Cam&#39;s Corner of the World

It's warm and sunny here *hides from northmen wrath*,
And as for terrorism, my advice, don't let it get to you. That's their purpose, to scare people. And if we are letting them, they have won already.
But marzipan sounds good.Although I love coconut cookies, which are passover specialty here, in Israel. Enjoying one right now.

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musemistress.livejournal.com

You know, there should be a society of constant complainers for these advertised holidays. The Santa with Bunny Ears sounds like a good campaign, it would at least make people question us and wonder what the heckfire we're doing.

And another point on Bush...I really do NOT think it was a smart thing to be blowing up a mosque, especially so near Easter which is somehow recognised all around the world in some way even though not everyone is Christian or something. In WW2, the Americans also blew up a massive library in Germany to try and attack their pride and confidance, unbeknowenst to them (or at least to the pilots as I am SURE the heads of the military knew about this) this library contained priceless works of some of the first ever written scripts and ancient books from 1000 years ago. Lets just say that Germany wasn't the only country that was pissed.
Bush needs to get his head on straight...I am not anti-American, that is the truth, but the stupidity of the government is very unnerving. Holland is at the bottom of the list with the amount of troops in Iraq, but the mere fact we are just below Spain and they have already been targeted is starting to make me jittery. We aren't a hostile force, on the contrary we are like the Norwegians with Mine clearing and Aid services...but still...yeah.

Dang, aren't we all negative hey. It's amazing how one man can really tic usually passive people off enough to make them rave...like me. Hmm

~Vana E~

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jedilora.livejournal.com

Yum, Passover cookies! My mum made me a batch of mandelbrot before I headed back to college. MMMMMM...

On a more serious note, I agree with your view on terrorism. They're trying to scare through violence. Unfortunately, it often works. Fighting the fear seems to me to be one of the best ways to fight terrorism.

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To quote a Scandinavian - 'fear is not an evil unless it overcomes you'. I mean, terrorists are scary as hell. We're talking people who would want me, my country, my continent to feel pain and are willing to do almost anything to make it happen. I don't think there is any shame in saying that scares me. And I don't think it is very wise to just shrug it off.

But just because we feel fear, doesn't mean we should let it govern us. That's when terrorists score a win. It's easy to make people afraid. I could do it by sneaking up on you and say 'boo!'. It's making us slaves of that fear that would truly be disasterous.

So I believe that fear is not an evil unless it overcomes us.

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Depends how you view fear. Humans have been dealing with fear since we had enough sense to know that big cats and other nasties with big pointy teeth could eat us. It's natural to feel fear in a world where other things can kill you.

To me, the real fight against terrorism is dealing with its cause. Terrorism is a symptom. You can cut all the cancer out of a body, but if it keeps coming back and infecting healthy tissue, you have a serious problem. It's a bit like neo-nazism, which I despise with every cell in my body - young angry boys are pulled in and destroyed by hatred. It's easy to just lock these boys up, but what does that solve? New ones are recruited and the cancer spreads. No, the cause has to be indentified and some solution has to be found. There is the real fight and the hard fight. Because it's very, very easy to just kill.

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Pretty freaky feeling, I imagine. You don't expect this stuff in little Norway, that's for sure. It's probably the same gang who did that fairly spectacular robbery in Oslo before Christmas. I'd hate to think there are several gangs capable of this kind of operation in Norway. Let us hope they're caught and put to justice for the murder at least.

Ah yes, Kvikk-lunsj, the Norwegian icon. I used to have fantasies about it and other Norwegian goodies while I was in Australia. Tyrkisk pepper. Smil. Potetskruer. Mmmm.

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Probably, heh. We're a weird kind. I mean, try to explain the concept of 'dra på hytta' to foreigners and they think we're insane.

Which we probably are, but oh well.

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*eyes icon* Who are those people?

Due to the whole Monica debacle, other mistakes Clinton did are just not going to be remembered, eh? I'm not sure how I feel about the whole NATO-bombs-Belgrade thing - obviously, something had to be done or Milosovich would have completed a genocide of the Albanians. But I don't know. The Serbs got all the blame when the blame should have been distrubted around a fair bit. The Yugoslavian wars were terrible and everyone did bad things.

What's with the whole 'baaaad, bad East' thing anyway? I mean, we're a round planet. Everything's east of something. Everything's also west of something. We're all East, we're all West. It's a fricking round planet.

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blackpearl500.livejournal.com

Bombing a mosque? That's really going to make him popular in the Middle East. I'm not surprised that the fighting is still going on though. They take Saddam out of the picture and expect the world to be a happy happy place. Yeah right. All they did was open up the office of "National Dictator".

Provided Uncle Sam doesn't continue it's tradition of aiding and appointing dictators, someone else is going to be in a hurry to fill that spot. Look for things to get especially ugly.

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The U.S. gov has already pissed off a lot of the world by their (I refuse to say "our" - Rumsfeld does NOT represent me, and, like a majority of Americans, I did not vote for the Shrub) chilling ignorance/indifference to the looting of the Iraqi museum last year. I guess that's a comparable situation to the German library in terms of treasures lost.

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Not to mention that Belgrade is where a lot of the Serbs who opposed Milosevic live. (I have a co-worker who's first-gen from Serbia and still visits her family there every chance she gets, so I heard a lot about this from her POV).

I have mixed feelings about that. What I can't forgive Clinton for is Rwanda (though the UN shares blame for that too).

But that blowjob thing was a media/Rebublican-created mountain out of a molehill. According to the Gallup polls and the non-Fox news, Clinton's approval ratings where actually the highest ever during that whole farce -- most Americans had sympathy for him and thought his sex life should be between him and his wife, had nothing to do with running the country. The economy was going gangbusters and people had money then, and therefore they were mostly happy with him.

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agent-tweed.livejournal.com

Miss Cam,

The people are "The Nine Sitters" also known as the Justices of The Supreme Court of The United States of America. When the PPC had a meet-up in Washington DC (The White City) we paired them by leaning/personality with the Nine Walkers. Strange things pass for fun in a political city.

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*nods* It's sometimes easy to forget a leader never ever speaks for the entire country. Bush doesn't, Milosovich didn't. Unfortunately there was a lot of villification of the Serbs, probably because they did some of the most horrific things at the end of the war(s), after NATO and the UN really got involved.

Rwanda was... I don't remember the Rwanda genocide, as I was 14 at the time and therefore quite the teenage brat. But of course, some of the blame does lie on the entire Western world. Europe failed its promise of 'never again'. It's shameful. We, of all people, should know the horrors of genocide.

Ah, Fox News. Quite the fun channel. My brother and I used to watch it late nights. It's an... interesting channel. I gather they did not have the same kind of polls? Wouldn't suprise me, really. How you phrase your question in a poll will affect what people answer. I never trust a poll that doesn't tell me how they asked the question.

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Aaaaah. The guys who made the Shrub President. I'm sure the world is just dying to thank them.

And now the icon amuses me greatly. Heh. So who's who from the Fellowship here?

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And of course the more unpopular Bush becomes in the Middle East, the better it is for al-Quida.

The nightmare scenario would be a general Shia uprising. If that ever happens, it's going to be hell. And if the US tries to fight it, it will be killing the very people it claimed it came to liberate (not to mention that International law dictate that the Iraqis do have a certain right to fight an occupying force - and that is what the US is). As much as one part of me would like to see the Shrub fail, I would never in a million years wish more war upon the Iraqi people. So I'm left to hoping Bush actually succeed in Iraq, which I must say rather leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. Ick.

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There is actually some major Shia holy period coming on, so if heavy fighting continues, it's not going to look very good in the Arab world.

There has been a lot of debate about Allied actions during WWW2. The terrorbombing of Dresden was not exactly a morale high point of Allied actions. It was just revenge for the German bombing of England. 30,000 dead and priceless buildings reduced to ash. It just goes to prove once again that in war, no one side is ever completely white and good. Never.

Bush really has managed to stir up Europeans. Before the war, the anti-war demonstrations gathered so many different people together and quite a lot of them not the normally protesting type. I don't think Norwegians have been so actively protesting something since the great EU debate(s).

Holland has some troops too, eh? There is quite a few countries with 'humanitarian troops', as they call it. There was only six countries who actually participated in military action against Iraq, but the Shrub likes to pretend every country there now supported the war, which pisses me off. Not only is that misrepresenting to the American people, it's quite likely al-Quida makes notes of it too.

Bah. More marzipan is needed.

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well, round about the time they "selected" the Shrub (because if we actually follow the Constitutional process for this situation people will FREAK!!!one!!!O!!ATTENTIONSPANS2SHORT!!11), they were looking a lot more like the Nine Riders to me.

And look, they chose Sauron. What a shock.

NOT.

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IIRC, in Rwanda, the Belgians were there as peacekeepers, and a few of them got killed so they bowed out. OK, fine. But the UN didn't stand up, neither did any individual nation, so what happened was you had a situation where most of the aid workers (white) left, and as the trucks were pulling out, their (black) co-workers were begging for help while their (also black) killers were waiting along the road with their machetes. All in all, almost a million people died, and it did seem like the world's involvement (or lack thereof) was very racial. The United States said flat out that "our" policy was not to intervene unless it was in "our" national interests. Since Rwanda has no oil or other economic interests, and isn't politically relevant since the Cold War was over and it wasn't near any potential "dominoes", tough titties.

After that, I don't want to hear any crap about how "evil" Saddam was. Sure, he was. No doubt. But he was also sittin' on a lot of friggin' oil.

Would Norway consider invading us and getting rid of the Shrub?
Under international law, it would be at least as legit as GWB invading Iraq.

Please?

We have Coca-Cola.

We have cheap DVD players. (Not as cheap as China, but we try)

Pretty please?

(I'm appealing to your Viking pride here.)

Pretty pretty please with Elijah Wood on top?

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Rwanda is a very good example of one of the UN's biggest flaw - 'getting caught in a net of indifference' as I like to call it. No one country will stand up and no one feels responsible enough on their own to risk troops.

Invading the US? Hmmhmmm. Obviously, you realise this would mean we'd occupy you and attempt to make you a democracy? That we'd probably start imposing our social democratic ways and force everyone to resolve their differences by talk, not gunning the other side down? We'd probably even make you watch Eurosong and develop a passionate interest in cross country skiing and other wintersports. And I'm pretty sure we'd rename the country and have a referendum on it.

Obviously, offerings of hot males will help sway minds here. And the Norwegian males would probably be enticed to come for the cars and Harleys. And we could have Thor blast the White House...

*hmmms and ponders*

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Then I want to ask you a question. What is the cause and how you propose to solve it?
I totally agree with you about what you said on terrorism, but it's very easy to say to someone other to find the cause and solve it. I, for instance, avoid saying it, or criticizing too much people for making decision I don't agree with, because I don't know the answer to problems they are facing (but Bush is a tool, and I would personally kicked all of our settlers from territories, because they are glaring inconsistence with our claims that we want piece).
Sorry, if I sound to aggressive, I don't mean to be :).

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I'm sorry, I think I didn't phrased it right. The meaning of my "don't let it get to you" was what you said about not letting it govern you, or to make your decision for you.
I think, that great blow for US wasn't just the destruction of WTC, but the way it affected their lives. The restriction of certain freedoms and the fear it brought.

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I'm sorry, it's we want peace, not piece (I knew something was wrong with the word). I swear it’s not Freudian slip. :)

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Quite frankly, I don't have the insight or the knowledge to say what the answer is. It would require years of studying just to get near an answer. And I'm not sure it's just one cause at work here.

From what I have read of others' studies into this, I have formed an opinion on the matter, but it's in no way meant to be The Answer.

The one thing I believe is at work is a crisis within Islam itself. It's now faced with modern times and there is two responses to this. Reform it - or go back to the fundamentals and reject modernism. If you look at al-Quida and all their anti-Western talk, it is actually *modernism* they feel is the enemy and the US and others are just a symbol of modernism. Al-Quida and similar terrorist organisation aren't just busy with terrorism, they're also engaged in a battle for the soul of Islam. And to me, the West can never win that battle. It must be the muslims themselves who reject this Islam-based terrorism, or it will never be stamped out.

Here we get to another thing I believe is part of the cause - the gap between the West and the Islamic countries and a mutal misunderstanding of what the other is about. Stereotyping, you might say. I read this very, very interesting book on how the West affects Islam by a British muslim. He said something which I believe is true - in general too- that to a certain degree, if you impose your image of something onto it, it starts to become a bit like it. Like a twisted mirror, if you will. The more we fear muslisms and feel they hate the West, the more they start to. That's putting it simply, it's a lot more complex than that.

Another part of the cause is that the muslism world consists of a lot of countries run more or less by dictatorial regimes. I don't think democracy will remove terrorism - didn't do it in Europe, after all - but I think it will take away some of that widespread respect al-Quida now enjoys in several countries such as Pakistan. Take Saudi-Arabia, for instance. The Royal family runs the country and is corrupt. It has pocketed billions of the oil revenue, which wasn't as big a problem a while back. Oil prices were high and the 'common' people were given great wealth. Oil prices has then gone down and production as well. Now people don't get as much wealth. And suddenly Saudi-Arabians start crashing planes into the WTC. It's nowhere near all of the cause, but I believe it plays a part.

And you have to look at the West itself. We have done our bit to anger the Islamic world. The US's unquestionable backing of Israel while Palestinians suffer. The Islamic world feels with the Palestinians, of course. The abandoning of Afghanistan after the war with Russia. That caused resentment - the US just used Afghanistan and then threw it away. There is a lot of anger over what the West has done, in particular relating to Israel. Britain outright lied to the Arab world during WW1, for instance. To fight the Ottoman empire, Arabs had been promised Palestine, but at the same time, Britain was offering it to the zionists (in an attempt to get Russia back in the war, among other things). Britain didn't deliver what they promised, and the Arab world was angered. And of course, the Arab world remembers the Crusade. They fear the West is coming in a sort of second Crusade.
(continued in part two)

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There is probably other things playing in too, and of course there's specific situations playing in here too. The rise of Islamic terrorism in Palestine obviously relates to the Israeli occupation and so on. And even if what I have mentioned is part of the general cause, how do you fix it? Part of the problem of the West trying to fix it, is going into Arab countries give al-Quida the right when it claims the US and others are out to run the Arab world. What the West can do is help to combat the poverty and pressure regimes into reforming, not supporting them. The West cannot on its own win a battle against al-Quida, I believe, because it isn't just about the West. It's also about what Islam should be, how to deal with modernism, how to deal with the fact that the great Islamic empires have fallen. People have pride. And the West coming in to 'fix it all' is humiliating. This is something that is happening in Iraq now. People feel humiliated. And humiliation can easily be turned to anger.

Gah, I'm just getting into longer and longer explanations. To sum it up - I have some ideas about what might be participating in the rise of Islamic terrorism and above all I believe what the West must do is stop viewing muslims and Islam as something evil, something needing fixing and start seeing muslims as a resource to help fight terrorism. But on their own terms. And the West needs to get off its high morale horse at once.

I hope that enlightens you a bit on my viewpoints. But either way, you always and forever have the right to ask the questions. Even if you don't know everything about a situation, that doesn't mean you have to be silent. Deomcracy is the right for every voice to be heard, regardless of education or I.Q. And quite frankly, I don't think Ariel Sharon has more brains than you.

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It was very enlightening, thank you. I really enjoyed reading someone intelligent, who has an opinion and can back it up (Now, with sucking up done I can proceed :)).
I admit freely that my opinion is very biased on the matter, despite the fact that among my friends I'm considered more liberal, just for the fact that I admit that Israel partially holds the blame for current situation.
I agree with what you said about the conflict between islam and western civilization, but sadly I still don't see the solution.
How can we stop that mutual hate? Somebody has to be the first to break the circle, to stop hating. The sad part for me is, that I personally don't believe that islamic world will accept the west that easily, even if we will be the first to reach out. There are plenty of people in the West who don't look at muslims as enemies. Your own country sent your people to help to rebuild Iraq. And yet they are in danger there. Plenty of people around the world protested against this war. How many people protest against prosecution af arabs? As well, I'm aware of the fact that extremists are only part, and not a major part of islam. But why the rest of them do nothing? Why palestinians celebrated destruction of twins? Does the fact that US support their enemy justify celebration of deaths of innocents? I swear to you, that no one in Israel celebrates the deaths of Palestinians (except for Yasin, but he was a monster). Why there is almost no condemnation of suicide bombers? If many of islamic religious figures would proclaim it wrong it would certainly help their cause. One more example. In the beginning of peace talks between Israel and Palestinians, both sides had given an obligations. Palestinians were granted certain independences(yes, I agree, that there were many things still to be worked out), they started to create their police, their army, their infrastructure. With the help of Israel. They had to remove the chapter about Israel destruction from their declaration. They never, never did it. It all happened before all hell broke loose a few years ago.
As for poor Sharon, I just don't like jumping on him because he does things not to my liking. On one hand I firmly believe that settlements have to go, on another hand, the structure of our government is such, that this move would probably cost Sharon his position. He has very hard job balancing between all these who scream that he's not doing enough for peace process, these who claim he's not keeping country secure, and not hard enough on Palestinians, and pressure from US, and pressure from Europe, who both know the best way to deal with the crisis (which I have the impression from Europe is elimination of cause, Israel itself)

And I'm so sorry to use your LJ for my ranting. Bad, bad Tal.

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(Note: When I here refer to 'Israel' I'm talking about the state and government of Israel, not Israeli people in general.)

Well, I think part of the problem of why the West is not well recieved in the Arab world in particular has to do with the pride thing I brought up. There used to be these great Arab empires and now they are dust while the West is great and powerful. It's a bit like Germany after WW1. Part of the reason why so many average Germans tolerated and embraced Hitler was that he gave them pride back. Germany was humiliated after WW1, and it came back to bite Europe in the bum. Part of the reason why Hamas is so strongly supported in the Palestinians areas is its charity work among Palestinians, which is a part of Islamic tradition. Palestinians trying to better Palestine. It's a lot easier for a proud people to accept inside help, then getting hand-outs for foreigners. People need to have some pride in themselves. And the West coming in all condescendingly with how to fix it all is a blow to Arab pride. I think that is part of the problem. And a lack of trust. Given how the West has acted in past times, I can certainly understand that. Europe wasn't exactly known for its gentleness and kindness abroad in its Empirical days. And the regimes in the Arab world hasn't exactly done much to enlighten their people. Many of them just don't know much about what the West wants and what it is about these days. What you don't know, you fear.

I think it's unfair to say there is no comdemnation of suicide bombers. Maybe you don't get as much about that in the Israeli media, but there are quite a lot of moderate muslims who have declared this against the nature of Islam. The problem is that the loudest voices are always the fundamentalists. And Palestinians have been robbed off their pride, their land and many of their people. Palestinian causalty is way, way higher than Israel losses. The Israel military cannot be challenged by the Palestinians. So the only way they see as a method of fighting back, to regain some pride, is suicide bombers. They have nothing else. And they don't feel the Israeli people are innocent. And of course, the Israeli military has also hit Palestinian civilians, and there's probably a view among Palestinians that this is on purpose. You hit non-military targets, we hit non-military targets. And on a deeper, sadder level, this is the way Palestinians get attention about their situation.

And because the US has aligned itself so firmly with Israel, it too becomes an enemy. It's... How shall I put this? When you live in a situation with no dignity, where your friends and family die for no good reason and you barely have any food and no future - life just loses its meaning. You stop caring. And then it's very easy to kill people and celebrate the death of those you think responsible for your situation. You have nothing else.
(to be continued...)

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