(Cont)
As for the oil executive involvement I can say that Unocal became involved even before the Taliban took control of Afghanistan and before al-Qaeda moved from Sudan to Afghanistan. They signed an agreement with Turkmenistan in 1995 and announced plans for a consortium to build a pipeline through Afghanistan in August 1996.
When the Taliban took control in September 1996 Unocal initially hailed the Taliban's capture of Kabul as a positive step towards stability.

In February 1997 Taliban representatives visited Washington D.C., where they met with State Department officials and Unocal. They later returned in November and again met with Unocal in Houston. According to a report by Caroline Lees of the Telegraph, the Taliban representatives visited the Houston Zoo, NASA space center, a Super Target store, and the home of a Unocal vice-president.

Unocal later described its meetings with the Taliban as efforts "to educate them about the benefits such a pipeline could bring" to the "desperately poor and war-torn country." Unocal ended its involvement in the pipeline project in 1998 after the United States launched missile attacks in Afghanistan and condemned the Taliban.

The Bush administration also met with Said Ramatullah Hashemi from the Taliban Foreign Ministry on March 19, 2001. A few months later, Colin Powell announced plans to have troops in Aghanistan "by October".

A couple of months later, was September 11th. The pipeline remained stalled until about 3 months after the war ended.

It's just a sheer coincidence that most of the US Presidents in the last few decades were Oil men or came from Oil States (except Carter, whose contribution was to trash the nuclear industry).

AS for discounting Pape, you tell me what sort of devout religious zealot spends the night before his suicide drinking and gambling at a strip club?

Finally, taking cheap shots at others without providing any sources yourself is an interesting strategy.

Pericles.. you wonder at my 'hysteria' ? You are dismayed that I 'attack' any hint (however small) of 'Islamization' in Australia?

Perhaps.. just maybe, I react as I do, because Christians are being specifically targeted by fanatical Muslims.. and I regard a taxi driver who refuses entry to a blind person as a 'fanatic'.

MALATYA, Turkey: Three Protestants murdered at a Christian publishing house here were tortured for three hours before their assailants slit their throats, a press report said Friday, quoting one of the doctors involved in the grisly case. Dr. Murat Ugras, a spokesman for the Turgut Ozal Medical center, told the daily Hurriyet of hospital surgeons' fruitless efforts to save Ugur Yuksel, one of the three victims of the massacre at the Zirve (summit) publishing house, which distributed Christian literature.

"He had scores of knife cuts on his thighs, his testicles, his rectum and his back," Ugras said. "His fingers were sliced to the bone. It is obvious that these wounds had been inflicted to torture him," he said.

The only thing I wonder about Pericles..is why you wonder about why I 'attack' any hint of Islamization.

In the RAAF we also had 'separate' prayer arrangements,.. OPD this way, RC that way.. all on Sunday.. we didn't restructure "the Air Force" for anyone.

It's all a matter of perspective, Boaz, and in my opinion you have entirely lost your sense of proportionality.

There is no doubt that bad things happen around the world, Boaz. Countless Iraqi civilians are now dead, who would have lived if the US had been a little more intelligent in their handling of the Saddam Hussein problem, for example. That does not mean that every American citizen is a terrorist bent on the destruction of goodness and decency, which is what Osama Bin Laden would like you to believe.

You could agree, I trust, that this is a reaction to a grave situation (the Iraq War) that lacks perspective. It has its internal logic, of course, but is far from being the whole story.

Which, I'm afraid, is the trap that you set for yourself every day, and just as surely as Wily E Coyote keeps buying from the Acme Company, you are a victim of your own blindness.

Sure, three Christians were murdered in Malatya, in very nasty circumstances. But if you actually did your research properly, you'd discover that all those horrible details that you lovingly recount, are pure embellishment.

But don't take my word for it.

http://tallskinnykiwi.typepad.com/tallskinnykiwi/2007/05/turkey_the_trut.html

So, back to perspective:

>>and I regard a taxi driver who refuses entry to a blind person as a 'fanatic'... The only thing I wonder about Pericles..is why you wonder about why I 'attack' any hint of Islamization.<<

What puzzles me about you, Boaz, is how you manage to persuade yourself that there is a link between a savage murder in a small Turkish town, and a taxi driver who doesn't want a dog in his cab.

Which reminds me - have you stopped beating your children yet?

Rache,

The caption says “Ronald Regan while introducing the Mujahideen leaders to media on the White house lawns (1985).

But the picture is in the oval office. There is no mention of which mujahideen leaders that he is meeting. As I have already mentioned twice and you have continued to ignore, we have supported the Northern Alliance of Shah Masoud since the early 80’s and we fight beside them in Afghanistan now. They formed a major part of the mujahideen. Your continual attempts to suggest that Mujahideen = Taliban = Alqaeda shows your lack of understanding. It simply is not the case.

Rache >> That same year Reagan asked the Chinese to pressure Pakistan to allow the US to provide the Mujahidin with ever more sophisticated weaponry. Even the Pakistani military … knew who the Gulbuddin Hikmatyars and Osama Bin Ladens really were.

You don’t know what you are talking about. Virtually all US military funding was funneled through the Pakistani gov’t via ISI. THEY mostly decided who got the money. That was their condition for allowing the escalation of the conflict. The Pakistani’s were concerned that the Soviets might retaliate against Pakistan. Pakistan’s ISI virtually created the Taliban and supported Gulbuddin when no one else would. There is no suggestion that aid money went to Osama bin Laden. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_war_in_Afghanistan_%281979-1989%29

You say that you recall that in the 80’s many in the US believed if you didn’t support al-Qaeda and its Mujahideen allies, you didn’t deserve to be in Congress.

Yet you have already acknowledged that in the 80’s there was no Taliban and even Alqaeda was only started in 1988. So what are you talking about? Do you perchance mean that you didn’t belong in congress if you didn’t support the people who were defending their countries from a communist agressor? Ie the Mujahideen?

I’ll tell you what type of religious zealot might spend the night before his suicide drinking – an Islamic zealot. You are attempting to substitute western notions of piety. You don’t need to be pious in our sense to be a muslim holy warrior.

Boaz said 'Islamification of Western society' is being if not achieved, at least energetically ATTEMPTED by Muslims. And he then included efforts by Islamic fundamentalists to make our society more acceptable to them. CJ said “every one of those examples has been refuted several times in this forum”. Now that is just a lie. You guys are attempting to retrospectively cover up the fact that you hadn’t done your homework. Boazy’s point was about the requests themselves. They were obviously never refuted.I also believe that the requests are important as they form part of a pattern of behaviour.

Lets make your analogy a little more apt. What about a local councilor who wanted a railway station built out the front of his house instead of in front of the local primary school. What if that particular councilor had a long history of asking for “accommodations.” In that case the very act of asking would be the more important fact, since it would be part of a pattern of obnoxious behaviour.

“I see ... a perfectly valid request closely akin to asking if the canteen could serve vegetarian food.”

Oh do you? Well that is probably the biggest problem of all. For starters the request is akin to asking the canteen to serve ONLY vegetarian food. Secondly Muslim prayer times aren’t fixed they have a number of hours in which to fulfill their obligations. Thirdly, will we amend lecture times for all religions? Or are we committed to retaining secular education. If you insist on seeing this request in isolation, instead of the rightful context in which it exists you are burying your head in the sand.

I have posted a lot of information about fundamentalist requests/demands from lecture time-tables to sharia. The western world has experience with nearly all these requests/demands and the larger the muslim population gets the more it wants to shape society in a manner acceptable to muslims. I believe that this is divisive and the very antithesis of sustainable integration

Boaz is bang on target when he talks about the different religous classes in RAAF.

Paul.L: ". CJ said “every one of those examples has been refuted several times in this forum”. Now that is just a lie. You guys are attempting to retrospectively cover up the fact that you hadn’t done your homework. Boazy’s point was about the requests themselves. They were obviously never refuted.I also believe that the requests are important as they form part of a pattern of behaviour. "

Come on, Paul. While it mightn't fit your paranoid Islamophobic fantasies, the fact is that, while reasonable requests were politely made and a handful of taxi drivers behaved badly a couple of years ago, the requests haven't been granted and the taxi drivers were disciplined. I grant that ham sandwiches weren't available at a council function in Melbourne, but I really don't see that as a portent of cultural oblivion.

The fact is that we live in a multicultural society of which a small percentage are Muslim. They are as entitled as anybody to follow the religion of their choice, and to advocate lawfully for their communities. That some bigoted and paranoid individuals want to interpret that as a "pattern of obnoxious behaviour" says far more about them than it does the vast majority of moderate and law-abiding Australian Muslims.

For example, Boazy's egregious equivalence of the acts of a few fundy Muslim taxi drivers with the murder of Christians in Turkey is just another example of his (and your) tiresome campaign of vilification of all Muslims because a small minority of them are nutcases.

People like you are every bit as much of the problem as the idiot Islamists are. But you're so convinced of your rightness that you'll never see it, which is why I don't bother arguing with you much.