www.byzcath.org Forums General Discussions Town Hall Al Qaida

Well, I remember a partisan of George Dubya, about a month after 9/11, that Osama bin Laden was in Afghanistan and that if the Afghani government would not surrender him to the US voluntarily, then "we gotta go in there and get him".

Indisputably the US went into Afghanistan. But did they get Osama bin Laden? It would seem that they did not.

Maybe Osama is hiding with all those "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq.

Fr. Serge

ALICE:

Christ is in our midst!! He is and always will be!!

When the talk turned to our invading Afghanistan, I had to think of the Russian experience. They spent 10 years there, didn't achieve their objectives, and went home with thousands of their young men in body bags. The place is mountainous, the natives know the place like the back of their hands, and few can tell what the shifting alliances among the natives are day to day. And if they want to live in caves--

The only way--IMHO--to do what our military leaders think they need to do is mount a WW2 type invasion where there would be a million men on the ground, doing what it took to rid the Pacific islands of Japanese troops: put a grenade into every opening and figure you've got whoever is hiding inside. But that won't happen because we have lost the will to sacrifice and stay focused on any objective for longer than a TV sound bite.

So unless we decide to go nuclear--which I don't advocate--there is no way that place will ever do anything but be a killing field for our people. And Osama will be just tickled to help us along with tht objective.

It's interesting that we don't remember our own history. Our colonists used the guerilla methods used by indigenous populations today and the British couldn't get out of their regular army ideas honed in Europe. Guess who won.

BOB

Interesting isn't it! This shows how little he understands the people of the USA.

Al-Qaida No. 2 insults Obama with racial epithet

CAIRO, Egypt – Al-Qaida's No. 2 leader used a racial epithet to insult Barack Obama in a message posted Wednesday, describing the president-elect in demeaning terms that imply he does the bidding of whites. The message appeared chiefly aimed at persuading Muslims and Arabs that Obama does not represent a change in U.S. policies.

Ayman al-Zawahri said in the message, which appeared on militant Web sites, that Obama is "the direct opposite of honorable black Americans" like Malcolm X, the 1960s African-American rights leader.

In al-Qaida's first response to Obama's victory, al-Zawahri also called the president-elect — along with secretaries of state Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice — "house Negroes."

Speaking in Arabic, al-Zawahri uses the term "abeed al-beit," which literally translates as "house slaves." But al-Qaida supplied English subtitles of his speech that included the translation as "house Negroes."

The message also includes old footage of speeches by Malcolm X in which he explains the term, saying black slaves who worked in their white masters' house were more servile than those who worked in the fields. Malcolm X used the term to criticize black leaders he accused of not standing up to whites.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the latest message was just "more despicable comments from a terrorist."...

..."Be aware that the dogs of Afghanistan have found the flesh of your soldiers to be delicious, so send thousands after thousands to them," he said.

Al-Zawahri did not threaten specific attacks, but warned Obama that he was "facing a Jihadi (holy war) awakening and renaissance which is shaking the pillars of the entire Islamic world; and this is the fact which you and your government and country refuse to recognize and pretend not to see."

He said Obama's victory showed Americans acknowledged that President George W. Bush's policies were a failure and that the result was an "admission of defeat in Iraq."

But Obama's professions of support for Israel during the election campaign "confirmed to the Ummah (Islamic world) that you have chosen a stance of hostility to Islam and Muslims," al-Zawahri said.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081119/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_al_qaida_obama

We do not refer to people of color as NATIVES anymore. Those days of Whites (rulers) up top and Natives (ruled) down below have passed. We use more respectful terms today to describe other people as citizens of a country, or belong to an ethnicity.

PAVEL:

Christ is in our midst!! He is and always will be!!

I was not aware that a word used to designate those people who are indigeneous to a piece of geography are no longer "native" to the place. I am "native" to the United States, meaning that I was born here and live here. I would be a "foreigner" elsewhere, meaning someone who is native to another place. In no reference that I have ever seen does the word connote or denote a person of color. Would you be kind enough to send me the reference?

In Christ,

BOB

Natives was the perjorative used to keep the subject peoples in their place by those who ruled the world. It was the word used in many place to describe those government departments who regulated the lives of such people. Such as the Dept for "Native Affairs" or "Native Welfare". Natives had to use separate facilities and were regarded as inferior.

When Papua New Guinea gained it's independence they banned the racist term "Native" and insisted on the term "National" to be used.

In my country call a white man a native and expect to see stars and that would happen in many places across the planet.

The term has a history of it's own and it's not nice. I am not a having a go at you personally but this is an international forum.

Thanks to Pani Rose for printing out the article I linked....

My post did not bring up anything about Iraq, Afghanistan, or weapons of mass destruction-- (which President and Senator Clinton both swore, {on television to Larry King Live right before us going to Iraq}, existed from the intelligence they had seen, as well as fully and unequivocally backing the decision to go to Iraq--so please let's not rehash this Iraq thing over and over)...just to clarify since it was brought up.

SO, to keep on topic., if you read the article, you will see that Al Qaida insulted the new President elect!

My point was that they are not changing their deranged tune...they still think that America is at war with Islam...and apparently, as long as the U.S. remains friends of Israel, no president will ever be their 'friend'...(if one can, indeed, *ever* be friends with crazy terrorists).

So, let's, atleast, say thank God that we have not suffered any more attacks, and pray that we will not in the future...and thank our Presidents, whoever they may be, black, white, Democrat or Republican, for wanting to protect us and doing what they think they need to do towards that end.

That is all this post was supposed to be about!

In Christ,
Alice

PAVEL:

Thank you for the update. I had no idea. Please excuse my more parochial experience, especially given the fact that, althought we both speak English, there are connotations and denotations that occur elsewhere in the world--as you cite--that don't even cross the radar where I live.

Point taken.

BOB

Pavel,

Hmmm....I am a 'native New Yorker' and that is a popular term in the U.S. that has proud connotations!

Alice

ALICE:

My point was that as an international forum we may have usages that can cause offense, even when we both profess to be native (ooops!!!) speakers of the same language. My grammar professor used to admonish us about using our ear as "native speakers" to give us some idea of what should and should not be considered good usage.

Pavel, may I ask what term we should use for people whose first language used to be referred to as their "native tongue"?

Alice, where I live there is a phrase used when the politicians get the people stirred up so that they begin to go to the polls or attend town meetings: "the natives are getting restless."

BOB

Dear BOB,

Sorry, that post should have been addressed to Pavel.

While I respect Pavel's admonishment about the word 'native' and its connotation in his country, my remark was made to make him realize that his concern is not a concern in the American English speaking world.


These are both very good examples which are still widely used in American vernacular....when children misbehave is another example of when the phrase 'the natives are getting restless' applies, and when it is often used !!!

Alice

Anyway--let's get back on topic...

Well let us admit it, the whole world was dragged after the US into the wrong battlefield.

You cannot kill Al Qaida or any other fanatic group by force; not only is it useless to try, it will actually make them stronger as it will build more fans and will enforce their cause as they see it.

The battlefield the whole world is fighting at is the wrong one. While everyone thinks that force, war and blood is where we should invest, I think that the world would have long won the war had it opened the doors for missionary work and liberating* education to take place on "enemy soul" - same soil chocking with the blood of our brothers and sister we like to call Heroes (personally, I don't want my heroes dead, I want them building their country while alive and kicking).

* Liberating the soul and mind of hatred into the light.

Like Alice, I too am a native New Yorker, have often described myself as such and been described as such, and it has never occurred to me to find the term insulting. I am also a native-born Irish citizen, thanks to the provisions of Irish law, and I don't find that in the least insulting either. People who are native speakers of Irish are quite proud of that fact.

There are, granted, some places (Australia comes to mind) where the term "native" is used pejoratively - this is usually a leftover from the English presence. But most people do not use the term that way - and most languages do not use the term that way either. Catherine Doherty often called me "rodnoi" - we usually conversed in Russian - and I felt honored, not insulted.

But if one is truly uneasy with the word "native", I suppose one might use the term "indigenous" instead. This could lead to some amusing (but baseless) distinctions, such as "the platypus is indigenous to Australia, but the wombat is native to Australia".

Fr. Serge

Father, I'm surprised! You didn't quote Churchill . . .

Paraphrasing, the US and England are two peoples separated by a common language . . .

hawk