A trifle

Terror at UCLA

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From the LA Times, on successive days this week...

Captivating conversions

Ecumenical movements

Blood rhetoric

By way of comparison:

One evening in Gulu at a sanctuary for night commuters, I met 14-year-old George, who said he spent three years with the rebels. He said that as the rebels prepared to break camp one night, a pair of 5-year-old boys complained that they were too tired to walk. �The commander got another young boy with a panga [machete] to kill them,� George said. On another occasion, George went on, he was forced to collect the blood of a murdered child and warm it in a saucepan over a fire. He was told to drink it or be killed. ��It strengthens the heart,�� George recalled the commander telling him. � �You then don�t fear blood when you see somebody dying.� �

Paul Raffaele, Uganda: The Horror
http://www.smithsonianmagazine.com/issues/2005/february/uganda.htm

All the wars

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What is the Neturei Karta?

Neturei Karta is not - as is often alleged - a small sect or an extremist group of "ultra-orthodox" Jews. The Neturei Karta have added nothing to nor have they taken anything away from the written and oral law of the Torah as it is expressed in the Halacha and the Shulchan Aruch. The Neturei Karta are fighting the changes and inroads made by political Zionism during the past one-hundred odd years. Guided by the rabbis of our time and under the inspiring leadership of the late Reb Amram Blau, the Neturei Karta refuse to recognize the right of anyone to establish a "Jewish" state during the present period of exile. ...

Neturei Karta oppose the so-called "State of Israel" not because it operates secularly, but because the entire concept of a sovereign Jewish state is contrary to Jewish Law.

All the great rabbis who in accordance with Jewish Law opposed Zionism at its inception did not do so merely due to consideration of the secular lifestyles of the then Zionist leaders or even for their opposition to Torah heritage and rejection of its values and practices, but due to the fact that the entire concept of a Jewish state is in direct conflict with a number of Judaism's fundamentals.

Condemnation of and segregation from anything connected to or affiliated with the so-called modern day "State of Israel" is based on the Talmud, the key fundamental doctrine of the Oral Tradition handed down by G-d to Moses on Mt. Sinai. The Talmud in Tractate Kesubos (p. 111a), teaches that Jews shall not use human force to bring about the establishment of a Jewish state before the coming of the universally accepted Moshiach (Messiah from the House of David). Furthermore it states that we are forbidden to rebel against the nations and that we should remain loyal citizens and we shall not attempt to leave the exile which G-d sent us into, ahead of time.

Jews are not allowed to dominate, kill, harm or demean another people and are not allowed to have anything to do with the Zionist enterprise, their political meddling and their wars.

http://www.nkusa.org/aboutus/index.cfm

Lacking detail

You're shitting me

Hijacking Language

Equal opportunity Lord

It seems that God supports all religions (and all animals) equally -- unless, I guess, Satan is copycatting, a theory which I suppose one can't reject out of hand.

Boorish

Grope isn't the right word: I'd just call him boorish.

Presidential?

Here's the first US press account of the Bush-Merkel incident I could find, and also a version from Germany's Der Spiegel. I think they complement each other nicely...

Same Same?

E Pluribus Unum

One Great Commission, one Sunna, one global imperative?
[Note that this is not al Qaida but Hamas making global claims in the first quote]

Philanthropic Principle?

What if any are the implcations of these two quotes for those with philanthropic intent?

Long Walks

A friend pointed me to a recent Washington Post article about Fat Man Walking, and it caught my eye only because as I write this, my friend Marshall Massey is walking (and blogging) his way from Omaha to Virginia on his way to a Friends Yearly Meeting where he has been asked to give a keynote presentation.

I recommend Friend Marshall's blog at http://journal.earthwitness.org.

The Chapel Feminine

I'm no great fan of the Da Vinci Code, but in this case the correspondence between Brown's book as quoted and Blake's writing and drawing was just too close to pass up!

Here's the complete Blake image from Vala:

Blinking Out and In

Quite a lovely pattern, in which what vanishes in the real world reappears in the virtual.

Lost in Translation

I make no claim as to the accuracy of the disputed translations here, drawn from right- and left-wing sources respectively -- although I suspect that in each case the nuance noted is both correct and significant.

I am no Arabist, much less a reader of Farsi, and wish only to pay hommage to those whose language skills allow us to access the subtleties of texts such as these, no matter their political persuasion. What seems significant to me is the simple fact that when we lack care in translation and sophistication in cultural understanding, we can be fed propaganda in place of insight.

And Egypt next?

Even Mullah Omar at first said that the Bamiyan Buddhas should be protected as cultural monuments, but was later forced to back down and destroy them...

What would the world's response be, if some years from now the same sort of program began to be executed in Egypt?

Religion or Culture?

One wonders how much the sense of insult and injury that accompanies blasphemy is a matter of the religion concerned, and how much is not religious but perhaps cultural? Catholic India seems to take its protests against the Da Vinci movie far more seriously than, say, Catholic America...

Game Mods Revisited

It turns out the jihadist game mod described in the Reuters report was in fact a fan video -- and the gamers are indeed delightedly ridiculing the article:

The video the retarded writer is referring to is not made by terrorists. It was made by a member of the Planetbattlefield forums. The voice of in the video is not a terrorist - it is Trey Parker from the movie Team America World Police. The article also claims it is a mod created by terrorist. It is not a mod. It is the Special Forces Expansion pack that anyone can buy.

julieb at http://cagematch.dvorak.org/index.php?topic=130.msg1364;topicseen

IDIOTS!!!
Watch it and read the news and laugh

drezir at http://www.forumplanet.com/planetbattlefield/topic.asp?fid=7419&tid=1888667

I suspect we'll be hearing more on this story, when Liz Losh gets hold of the hearing transcripts, for instance.