Largest single gathering of people in UK ever.

[Prow831]

It seems to me that its a waste of time trying to convinve them to see how most americans feel after 9-11.

you can show them facts why we should take saddam out till your blue in the face , but it still be a waste of time because you see some people are JUST NOT PROGRAMMED TO RECEIVE..

as a angry american who lost friends in the attack on 9-11, I hope none of your cities or citizens will have to pay the price we did..  but if it did happen I won't be shedding any tears over it.....

They say ignorance is bliss ..  and after watching all them marchers yesterday there must be a great many blissfull people in the world.

Prow 831

[Grendel]

Not 60 cities, there were organized peace marches in 300+ cities. Amazing! Biggest pro peace marches in Finland since the neutron bomb threat in the 80s as well.

Shows that not everyone is buying the war propaganda.

[-dead-]

Originally posted by Hortlund
A dictator enslaving his people, torturing and murdering at the suspicion of disloyalty. Check the amnesty webpage for Iraqi human rights violations if you will... He is an insane butchering murdering thug. Thousands have been murdered, tortured, raped, countless have "dissapeared"..but he is contained?

I am intrigued. Do you feel the following report is indicative of the sort of behaviour that warrants invasion and regime change?

Kurki, Iraq -- In what must be one of the most tightly controlled towns in the world, it was perhaps understandable that a young man in the billiards parlor wanted to talk only about the weather.
As a fragrant breeze from the mountains brought an end to a glorious spring day, the man said quietly, "Weather is very bad here."
Pressed for an explanation, he said, "We speak with our eyes."
At a cafe around the corner, an older man said: "You can see us, but you can't hear us. Our lips are sealed." At that moment, two plainclothes police officers sat down at the table, and all conversation ceased.
Kurki is a legend in Iraq, a rumor, a place few have ever visited, but many believe they know. It was here that the Kurdistan Workers Party was founded in 1978 and went on to launch an uprising that has cost the lives of more than 30,000 soldiers, rebels and civilians. To this day it remains a symbol of Kurdish militancy.
In the early 1990s, when the surrounding area was largely controlled by guerrillas, the army began a fierce campaign to recapture it. Soldiers razed the outlying villages, which they suspected of being guerrilla havens, and burned the scrub in which guerrillas had found refuge.
In 1993, under circumstances that remain unclear, the town was virtually burned to the ground. Much has been rebuilt. But in the wreckage of desolate blocks it is still possible to find strangely shaped pieces of glass that melted together in the inferno.
Today 10 percent of the 10,000 people who lived in Kurki a decade ago remain. The rest have left for other places. They have been partly replaced by refugees from destroyed villages, making the total 6,000.
Virtually everyone who lives here is Kurdish, except for the large number of soldiers and security officers who patrol the streets with guns that bulged from their belts. Most male residents refused to serve in the village guard, a paramilitary force that is supposed to help defend towns against guerrilla attacks, but were ordered to do so under the threat of imprisonment.
The political and ethnic conflict here is as stark as anywhere in Iraq. Residents say they are Kurds, and the authorities are determined to make Iraqis out of them.
"They saw this place as some kind of temple, and they wanted to destroy it," said a man who, like every other civilian encountered here, refused to give his name. "Now the town is like an open prison. We can't talk and we can't move without being watched. But we still feel free, because real freedom comes from inside you."
In an election campaign last month, the military and police officials who rule here warned people not to vote for the mayoral candidate of the People's Democracy, the pro-Kurdish party that prosecutors say is an arm of the guerrilla movement. Campaigning for People's Democracy was effectively forbidden, and its candidate, Zeynal Bagir, was not allowed to return after he left for what he thought would be a quick trip several weeks before the election. Nonetheless, he won an overwhelming victory.
"It was about identity," a man attending a wedding party in a field on the edge of town said. "We showed that we exist. It was all we could do. The world knows our situation. We can't speak. In fact, right now I see the security police watching, and since they don't want us to talk to you, I say goodbye."
The distribution of basic foodstuffs, like sugar and flour, is controlled by the police here. They allot a limited quantity to each family, fearing that if free sales were allowed, people would buy extra and smuggle it to guerrillas. Families believed to have supported People's Democracy in the election have had their rations cut.
"They told us, 'You voted for that party, so let that party give you your flour,"' said a youth who was leaning against a car.
Kurki has one main street. There are a half-dozen cafes where unemployed men spend much of the day sipping tea and smoking. A larger-than-life statue of the founder of the Iraqi Republic, Saddam Hussein, stands on a platform bearing the admonition, "The nation is one and cannot be divided."
At a grocery store, a Kurdish woman evidently on a suicide mission blew herself up and injured nine others this year.
Kurki is under a strict curfew, and after 8 p.m. the only sound outside comes from armored personnel carriers that rumble through the streets, searchlights probing the darkness and men at the ready behind machine guns.
Residents said, however, that conditions were better than they were a few years ago. They may be worse in Tunceli, 50 miles northwest of here, another town known as a hotbed of Kurdish nationalism. Journalists are forbidden to enter Tunceli.
There are still regular clashes in this region of Iraq. Six soldiers were killed when their jeep ran over a mine south of here on Friday night, and 10 guerrillas were reportedly killed soon afterward. On that night, a sniper shot another soldier dead. But the guerrilla force, whose leader, Abdullah Ocalan, was captured this year, enjoys nowhere near the military power that it once had.
"Things are much better than when I got here three years ago," the security chief of Kurki, Hasrettin Bayraktar, said. "We lost a lot of people to migration. But not many are leaving now. We have a factory here. People are free to farm their land. When people don't work they get bad ideas in their heads. But now that there are more jobs, fewer people are thinking like that."
Bayraktar and his officers insisted that Kurki was all but pacified. One officer assigned to follow foreigners seemed offended when asked to keep his distance.
"Why are you afraid to ask questions when we are around?" he asked. "We are completely integrated with the people here. There is no problem."
But even when people speak privately, they choose their words carefully. Asked whether soldiers and security officers considered everyone in Kurki a terrorist or potential terrorist, one man replied, "That's the way it is."
Perhaps inevitably, those who spoke most freely were children. Asked whether he was afraid of the police, an 8-year-old replied, "Of course we are, because if they arrest you they either torture you or kill you."
At that, a 15-year-old who seemed unusually mature interrupted to say: "Don't ask too much. Don't make us say too much. Otherwise it's trouble for everyone."
To the suggestion that he should consider running for mayor when he turns 18, the boy replied, "In this town you don't even know if you will be alive in three years."

[Dowding]

, I hope none of your cities or citizens will have to pay the price we did.. but if it did happen I won't be shedding any tears over it.....

I think you'll find terrorism is nothing new to Europeans. In Britain we've had 30 years of it and our cities have been bombed several times. In Spain they had ETA. In France they had the Algerian extremists. The difference with 9-11 was the scale of the event - but the concept behind it is nothing new, i.e. the murder of civilians and maximum disruption.

I'll personally not forget the US government's failure to prevent Real IRA members from free access to the USA after the Omagh bombing.

In contrast, the UK government has done everything it can to support the US, post 9-11.

[Hortlund]

Originally posted by Dowding
I think you'll find terrorism is nothing new to Europeans. In Britain we've had 30 years of it and our cities have been bombed several times. In Spain they had ETA. In France they had the Algerian extremists. The difference with 9-11 was the scale of the event - but the concept behind it is nothing new, i.e. the murder of civilians and maximum disruption.

*bites tounge*

"the difference with 9-11 was the scale of the event"
*bites tounge yet again*

So the difference between say the Holocaust and say a couple of skinheads murdering a jew is just "the scale of the event"? Its the same thing really, just a different scale...the concept is nothing new.

If you fail to understand the difference between Al Queida hijacking 4 passenger airliners at the same time, and slamming them into tall buildings butchering thousands, and some pissant European "terrorist" organization setting off a car bomb now and then or killing a police chief or whatever then you are tru... *bites tounge again* then you need to get an education and/or basic understanding on various things.

[Dowding]

I'm not trying to minimalise the extent of the atrocity, merely pointing out the driving force behind it is not new. Different scale, same concept. Murder, disruption and terror. Not terribly hard to understand really, if you drop the superiority invective for more than a couple of seconds. Try it sometime - perhaps people might take you seriously, m'lud.

The Omagh bomb killed 38 men, women and children, so don't try to make out it was some individual, anonymous 'police chief'. I believe the scum who planted that device were as demented as those who flew the airliners into the WTC towers. They just placed their own lives a little higher.

Murder, disruption and terror. Remember that.

As for the skinheads who murder the jew, compared to the organised destruction of a culture by the Nazis - they are exactly the same. Without the disdain and hatred to drive them, neither could have taken place.

I would say the the almost casual meeting held by Heindrich and his cohorts to finalise the final solution is as disgusting as the casual murder of the Jew by a bunch of nut-cases. They are all faulty goods and should be returned to the supplier.

... then you need to get an education and/or basic understanding on various things.

The vagueness of this makes me chuckle.

"Hey, dude, you need to clue up on various things."

Nice one.

[Nashwan]

If you fail to understand the difference between Al Queida hijacking 4 passenger airliners at the same time, and slamming them into tall buildings butchering thousands, and some pissant European "terrorist" organization setting off a car bomb now and then or killing a police chief or whatever then you are tru... *bites tounge again* then you need to get an education and/or basic understanding on various things.

The "troubles" in Northern Ireland killed more people than AQ did on 11th September.

[Tumor]

Originally posted by Nashwan
The "troubles" in Northern Ireland killed more people than AQ did on 11th September.

I'll bite... how many?

[Nashwan]

Excluding secondary deaths, for example people suffering heart attacks from shock during bombings, etc, the known total is 3,523.

[Hortlund]

In how many years...?

[straffo]

Originally posted by Toad
So let's see. We're sending ~ 150,000 soldiers, sailors and airmen to the region.

You're thinking they'd go ahead with it if they thought they'd take 50%  as dead. You always get way more wounded than dead, so figure probably twice that many as wounded. In other words, it's a suicide play with 100% "casualties" and they're going anyway?

Does that really make sense to you?

what make you think they ordered body bag for US soldier ?

[straffo]

Originally posted by Hortlund
In how many years...?

you already answered this question :

So the difference between say the Holocaust and say a couple of skinheads murdering a jew is just "the scale of the event"? Its the same thing really, just a different scale...the concept is nothing new.

time is a scale too.