharia, Muslim law, throughout the Arab world. For this group, Saudi Arabia, which sentences criminals to public stonings and to have hands, ears, and other parts cut off, and makes women cover from head to toe when in public, is too liberal.

They are impotent to do this because of Western influences, which have seeped in to the Middle East and corrupted their society.

Since they want to take their world back to the Middle Ages, they are using a tactic from the Middle Ages to achieve their goal, jihad, or Holy War, on the West. These people to not want anything from us, do not want us to do something or not do something. Their issue with us is our way of life, and they will not stop until they have achieved their goal of subduing the West for Allah or until they are killed. In jihad, only 3 responses are acceptable for the enemy--to convert to Islam, to accept an Islamic ruler and sharia law and pay a fee for being allowed to remain a non-muslim, or to die. That is what they are trying to achieve. I know it sounds fantasical and unbelievable, but that's it.

According to their beliefs, they may use any means they can to achieve their goals including lying and accepting truces or engaging in negotiations, and doing all this in bad faith, with the intention of waiting until they are strong enough to rise up and defeat their enemy.


Edited 5/12/2004 9:50 pm ET ET by wrhen

Renee

iVillage Member
Registered: 04-10-2003
Wed, 05-12-2004 - 10:38pm
Wow thanks. I mean I feel so out when they talk about it all you have cleared a lot of my questions up for me. I cant believe it all. I just cant believe people can think killing people is the right thing to do. I mean for them to kill innocent people and it being right in their faith. Its mind blowing. So does or did Bin Laden and Sadam have anything to do with each other or anything?
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Thu, 05-13-2004 - 8:20am
The Middle East

U.S. MANIPULATES MIDEAST FOR FUN AND PROFIT - about the Gulf War, Oil and the Arms trade. The USA is the world's biggest exporter of arms. The Mid-East is the biggest importer.

Osama bin Laden: Some of his "justifications" from 1998

"We however, differentiate between the western government and the people of the West. If the people have elected those governments in the latest elections, it is because they have fallen prey to the Western media which portray things contrary to what they really are. And while the slogans raised by those regimes call for humanity, justice, and peace, the behavior of their governments is completely the opposite. It is not enough for their people to show pain when they see our children being killed in Israeli raids launched by American planes, nor does this serve the purpose. What they ought to do is change their governments which attack our countries. The hostility that America continues to express against the Muslim people has given rise to feelings of animosity on the part of Muslims against America and against the West in general. Those feelings of animosity have produced a change in the behavior of some crushed and subdued groups who, instead of fighting the Americans inside the Muslim countries, went on to fight them inside the United States of America itself.


The Americans started it and retaliation and punishment should be carried out following the principle of reciprocity, especially when women and children are involved. Through history, American has not been known to differentiate between the military and the civilians or between men and women or adults and children. Those who threw atomic bombs and used the weapons of mass destruction against Nagasaki and Hiroshima were the Americans. Can the bombs differentiate between military and women and infants and children? America has no religion that can deter her from exterminating whole peoples. Your position against Muslims in Palestine is despicable and disgraceful. America has no shame. ... We believe that the worst thieves in the world today and the worst terrorists are the Americans. Nothing could stop you except perhaps retaliation in kind."

1998-May
Interview with Osama bin Laden
ABC reporter John Miller is asking the questions
Information posted to me via a IslamicMessage email list.


There is strong feelings throughout most Islam nations that America suppresses them. Although ordinary, peaceful citizens do not suppose as much, or feel hatred (in the same way American's should not hate all the middle-East because American embassies are bombed), it is normally the strongest and loudest voice, the most extreme, that the Western world comes to see as representative.

Support for Osama bin Laden

"As Osama Bin Laden is vilified in the West, he is fast achieving the status of a cult hero in parts of the Arab world.

Television personality

Millions of Arabs watched last Thursday as a satellite television station aired a three-year-old interview with him. Even moderate Arabs said afterwards they could identify with his criticism of America's support for Israel which still occupies Palestinian land. "

" would like US and British forces to leave Saudi Arabia.

Many Saudi Islamists, who have little direct contact with the West, see these troops as colonial invaders, as latter-day crusaders come to defile the birthplace of Islam. "

"The cult of Bin Laden" by BBC News
Monday, 24 September, 2001, 12:31 GMT 13:31 UK


Osama bin Laden iterates the same reasons each time - the injustice done to the Palestinians, the cruelty of continued sanctions against Iraq, the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia, the repressive and corrupt nature of US-backed Gulf governments - and he wins a good deal of popular sympathy.

Israel
Israel, which receives over 3 billions dollars military support from America, is very much hated amongst the Arab world. Perhaps the West, America in particular, thinks that Israel is a stronghold, or a stabilizer on the middle East, but it's presence and it's continual conflicts with it's neighbours such as Pakistan have caused Israel to become to be seen as another Satan, a state controlled by America.


"...Arab nations have lost three wars against their arch-foe - and America's closest ally - Israel. A sense of failure and injustice is rising in the throats of millions.

Three weeks ago, a leading Arabic newspaper, Al-Hayat, published a poem on its front page. A long lament about the plight of the Arabs, addressed to a dead Syrian poet, it ended:

"Children are dying, but no one makes a move.
Houses are demolished, but no one makes a move.
Holy places are desecrated, but no one makes a move....
I am fed up with life in the world of mortals.
Find me a hole near you. For a life of dignity is in those holes."

It sounds as if it could have been written by a desperate and hopeless man, driven by frustration to seek death, perhaps martyrdom. A young Palestinian refugee planning a suicide bomb attack, maybe. In fact, it was written by the Saudi Arabian ambassador to London, a member of one of the wealthiest and most influential families in the kingdom that is Washington's closest Arab ally.

...From one end of the region to the other, the perception is that Israel can get away with murder - literally - and that Washington will turn a blind eye. Clearly, the US and Israel have compelling reasons for their actions. But little that US diplomats have done in recent years to broker a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians has persuaded Arabs that the US is a fair-minded and equitable judge of Middle Eastern affairs.

Over the past year, Arab TV stations have broadcast countless pictures of Israeli soldiers shooting at Palestinian youths, Israeli tanks plowing into Palestinian homes, Israeli helicopters rocketing Palestinian streets. And they know that the US sends more than $3 billion a year in military and economic aid to Israel. "

More click on

 


Photobucket&nbs

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Thu, 05-13-2004 - 8:40am

From the mouth of Colin Powell...........


No proof links Iraq, al-Qaida, Powell says.........


Secretary of State Colin Powell reversed a year of administration policy, acknowledging Thursday that he had seen no “smoking gun concrete evidence” of ties between former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida.







Powell, speaking at a news conference at the State Department, stressed that he was still certain that Iraq had dangerous weapons and needed to be disarmed by force, and he sharply disagreed with a private think tank report that maintained that Iraq was not an imminent threat to the United States.


“I have not seen smoking gun, concrete evidence about the connection, but I do believe the connections existed,” he said.


Powell’s observation marked a turning point in administration arguments in support of the U.S. invasion of Iraq last spring. The assertion that Saddam and the terrorist network led by Saudi fugitive Osama bin Laden were working in concert was a primary justification for the war.


As recently as September, President Bush declared that there was “no question” that Saddam had ties to al-Qaida.


Powell himself made the case most strongly in February, when he urged the U.N. Security Council to back U.S. military action in Iraq. “Iraqi officials deny accusations of ties with al-Qaida,” Powell said then. “These denials are simply not credible.”


Powell defended those comments Thursday, even as he cast doubt on their conclusions. He said that at the time, he was referring specifically to the presence of

 


Photobucket&nbs

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Thu, 05-13-2004 - 8:52am

As you can see there's much disagreement about this. I read that a paper was found in Iraq that suggested a meeting between the two but that no meeting took place.


Pentagon Questions Reports on Osama-Saddam Ties.


Several newspapers and other media outlets had egg on their face Monday after reporting or endorsing a Weekly Standard story revealing new evidence of an "operational relationship" between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden.

Several outlets, including the New York Post, The Washington Times and FOX News, ran with the story. There was just one problem: On Saturday, the Pentagon issued a press release stating that "news reports that the Defense Department recently confirmed new information with respect to contacts between al-Qaida and Iraq ... are inaccurate."

Despite this, the New York Post on Monday titled its editorial on the subject: "Bush Was Right."

In the current Nov. 24 issue of the conservative journal The Weekly Standard, Stephen F. Hayes writes that Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein "had an operational relationship from the early 1990s to 2003 that involved training in explosives and weapons of mass destruction, logistical support for terrorist attacks, al Qaeda training camps and safe haven in Iraq, and Iraqi financial support for al Qaeda."

The magazine's revelations allegedly came from a "top secret U.S. government memorandum obtained by The Weekly Standard." The Pentagon press release, however, states that the classified sections of the document contained "raw reports" and "was not an analysis of the substantive issue of the relationship between Iraq and al Qaida and it drew no conclusions."

The Nov. 17 New York Post editorial made no mention of the Pentagon refuting the charge as "inaccurate."

Also on Monday, The Washington Times carried an editorial on the issue, using The Weekly Standard article as evidence. At the end of the editorial, the Times mentions the Pentagon release, but urges "readers to examine the Weekly Standard article and decide for themselves."

On Nov. 16, The Washington Post's Walter Pincus reported that the CIA has found "no evidence that Hussein sought to arm terrorists."


http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=2030480

cl-Libraone~

 


Photobucket&nbs

iVillage Member
Registered: 04-10-2003
Thu, 05-13-2004 - 8:54am
Why do we have Isreal as an ally and send them money? Why does the other middle eastern countries dislike them?
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Thu, 05-13-2004 - 9:30am
America's staunchest Mideast ally

When Kennedy sold Hawk missiles to Israel, a great friendship was born


Today the relationship between the United States and Israel is so close that it is hard to believe things were ever otherwise. Administration officials sometimes bristle at what they judge to be Israeli intransigence - an exasperated Secretary of State James Baker once read the White House phone number aloud to reporters and asked Jerusalem to call - but on the whole, the two countries are common-law allies. US foreign aid flows to Israel like a fiscal River Jordan. US weapons are the backbone of Israeli defense.

Yet the situation was not always thus. One of the greatest strengths of Warren Bass's thorough and fascinating "Support Any Friend: Kennedy's Middle East and the Making of the US-Israel Alliance" is that it reminds us this relationship was made, not born. The two countries may share cultural affinities, but at many points along the way a change of leadership, or of heart, might have made things turn out differently. "The US-Israel alliance we know today is the cumulative product of individual decisions that could have gone either way," writes Bass.


The author contends that the pivotal presidency for US-Israeli relations was that of John F. Kennedy. Other historians typically emphasize the importance of later administrations and events, particularly the aid and arms flows that followed the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War. Yet JFK was the first US chief executive to sell a major weapons system to the Israelis, Bass points out.


True, the system in question was a defensive one - Hawk antiaircraft missiles. But the gates were open. As Israeli founding father David Ben-Gurion had foreseen, the two nations began to move closer once the US policy debate focused on which armaments to sell Israel, as opposed to whether to sell any at all.


Indeed, before the end of Kennedy's 1,000-day administration Israel had begun asking for F-104 fighters, tanks, and ground-to-ground missiles. The founding generation of Israel's leaders was eager to lessen reliance on France and Britain for arms in favor of a Western power they judged would end up more powerful, and more reliable.


"The Hawk precedent remains perhaps the most under appreciated milestone in the US-Israel special relationship," writes Bass.


This does not mean Kennedy entered office planning to improve US-Israeli ties. Unlike, say, Lyndon Johnson, the studiedly cool JFK did not have a romantic attachment to Israel or its people. America was locked in a cold war with a Soviet adversary that seemed on the march, and the young US chief executive was trolling for allies.


He'd have been happy to sign up Egypt as well. Early in his term, Kennedy made overtures of aid and friendship to Egypt's charismatic nationalist ruler Gamal Abdel Nasser. But he was unwilling or unable to fully take Kennedy's hand. Moreover, Nasser became embroiled in a nasty civil war in Yemen - "my Vietnam," he later called it - which sapped his attention. Egyptian intervention in Yemen frightened Saudi Arabia, Yemen's neighbor on the Arabian Peninsula. This put the White House in what has since become a familiar spot: trying to manage a multidimensional conflict dealing with Egypt, Israel, and oil.


Kennedy had differences with Israel, to be sure. Primary among these was the Israeli drive to acquire nuclear weapons. JFK pushed hard to inspect Israel's Dimona nuclear reactor, to see if it was intended to produce bomb-grade fissile material. But he settled for an inspection regime that was less than ironclad, a move Bass judges a "fudge." Kennedy's assassination settled the matter, as nuclear nonproliferation ranked much lower on LBJ's list of concerns.


Did a yen for Jewish votes drive Kennedy's Middle East policies? As a former representative and senator, he must have had some idea of the political consequences of his moves in the region, but "there is scant evidence in the documentary record that the hunt for Jewish votes ever seriously drove Kennedy's Arab- Israeli diplomacy," writes Bass.


Nor did a powerful Jewish lobbying organization push through the Hawk sale, according to "Support Any Friend." The American Israel Public Affairs Committee and its brethren were infants at the time.


These assertions could well be true, but are worth further exploration. As Bass notes, as early as 1948, opponents of Harry Truman's recognition of Israel believed it was motivated by domestic politics.


The author, a former fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations currently on the staff of the federal 9/11 commission, has done an impressive amount of documentary research. He cites documents from archives on three continents. His book contains vivid sketches of its dramatis personae, including Ben-Gurion and a young Shimon Peres.


Nor does Bass view JFK with the sort of misty sentimentalism that Kennedy himself would have abhorred. There are mercifully few references to "Camelot." Jackie and Caroline appear only as bit players.


Yet in the end the book may leave readers with two thoughts: the first, that enmities in the Middle East have cooled little 40 years hence; the second, that JFK, for the brevity of his time in office, really did make a tremendous difference in the world.


It was the middle of the night in the Middle East when the news came through that Kennedy had died. In Egypt, an aide relayed the news to Nasser. Writes Bass: "Nasser felt somehow compelled to go in to the office. 'My God, why have I dressed, why have I come here?' he asked when he arrived. 'There is nothing any of us can do about it.' "


For more info. try initiating a search on http://www.google.com


And you're welcome.

cl-Libraone~

 


Photobucket&nbs

iVillage Member
Registered: 04-10-2003
Thu, 05-13-2004 - 12:26pm
Thank you so much. Yesterday all I did was search google for things but so much stuff that deals with other things pop up to because it finds a the key words. I just wanted to hear from a person and I thank you for all your time and effort.
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Thu, 05-13-2004 - 2:43pm
Please feel free to join in the discussions. It's not all politics....... there's a Lite News section too. That's how we all learn by asking questions, or experience, the former being the safest. Happy





cl-Libraone~

 


Photobucket&nbs

iVillage Member
Registered: 07-25-2003
Thu, 05-13-2004 - 3:30pm
<>

There's been a lot of confusing reports coming out at differnt times, but here's what we know.

Saddam wasn't a religous Muslim and his government was one of the few remaining secular ones in the Middle East, while OBL is one of the fundamental Islamists I described in my previous post.

Saddam has always dreamed of uniting the Arab world again as Suliman the Magnificent did when he built the Ottoman Empire. That's why he has always been obssessed with building up his military and being the most powerful force in the area. That's what the invasion of Kuwait was all about. He thought once his army, the 4th largest in the world, invaded and occupied a few neighboring countries, the rest would pretty much surrender. He was only hours away from a planned invasion of Saudi Arabia when he realized that world was so outraged by what he was doing in Kuwait that he better bide his time and hold off on that until he was better situated. After the war, we opened an air force base in Saudi Arabia to defend it and other countries in the region against Saddam who was still a threat.

Saddam had to rethink his grand plan, and as the fundamentalist movement grew, he started to use it, as a way to appeal to Muslims in other countries; remember, he's still planning to become the man that goes down in history for uniting the Arab world. He had a verse of the Koran incorporated into the Iraq flag. He had a scribe create an illuminated manuscript of the Koran using Saddam's own blood instead of ink. He started incorporating religous messages into his speeches, supporting various acts of international terrorism with money and training and probably intelligence, too. Iraq also gave protection to terrorists who were wanted wold-wide including one involved in the first World Trade Center attack, and one involved in the last.

For his part, Osama ben Laden has spoken strongly against secular Arabic leaders like Saddam which gave rise to speculation that he would not collaborate with him. However, from recently released Clinton era intelligence, and documents found in Iraq, we know the 2 did have a relationship. Additionally, the 'asprin' factory that Clinton bombed in Sudan was manufacturing chemical agents that were traced directly back to Iraq's WMD program, and coincidentally, this was occuring at the same time ben Laden was running his training camp in the same part of Sudan. Iraqi records have turned up which name Osama as a collaborator, and there are records of intelligence agents meeting with members of Al Queda out of the country. Before the war, we also had information about a meeting between intelligence officers and Mohammed Atta, the 9-11 ring leader.

There were questions about whether or not that meeting really took place, so the administration didn't base their case against Saddam on an Iraq-9/11 link, but on Saddam's WMD and his support of terrorism in general. Since the war started, we have confirmed that terrorists were training in Iraq, and we have uncovered Iraqi documents which indicate that they did meet with Atta. Some have said that that documentation is somewhat ambiguous but last week, it was, in fact, confirmed. The meeting was supposed to have happened in the Check Republic, and they, at last, released information that confirmed a meeting did occur there between Atta and Iraqi intelligence agents.

There is also some information which indicates that while Iraq occupied Kuwait, they may have altered some Kuwaiti records to provide false identification for Iraqi operatives and possibly terrorists including one tied to the first TWC attack and one tied to 9-11. This is an avenue that really needs to be investigated further.









Edited 5/13/2004 6:16 pm ET ET by wrhen

Renee

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