Clipmarks | arifsali's Read Later collection

The Biggest Threat to the West Lies Within Itself, Not with Islam

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 22:32:52 GMT

clipped by: Kore7
clipper's remarks: Simon Jenkins on threats to peace and democracy.

This defeatism led the American Congress to allow its president to authorise torture and detention without trial in what Senator Robert Byrd called “the slow unravelling of the people’s liberties”. It enabled a British Home Office to curb free speech and habeas corpus. It arms police, fortifies buildings and impedes the free movement of citizens. It makes every Christian suspicious of every Muslim.

Clip Source: www.timesonline.co.uk

The biggest threat to the West lies within itself, not with Islam

The chief threat to world security at present lies in the capacity of tiny groups of political Islamists to goad the West into a rolling military retaliation.

Extremists on each side feed off the others’ frenzied scenarios so as to garner money and political support for their respective armies of the night. Each sees the other as a cosmic menace and abandons communal tolerance and peaceful diplomacy to counter it.

To portray Islam as a whole as a concerted threat to western security, and to imply that the West’s democratic institutions and freedoms are not proof against that threat, is absurd and close to treason. Then to demand that western freedoms be dismantled and stored away for the duration of a “war on terror” is to wave the flag of surrender.

I believe in the robustness of the democracies created in the West over the past half-century. I am not sure that our leaders do.

Tags: terrorism, islam, christianity, religion, freedom, war, peace, democracy, west, torture

Socrates Meets Jesus

Tue, 02 Jan 2007 02:43:21 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: a must! read it all, thinkers will love it..

Clip Source: www.unm.edu

Socrates Meets Jesus
by Prometheus

Socrates

Good morning, Jesus, I have heard much of your marvelous teachings. In my own modest way I am a philosopher here in Athens. I am told you have great wisdom and certainly that is indicated by the throng of admirers that follow you through the streets. If you have a few moments to spare, I would appreciate it if you would enlighten me with the answers to some of the puzzling problems I have been wrestling with all my life

Jesus

I am as a fisher of men in my search for followers. I bring the truth of God to all men. Seek and you shall find, ask and it shall be answered knock and it shall be open unto to thee.

Socrates

There is one basic question that has always been uppermost in my mind. Although it has always been an insurmountable obstacle to me in my search for the truth and meaning, I am sure that with your learning you will find it far to easy and think me a foolish old man. I have always longed to live honorably and nobly, but it seems that I have merely stumbled through life without even even knowing what was honorable or noble. With my limited understanding, it often seems to me that life, even with all its sound and fury, really signifies nothing. Please tell me: How should a man live; what is the purpose of life.

Jesus

To serve and worship God.

Tags: philosophy, religion, mind, debate

Neo-cons on the failure of the neo-con project

Thu, 09 Nov 2006 17:38:57 GMT

clipped by: enbar
clipper's remarks: Invictus already clipped a related article (link), but I thought this deserved a clip of its own. Perle, Kenneth Adelman, David Frum and others on why Iraq's disastrous outcome is someone else's fault -- mainly Bush's.

Clip Source: www.vanityfair.com

Neo Culpa

As Iraq slips further into chaos, the war's neoconservative boosters have turned sharply on the Bush administration, charging that their grand designs have been undermined by White House incompetence. In a series of exclusive interviews, Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, David Frum, and others play the blame game with shocking frankness. Target No. 1: the president himself.

I remember sitting with Richard Perle in his suite at London's Grosvenor House hotel and receiving a private lecture on the importance of securing victory in Iraq. "Iraq is a very good candidate for democratic reform," he said. "It won't be Westminster overnight, but the great democracies of the world didn't achieve the full, rich structure of democratic governance overnight. The Iraqis have a decent chance of succeeding." Perle seemed to exude the scent of liberation, as well as a whiff of gunpowder. It was February 2003, and Operation Iraqi Freedom, the culmination of his long campaign on behalf of regime change in Iraq, was less than a month away.

Three years later, Perle and I meet again at his home outside Washington, D.C. It is October, the worst month for U.S. casualties in Iraq in almost two years, and Republicans are bracing for losses in the upcoming midterm elections. As he looks into my eyes, speaking slowly and with obvious deliberation, Perle is unrecognizable as the confident hawk who, as chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, had invited the exiled Iraqi dissident Ahmad Chalabi to its first meeting after 9/11. "The levels of brutality that we've seen are truly horrifying, and I have to say, I underestimated the depravity," Perle says now, adding that total defeat—an American withdrawal that leaves Iraq as an anarchic "failed state"—is not yet inevitable but is becoming more likely. "And then," says Perle, "you'll get all the mayhem that the world is capable of creating."

Tags: politics, war, bushies, conservatives

A Democrat Knows That the Leaf Turns: Garrison Keillor

Wed, 08 Nov 2006 16:58:16 GMT

clipped by: gingembre
clipper's remarks: A great read. Here's a bit more...
"The rescue squad can get to you anywhere in St. Paul in four minutes or less. That is official policy...And the four-minute-or-less response represents the nature of our civil compact here in St. Paul: if you urgently need help, someone will be there before panic sets in. In the suburbs, thanks to Republicans and their code of personal responsibility, the coronary victim will have time to read the entire Gospel of St. Mark before help arrives. There is a message here: if lower taxes are your priority over human life, then we know what sort of person you are. The response to a cry for help says a lot about us as human beings."

Clip Source: www.commondreams.org

This is Democratic bedrock: we don't let people lie in the ditch and drive past and pretend not to see them dying. Here on the frozen tundra of Minnesota, if your neighbor's car won't start, you put on your parka and get the jumper cables out and deliver the Sacred Spark that starts their car. Everybody knows this. The logical extension of this spirit is social welfare and the myriad government programs with long dry names all very uninteresting to you until you suddenly need one and then you turn into a Democrat. A liberal is a conservative who's been through treatment.

A Democrat Knows That the Leaf Turns

by Garrison Keillor

People are united in a civil compact and we know it, even if we don't talk about it. This compact is powerful in the Midwest, and when we midwesterners travel to New York or London or Paris, we wonder: if we were struck by a car and lay bleeding in the gutter, would people stop and help?

The fear of catastrophe could chill the soul but the social compact assures you that if the wasps come after you, if gruesome disease strikes down your child, if you find yourself hopelessly lost, incapable, drowning in despair, running through the rye toward the cliff, then the rest of us will catch you and tend to you and not only your friends but We the People in the form of public servants. This is a basic necessity in a developed society. Men and women make love and have babies in the knowledge that if the baby should be born with cerebral palsy or Down syndrome or a hole in its heart and require heroic care, the people of Minnesota and of St. Paul will stand with you in your dark hour. If you are saddled with trouble too great for a person to bear, you will not be left to perish by the roadside in darkness. Without that assurance, we may as well go live in the woods and take our chances.

Tags: politics, government, social welfare, democrat, liberal