"Five days later, during his flight returning to Rome from World Youth Day in Krakow, Poland, Pope Francis gave a press conference. He was asked about the French priest and Islam by Antoine-Marie Izoard, a journalist with I.Media, a French Catholic news agency. Izoard said:
'Catholics are in a state of shock -- and not only in France -- following the barbaric assassination of Father Jacques Hamel in his church while he was celebrating Holy Mass. Four days ago ... you told us once again that all religions want peace. But this holy priest, eighty-six years old, was clearly killed in the name of Islam. So I have two brief questions, Holy Father. When you speak of these violent acts, why do you always speak of terrorists but not of Islam? ... And then, ... what concrete initiative can you launch or perhaps suggest in order to combat Islamic violence?'
Pope Francis responded:
'I don't like to speak of Islamic violence because every day when I open the newspapers I see acts of violence, here in Italy: someone kills his girlfriend, someone else his mother-in-law...and these violent people are baptized Catholics! They are violent Catholics...If I spoke about Islamic violence, I would also have to speak about Catholic violence.'"
#3
He should condemn both. Just because they are Catholic (as am I) doesn't mean it can't be condemned. They are, however, killing for personal or criminal purposes, not in the name of, or justified by, their religion
Posted by: Frank G on the road ||
08/14/2016 11:22 Comments ||
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#4
I stopped going to Mass due to the commie Leftist Pope and wrote a letter to the parish citing the reason.
Posted by: Jack salami ||
08/14/2016 19:12 Comments ||
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[PJ] I’m already feeling the push when it comes to my son’s academic future. Perhaps it is because we’ve made the decision to enroll him in preschool starting at the age of two. Brochures are filled with details on curriculum styles. One place even promised to teach my son sign language. Of course, the bigger the promises, the greater the cost. Someone has to pay for that in-class set of iPads.
Eventually we settled on a simple, affordable, no-tech co-op that focuses on play-based learning. And while there is plenty written about the benefits of letting your toddler do his thing, one aspect play-based advocates fail to emphasize is that manual play doesn’t end when your child is finally old enough to begin a formal education.
My husband entered second grade fully aware of his fractions thanks to countless hours spent in the garage with his father. By the time I entered wood shop in 7th grade I’d already designed and built a scooter from scratch with my dad. Between the two of us we’d accumulated more practical mathematical knowledge in the garage than we’d ever get in high school. And all of it began with the fun of a toy hammer and a pretend workbench.
Apparently the benefits weren’t just intellectual in nature. As it turns out, there are some serious long-term physical benefits to working with tools as well:
In a series of studies testing grip and pinch strength, researchers report in the Journal of Hand Therapy that among the 237 healthy millennials studied between the ages of 20 and 34, men today are significantly weaker than their counterparts of the '80s. Specifically, men could squeeze with 120 pounds of force in 1985 and only 95 today, reports Today.com. The strength of women dropped off, too, but not as substantially.
The prime reason, the researchers propose, is that men are simply less handy--fewer work in manual labor jobs, hence the reduction in strength over these past three decades, reports the San Francisco Chronicle.
According to the researchers, weaker hand strength has been linked to a variety of health conditions including heart disease, stroke and arthritis. Hence medical associations have been warning us for years that too much texting can literally "send us to an early grave." Creepy, huh? It's like we were meant to do more with our hands and minds than hit buttons all day.
#1
And so much for the grand and wonderful service based economy...time for some of that nasty old manufacturing and hard work that the libtards ran out of the country with their tax laws and labor unions.
[ENGLISH.ALARABIYA.NET] Much has been written about the Arab uprisings, and the great unraveling of states and societies that ensued in their wake. In which multiple dictatorships were cast off in rapid succession, with mixed but near uniformly distasteful results.
Scholars looked for precedents in other regions and epochs to compare and contrast. Historians focused on the nature of the fractured modern Arab states and their inherently questionable political legitimacy. Sociologists and demographers searched for long term trends to gauge the changing dynamics between urban and rural communities, the persistence of ethnic, sectarian and tribal loyalties, as well as modes of mobility, social and cultural empowerment and marginalization of certain social strata either because of poor education or subtle and unsubtle discrimination. And economists analyzed the structural deficiencies of the rentier state, and the impact of income disparity, rampant corruption and stagnation. I think it has to do with language. Language shapes the user's thoughts, and is in turn shaped by the way its users think.
When the definitive history or histories of these turbulent times of unwinding and disintegration are written, they will likely avoid using one Meta narrative to explain the colossal collapse of whole societies in real time into total anarchy and unfathomable violence and wanton destruction, that many a times were live-streamed and captured in high definition videos documenting how the Arabs and other communities that lived among them, with a helping hand from their neighbors and powers beyond the seas, were destroying the brittle world they have built.
But much of what was written by scholars was reductionist, bland or lacking in insights as to what makes individuals and groups behave the way they do in seemingly apocalyptic times. And somehow in these narratives the economic data and charts, the nature of the despotic state and the changing demographic and societal dynamics, failed to go beyond providing a superficial, incomplete explanation.
Six chronicles of a death foretold
Years from now, we will most likely get a better insight into what the Arabs did to themselves, or what happened to them during their collective fateful crossing into a purgatory like universe from which there is no return, by reading the great novels chronicling the journey, or by the first accounts of the witnesses watching the tragedy and the actors living in it, as conveyed to us by insightful journalists, whose front row seats allow them to smell the stench of death, to hear the cries of victims and to observe real men and women oscillating between hope and despair.
In the current issue of the New York Times ...which still proudly displays Walter Duranty's Pulitzer prize... Magazine, the gifted journalist Scott Anderson gives us a heart wrenching account of the unraveling through the piercing eyes of six disparate characters from Egypt, Libya, Syria, Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan, who went through the upheavals, and were scarred by them but lived to tell their tales of woes, despair and hope that they experienced during their physical and psychological crossings. In the long article, (I almost said novella) titled "Fractured lands: how the Arab world came apart", Anderson’s characters, like all complex and tragic characters that inhabit the truly great novels of the 19th and 20th centuries convey in various degrees of eloquence and bluntness a tragic and visceral sense of their worlds, and they ended up giving us six narratives that complement each other’s, even though the characters never met personally.
Two warriors and two activists
We first meet the gruff Dr. Azar Mirkhan, a Kurdish medical doctor and a Peshmerga warrior who is obsessed with Kurdish independence and total separation from the Arabs of Iraq whom he sees as the implacable enemies of the Kurds. Dr. Mirkhan fought the Iraqi army as well as ISIS. He conveys a sense of guilt because he did not arrive on time to help the Yezidi Kurds living on mount Sinjar who were massacred by ISIS in the summer of 2014. Then we are introduced to Professor of mathematics, Laila Soueif, the strong wiled matriarch of a prominent Egyptian dissident family,whose struggle for democracy and dignity mirrors that of Egypt. Laila Soueif’s husband Ahmed, her son Alaa, and daughter Sanaa were imprisoned and tortured under the various autocratic regimes that ruled Egypt in recent years. In one of the most poignant passages in the article, Ahmed the famed human rights When they're defined by the state or an NGO they don't mean much... lawyer told his defendant son in court, "I wanted you to inherit a democratic society that guards your rights, my son, but instead I passed on the prison cell that held me, and now holds you."
In Libya, we encounter a young military cadet named Majdi el-Mangoush who fought in the rebellion against Muammar el-Qadaffy and lost dear friends, but refused to lose hope even while Libya continues its descent to chaos. He continues his studies, while cherishing his solitude as a former warrior in a Pine ’forest’ he planted in the desert.
We then witness the incredible evolution of a young shy Iraqi women Khulood al-Zaidi, into a determined advocate for women’s rights in the provincial city of Kut, before the Shiite turbans drove her out of town and into exile in Jordan. From Jordan her journey led her to temporary residence in Caliphornia, an impregnable bastion of the Democratic Party,, then back to Jordan to save her family, and finally, through the torturous watery passage across the Mediterranean to Greece before settling first in Germany then Austria. For Anderson, Khulood exemplify "the extraordinary power of the individual to bring change" to chaotic societies. But, alas there is a painful paradox here "It is people like Khulood who must see to the mending of these fractured lands. Yet, it is those very people, the best their nations have to offer, who are leaving in search of a better life elsewhere. Today, Austria’s gain is Iraq’s loss."
The Syrian exile and the condemned Iraqi
Through the eyes of a young Syrian student Majd Ibrahim, we see the gradual destruction of one of Syria’s ancient cities, Homs, and the depredations of both the Assad regime and some of the opposition groups. Ibrahim also went through his psychological and physical passages and ironically ended up living in Dresden, Germany, the city that was destroyed by the Allies during WWII, the same city that comes to mind when one is confronted by the destruction that has been visited on Homs. Finally, Anderson bring us to meet an unlikely character, Wakaz Hassan, a young Iraqi, who already crossed into the heart of darkness when he joined ISIS, before escaping their clutches to end up in a crowded jail in Iraqi Kurdistan. Wakaz, matter-of-factly described how he executed six blindfolded and handcuffed men, as he was ordered by ISIS. Wakaz’s life maybe the most precarious, because when he loses his usefulness as a source of intelligence on ISIS to his Kurdish captors, he will be handed to Iraqi authorities for execution.
The beginning of the unraveling
Anderson correctly traces the beginning of the unraveling to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. (One can even go back to 1980 when the calamitous Iraqi invasion of Iran began and lasted 8 years, then lead to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, which in turn hastened the American invasion of Iraq). Anderson, rarely speaks directly, leaving that mission to his characters, but when he does, his observations are profound and jarring. "In my professional travels over the decades, I had found no other region to rival the Arab world in its utter stagnation." He then focuses on the entrenched culture of grievances. "One of the Arab world’s most prominent and debilitating features, I had long felt, was a culture of grievance that was defined less by what people aspired to than by what they opposed. They were anti-Zionist, anti-West, anti-imperialist."
In his attempt to answer what went wrong, Anderson avoids providing "a single answer." But he observes that the three countries that have disintegrated the most, "as to raise doubt that they will ever again exist as functioning states -- Iraq, Syria and Libya -- are all members of that small list of Arab countries created by Western imperial powers in the early 20th century." While the lack of "national coherence" is a factor in the unraveling, one could say that if good, accountable governance was created, the outcome might have been different. In other words, the problem was not necessarily or exclusively in the artificial boundaries and weak national coherence, but precisely in what happened and did not happen within these boundaries that led to the great unraveling.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/14/2016 00:00 ||
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#1
In his attempt to answer what went wrong, Anderson avoids providing "a single answer."
How about 'Islam'
Posted by: lord garth ||
08/14/2016 7:54 Comments ||
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#2
I'd go with 'Arab'. But that's just my opinion.
#5
Some give them credit for inventing algebra and the number 0 but all I give them credit for is Olympic gold level blowing yourself up in crowded spaces.
Those people have been killing each other and fighting over the succession to Mohammed for over 1200 years. They still piss and moan about the Crusades...a 1000 years ago and whine and snivel all the while.
They have done more harm to themselves over the years than any single event or series of events the "imperialists" could bring to them.
Remember Tamerlain and the 1.5 million massacred in Baghdad and that was a leader who is called a "defender of the faith" by Moslems...burned the University of Baghdad and threw ever book and scroll in the libraries into the Euphrates River...turning it black for miles.
The only time the Moslems functioned is when they hired Jews and Christians to take care of the administration while they indulged in court intrigue and assassinations. Even their fierce Janissaries were Christians and Jews.
We are locked into a battle of good versus evil. Islam which promotes paradise through a culture of death and destruction against Christianity and Judaism which believe in love, peace, and paradise through brotherly love and forgiveness.
The problem, for all of the excuses the academics want to heap on the situation, is Islam and there is no other way to cut the salami.
If Erdogan isn't stopped the next failed state/hell hole will be Turkey.
When I was in Libya, I had hope that cooler heads would prevail but the leadership was too chicken shit to deal with the militias and the Islamists in a meaningful way.
In Iraq, much of the same early energy and hopefulness is gone. Same story, but I will dump Iraq right in George's lap for all of the wrongheaded and stupid things that Paul Bremer did in Iraq that drove vast numbers of them straight into the arms of Al Qaeda.
#8
In my professional travels over the decades, I had found no other region to rival the Arab world in its utter stagnation.
The "stagnation" had been taking place for over a century, and accelerated after WWII. The Arab world had been "unraveling" for 50 years before the US invaded Iraq.
In fact, the invasion was an attempt to transform the Middle East by creating a functioning democracy. The Bush administration tried to do it on the cheap and underestimated the backlash from Iraq's neighbors.
Posted by: Frozen Al ||
08/14/2016 12:30 Comments ||
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#9
When we had intimidating force bracketing Iran geopolitically, in Iraq, Afghanistan and a credible NATO ally in Turkey, we had the power to induce change there through a mix of internal revolution and confrontation from the US and a coalition of the willing countries at risk for Iranian domination. No one had the balls to take that on and endure the costs, and all the decrement of our influence and sway in the region has been the fruits of this gutlessness. now, thanks to our feckless and frankly incompetent POS POTUS, the task will be more than we can do. God help Israel.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Yes, Jeanine. From humble beginnings in Arkansas and later with a one room B&B in D.C. 
[ENGLISH.ALARABIYA.NET] Much has been written about the Arab uprisings, and the great unraveling of states and societies that ensued in their wake. 
