EMAIL SIGN UP!
Most Popular This Week
Popular content
Today's Top News
UN Staff Killed in Afghanistan Amid Protests over Qur'an Burning
Police spokesman in northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif says demonstrators killed at least eight UN employees
The UN mission in Afghanistan has been thrown into a deep crisis after a furious mob of protesters killed and wounded a number of its staff in one of the country's most peaceful cities.
Afghans burn an American flag during a protest in Herat province today. The UN mission in Afghanistan has been thrown into a deep crisis after a furious mob of protesters killed and wounded a number of its staff in one of the country's most peaceful cities. (Photograph: Omar Sobhani/Reuters) One police source in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif claimed at least eight foreign UN employees were killed after a demonstration in the thriving commercial hub turned violent. Other officials reported different figures.
Provincial police spokesman Sherjan Durrani said the demonstrators poured out of mosques in the city in the early afternoon, shortly after Friday prayers where worshippers had been angered by reports that a Florida pastor had burned a copy of the Qur'an.
Last year Terry Jones, a US fundamentalist Christian leader, did threaten to burn copies of the Muslim holy book. He backed down after warnings that Islamic opinion around the world could be inflamed and the lives of US troops in Afghanistan and Iraq endangered.
But on 21 March Wayne Sapp set light to a Qur'an with Jones standing by.
Durrani said that while most protesters were peaceful, others were seeking targets to attack, including shops and the UN compound.
Whatever the final death toll, the incident is seen as a disaster for the UN, coming just over a week after the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, announced that Mazar-e-Sharif would be one of the first areas of the wartorn country to be transferred from Nato to Afghan government security control.
If the number of UN staff killed is high, the organisation will be obliged to consider closing down or dramatically reducing all its operations in the country – something it came perilously close to doing in late 2009 when an attack on a UN guesthouse in Kabul killed five staff.
The UN has already issued a "white city" order, which forces all staff in the country into lockdown in their compounds.
Earlier in the day hundreds of Afghans marched on the US embassy in Kabul.
In a statement the UN confirmed that some of its staff members had been killed. "The situation is still confusing and we are currently working to ascertain all the facts and take care of all our staff. The special representative of the secretary general, Staffan de Mistura, is on his way to Mazar-e-Sharif now to deal with the situation personally on the ground."
Comments
Note: Disqus 2012 is best viewed on an up to date browser. Click here for information. Instructions for how to sign up to comment can be viewed here. Our Comment Policy can be viewed here. Please follow the guidelines. Note to Readers: Spam Filter May Capture Legitimate Comments...
70 Comments so far
Show All""But on 21 March Wayne Sapp set light to a Qur'an with Jones standing by.""
******************
Well you know these 2 fuck ups will become national heros and probably be given positions in o's administration, like in the new and forth coming 'department of religion', wasp style. That's 'white anglo-saxon protestant'.
Shame these 2 can't be sent over to Afghanistan to 'view' their work.
I really can't blame the poor Sapp.
Burning a Koran is a necessary stepping-stone to get the coveted job of Chaplain to the Florida Legislature.
Jones, in what passes for him and his as religious 'thought', apparently believed that by claiming the right to a response from the Muslim community to his threats, he actually deserved and expected to be engaged on the level of what amounts to a schizophrenic reading of both Islamic and Christian scripture. He is utterly unaware of the deep respect that was represented by the silence, for that of what is legitimate in him as a human being.
The sadness of what amounts to projection of self imposed trauma is that it slams his own self-constructed closet door on any legitimate conversation of spiritual truth due to judgments that come not from scripture but from a profoundly damaged human being. Having little to do with G-d Terry Jones, Sapp and his followers then try to say that it is someone else who has their hand on the door knob, closing the door and preventing them from experiencing the light.
WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER
It's just an extension of the Cursades! been going on at least a thousand years so far. To bad we can't get all the religious in one place, like the Golan strip. Arm them and forget them! Seal them up no commerce no air travel just let them have it out Armegetton style!
Whoever god wants to come out of top will win! Meanwhile in the real world we can have some peace & quiet! While God settles it!
>^^<
Check out the stories at www.talk2action.org
One is about the book burning, another titled "Who Are The Apostles."... This one will show you that you might get your wish about religions all in one place.
Stories from Mazur-i-Sharif contain an important fact missing from this story...
The crowd was more incensed over the 'Kill Team' actions. Apparently the (unreported) story in US press, about the Qur'an (correct spelling) burning was last straw in these insane efforts to 'win hearts and minds'.
We have created even more enemies to justify our long term stay and enrich the war profiteers.
A book in not a living thing. A book is not a living thing. A book is not a living thing.
So crowds of uneducated, backwards morons were incted to murder people during Friday prayers by their Imam Overlord over someone burning a BOOK half way around the world.
If these Afghan imbeciles only knew how their behavior makes the tea party folks back home seem reasonable.
Yes, after an interminable, cumulative train of Amerikan atrocities, offenses, and insults, it's only natural to expect outraged Afghan victims to first ask themselves how their response will be perceived by the Amerikan public.
Maybe they should have a little less reverence for the Koran, and more for Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People".
Conservative religion is collective insanity
John Kerry lost Ohio and thus the presidential election when the Pope refused to allow him to receive the sacraments just a few days before the election. The dead are yet to be counted.
Angry Irish Jesus, Mohamed,et al have no business in our politics. The pope and his outfit are little more than mafia. Actually, they are more ruthless and powerful. "Obey the teachings of the church" That just about covers it. See you in hell.
Oh, my... I'll start by pointing out that if you need a book or a 'religion' to provide you with a 'moral' compass, you need a hell of a lot more help than can be provided by any church leader.
The teachings of Jesus have nothing to do with any churches I've ever been to or heard about. Churches, including the Catholics, are all about the monies, not the morals.
No, religion has no place in a civilized state. Religion is what you use when you want to burn books, people or other scapegoats. There's no god at all.
Sigh.. tired old OMFG Mao! Stalin! Hitler! argument.
Hitler was quasi-religious at the very least.
Mao and Stalin were atheists, but no one kills anyone in the name of non-belief. No one kills each other because they don't believe in astrology or Zeus. No one kills each other because they don't believe in unicorns. Nobody kills each other because they don't believe in God.
Stalin and Mao killed people over political ideals, and ran their organizations like religions that worshiped the state, and made themselves into quasi-deities. Nationalism is a bad thing, just like religion is a bad thing. Anything that serves to divide people into waring sects is not good.
Societies never become worse off by being more reasonable about things. There is nothing that says you can't take what you like from the Sermon on the Mount without being Christian. No one calls themselves a Ghandian just because they happen to agree with the idea of nonviolence.
And honestly, if a person needs to be told how to behave instead of being able to figure it out for themselves, then I think there's an issue.
Wow, that's a nice troll there. How long have you been under the bridge just waiting to come out and be so special?
Be careful not to keep your moral compass too close to the bible. You will never find your way out of the dark forest of prejudice.
That's an interesting bit of "history", Angry Irishman. I like history too, and one of my regrets is that I don't find enough time to read up more on things. Anyway, I found this from Wikipedia:
>>"In 1481, the papal bull Aeterni regis had granted all land south of the Canary Islands to Portugal. On 4 May 1493 the Spanish-born Pope Alexander VI decreed in the bull Inter caetera that all lands west and south of a pole-to-pole line 100 leagues west and south of any of the islands of the Azores or the Cape Verde Islands should belong to Spain, although territory under Christian rule as of Christmas 1492 would remain untouched. The bull did not mention Portugal or its lands, so Portugal couldn't claim newly discovered lands even if they were east of the line. Another bull, Dudum siquidem, entitled Extension of the Apostolic Grant and Donation of the Indies and dated 25 September 1493, gave all mainlands and islands then belonging to India to Spain, even if east of the line."<<
So it looks like the Catholic Church has been handing out territory, left and right, to those that "obey the teachings of the Church". And it looks like the Catholic Church had not just the moral compass, but the mariner's compass as well, to first conquer territory where the moral compass can then be deployed! John Kerry should have known better.
*rolls eyes*
No matter how much you religionists try to claim so, religion is not a prerequisite for ethics and morality.
And really, the last people who should be lecturing people on morality, are Irish catholics, given the scale of child abuse that the Irish catholic church engaged in and condoned. Go fix your own problems fist.
What makes you think you can't have a moral compass without religion? How highly offensive to those of us who are not religious. If anything, we have morals IN SPITE of religion's barbarism, because there was morality before there was religion. It is a product of our evolution because it contributed to our survival as a species...
"You Liberals can't stand the Catholic Church..."
I come from a Liberal family, and while we didn't practice any religion, I was taught by my parents that everyone, regardless of race, religion, means, ect., was no more, nor no less than I. I was also taught to live by the Golden Rule, and to be truthful, honest, and hard working. In my early teens I babysat for the families of two Catholics who came from a large family we knew. These men molested me. I realized as an adult that they probably went to confession afterward and was absolved of their sins. I still carry the scars many decades later. Then I married into a very Conservative Baptist family from Texas, and soon became an active church member. I was shocked to learn how hated the Catholic Church was. There was a big celebration every time a Catholic converted to Baptist. At the family Thanksgiving in 1963, JFK's funeral was showing on the TV, and my in-laws, one a Baptist Preacher, laughed and made jokes about Mrs. Kennedy and the other family members.
I couldn't take any more of the hate taught in the church, and after quite a few years I stopped attending. A relative joined the Adventist church late in life, and gradually changed from a caring person into one advocating the death of Edward Kennedy, and "all the damned Catholics." She'd also changed from being a Democrat her whole life to becoming a Republican. So where's the Liberal hatred for Catholics here?
Wow, shadre, thank you for sharing. I have some southern Baptist friends, very nice people generally, but there is a certain boundary that I try to stay away from - where our world view would be totally opposite. Over the years, I have learned to treat it as just another psychological conditioning, although under certain circumstances, such conditioning could lead to some callous or even inhumane thinking and behavior. I always admire people who manage to break free of childhood conditioning for which they cannot be held responsible.
In any decent society this Jones fellow and his so called parishoners would be charged with incitement to murder because they are responsible for the deaths of the UN workers. Free speech has as much to do with this crime as it does when someone yells "fire" in a crowded theater.
I wonder how many decent early american pioneers and soldiers were charged with genocide. I believe we called it manifest destiny. Now it's national security. I'll bet the number of americans who support pastor Jones actions is in the millions.
Certinally! He didn't kill anyone, maim anyone,, just held a private cermony in his meeting place with his like minded friends.... and they burned a book. Anyone think the murder of 12 people is a bit far in retaliation?? In america he has the right to express his religion as he chooses, within reason. no virgin sacrafice, no wierd sexual mutalition of males or females.
I don't see anything he did as wrong under american norms, And in their country maybe they are reacting whin the law too..
That's religion must never be allowed in the public debate,, EVER!
>^^<
guesswho says a book is not a living thing. I agree. Especially, as an atheist. Funny, though, I do own a Bible, but have never thought to burn it. I have very, very strong feelings about the abject stupidity inherent in Christians who would burn the Koran or for Muslims who would burn the Bible, I do respect the right of their saner brethren to believe as they choose. The Bible I have sits on my shelf as a reference book and I probably should add a Koran just to keep my shelf level.
I would also agree with guesswho on the Afghans' imbecility - with one exception: by picking on United Nations personnel they chose to exact their revenge on the wrong people. Their deaths rest squarely on the shoulders of haters like Jones and Sapp, just as they do on the shoulders of the Afghans who chose to kill innocent people because they could not reach Jones and Sapp.
Christians don't need "burning the bible" as an excuse to kill people.
It was not Muslims that sent the Jews to Concentration camps in Germany and Poland. Nor was it Muslims that killed 2 million plus in Vietnam or that dropped Nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It is not Muslims that Invaded Iraq or that drop DU Munitions on people in Pakistan by drone.
So what is your great big difference?
Why are nonbelievers ill equipped "to do theology?" Because they come at it without the preconception that the subject matter they are dealing with is true?
Theology has to be the biggest nonsense profession out there. It's pretty foolish to think that the reason nonbelievers disagree with its conclusions is because they don't understand its unsound reasoning. We understand it, we just find it irrational and baseless.
>>Angry Irishman wrote: "Without the proper training in theology, you can't understand what is going on."<<
One could say the same thing about Zen Buddhism, yoga, various forms of meditation, etc. There are people who follow any number of such practices, lead a normal life, without consciously harming others, and even working for the welfare of all humanity and other species. And there are those activists who have dedicated their life to various noble causes, helping humanity, saving what's left of the natural world, etc., without believing in any religion. So there's proof that one could be a good human being without adopting your particular faith or any particular faith.
Wow. Nuclear fission is science. It can be directly studied. There is no doubt it is a fact of reality. To compare the possibility for me to go and learn about the physical sciences to learning about how individuals have chosen to interpret the world's oldest game of telephone is rather silly. But my point, again, is that theology is not rocket science. It's not even a science, it's just a game of apologetics and is rather unconvincing to those who aren't superstitious.
This has nothing to do with my heart, I was raised Catholic and eventually came to my senses. I am able to lead a good life without being told what to do by an omnipotent sky daddy. Unfortunately, you harbor a belief that says a freethinker such as myself will burn in hell for not agreeing with you, even if I lead a good life. So, if anyone has a problem with their "heart" it's you. I'd never, in good conscience, be able to harbor such an unethical and atrocious belief system as what is put forward in the Bible.
Sure, there is nothing unsound about understanding there is evil in the world. What is unsound is somehow believing that a truly benevolent being would allow such evil to persist. Hence, one must conclude such a being does not exist. The problem of theodicy is the main reason I came to my senses and became an atheist. I cannot possibly believe that a benevolent God would allow things like the recent tsunami to happen (and I've heard every theological answer to the question, and they all fail to satisfy me, so don't bother to start carrying on about punishment for sin, "free will," or the redemptive power of suffering. The Universe is simply indifferent to the happiness or suffering of human beings, end of story).
And seriously, the fact that millions of people have been horribly misled and some would say "brainwashed" from birth to believe this claptrap isn't evidence of anything other than human credulity. Besides, I could just as easily use your own argument against you by pointing out that mobs of people also believe in all sorts of other religions, and I highly doubt you find that a convincing case for the truth of Islam.
Sorry my friend, the only person who doesn't want to face the facts is you. And I can only conclude that is either because you can't stomach the fact that one day you are going to die and turn into worm food, or you aren't able to figure out a better way to give your own life meaning if it isn't instilled from without by some divine anthropomorphic entity we invented so we can feel like humans are the point of all existence. You've already made clear you don't believe we have the power to be good people without being threatened with eternal spankings.
My heart is filled with joy at the magnificence of the universe, and it's working just fine without an invisible friend or a magical guidebook.
The Inquisition was very much a Christian thing, or hadn't you heard?
Well, a Catholic thing, anyway.
As for 'christian violence', apparently you've never also heard of the Klan, Christian Identity, or other affiliated groups?
The christian also believes that those who don't believe in their claptrap are going to be burning forever in a lake of fire. Umm, eternal punishment for not taking a cookie while alive? You think that's reasonable? You think that's not a message of hate and contempt that is beyond all other measures? You think that there aren't xtians who really enjoy killing those who don't believe that the mother of Jesus was a perpetual virgin?
Maybe you should take a closer look at the philosophy of your church. After all, they still are trying to convince those fucked by their priests to 'confess' their own sins and forgive those who raped them.
Ah so these are from the Koran?
>>Next we headed for the land of Bashan, where King Og and his army attacked us at Edrei. But the LORD told me, 'Do not be afraid of him, for I have given you victory over Og and his army, giving you his entire land. Treat him just as you treated King Sihon of the Amorites, who ruled in Heshbon.' So the LORD our God handed King Og and all his people over to us, and we killed them all. We conquered all sixty of his towns, the entire Argob region in his kingdom of Bashan. These were all fortified cities with high walls and barred gates. We also took many unwalled villages at the same time. We completely destroyed the kingdom of Bashan, just as we had destroyed King Sihon of Heshbon. We destroyed all the people in every town we conquered – men, women, and children alike. But we kept all the livestock for ourselves and took plunder from all the towns.
>>At the customary time for offering the evening sacrifice, Elijah the prophet walked up to the altar and prayed, "O LORD, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, prove today that you are God in Israel and that I am your servant. Prove that I have done all this at your command. O LORD, answer me! Answer me so these people will know that you, O LORD, are God and that you have brought them back to yourself." Immediately the fire of the LORD flashed down from heaven and burned up the young bull, the wood, the stones, and the dust. It even licked up all the water in the ditch! And when the people saw it, they fell on their faces and cried out, "The LORD is God! The LORD is God!" Then Elijah commanded, "Seize all the prophets of Baal. Don't let a single one escape!" So the people seized them all, and Elijah took them down to the Kishon Valley and killed them there. (1 Kings 18:36-40 NLT)
>>So Joshua and his warriors traveled to the water near Merom and attacked suddenly. And the LORD gave them victory over their enemies. The Israelites chased them as far as Great Sidon and Misrephoth-maim, and eastward into the valley of Mizpah, until not one enemy warrior was left alive. Then Joshua crippled the horses and burned all the chariots, as the LORD had instructed. Joshua then turned back and captured Hazor and killed its king. (Hazor had at one time been the capital of the federation of all these kingdoms.) The Israelites completely destroyed every living thing in the city. Not a single person was spared. And then Joshua burned the city. Joshua slaughtered all the other kings and their people, completely destroying them, just as Moses, the servant of the LORD, had commanded. However, Joshua did not burn any of the cities built on mounds except Hazor. And the Israelites took all the captured goods and cattle of the ravaged cities for themselves, but they killed all the people. As the LORD had commanded his servant Moses, so Moses commanded Joshua. And Joshua did as he was told, carefully obeying all of the LORD's instructions to Moses. (Joshua 11:7-15 NLT)
>>If a man still prophesies, his parents, father and mother, shall say to him, "You shall not live, because you have spoken a lie in the name of the Lord." When he prophesies, his parents, father and mother, shall thrust him through. (Zechariah 13:3
NAB)
Just a wee sampling of the violence and hatred in "The Holy Bible".
And those good king Loving Christian Priests were the ones in Charge of the Native Residential schools in Canada and the USA.
Those schools had a death rate of 50 percent meaning HALF the children that entered them never survived. 70 percent of all Children were subject to sexual abuse at the hands of those priests.
The death rate at these schools were higher then many of the Concentration camps in Nazi Germany.
To be fair, GwNorth, the things you quoted are from the Old Testament. I think packaging that with the teachings of Jesus Christ was either a sinister move or a masterstroke, depending on the POV, as there does not seem to be any overlap between the two, other than some contrived "continuity" some people may come up with. I think Gandhi had it right when he quipped:
"I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ."
To be fair NO ONE KNOWS what Mohamed said or what Jesus Christ said.
Mohamed could not read or write. Any words ascribed to him are what people CLAIMED he said just as the words of Jesus were written by people who did not even meet him wherein the Council of Nicea discarded things it did not think fit their purposes. The Roman Empire wanted a subservient people and not one that would take arms against it and the Council obliged.
The Roman Catholic Church has throughout its long and bloody history cited the Old Testament to justify its actions. See the 30 years war. The old Testament is part of the Bible. You can not just ignore the parts not liked and claim it proves it a book of "peace" The Old testament is far bloodier then anything in the Koran. If the Old Testament was "lies" then how was it included in the Holy Bible and how do those Good Christians explain that the Jealous and Vengeful God that instructed his followers to eliminate entire peoples suddenly had a change of heart if that same God Infallible and the Bible the word of God as the Roman Catholic Church claims?
It just mumbo jumbo.
Revelations is filled to the brim with violence and is not the Old Testament. It is part of the New Testament. I grow sick to death of the idiots that try and pretend that the all the GOOD done by the Roman Catholic Church is done because they are Christians and all the harm they committed has nothing to do with that same Church.
It is the height of hypocrisy. Just as there are Muslims who have never harmed a soul and call for peace there are Christians that do the same. It hardly PROVES anything.
And here is another fact. The reason Islam grew so quickly is the Koran instructs its followers to give mercy to those that surrender. The Koran also forbids its follower to make war on women and children. It was the Christians who slaughtered the Jews of Jerusalem when that city fell. It was Christians that murdered entire cities during the 30 years war with the outright permission of the Pope. The Pope SANCTIONED that war and the massacres and rapes.
By the way. What precipitated the massacre of the Incas was when Montezuma pulled the bible a Christian Priest was reading to him out of the mans hands , looked at it and then threw it to the ground. For this grave sin the Indians were slaughtered by the hundreds in the square and the slaughter did not end until literally millions were killed.
I hope one day you have the courage to leave your bronze-age superstition behind and find a way to be good to your fellow man without needing guidance from a magic book. Your points are irrelevant because Christianity has caused violence, and still causes violence. And second, even if it taught peace, that doesn't make it remotely true... just more benign. Christian teachings of "loving your neighbor as yourself" meant just that: your neighbors. Be nice to your in group. It was never meant to apply to the dangerous heathens. It has only been due to progression in modern ethics and massive cherry picking on the part of theologians that Christianity has become a "religion of peace".
I agree with you that Islam is more violent. But that doesn't mean Christianity isn't also a part of the problem.
When people are convinced that a book is inerrant, and therefore take what is plainly written in it seriously, it is most certainly the fault of those who teach others that said book is divine and above scrutiny. You can talk all day long about the nuanced viewpoints of theologians, it doesn't change the fact that those are not the viewpoints held by most Christians who have not taken courses in theology but just think whatever their church leaders tell them to think each Sunday.
>>What are you talking about regarding the killing of the Jews? I only know of one fall of Jerusalem. That was in AD70 when the Roman armies of Titus entered the city and killed over 1 million Jews. Are you talking about something else? How about some links for your claims. This is typical behavior of anti-Catholics: make a claim with out substantiation, and because it is against the hated Catholic Church.
I suggest you do a bit of reading on The Crusades and the fall of Jerusalem. The Good Christian Knights under the sanction of their priests slaughtered the Jews who were living peaceably with the Muslims.
I suggest you do a review on all the pogroms sanctioned by the Church throughout Europe that saw tens of thousands of Jews Murdered in the name of God.
Go pick up any volume on the Crusades and the Christian knights BOAST of slaughtering The Jews wherein they were wading in blood. Jews had fled to the Synagogue and the Crusaders burnt it down around them killing all inside while singing Christian hymns.
They also sacked Constantinople with the full blessing of the Roman Catholic Church putting tens of thousands of Orthodox Christians to the blade.
I suggest you read of the slaughters and mass rapes that happened in the 30 years war wherein a Priest would pronounce a man married to a woman then allow that man to murder and rape her because the Church saw the woman as the mans wife.
There's plenty of BS in the New Testament as well. But it doesn't matter. Plenty of people take the Old Testament just as seriously. It's all a bunch of nonsense.
Belief is a psychological phenomena that masks ignorance with unverifiable certainty.
When you are not reading fairy tales, try Thomas Payne's Age of Reason.
Bibles are cheaper than firewood and I always keep a cord around for those cold winter nights.
*rolls eyes*
There are many many millions all over the world. Much of the reaction of the many many millions Muslims worldwide, to what Jones and Sapp did, has been a collective yawn. The people who have reacted are a few Afghans. Have you considered why? Perhaps because they are already pissed off at being invaded and bombed.
And when was the last time a Bible was burned?
Nothing wrong with apprecating books, I have a Talmoud, a Quaran, a Bible, even a book of Mormon.. Human fantacies interest me. That's still not a crime to own books.. Yet!
>^^<
I have my Bible from my early twenties when I attended church, and my mother's big Bible that I use as a reference book, which upsets my Christian son no end. Glad to hear there are others who use this book for the same purpose. The older I've gotten, the more ridiculous what's in this book seems to me. I believe in the creator that has no more interest in its creations than the author who doesn't go back into their published works to re-write them, or the sculptor who doesn't keep chipping away at a statue once it's completed, or ...
At www.talk2action.org, there's a story about this Qur'an burning. There's also another story that everyone should read to understand just what all the "stuff" that's happening now in this country is leading to. It's several stories down from the book burning story, and is titled "Who Are The 'Apostles.'... Pretty scary stuff.
I am out of work and a news junkie, I did not read or hear about this Terry Jones Qur'an burning incident till today , on March 21, 2011.
March 21st, where were the headlines and the outrage????
No national media coverage at all??Did it really happen? Why was the UN embassy attacked and not the US embassy??
Could this be another CIA false flag to get more engagement from the UN ?
Which basically means other country's will rejoin the fight and buy more military hardware from the USA.
Something stinks, and its reeks of the USA, CIA, neocon destabilization .
Is this the USA or the United Stasi of America??? Is everyone marching lock step, no more free press , no more truth?
Because the truth will endanger lives?? Really? More so than two 3 illegal occupations for empire??
Who are they kidding, America has no soul as long as war mongers, fear mongers and hate mongers rule at the bequest of bankers and the military industrial complex.
I too pay close attention to news from many sources. After the riots in Afghanistan, which were reported, I tried to figure out how I hadn't heard about the burning. Every MSM report that mentions the fact that the burning wasn't reported, states, without comment or elaboration as to why, that the burning wasn't noticed or covered or reported in the media. Unbelievable! Given the way coverage world-wide about Pastor Jones unfolded when he first said he was going to burn a number of the books, and then backed down, I cannot believe that any reporter or news organization with any journalistic integrity would simply not cover the story. Surely dozens of reporters were watching everything Jones did in the aftermath of the events presaging the March 21 burning. Why did they refrain from publishing the story? Or, why were they unable to publish it?
It's absolutely astounding that something so momentous was not reported by either the MSM or "progressive" media. Correct me if I'm wrong: no news media reported the book burning to Americans. I'm unsure how Karzai and other Muslims in Afghanistan found out about it -- obviously long before I did.
The real significance of this event is the way the media handled it. If the pastor had "convicted" and burned a copy of Playboy, that would merit little or no news coverage. But the burning of the Qur'an, in the wake of the international impact of the earlier threats to burn it, should have been all over the front pages -- unless there was some kind of organized suppression of the story. The obvious questions: what else are we not hearing about? And why? Is there some kind of deference being paid to Islamic fundamentalists that results in this kind of censorship?
So now we make a video of someone lighting up a Bible and a Qur'an in the same fire, get it on the net, buy some popcorn (not too much salt please but with real butter) and sit back and enjoy the show ?
This whole thing is sad. That these racist (don't even know if that's the right word for these people who hate them more for the religion than anything else) idiots think it okay to make a media spectacle out of burning a religious book shows how intolerant they are. Not to mention what this says about media that feels the need to report this.
Then we have these Afghans who seem to think its okay to murder over a burt book. Afghans certainly have enough to be pissed about and I understand the desire to lash out, but I have to agree with Guess Who. I can't imagine this was spontaneous.
So just how many lives do we have to destroy in our quest for oil, minerals, and geopolitical power? Iraqi, Afghani, Libyan, Pakistani, American, British, Chinese. These are just some of the nationalities who have been killed or horribly wounded in our current wars. Not to mention the destroyed infrastructure, economies, and societies along with the hundreds of thousands made homeless or refugees.
Plenty of White Muslims, in fact the Iranians are the decendants of the Aryans that Hitler made so much of!
>^^<
Let's see...
Day after day This rafter day after day, Afghans are killed as 'collateral damage. Then we kill a by of bystanders as they were negotiating a surrender from a Taliban group, And we kill a group of children gathering firewood(9 to be exact). etc,etc,etc
Then trophy pictures of US soldiers holding dead Afghans get published which really gets the Afghan's attention.
And then Jones burns the bible, knowing full well the possible consequence.
I'm sure that if Afghan policeman came here and kept killing innocents folks 'accidently'....oops, sorry.
And a bible was then burned in front of a mosque.
I'm sure we would 'turn the other cheek' and go 'now. now, boys'. No violent reaction at all.
Suuuure we would!
Christian nation my *ss. The U.S. of Israel is the most evil pile of Dog waste on the planet.....right down there with Israel and the U.K. The creator must have "special" plans for you hegemonious pigs which will undoubtedly have room for your "religeous right".
too bad their "spirituality" leads to things like this , what happened to compassion and loving your enemy and all that?
Who's "spirituality" are you referring to?