All People Who Are Not Afraid Of Facts's topics - tribe.net

Weigh in... your opinion, that is

2008-06-05T20:34:49Z

Discuss some interesting topics on CreateDebate like these:

http://www.createdebate.com/debate/show/Hydrogen_as_a_fuel_source___

http://www.createdebate.com/debate/show/Who_is_going_to_be_the_next_President_of_the_United_States

http://www.createdebate.com/debate/show/Should_creationism_be_taught_in_science_classes_in_public_schools

http://www.createdebate.com/debate/show/Do_you_trust_the_press

http://www.createdebate.com/debate/show/911_was_an_inside_job

posted in All People Who Are Not Afraid Of Facts - 0 replies

NOT AFRAID OF FACTS, BUT ARE WE AFRAID OF EACH OTHER

2007-04-20T15:56:04Z

I joined this group because I was offended by a posting where Arafat was shown in a demeaning manner. Now, I don't support any one side, particularly, but I think that we are all human and deserving of respect and love.

Now the facts are that I joined to possibly counter any possible bigotry here. Question: Will you all let me stay to be an additional voice of reason, or are the facts too hard to swallow?

"In a world where money rules, love, human rights and brotherhood are DYING!"

posted in All People Who Are Not Afraid Of Facts - 2 replies

Note from tribe.net: please assign a moderator

2006-11-21T23:02:35Z

Hey there, "All People Who Are Not Afraid Of..." members--

This Tribe doesn't have a moderator, but as a matter of policy, Tribe.net likes all groups to have a leader. Can you collectively choose someone to moderate your Tribe?

When you've reached consensus, have the new moderator send a note to help@tribe.net, with the words "Moderator Change – All People Who Are Not Afraid Of..." in the subject header, letting us know that you've selected a new leader. Please be sure to include a link to this discussion thread!

Thanks--

TOU (Terms of Use) Guy

posted in All People Who Are Not Afraid Of Facts - 1 reply

See the best of Spain

2006-09-18T07:19:17Z

Know more about Spain and feel the beauty of it to this site. Go to http://www.spaintraveltour.blogspot.com now.

posted in All People Who Are Not Afraid Of Facts - 0 replies

alaska

2006-07-17T04:48:17Z

Alaska remains the only state in the nation in which adults are legally free to possess and use small amounts of marijuana within their homes.

hmmm what do you think?

posted in All People Who Are Not Afraid Of Facts - 0 replies

fetus

2006-07-17T04:45:55Z

Appointing a guardian for a fetus would violate a woman's right not only to decide whether to continue her pregnancy, but also to choose medical care to protect her own health during pregnancy.

oh yeah thats right!

posted in All People Who Are Not Afraid Of Facts - 0 replies

banana!

2006-07-17T04:42:28Z

A banana is a herb.
does anyone care- no probably not. lets find some good stuff :)

posted in All People Who Are Not Afraid Of Facts - 0 replies

THE NAZI - MOSLEM TERRORIST LIK

2005-03-10T22:43:29Z

While this is long, it is VERY important information which everyone who cares about 9-11 and the terrorists war with us NEEDS to know!

First, is the authors website so you can
see that he is extremely well qualified to be making the statements he does. (Of course, you can read it before, or after reading the following information.)

http://www2.john-loftus.com/

-----------------------------------

OK People, while I do really do not like what I read below there is nothing I can do about it other than let others know of it.
So please take the time to carefully read this.

The information below is very important for everyone to know.

Subject: Nazi Muslims

From a speech given by JOHN LOFTUS to a Jewish group.

-------------------------------------

It always seems a little strange to have an Irish-Catholic talking about Yom Ha Shoah. Still, I had a very unusual education about the Holocaust.

When I was working for the Attorney General, I was assigned to do the classified research about the Holocaust, so I went underground to a little town called Suitland, Maryland, right outside Washington, D.C. and that's where the US Government buries its secrets - -
literally.

There are twenty vaults underground and each vault is one acre in
size. Anyone see the movie "Raiders of the Lost Ark"?
The last scene of that movie is what the underground vaults are really like, only not as organized as they are in the movie.

In those underground vaults I discovered something horrible. I
learned that many of the Nazis I had been assigned to prosecute were on the CIA payroll!

Only the CIA didn't know they were Nazis because the British Intelligence Service had lied to them.

And what the British Intelligence Service didn't know was that their liar was Kim Philby, the Soviet communist double agent - - a little scandal of the Cold War.

Still, our State Department swept it all under the rug and allowed the Nazis to stay in America until I was stupid enough to go public with it.

What do you do when you want to go public with a story like this one?

You call up 60 minutes.

We had a great time. Mike Wallace gave me 30 minutes on his show.
For a long time, it was the longest segment that 60 minutes ever did.

When the episode about Nazis in America went on the air back in 1982, it caused a national uproar. Congress demanded hearings, Mike Wallace
got the Emmy award, and my family got the death threats.

It was a great trip.

Then a funny thing happened. Over the last 25 years, nearly every retired spy in the U.S. and Canada and England all wanted me to be their lawyer, for free of course.

I had 500 clients, they paid me $1 apiece.
So while I am the worst paid lawyer in America, I'm among the better employed.

Let me give you an example. This year a friend of mine from the CIA, named Bob Baer wrote a very good book about Saudi Arabia and terrorism, it's called "Sleeping with the Devil".

I read the book and I got about a third of the way through and I stopped. Bob was writing how when he worked for the CIA how bad the files were.

He said, for example, the files for the Muslim Brotherhood were almost nothing. There were just a few newspaper clippings.

I called Bob up and said, "Bob, that's wrong. The CIA has enormous files on the Muslim Brotherhood, volumes of them. I know because I
read them a quarter of a century ago."

He said, "What do you mean?"

Here's how you can find all of the missing secrets about the Muslim Brotherhood -- and you can do this too.

I said, "Bob, go to your computer and type in two words into the search part. Type the word "Vanna," V-a-n-n-a. He said, "Yeah." Type in "Nazi."

Bob typed the two words in, and out came 30 to 40 articles from around the world.
He read them and called me back and said, "Oh my God, what have we done?"

What I'm doing today, is doing what I'm doing now: educating a new generation in the CIA that the Muslim Brotherhood was a fascist organization which was hired by Western Intelligence and has evolved over time into what we today know as al Qaeda.

Here is how this story began.

In the 1920's there was a young Egyptian named al Bana who formed a nationalist group called the Muslim Brotherhood.

Al Bana was a devout admirer of Adolph Hitler and wrote to him frequently. So persistent was he in his admiration of the new Nazi Party that in the 1930's, al Bana and the Muslim Brotherhood became a secret arm of Nazi Intelligence.

These Arab Nazis had much in common with the new Nazi doctrines. They hated Jews; they hated democracy; and they hated the Western culture.

It became the official policy of the Third Reich to secretly develop the Muslim Brotherhood as the fifth Parliament, an army inside of Egypt.

Then when war broke out, the Muslim Brotherhood promised, in writing, that they would rise up and help General Rommell and make sure that no English or American soldier was left alive in Cairo or Alexandria.

The Muslim Brotherhood began to expand in scope and influence during World War II. They even had a Palestinian section headed by the grand Mufti of Jerusalem, one of the great bigots of all time. Here, too,
was a man - - The grand Mufti of Jerusalem was the Muslim Brotherhood representative for Palestine.

These were undoubtedly were Arabs who were Nazis. This "Grand Mufti" went to Germany during the war and helped recruit an international SS division of Arab Nazis. They based it in Croatia and called it the "Handjar" Muslim Division.

It was to become the core of Hitler's new army of Arab fascists that would conquer the Arab peninsula from then on to Africa

- - grand dreams.

At the end of World War II, the Muslim Brotherhood was wanted for war crimes and their German intelligence handlers were captured in Cairo. The whole net was then rolled up by the British Secret Service.

Only a horrible thing happened. Instead of prosecuting the Nazis and the Muslim Brotherhood - - the British government hired them.

They brought all the fugitive Nazi war criminals of Arab and Muslim descent into Egypt, and for three years they were trained on a special mission. The British Secret Service wanted to use the fascists of the Muslim Brotherhood to strike down the infant state of Israel in 1948.

Only a few people in the Mossad know that many of the members of the Arab Armies and terrorist groups that tried to strangle the infant State of Israel were the Arab Nazis of the Muslim Brotherhood.

And Britain was not alone. The French Intelligence service cooperated by releasing the Grand Mufti and smuggling him to Egypt, so all of the Arab Nazis came together.

While from 1945 to 1948, the British Secret Service protected every Arab Nazi they could, they still failed to quash the State of Israel.

What the British did then, was that they sold the Arab Nazis to the predecessor of what became the CIA. While it may sound stupid; it may sound evil, it did happen.

The idea was that we were going to use the Arab Nazis in the Middle East as a counter- weight to the Arab communists. Just as the Soviet Union was funding Arab communists, we would fund the Arab Nazis to fight against them.

Lots of secret classes took place. We kept the Muslim Brotherhood on our payroll.

Only the Egyptians became nervous and Gamal Nasser ordered all of the Muslim Brotherhood to either get out of Egypt or be imprisoned, and he would execute them all.

During the 1950's, the CIA evacuated the Nazis of the Muslim Brotherhood to Saudi Arabia. When they arrived in Saudi Arabia, some of the
leading lights of the Muslim Brotherhood like Azzam, became the teachers in the Madrasas, the religious schools.

There they combined the doctrines of Nazism with this weird Islamic cult, Wahhabiism.

Everyone thinks Islam is this fanatical religion, it is not. They
think that Islam - - the Saudi version of Islam - -is typical, and it's
not.

The Wahhabi cult was condemned as a heresy more than 60 times by the Muslim nations.

Yet, when the Saudis got wealthy, they bought a lot of silence. This
is a very harsh cult.

The Wahhabiism was only practiced by two nations, the Taliban and Saudi Arabia. That's how extreme it is.

It really has nothing to do with Islam.
Islam is a very peaceful and tolerant religion. It has always had
good relationships with the Jews for the first thousand years of its existence.

For the Saudis, there was a ruler in charge of Saudi Arabia, and they were the new home of the Muslim Brotherhood,so fascism and extremism were mingled in these schools.

And there was a young student who paid attention - - and Azzam's student who was named:

Osama Bin Ladin.

Yes, Osama Bin Ladin was taught by the Nazis of the Muslim Brotherhood who had emigrated to Saudi Arabia.

In 1979, the CIA decided to take the Arab Nazis out of cold storage. The Russians had invaded Afghanistan, so we told the Saudis we would fund them if they would bring all of the Arab Nazis together and ship them off to Afghanistan to fight the Russians.

We had to rename them.

After all, we couldn't call them the Muslim Brotherhood as that was too sensitive a name. It's Nazi connection was too known.

So we called them the Maktab al Khidimat il Mujahideen, the MAK.

And then the CIA lied to Congress and said they didn't know who was on the payroll in Afghanistan, except the Saudis.
It was not true. And a small section CIA knew perfectly well that we had once again hired the Arab Nazis and that we were using them to fight our secret wars.
Azzam and his assistant, Osama Bin Ladin, rose to some prominence from 1979 to '89, and they won the war.

They had driven the Russians out of Afghanistan. So our CIA said, "We won, let's go home!" and we left this army of Arab fascists in the field of Afghanistan.

The Saudis did not want them to come back.

So the Saudis started paying bribes to Osama Bin Ladin and his followers to stay out of Saudi Arabia. And this, split the MAK half.

Azzam was assassinated and apparently by Osama Bin Ladin himself. The radical group - - the most radical of the merge of the Arab fascists and religious extremists - - Osama called that al Qaeda.

To this day, there are branches of the Muslim Brotherhood all through al Qaeda.

Osama Bin Ladin's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, came from the Egyptian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, wich was a result of a Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

While there are many flavors & branches, they are all Muslim Brotherhoods.

There is one in Israel. The organization known as "Hammas" is
actually a secret chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood.

When Israel assassinated Sheik Yassin a month ago, the Muslim Brotherhood published his obituary in a Cairo news- paper in Arabic and revealed that he was actually the secret leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza.

So the Muslim Brotherhood has became this poison which spread throughout the Middle East and on 9 - 11, it began to spread around the world.

I know all of this sounds like some sort of a sick fantasy, only you can go to your computer and type in the words "Vanna," V-a-n-n-a and the word "Nazi," N-a-z-i, and you will see all of the articles come
up.

Those are all the pieces of information that the CIA was trying to hide from its employees. It did not want them to know the awful past

In 1984, while I was exposing European Nazis on the CIA payroll, at the same time, they were trying to hide from Congress the fact they had Arab Nazis back on the payroll to fight the Russians - - a really stupid and corrupt program.

So, when Bob Baer studied his files, he was just stunned.

A whole new generation: all the current CIA people know nothing about this. And believe me, the current generation CIA are good and decent Americans and I like them a lot.

They're trying to do a good job, only part of their problem is that their files have been shredded. All of these secrets have to come
out.

My clients in the intelligence community said,

"Well, what are you doing about this ?"

They gave me an example.

"Here's how the Saudis finance these groups. The Saudis have established a group of charities on a street in Virginia.
It's 555 Grove St., Herndon, Virginia."

So I said, "OK the Saudis are terrorists,
so what?"

These charities fund Hamas, Hezbollah, Muslim Brotherhood and al
Qaeda. And the Saudis are getting tax deductions for terrorism.
They have set up front groups so all the terrorists groups in the U.S. and the front groups get the Saudi money as a charitable donation.

I said, "You're kidding me."

Nope. And then they told me that right near where I lived in Tampa, Florida was one of the leading terrorists in the world.

There were two professors at the University of South Florida. One had just left - - and he was now in Syria - - and he was the world head of Islamic Jihad.

His number two, the head of Islamic Jihad in the Western Hemisphere, was Dr. Sami al-Arian, who is still employed as a professor at the University of South Florida.

You've got to be kidding. This can't be true!

Yes, these guys are raising money all across America and shipping it to Syria to go down to Palestine, the Palestinian areas, and to hire suicide bombers to kill Jews.

They sent me the video tapes. There was Professor al-Arian on stage
and one of his friends gets up and says:

"Now, who will give me $500 to kill a Jew? There are people standing
by in Jerusalem who will go out in the street and stab a Jew with a knife, but we need $500. All of this money will go to the Islamic committee for Palestine."

And that is the front group in the United States for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
With this, I asked all my friends in the FBI and CIA send in these files.

I said, "Why haven't you prosecuted this guy? You've known about him since 1989."

"We'd love to. We've tried to prosecute him only we were told we couldn't touch him because he gets all of his money from the Saudis. And we are all under orders not to do anything to embarrass the Saudi government."

I said, "I don't mind embarrassing them."
So you know what I did?

I donated money to the charity that was the terrorist fund, because under Florida law,it gave me the right to sue the charity to find out where my money was going.

It was hilarious.

In early March, 2002, I drafted a long lawsuit exposing Professor Sami al-Arian, naming all the crimes he'd committed, all the bombings in Israel, the fundraising in America with terrorism. I mentioned how
his money got to him from the Saudis and how the Saudis had convinced our government not to prosecute him for political reasons.

Because of my high-level security clearances, everything I write is sort of classified material and has to be sent back to the government before publication, for censorship.

So I sent my long lawsuit complaint to the CIA, and they loved it.

They said, "Oh, great. We don't like the Saudis either. Go sue
them."

Three days later two FBI Agents showed up at my door, saying, "You know, there are only 21 people in the U.S. government that knew some of this information, and now you're 22. How did you find out?"

I said, "I'm sorry, I can't tell you, attorney-client privilege."

That's why my clients pay me $1.00 each.
The day before I went to file the lawsuit, I got a frantic phone call from the United States Department of Justice. They said,

"John, please don't file the lawsuit tomorrow. We really are going to raid these Saudi charities. We're going to close them down. Just
give us more time."

"Oh yeah, you're going to raid them. That's what you told me in
January - - and again in February, and now it's March.

You want more time? I'll give you until 4:00 o'clock tomorrow. I'm filing my complaint at 10:00 a.m., so that at 4:00 p.m., I am going
to release the address of the Saudi charities.

I filed my lawsuit at 10:00 o'clock the next day, and told the press I was going to hold something back for a little bit.

Them at 10:15 am, the U.S. Government launched Operation Greenquest, a massive raid on all the Saudi charities in homes and businesses, and in one hour we shut down the entire Saudi money- laundering network in
America.

From March 20, 2002 to the present, the government has found more and more evidence seized in those archives from the single raid that day.

The evidence was so compelling that Professor al-Arian is no longer giving his speeches. He is now in a federal prison awaiting trial.

His accomplice, Hammoudeh, has also been indicted. Some 32 different people have been indicted in the United States as a direct result of these efforts.

Only not the Saudis - No, not the Saudis.

A month after I filed my lawsuit against al-Arian, When I did it: I caused some trouble. I invited some 40 of the top trial lawyers in America to come down to St. Petersburg, Florida.

Boy, did I have a deal for them. I wanted them to put up millions of dollars of their own money!

While I'm poor, I had no money to give them - - I still wanted to do something for America.

These are lawyers like Ron Motley who had won billions of dollars in their lawsuits against the tobacco industry and the asbestos
industry.

I said, "What I want you to do is look at the evidence I've
collected. It's the same Saudi banks and charities which funded Sami al-Arian and also funded al Qaeda."
I said, "I want you to bring a class action in Federal Court in Washington on behalf of everyone who died on Sept. 11th.
I'm going to work for free and collect all the evidence, introduce you to the experts, provide all the exhibits and documents . . . and we have to do this for America."

So these lawyers all studied all of the documents I had collected, and on August 15, 2002, they filed the largest class-action lawsuit in American history in the Federal District Court in Washington D.C., asking for one trillion dollars damages against the Saudis.

The lawsuit said essentially that all these Saudi banks had one thing in common. They were bribing Osama bin Ladin 300 million dollars a year to stay out of Saudi Arabia and go blow up someone else.

Well, on 9-11, we found out that we were the someone else, and the Saudis had to pay for their negligence.

That lawsuit is coming along very well.

Now, more and more people in the CIA and FBI are sort of using me as a back channel to get our information.

And believe it or not, they've actually given me my own TV show now on Sunday mornings on FOX TV nationwide. I'm on at 11:20 eastern
standard time.

Plus, ABC Radio has given me a national radio program, I'm on at 10:30 at night.

So what I've become in my old age is a teacher. Now, every day I get from 500 to 1,000 e-mails from honest men & women around the world from in the intelligence community.

We have to end the evil in this world. We must recognize that al
Qaeda simply did not spring up on its own.

The evil route was Nazism.

The al Qaeda Doctrine is the same as the Arab Nazis held. They hated Jews, they hate democracy, & they hate Westerners for Western culture.

Al Qaeda is nothing other than the religious expression of Arab Fascism.

We allowed this branch of the Nazi trunk to survive, to flourish, and it has come back to haunt us.

We must do a better job. If we are to keep our children safe, we must teach them the lessons of the past. Every generation should know what these candles mean.

That not only did one of the greatest tragedies in the history of the world really happen, that the evil that caused it - - Nazism - - survived because we didn't fight hard enough.

We did not finish the job.

We must tell our children that in every generation, the men and women of America have stood side by side with our Jewish, Christian, and Moslem brothers.

We have risen up together against this hatred. America is united now.

We will win the war on terror, and we will finish the job which soldiers and survivors started more than a half century ago. We must set the standard that to teach a child to hate is the worst form of child abuse.

We must work together to end racism in our children's lifetime. We
must teach our children to remember the Holocaust and be proud, so proud of those who survived and inspired us with their courage.

In their name, in their honor, let us go forward and fight together.

NEVER AGAIN.

posted in All People Who Are Not Afraid Of Facts - 2 replies

Rescuing the Bible from Fundamenalism

2004-12-26T10:09:29Z

Bishop Spong's book is great. It is about facts. Check out liberalseekers.org.

posted in All People Who Are Not Afraid Of Facts - 0 replies

Good Stuff on Afganastan & Iraq plus other

2004-10-29T08:47:30Z

For some reason, it seems the media does not tell us the facts about what is going on in either Iraq or Afghanistan.

(And it seems that some of the media even lies about things.)

If you click on the link below you can read various blogs on different subjects.

I suggest you read

The GOOD things which have and are happening in Afghanistan, Parts 1 & 2.
The Good things happening in some other Islamic countries

AND the GOOD things which have and are happening in Iraq, Parts 1 through 13

(And there are new ones posted when they are available.)

http;//chrenkoff.blogspot.com/

posted in All People Who Are Not Afraid Of Facts - 0 replies

UN Says WMD in Iraq!

2004-08-19T07:26:01Z

UN inspectors: Saddam shipped out WMD before, and after the war started!

SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM
Friday, June 11, 2004

The United Nations has determined Saddam Hussein shipped weapons of mass destruction components as well as medium-range ballistic missiles before, during and after the U.S.-led war against Iraq in 2003.

The UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission briefed the Security Council on new findings that could help trace the where- abouts of Saddam's missile and WMD program.

The briefing contained satellite photographs which demonstrated the speed with which Saddam dismantled his missile and WMD sites before and during the war.

The Security Council members were shown photographs of a ballistic missile site outside Baghdad in May 2003, and then saw a satellite image of the same location in February 2004, in which facilities had disappeared.

Demetrius Perricos told the council that on June 9 "the only controls at the borders are for the weight of the scrap metal, and to check whether there are any explosive or radioactive materials within the scrap," Middle East Newsline reported.

"It's being exported," Perricos said after the briefing. "It's being traded out. And there is a large variety of scrap metal from very new to very old, and slowly, it seems the country is depleted of metal."

"The removal of these materials from Iraq raises concerns with regard to proliferation risks," Perricos told the council. Perricos also reported that the inspectors found Iraqi WMD and missile components shipped abroad that still contained UN inspection tags.

He also said the Iraqi facilities were dismantled and sent both to Europe and around the Middle East. at the rate of about 1,000 tons of metal a month.

The destionations included Jordan, the Netherlands and Turkey.

----------------------

Tuesday, August 26, 2003 :

U.S suspects Iraqi WMD in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley

The Baghdad missile site contained a range of WMD and dual-use components, UN officials said.

They included missile components, reactor vessel and fermenters – the latter required for the production of chemical and biological warheads.

"It raises the question of what happened to the dual-use equipment, where is it now and what is it being used for,"

Ewen Buchanan, Perricos's spokesman, said. "You can make all kinds of pharmaceutical and medicinal products with a fermenter. You can also use it to breed anthrax."

The UNMOVIC report said Iraqi missiles were dismantled and exported to such countries as Jordan, the Netherlands and Turkey. In the Dutch city of Rotterdam, an SA-2 surface-to-air missile, one of at least 12, was discovered in a junk yard, replete with UN tags.

In Jordan, UN inspectors found 20 SA-2 engines as well as components for solid-fuel for missiles.

"The problem for us is that we don't know what may have passed through these yards and other yards elsewhere,"
Buchanan said. "We can't really assess the significance and don't know the full extent of activity that could be going on there or with others of Iraq's neighbors."

UN inspectors have assessed that the SA-2 and the short-range Al Samoud surface-to- surface missile were shipped abroad by agents of the Saddam regime.

Buchanan said UNMOVIC plans to inspect other sites, including in Turkey.

In April, International Atomic Energy Agency director-general Mohammed El Baradei said material from Iraqi nuclear facilities were being smuggled out of the country.

SOURCES:

http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtribune/breaking_1.html

http://www.un.org/Depts/unmovic/new/documents/quarterly_reports/s-2004-435.pdf

---------------------------

U.S suspects Iraqi WMD in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley

SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM
Tuesday, August 26, 2003

U.S. intelligence suspects Iraq's weapons of mass destruction have finally been located.

Unfortunately, getting to them will be nearly impossible for the United States and its allies, because the containers with the strategic materials are not in Iraq.

Instead they are located in Lebanon's heavily fortified Bekaa Valley, swarming with Iranian and Syrian forces, and Hizbullah and ex-Iraqi agents,

Geostrategy-Direct.com will report in Wednesday's new weekly edition.

U.S. intelligence first identified a stream of tractor-trailer trucks moving from Iraq to Syria to Lebaon in January 2003. The significance of this sighting did not register on the CIA at the time.

U.S. intelligence sources believe the area contains extended-range Scud-based missiles, parts for chemical and biological warheads. And mutually lucrative Iraqi-Syrian arms transactions are nothing new.

Firas Tlas, son of Syrian Defense Minister Mustafa Tlas, has been the key to Syria's rogue alliance with Iraq.

He and Assad made hundreds of millions of dollars selling weapons, oil and drugs to and from Iraq, according to the May 13, 2003 edition of Geostrategy-Direct.com.

The CIA now believes a multi-million dollar deal between Iraq and Syria provided for the hiding and safekeeping of Saddam's strategic weapons.

Not surprisingly, U.S. inquiries in Beirut and Syria are being met with little substantive response, U.S. officials said.

SOURCES:

http://216.26.163.62/2003/ss_iraq_08_25.
html

http://www.Geostrategy-Direct.com

posted in All People Who Are Not Afraid Of Facts - 0 replies

Proven Allies- AQ & Saddam - Part 1

2004-08-18T22:37:51Z

Part 1 of "The Proven Allies, Al Qaeda & Saddam"

Proven Allies, al Qaeda & Saddam

I am posting two articles on this.

FIRST: There two types of people:

Those who believe what they want to believe in spite of the facts.

And those who believe what the facts prove.

Those against our actons to remove the psycho Saddam from power, to eliminate the Al Qaeda link with him and to free the Iraq people are among the former.

The uninformed say that since there was no link between Al Qaeda and Iraq, the U.S. has no business going into Iraq and liberating the Iraqi's.

As there is more than sufficient evidence proving Al Qaeda was in league with Iraq since 1994, which was long before the war, those who say we should not be there, are either ignorant of the facts OR they are just too dumb to comprehend the facts.

And of course, those of us with sufficent knowledge of the facts, know the US had more than enough justification to remove Saddam's regime id there had actually never been any Al Qaeda connection at all.

--------------------------

Wrong Again
By Richard Minite

June 18, 2004

Every day, it seems as if another American soldier is killed in Iraq. These grim statistics have become a favorite of network news anchors and political chat show hosts.

Nevermind that they mix deaths from accidents with actual battlefield casualties; or that the average is actually closer to one American death for every two days; or that enemy deaths by far, outnumber ours.

What matters is the overall impression of mounting, pointless deaths.

That is why is important to remember why we fight in Iraq -- and who we fight.

Indeed, many of those sniping at U.S. troops are al Qaeda terrorists operating inside Iraq. And many of bin Laden's men were in Iraq prior to the liberation.

A wealth of evidence on the public record and from government reports as well as congressional testimony to news accounts from major newspapers, all attests to longstanding ties between bin Laden and Saddam Hussan going back to 1994.

Those who try to whitewash Saddam's record don't dispute this evidence; they just ignore it.

So let's review the evidence, all of it on the public record for months or years:

* Abdul Rahman Yasin was the only member of the al Qaeda cell who detonated the 1993 World Trade Center bomb to remain at large in the Clinton years.

He fled to IRAQ. And U.S. forces have recently discovered a cache of documents in Tikrit, Saddam's hometown, which show Iraq gave Mr. Yasin both a house and monthly salary.

* Bin Laden himself met at least EIGHT times with officers of Iraq's Special Security Organization!

(Which was a secret police agency run by Saddam's son Qusay.)

Bin Laden also met with officials from Saddam's mukhabarat, it's external intelligence service, according to information made public by Secretary of State Colin Powell, while speaking before the United Nations Security Council on February 6, 2003.

* Sudanese intelligence officials told me their agents had observed meetings between Iraqi intelligence agents and bin Laden starting in 1994, when bin Laden lived in Khartoum.

* Bin Laden met the director of the Iraqi mukhabarat in 1996 in Khartoum, according to Mr. Powell.

* An al Qaeda operative now held by the U.S. confessed that in the mid-1990s, bin Laden had forged an agreement with Saddam's men to cease all terrorist activities against the Iraqi dictator, Mr. Powell told the United Nations.

* In 1999, a British newspaper, The Guardian reported that Farouk Hijazi, a senior officer in Iraq's mukhabarat, had journeyed deep into the icy mountains near Kandahar, Afghanistan, in December 1998 to meet with al Qaeda men.

Mr. Hijazi was "thought to have offered bin Laden asylum in Iraq," the Guardian reported.

* According to Jane's Foreign Report, a respected international newsletter reported that in October 2000, another Iraqi intelligence operative, Salah Suleiman, was arrested near the Afghan border by Pakistani authorities.

Jane's reported Suleiman was shuttling between Iraqi intelligence and Ayman al Zawahiri, now al Qaeda's No. 2 man.

Why are all of those meetings significant?

The London Observer reported FBI investigators cited a captured al Qaeda field manual in Afghanistan, in which the "emphasizes the value of conducting discussions about pending terrorist attacks face to face, rather than by electronic means."

* As recently as 2001, Iraq's embassy in Pakistan was used as a "liaison" between the Iraqi dictator & Al Qaeda, Mr. Powell told the United Nations.

* The London's Independent reports.that documents which Spanish investigators seized from a Yusuf Galan (who is charged by a Spanish court with being "directly involved with the preparation and planning" of the Sept. 11 attacks) showed that he had been invited to a party at the Iraqi embassy in Madrid.

And the invitation used his "al Qaeda nom de guerre,"

* An Iraqi defector to Turkey, known by his cover name as "Abu Mohammed," told Gwynne Roberts of the Sunday Times of London he saw bin Laden's fighters in camps in Iraq in 1997.

At the time, Mohammed was a colonel in Saddam's Fedayeen. He described an encounter at Salman Pak, the training facility southeast of Baghdad.

At a vast compound which run by Iraqi intelligence, Muslim militants trained to hijack planes with knives -- on a full-size Boeing 707!

Col. Mohammed recalls his first visit to Salman Pak this way:

"We were met by Colonel Jamil Kamil, the camp manager, & Major Ali Hawas. I noticed a lot of people were queuing for food. (The major) said to me: 'You'll have nothing to do with these people. They are from Osama bin Laden's group, the PKK and Mojahedine Khalq.'"

* In 1998, Abbas al-Janabi, a longtime aide to Saddam's son Uday, defected to the West.

At the time, he repeatedly told reporters there was a direct connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

*The Sunday Times found a Saddam loyalist in a Kurdish prison who claims to have been Dr. Zawahiri's bodyguard during his 1992 visit with Saddam in Baghdad.

Dr. Zawahiri was a close associate of bin Laden at the time and was present at the founding of al Qaeda in 1989.

* Following the defeat of the Taliban, almost two dozen bin Laden associates "converged on Baghdad and established a base of operations there," Mr. Powell told the United Nations in February 2003.

From their Baghdad base, the secretary said, they supervised the movement of men, materiel and money for al Qaeda's global network.

* In 2001, an al Qaeda member "bragged the situation in Iraq was 'good,'" according to intelligence made public by Mr. Powell.

* That same year, Saudi Arabian border guards arrested two al Qaeda members entering the kingdom from Iraq.

* Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi (whose specialty was poisons) oversaw an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, Mr. Powell told the United Nations.

Wounded in fighting with U.S. forces, he sought medical treatment in Baghdad in May 2002.

When Zarqawi recovered from his wounds, he restarted a training camp in northern Iraq.

Zarqawi's Iraq cell was later tied to the October 2002 murder of Lawrence Foley, an offical of the United States Agency for International Development, in Amman, Jordan.

The captured assassin (Whose accomplice escaped into Iraq.) confessed he received orders & funds from Zarqawi's cell in Iraq.

*Zarqawi met with military chief of Al Qaeda, Mohammed Ibrahim Makwai (aka Saif al-Adel) in Iran in February 2003, according to intelligence sources cited by the Washington Post.

* Mohammad Atef, who was the head of Al Qaeda's military wing until the U.S. killed him in Afghanistan in November 2001, told a senior Al Qaeda member now in U.S. custody the terror network needed labs outside of Afghanistan to manufacture chemical weapons.

"Where did they go, where did they look?" said secretary Powell, "They went to Iraq."

* Abu Abdullah al-Iraqi was sent to Iraq by bin Laden to purchase poison gases several times between 1997 and 2000.

He called his relationship with Saddam's regime "successful," Mr. Powell told the United Nations.

* Mohamed Mansour Shahab, a smuggler hired by Iraq to transport weapons to bin Laden in Afghanistan was arrested by anti-Saddam Hussein Kurdish forces in May, 2000.

He later told his story to American intelligence and a reporter for the New Yorker magazine.

* Documents found in the debris of the Iraqi Intelligence Center show Baghdad funded the Allied Democratic Forces, a Ugandan terror group led by an Islamist cleric linked to bin Laden.

According to a London's Daily Telegraph, the organization offered to recruit "youth to train for the jihad at a headquarters for international holy warrior network" to be established in Baghdad.

* Mullah Melan Krekar, ran a terror group (the Ansar al-Islam) linked to both bin Laden & Saddam Hussein. Mr. Krekar admitted to a Kurdish newspaper he met bin Laden in Afghanistan and other senior Al Qaeda officials.

His acknowledged meetings with bin Laden go back to 1988. When he organized Ansar al Islam in 2001 to conduct suicide attacks on Americans, "three bin Laden operatives showed up with a gift of $300,000 'to undertake jihad,'" Newsday reported.

(Krekar is now in custody in the Netherlands.)

His group operated in portion of northern Iraq loyal to Saddam Hussein -- and attacked independent Kurdish groups hostile to Saddam.

A spokesman for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan told a United Press International correspondent that Mr. Krekar's group was funded by "Saddam Hussein's regime in Baghdad."

* After October 2001, hundreds of al Qaeda fighters are believed to have holed up in the Ansar al-Islam's strongholds inside northern Iraq.

Some skeptics dismiss the emerging evidence of a longstanding link between Iraq and Al Qaeda by contending that Saddam ran a secular dictatorship hated by Islamists like bin Laden.

In fact, there are plenty of "Stalin- Roosevelt" partnerships between international terrorists and Muslim dictators.

Saddam and bin Laden had common enemies, common purposes and interlocking needs.

They both shared a powerful hate for America and the Saudi royal family.

They both saw the Gulf War as a turning point. Saddam suffered a crushing defeat which he had repeatedly vowed to avenge.

Bin Laden regards the U.S. as guilty of war crimes against Iraqis and believes non-Muslims should not have military bases on the holy sands of Arabia.

Al Qaeda's avowed goal for the past ten years has been the removal of American forces from Saudi Arabia, where they stood in harm's way solely to contain Saddam.

The most compelling reason for bin Laden to work with Saddam is money. Al Qaeda operatives have testified in federal courts the terror network was always desperate for cash.

Senior employees fought bitterly about the $100 difference in pay between Egyptian and Saudis (as the Egyptians earned more).

One Al Qaeda member, who was connected to the 1998 embassy bombings, told a U.S. federal court how bitter he was that bin Laden could not pay for his pregnant wife to see a doctor.

Bin Laden's personal wealth alone simply is not enough to support a profligate global organization.

Besides, bin Laden's fortune is probably not as large as some imagine.

Informed estimates put bin Laden's pre-Sept. 11, 2001 wealth at perhaps $30 million. $30 million is the budget of a small school district, and not of a global terror conglomerate.

Forbes has estimated Saddam's personal fortune at $2 billion. So a common enemy, a shared goal and powerful need for cash seem to have forged an alliance between Saddam and bin Laden.

CIA Director George Tenet reported to the Senate Intelligence Committee: "Iraq has, in the past, provided training in document forgery and bomb making to al Qaeda.

It also provided training in poisons and gasses to two al Qaeda associates; one of these [Al Qaeda] associates characterized the relationship as successful.

Mr. Chairman, this information is based on a solid foundation of intelligence. It comes to us from credible and reliable sources. Much of it is corroborated by multiple sources."

The Iraqis, who had the Third World's largest poison-gas operations prior to the Gulf War I, have perfected the technique of making hydrogen-cyanide gas, which the Nazis called Zyklon-B.

In the hands of Al Qaeda, this would be a fearsome weapon in an enclosed space -- like a suburban mall or subway station.

-------------

Mr. Miniter is a senior fellow at the Center for the New Europe and author of "Losing bin Laden: How Bill Clinton's Failures Unleashed Global Terror" (Regnery) which is (or was) now on the New York Times' bestseller list

posted in All People Who Are Not Afraid Of Facts - 0 replies

Sad Facts

2004-08-07T00:09:30Z

--

American politics is still largely a matter of socialist and Marxist clichés being widely accepted and promoted

Kelley Ross, Ph.D. who is Professor of Philosophy at Valley College.Currently the Libertarian candidate for Congress in the 20th District in California.

http://www.friesian.com/ross/

The Essential Anti-Communist Bibliography

E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.
Dante Alighieri, Inferno XXXIV:139

["And thence came forth to see again the stars."]

With exquisite irony, just as the Iron Curtain and the Soviet Empire fell in the years 1989-1991, American 60's radicals, essentially Communist sympathizers, were completing their takeover of American higher education and other "circles," as the Soviets used to say, of the American intelligentsia.

So, just as a flood of "English Department Marxism," largely innocent of economics, history, and logic, began to dominate academic publishing & "informed" media opinion, the presumptive beneficiary of all this, the Soviet Block, was no longer there to enjoy it.

Of course, Fidel Castro was still there, approaching forty years of dictatorship over impoverished Cuba, so he could still bask in the praise of his clueless, "useful idiot" (said Lenin) American supporters.

This is a living and important political issue, since American politics is still largely a matter of socialist and Marxist clichés being
widely accepted and promoted.

A television history of the Cold War made by Ted Turner made it sound like the Soviets were the good guys and the United States was merely consumed with paranoia -- and Harry Truman was "naive" for becoming alarmed about Josef Stalin and building the alliances to contain the Soviet Union.

Examinations of the Communist "Hollywood Ten" on the "E!" Entertainment cable network praise them for "standing up for what they believed in," even though they didn't stand up for what they believed in (Communism), since they either refused to say anything or took the Fifth Amendment, and, what's worse, they did so on instructions of the Communist Party!

They most certainly didn't believe in free speech, as their defenders now say, since the regimes they supported never allowed it and, now that the like minded have taken over American universities, dissenting conservative and libertarian speakers are regularly shouted down, physically attacked, and, with the cooperation of administrators, kept off campuses.

A majority of Americans actually thought that little Elián González, after his mother died trying to get him to the United States, should be sent back to slavery and brain- washing in Cuba with his father -- who, of course, did not gain custody of Elián: The boy, as the Cubans have frankly admitted, is the property, like all Cuban children, of the State.

The Cold War thus continues, even if now largely an internal American conflict. The Hollywood Ten are held up as martyrs, for losing their jobs & spending a few months in prison for contempt of Congress.

This, even while they had the blood of the millions murdered in Russia and Eastern Europe on their hands, as the conscious and willing agents of Josef Stalin (who was still alive, remember, and still killing people at the time, even readying a pogrom against the Jews), a greater mass murderer than Adolf Hitler.

If the Hollywood Ten had been Nazi sympathizers and German agents, the fashionable Left would be shedding no tears over them now; yet they were, as a matter of fact, the moral and practical equivalent of Nazis.

The books here are mainly those describing the plain truth about Marxism, the practice of Communism, and Soviet spies and sympathizers in the United States. These are not "classics" of Anti-Communism (like the immortal Witness by Whittaker Chambers [1952, 1980, Regnery Publishing, Washington, DC]), rather they are all from the 80's and 90's.

The books are alphabetized by (first) author.

Christopher Andrew and Visili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield, The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB, Basic Books, 1999

Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley, Hollywood Party, How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry in the 1930's and 1940's, Forum, Prima Publishing, Rocklin, California, 1998

Peter J. Boettke, Why Perestroika Failed, The Politics and Economics of Socialist Transformation, Routledge, 1993

Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin, Parallel Lives, Alfred A. Knopf, 1991

Mona Charen, Useful Idiots, How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First, Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2003

Peter Collier and David Horowitz, Deconstructing the Left, From Vietnam to the Persian Gulf, A Second Thoughts Book, 1991

Robert Conquest, The Great Terror, A Reassessment, Oxford University Press, 1990

Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, Oxford University Press, 1986

Robert Conquest, Reflections on a Ravaged Century, W.W. Norton & Company, 2000

David Conway, A Farewell to Marx, An Outline and Appraisal of His Theories, Penguin Books, 1987

Ann Coulter, Treason, Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism, Crown Forum, New York, 2003
Stéphane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panné, Andrzej
Paczkowski, Karel Bartosek, Jean-Louis Margolin, translated by Johnathan Murphy and Mark Kramer, The Black Book of Communism, Crimes, Terror, Repression, Harvard University Press, 1999

Darío Fernández-Morera, American Academia and the Survivial of
Marxist Ideas, Praeger, London, Westport, Connecticut, 1996

John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know, Rethinking Cold War History, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1997

David Gordon, Resurrecting Marx, The Analytical Marxists on Freedom, Exploitation, and Justice, Transaction Books, 1990

John Earl Haynes & Harvey Klehr, Venona, Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, Yale University Press, 1999
Arthur Herman, Joseph McCarthy,

Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator, The Free Press, 2000

Paul Hollander, Anti-Americanism, Critiques at Home and Abroad, 1965-1990, Oxford University Press, 1992
Paul Hollander, The Many Faces of Socialism, Comparative Sociology and Politics, Transaction Books, 1988

Paul Hollander, The Survival of the Adversary Culture, Social Criticism and Political Escapism in American Society, Transaction Publishers, 1988

David Horowitz, Radical Son, A Generational Odyssey, The Free Press, 1997

Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals, How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education, HarperPerennial, 1990, 1991

David King, The Commissar Vanishes, The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin's Russia, Metropolitan Books, 1997

Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Kyrill M. Anderson, The Soviet World of American Communism, Yale University Press, 1998

Brian Moynahan, The Russian Century, A History of the Last Hundred Years, Random House, 1994

Richard Pipes, Communism, A History, A Modern Library Chronicles Book, 2001
Richard Gid Powers, Not Without Honor,

The History of American Anticommunism, The Free Press, 1995

Ronald Radosh, Commies, A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left, Encounter Books, San Francisco, 2001

Paul Craig Roberts and Karen LaFollette, Meldown, Inside the Soviet Economy, Cato Institute, 1990

R.J. Rummel, Death by Government, Transaction Publishers, 1994

Robert Skidelsky, The Road From Serfdom, The Economic and Political Consequences of the End of Communism, Penguin Books, 1995

Thomas Sowell, Marxism, Philosophy and Economics, Quill, William Morrow, 1985

Further information about Marx:

http://www.friesian.com/marx.htm

posted in All People Who Are Not Afraid Of Facts - 0 replies

Unsubscribed Neil

2004-07-26T07:19:52Z

You all may remember Neil, who recently unsubscribed from Tribe.net.

Well, its a funny story, because he was in this tribe, and another tribe I'm in "Middle East Conflict". It appears he didn't like some facts he read over there, and bailed on the whole thing !! Or at least on his current identity here.

I replied to a posting of his, and it apparently freaked him out. He deleted the whole discussion and unsubscribed himself !! LOL!

posted in All People Who Are Not Afraid Of Facts - 5 replies

Politics & Science Don't Mix

2004-06-14T04:52:49Z

"Suicide by Pseudoscience"
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.06/view.html?pg=4

'As the report amply documents, the Bush administration has systematically manipulated scientific inquiry into climate change, forest management, lead and mercury contamination, and a host of other issues. Even as Marburger addressed his critics, the administration purged two advocates of stem-cell research from the President's Council on Bioethics.

When politicians dictate science, government becomes entangled in its own deceptions, and eventually the social order decays in a compost of lies. Society, having abandoned the scientific method, loses its empirical referent, and truth becomes relative. This is a serious affliction known as Lysenkoism.

Politics without objective, honest measurement of results is a deadly short circuit. It means living a life of sterile claptrap, lacquering over failure after intellectual failure with thickening layers of partisan abuse. Charlatans like Lysenko can't clarify serious, grown-up problems that they themselves don't understand.

Eventually the whole vast bubble will burst of its own fairy-tale unreality. Few will be held accountable. The quackeries will be purged, forgotten, hushed up. Except, that is, for the lasting effect on the health, morale, and self-esteem of the American people.

posted in All People Who Are Not Afraid Of Facts - 1 reply

It is a FACT

2004-05-03T11:45:45Z

xxx

That if I like something, I like to share it with others and so, here are these.

Hope you enjoy both

http://www.qnet.com/~pontius/smile/smilelmp_1%5B1%5D.htm

http://members.tripod.com/~sunysmile/boogy.html

posted in All People Who Are Not Afraid Of Facts - 1 reply

Iraq Fac Attaq

2004-04-29T07:09:03Z

Every day you here the same headlines repeated over and over about this skirmish or that, and all the news seems to be slanted either for or against George Bush.

What I'd really like to hear about is real progress or lack of progress regarding the infrastructure -- all the money that's going into the corporations to rebuild Iraq.

What percentage of towns had running water, electricity, and working sewage systems before the war and now?

What percentage of Bagdad had running water, electricity, and working sewage systems before the war and now?

We hear that the marshes are being restored to the south, but the liberal media is careful to not publish too much good news about progress -- and are they destroying water supply damns to restore the marshes? I've seen a few conservative pieces, but that's harder to come by in the Bay Area.

Seems we won't really hear any news without spin until after the election.

posted in All People Who Are Not Afraid Of Facts - 8 replies

Facts on Guns

2004-04-22T21:53:26Z

xxx

Oh, how "Politically Incorrect"
this post is;

Sadly, far toom many people believe what they want to believe in with a complete disgrade of the facts.

Then there those who believe what they do because the facts prove it is true.

This first professor started out doing research to back up his anti-gun stance.

Being a person who believes what the facts prove, he changed his position

Articles by Dr. John Lott, Jr.

Dr. John Lott Jr. Page John R. Lott Jr. -- American Enterprise Institute (AEI) - General, 1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20036

www.tsra.com/LottPage.htm

John Lott's Website

On this site I will post most statements regarding my work and gun control. Also included is a list of my op-eds, and information on The Bias Against Guns, my new book.

www.johnrlott.com

More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun-Control Laws at Amazon
.
Multiple regression analyses are rarely the subject of heated public debate or 225-page books for laypeople.

John R. Lott, Jr.'s study in the January 1997 Journal of Legal Studies showing ...
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226493636

An interview with John R. Lott, Jr., author of More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws, Second Edition. Also available on website: online catalogs, secure online ordering, ...
www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/493636.html

-----------------

Interview wth Prof. Kleck
www.shadeslanding.com/firearms/kleck.interview.html

GunCite-Who is Gary Kleck?
A brief description of Gary Kleck and his research.
www.guncite.com/gcwhoGK.html

Gary Kleck - FSU Criminology and Criminal Justice

Gary Kleck, Professor of the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida State University.
www.criminology.fsu.edu/ccjfaculty/kleck.htm

posted in All People Who Are Not Afraid Of Facts - 0 replies

Nobody cares.

2004-04-19T04:13:06Z

Fact is, nobody cares about facts. Flash and style! No substance.

posted in All People Who Are Not Afraid Of Facts - 9 replies

QotD

2004-04-19T00:05:35Z

"Set up as an ideal the facing of reality as honestly and as cheerfully as possible."
Dr. Karl Menninger

http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Dr._Karl_Menninger

posted in All People Who Are Not Afraid Of Facts - 2 replies

Facts Are Kool

2004-04-18T09:55:17Z

I like facts cause they are grounded in physical reality. Lies and psychology trickery is null and void in my world.

How 'bout you?

posted in All People Who Are Not Afraid Of Facts - 5 replies

Little Known American History Facts

2004-04-11T01:56:29Z

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

One sad bit of American history which few if any manage to learn about are the "Bible Wars" between Catholics and Protestants in the latter half of the 19th century.

This is especially unfortunate because is remarkably resembles some of the issues which face us today with regards to having religion in public school.

In the early decades of American history, Catholics were relatively rare. They did not begin to take up residence here in large numbers until the 1830ís and 1840ís and then with the great waves of immigration which followed the Civil War.

Although they were often better off here than in Europe - their priests were not generally hunted down and imprisoned - other forms of discrimination nevertheless existed.

It is worth noting that one of the groups which the KKK originally organized against was Roman Catholics. Many people in America feared a "papist" conspiracy to overthrow American democracy.

Although much of this was pure prejudice, it is worth keeping in mind that the Vatican made strong and explicit condemnations against liberalism, religious plurality and the like.

Democratic suspicion of the aims of the Catholic church were not entirely unjustified, although that certainly did not warrant discrimination against Catholic individuals.

Even today, there is widespread suspicion and even hatred of Catholicism among fundamentalist Protestants - something which would surprise many Catholics who have become used to religious freedom.

One area where Catholics experienced the worst discrimination was in the public school system, where all children were supposed to be treated equally.

In America's public schools of the time, prayers and bible readings were common. This is exactly the sort of situation which many fundamentalist evangelicals wish to recreate today.

Unfortunately for religious minorities, the prayers were Protestant and the readings were from the King James Version - a Protestant version of the bible, not the official Catholic Douay version.

Although it is part of Protestant theology that believers should be able to interpret scriptures as their consciences dictate, this is not true of the Roman Catholic Church. For Catholics, scriptures are supposed to be read in the light of church tradition as mediated by priests and church leaders.

Thus, reading a bible in public schools "without comment" is essentially a Protestant practice - and although it might not be seen so strongly today, the difference was much more pronounced 100 years ago.

Catholic children were not granted the privilege of leaving the room or even just sitting quietly while the other children engaged in their religious practices.

Although this would have entailed treating them as second-class citizens, at least it would have amounted to some grudging acknowledgement their concerns were valid. Instead, they were forced to participate actively against their consciences.

Dissent was not permitted!

One example comes from poor Tom Wall, a student in Boston in 1859. The 11-year-old boy refused to obey an order to read the Ten Commandments from a Protestant bible, and so the teacher beat him until he gave in.

Although the teacher was taken to court, all charges were dismissed.

This was the "equality" Catholics could expect in America's Protestant- dominated court systems. Gradually, priests and other church leader began to vocalize their concerns regarding the education Catholic children were receiving.

They recognized the First Amendment should have created a situation whereby the government would not be permitted to promote Protestantism in favor of Catholicism.

It is important to keep in mind that the parents were not even asking that all religious practices be ended in schools - all they wanted was that their children be permitted to read from their own bible and opt out of Protestant prayers.

Sometimes, their wishes were respected - the superintendent of public schools in New York City decided that prayers could no longer be mandatory. Still, in general, Catholics were rarely so well received.

The bishop in New York City was forced to post armed guards outside of Catholic churches to stop vandalism. In other cities, the violence was worse.

When Philadelphia's board of education voted in 1843 to allow Catholic children to be excused from religious exercises, Protestants rioted. Catholic churches and the homes of Catholic families were burned. Thirteen people were mercilessly killed.

This was the worst incident, although smaller incidents broke out across the country as the years progressed.

In 1854, a missionary priest in Maine was tarred and feathered for daring to urge a parishioner to fight a local school board regulation forcing all students to read the King James Bible.

Eventually, the violence in communities all over the country was a principle cause behind the creation of the Catholic school system. As they could not achieve equality in the government- funded schools, they were forced to create their own.

It is amazing that contemporary conservative Catholics have forgotten their own history and are calling for a return of prayers, bible reading and other forms of religious observance to America's public schools.

Have they bothered to think about this for even a moment?

(Neil Sez: Religious people thingk?)

More Book Battles

Similar violence occurred well into the late 20th century.

In 1974, West Virginia residents battled over the adoption of new school books. The books up for a vote were denounced as "irreligious", "immoral and indecent" and even as having "the most vulgar, vile and filthy words in print" - although reporters were unable to find what the critics were talking about.

The books were adopted by a majority of the board, but this sparked an incredible wave of less-than-civil unrest.

Religious leaders urged that all "true Christians" keep their children at home rather than send them to school. Mobs surrounded the schools and blocked bus garages. Teachers and parents who didn't join the boycott were threatened.

Coal miners - about 3,500 - went on strike in sympathy for the good Christian parents, and the mob violence escalated to the point the some people began carrying pistols out of fear of personal safety. Both school buses and regular city buses were stopped completely, leaving some 11,000 poor people without any transportation.

Court injunctions against the protestors didn't help, so the superintendent had to close all the schools because he couldn't guarantee the safety of the children from the Christians.

While reporters were attracted to the story in droves,it was at their own peril - a cameraman was beaten by a mob of fundamentalists at a rally.

Eventually the schools were reopened with increased security, but without the protests stopping.

Pro-boycott ministers prayed to God that the board members who dared to vote for the books be killed. After that, a Molotov cocktail was thrown against a grade school.

Five shots hit a school bus.

Another grade school was damaged by a dynamite blast, and a bigger explosion damaged the school district's central office.

Eventually, Minister Marvin Horan was indicted along with three of his followers for the bombings.

It is fortunate they were caught as they had planned on wiring bombs to the gas tanks of cars of families who drove their children to school during the boycott.

This is the sort of protection against school violence which American Christianity offers us,

I guess. For some reason, it doesn't inspire a sense of safety and peace in me.

By Austin Cline

posted in All People Who Are Not Afraid Of Facts - 0 replies

A FACT About Sexual Abuse

2004-04-10T05:32:17Z

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx "A disturbing fact continues to surface in sex abuse research. The first best predictor of abuse is alcohol or drug addiction in the father.

But the second best predictor is conservative religiosity, accompanied by parental belief in traditional male-female roles.

This means that if you want to know which children are most likely to be sexually abused by their father, the SECOND most significant clue is *whether or not the parents belong to a
CONSERVATIVE RELIGIOUS
group with traditional role beliefs and rigid sexual attitudes*.

(Brown and Bohn, 1989; Finkelhor, 1986; Fortune, 1983; Goldstein et al, 1973; Van Leeuwen, 1990).

["Sexual Abuse in Christian Homes and Churches", by Carolyn Holderread Heggen, Herald Press, Scotdale, PA, 1993 p. 73]

posted in All People Who Are Not Afraid Of Facts - 0 replies

48 Laws of Power: #32

2004-04-10T04:50:23Z

"Play to People's Fantasies"

"The truth is often avoided because it is ugly, and unpleasant. Never appeal to truth and reality unless you are prepared for the anger that comes from disenchantment. Life is so harsh and distressing that people who can manufacture romance or conjure up fantasy are like oases in the desert: Everyone flocks to them. There is great power in tapping into the fantasies of the masses."

From:
The 48 Laws of Power, Robert Greene
ISBN: 0 14 02.8019 7

posted in All People Who Are Not Afraid Of Facts - 5 replies

Facts are relative

2004-04-10T00:39:26Z

What is a "fact" anyway? I mean, who's to say? You know, I do like something, that's like "factual". I can easily deny it! If enough people agree with me, then its NOT a "fact", right?

Hey, that's easy!!!

posted in All People Who Are Not Afraid Of Facts - 3 replies

Fundamental Attribution Error

2004-03-25T12:42:05Z

"What it comes to interpreting other people's behavior, human beings invariably make the mistake of overestimating the importance of fundamental character traits and underestimating the importance of situation and context. We will always reach for a 'dispositional' explaination for events, as opposed to a contexual explaination."

From "The Tipping Point", Malcolm Gladwell.

I think this concept describes what happens sometimes when people deny facts: Due to an overwhelming need to attribute causality to non-contextual things.

posted in All People Who Are Not Afraid Of Facts - 4 replies

Crosseyed and Painless

2004-02-17T20:10:43Z

"...Beneath the wild dance patterns of "Crosseyed and Painless," there lurks a dementedly sober disquisition on the nature of facts that culminates in a hilarious, rapidly recited list of characteristics ("Facts are simple and facts are straight/Facts are lazy and facts are late...") that could go on forever..."

http://www.jahsonic.com/TalkingHeads.html

posted in All People Who Are Not Afraid Of Facts - 0 replies

fact

2004-02-01T00:06:16Z

Facts are unmistakable truth

posted in All People Who Are Not Afraid Of Facts - 1 reply

My first posted fact

2004-01-31T22:53:25Z

Here's a fact for you. My website is www.karmafree.com You can download my album there called 7 Stages of Life. Here's another fact. Your probably going to enjoy it.

Let me now if you do.

posted in All People Who Are Not Afraid Of Facts - 0 replies