• If you are having problems logging in please use the Contact Us in the lower right hand corner of the forum page for assistance.

Aren't we proud?

Help Support Ranchers.net:

Disagreeable

Well-known member
Joined
Jul 4, 2005
Messages
2,464
Reaction score
0
George W. Bush's pals are embarrassing...

Link below; my emphasis.

"Karen Hughes, who has faced a rocky road since being named Washington's public relations chief, answered tough questions Friday about the invasion of Iraq and wrongly stated that Saddam Hussein gassed to death "hundreds of thousands" of his people.

Although the U.S. undersecretary for public diplomacy twice repeated the claim after being challenged by journalists, Gordon Johndroe, a State Department official traveling with Hughes, later called The Associated Press to say she misspoke.

Hughes, a longtime confidante of President Bush, was in the world's most populous Muslim nation to improve America's battered image after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9777092/
 
I noticed the pants issue and at times I've seen her with clerics/ in or near mosques etc without her head covered.

When I was in Cairo...you did " as the Romans" as the saying goes, just out of respect for the people/ culture.

She 's a good lady and I'm sure she means well and wants to do a good job but someone needs to instruct her on Middle Eastern/Muslim cultures.
 
Her handlers really have their hands full. She's in 'way over her head with this job, but I guess this is all Bush could come up with to repay her for her hard work on his behalf. At least he didn't appoint her to FEMA or the Supreme Court. :D I understand that she came back to DC when her son left for college, but I wonder about her husband. Did he come with her or did she leave him in Texas?
 
I was in Cairo in '99 and 2003 and believe me it is ULTRA conservative now for women's styles. But, I wanted to see their country, do my work, and get along....so I didn't try to push my " American-ness" onto them. I went with the flow and for that I am welcomed back anytime I want to return.

Too bad the " higher ups" in the Gov't can't seem to take the same approach.
 
reader (the Second) said:
I've had real problems with the paternalistic attitude the administration has taken in public in its diplomacy towards countries where Islam is dominant in assuming that women who dress modestly or cover their heads are oppressed and need to be liberated. That is certainly true in some countries, for some women but to judge freedom or oppression by lifestyle choices in another culture is p-a-t-e-r-n-a-l-i-s-t-i-c.

I see nothing wrong with premarital sex but I don't criticize the U.S. because there is a traditionalistic movement towards abstinence among born again Christians and other traditional religious groups (the "no touch" beliefs in traditional Judaism among teenagers).

What I have heard is that in Iran both men and women are highly educated and that the mullahs encouraged this and are now paying the price as the young people question conservative religious beliefs and want more freedom. I see these things as pendulums. I have seen the swing in my lifetime in the Arab world but also to some extent in the U.S. where the secular have become more blatantly sexual in dress and behavior and the nonsecular have grown in number and rejected these values.

As a person whose relatives are very traditional Jewish women (with graduate degrees in quantum physics and math to boot and careers), I understand that it is the individual's freedom of choice to follow one's religion which may ask for a certain kind of modesty and avoidance of the rampant sexuality that a Brittany Spears and our movies push.

This is the same kind of moral relativism that has always been used to justify injustices all around the world. God forbid you prevent an American woman from having her fetus' brains sucked out in the 8th month of pregancy. But if a woman in the Middle East get stoned to death for having a child out of wedlock, or is murdered to avenge the sins of her brother, "that's just their culture, and we have to respect that." Islamic culture's treatment of women goes a lot deeper than forcing them to wear burkas, and you know it.
 
file this thread under what crock........

saddam KILLED ("At least 300,000 Iraqis were reportedly killed during Saddam's decades-long rule,") hundreds of thousands, they are dead, and how he killed them is somewhat irrelevent at this point...some were slowly tortured to death, others shot in front of thier family and children, many wives and daughters were raped tortured, and then murdered...and all you liberals care about is "HOW" she said they were KILLED, they are still dead, and SADDAM KILLED THEM,

and them you whine about how she dressed when she said it,,,

Radical Islamic terrorists, ( and many devout muslims) think it is okey to remove a girls finger nails becuase she dared to polish them....or disfigure a woman for showing famininity,,,and all you can do is whine about her wearing pants????

maybe you could show some outrage at this MUSLIM TRADITION,,,



Religion
FGM predates Islam and is not practised by the majority of Muslims, but has acquired a religious dimension. Where it is practised by Muslims, religion is frequently cited as a reason. Many of those who oppose mutilation deny that there is any link between the practise and religion, but Islamic leaders are not unanimous on the subject. The Qur'an does not contain any call for FGM, but a few hadith (sayings attributed to the Prophet Muhammad) refer to it. In one case, in answer to a question put to him by 'Um 'Attiyah (a practitioner of FGM), the Prophet is quoted as saying "reduce but do not destroy". Mutilation has persisted among some converts to Christianity. Christian missionaries have tried to discourage the practice, but found it to be too deep rooted.

FGM is Female Genital Mutilation
 
Steve said:
file this thread under what crock........

saddam KILLED ("At least 300,000 Iraqis were reportedly killed during Saddam's decades-long rule,") hundreds of thousands, they are dead, and how he killed them is somewhat irrelevent at this point...some were slowly tortured to death, others shot in front of thier family and children, many wives and daughters were raped tortured, and then murdered...and all you liberals care about is "HOW" she said they were KILLED, they are still dead, and SADDAM KILLED THEM,

and them you whine about how she dressed when she said it,,,

Radical Islamic terrorists, ( and many devout muslims) think it is okey to remove a girls finger nails becuase she dared to polish them....or disfigure a woman for showing famininity,,,and all you can do is whine about her wearing pants????

maybe you could show some outrage at this MUSLIM TRADITION,,,



Religion
FGM predates Islam and is not practised by the majority of Muslims, but has acquired a religious dimension. Where it is practised by Muslims, religion is frequently cited as a reason. Many of those who oppose mutilation deny that there is any link between the practise and religion, but Islamic leaders are not unanimous on the subject. The Qur'an does not contain any call for FGM, but a few hadith (sayings attributed to the Prophet Muhammad) refer to it. In one case, in answer to a question put to him by 'Um 'Attiyah (a practitioner of FGM), the Prophet is quoted as saying "reduce but do not destroy". Mutilation has persisted among some converts to Christianity. Christian missionaries have tried to discourage the practice, but found it to be too deep rooted.

FGM is Female Genital Mutilation

My, my, you are getting stressed, Steve. I'll try to help out one more time and remind you that George W. Bush didn't take us to war in Iraq because Saddam killed 300,000 people. Women in Iraq had relatively equal rights with men under Saddam's rule. They went to school, they held jobs in Saddam's government. Now under the recently "approved" Constitution in Iraq, all those things may change for women.

As for Karen Hughes, she represents me in her wanderings across the world. In my opinion, she's an embarrasment to this country.
 
I did read your whole post. The burkas and the other dress code aspects of their culture that you defend are symptomatic of a deeper underlying problem - the same one that belies honor killings. You're basically nitpicking what symptoms of a disease you can tolerate and which ones you can't. Islamic culture largely condones terrorism, honor killings, clitorectomies, etc. and until we face that fact, we won't be able to accomplish anything. You're buying into political correctness. I'm not really attacking Islam, per se, but the whole idea of theocracy. When the church ruled Europe, we had similar problems. The fact of the matter is, power corrupts. The Taliban and other regimes are examples of this.
 
I don't really see with what my job has to do with my personal opinions. I don't have to be impartial about EVERYTHING, you know. But I digress...

I'm not attacking every single Muslim by stating that, as a whole, the current Islamic culture breeds religious fanaticism. I'm talking about broad trends here. Sure, not every Muslim is a terrorist. Not every teenage girl dresses like a slut. Nonetheless, Britney Spears, Christina Aguielara, and all the other loose women you find despicable are a product of OUR CULTURE. So are school shootings the decline of the family unit. Does this mean I'm condemning the entire American population? OF course not. But our culture has led to the rise of these disturbing fashions and behaviors, just as Middle Eastern culture has led to the emergence of radical suicide-bombers. They are individual products of a certain culture that has affected them in a very negative way. Do you remember the videos of Middle Easterners burning American flags and dancing in the streets after 9/11? It's no secret they harbor deep resentments against us. Are you pretending like the majority of the Islamic Middle East likes America, and just a few sick individuals lash out? No, it's a broad resentment that leads to outburst of violence.
 
"Karen Hughes, who has faced a rocky road since being named Washington's public relations chief, answered tough questions Friday about the invasion of Iraq and wrongly stated that Saddam Hussein gassed to death "hundreds of thousands" of his people.

Maybe someone should have checked with the Kurds and not just looked at the figures for one village, even by the Kurds estimates the number runs much higher and by the Human rights groups it is estimated to be at least 50,000. this number being much higher then the low estimate this liberal reporter gives of

5,000 believed to have been gassed

my (extremely liberal) source disagrees:
The chemical attacks on Halabja and Goktapa and perhaps two hundred other villages and towns were only a small part of the cataclysm that Saddam's cousin, the man known as Ali Chemical, arranged for the Kurds. The Kurds say that about two hundred thousand were killed. (Human Rights Watch, which in the early nineties published "Iraq's Crime of Genocide," a definitive study of the attacks, gives a figure of between fifty thousand and a hundred thousand.)
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?020325fa_FACT1
 
We have seen some ugly behavior on the part of Americans toward Muslims (Abu Ghraib leaps to mind) as well but that doesn't make all or even the majority of Americans barbaric.

This was my point all along. Most of us found those abuses deplorable, but you have to admit that it reveals something about our culture that the prisoners were humiliated sexually and photographed.
 
I believe that the U.S. is going to have a return to values movt -- different than the one you espouse - which has some good points but is too misused for my taste - one that puts statesmen and women back in govt and holds governments accountable and disallows so much money going into false advertising by political parties.

You may be assuming too much about the values I espouse. I tend to see the events of the world as a pendulum, swinging back and forth, rather than a steady march upward and onward. Of course, this is where we come dangerously close to a philosophical discussion, which is probably best to avoid. Were I to begin disclosing my thoughts on the deeper implications of the world, I would probably alienate everyone on this site, conservative or liberal. Let's just say I'm not an optimist. :wink:
 

Latest posts

Top