Reading through this thread, the only one who has failed to put a reasoned and convincing argument across is you, and when you have failed to do so you start calling into question Nexxo's ability to do so. It seems you will not recognise that the western world has a large part to play in what is happening in the middle east, something I find to be totally ignorant.
the thing I gotta point out was the oil for food scandal.. which also brings into question the UN's interest in getting to the truth (because it was all so ugly) kofi's son was found to be taking kickbacks along with many others including saddam.. which probably had everyone involved scrambling to cover it up- they had no proof kofi was in on it, but considering it was an inside investigation done by the UN itself, I gotta say sure.. put his credibility in the trash can for me personally
I call him biased as there is no attempt to explore any other possible interpretation of those facts other than they are evidence that the West is evil/bad. As I pointed out earlier in the thread many of the facts that Nexxo waves as evidence can in fact have several other interpretations put on them which are not damning at all. That is why I say he is being biased. There is little point in chuntering out a string of more and more obscure facts, I'm sure someone more well versed in the subject than I could equally chunter fact and counter fact with him. But regardless of that the important thing is to look at those facts openly and objectively....Nexxo does not do that...he merely waves them as evidence to support his preformed opinion, and goes even further to fabricate entirely hypothetical scenarios based on those facts which he also presents as fact.
Well please, present your interpretations of the facts available then so we can attempt to see your point of view on this. As it stands right now all you are doing is spouting a lot of vitriol about a topic you don't know much about (by your own admittance).
I present my arguments supported by facts, which, incidentally are hardly obscure to most contributors in this forum. If, in good scientific fashion, you wish to challenge my arguments, please come up with some alternative explanations for the facts. Don't just laugh condescendingly to hide your own ignorance and don't just say: "Well, I'm sure there were good reasons...". That is opinion and so far you have not mentioned a single fact or logical reason to support that opinion. You are just operating on blind faith that the West is morally good and just. And don't do the Muslim fundies you so despise do exactly the same thing regarding their side? That you mistook me for a fundie is entirely your own biased perception, and nothing to do with how I presented my arguments or the facts. But it does illustrate nicely how you are subject to the same prejudice you accuse Muslims of. Never have I argued in favour of fundamentalists; I have just demonstrated that things are not as one-sided as your Islamophobic views present them to be. But as Bush said: "If you're not with us, you're against us", right? My problem is that Islam is condemned, past, present and forever more, based on a set of unflattering snapshots in recent history. I have simply shown some equally unflattering snapshots of Christianity. Everybody argues that things have changed since; Christianity is more mellow now. Yet the same possibility for improvement is not entertained for Islam. My other problem is that Islam is judged by the actions of a small group of fundamentalists which the West had a part in deliberately fostering for its own ends, and had a part in creating by its actions in the Middle East. Yes, they are nutters. Yes they are evil and destructive. Yes, we better take a long hard look at our self-righteous selves and ask ourselves why they hate us so; whether they might not have a teensy-weensy reason somewhere, and if our actions make us any better than them. I hardly think so. We're just different.
I have already shown that Nexxo is being biased in his interpretation of the facts with examples earlier in the thread and I' have no reason to doubt that he is being equally biased in his selective presentation of the facts. So I have no intention in continuing adnauseaum to counter his arguments when I have seen more than enough of them already to see they are biased. Ps please don't accuse me of "spouting vitriol" just because our opinions differ.
No you haven't. You have just said that there could be alternative interpretations but not mentioned any. You have not demonstrated the selectiveness of my facts by bringing some facts to the table which counterbalance my arguments. Your arguments, like your laugh, are hollow. Your views of Islam are hostile, one-sided and based in uninformed prejudice and regurgitated dogma. Sorry, you're a fundentalist.
Agreed! Having taken a Middle Eastern History course at Uni I must say that most of the things I am reading about Islam are completely blown out of proportion. The best one for me is that since I am in the deep south, all these Christians are saying that they do not agree in any way shape or form with Islam and that their whole religion is wrong, neglecting the fact that we all came from Abraham. (Oh and if you try to point that out to them you get death threats). I think that if people were forced to take a religious diversity and history course in Uni a lot of problems because of the lack of knowledge would be gone.
Technogiant, I'm sorry but it's not Nexxo that has a biased viewpoint, rather it's just you not being flexible enough to concede the fact that perhaps Nexxo is right. I mean where are all your facts? Or even examples? All I see is you bashing Islam and you assuming that the West had no part in these politics(which is absurd as the West has been internationally politically active since the late 1800s.).
Thank you for reminding me. You argue that the US and UK took first dibs on the oil contracts as compensation for their expenditure on the war. But did they not engage in this war to free Iraq from tyranny? To protect themselves from terrorist attack? That is how it was presented. In that case could their self-engineered preferential treatment in bidding for oil contracts not be regarded as a conflict of interest? Now follow the money. Where do all the oil profits go? Certainly not the Iraqi people; both Bremer's 100 orders and the oil contracts explicitly state that all foreign investment profits can be taken out of the country and its economy. Not the US or UK government, while it would have been rather handy right now with the recession and all. No, all the profits are going to private oil companies. The US politicians who engineered the invasion all had strong business links and investments in the oil industry; the Bush dynasty is built on oil. They also go to Haliburton, the company given almost exclusively all rebuilding contracts for Iraq in a closed tendering process. Now what is the relationship between Haliburton and Vice president Dick Cheney again? Cheney was chairman and CEO of Halliburton Company from 1995 to 2000 and has stock options in Halliburton. But there are other facts: Saddam was supported by the US when he was alredy clearly a mass-murdering tyrant; it was the invasion of Kuwait that incurred the wrath of the West. Planning for invasion of Iraq began before 9/11; reports from weapons inspectors that there were no WMD in Iraq were ignored. After Gulf War V1.0 it took Saddam no more than a few months to get water, sewage and utilities up and running again; after the invasion it took the allies years. Oil production was up and running in a few months however. It was obviously not about the people. You argue that the increased profit margins were to compensate for increased risk in an unstable region. This contradicts the US' point of view that their invasion had made Iraq a safer and more stable democracy. Or are you saying that their invasion destabilised the region? Were things not more stable under Saddam after all then? Moreover, oil companies were already working in much dodgier areas such as African civil war zones at significantly smaller profit margins. Your turn.
For goodness sake.....take a breath....stand back and take a good long look at YOURSELF. You call me a Fundie when you quite obviously spend an inordinate amount of your life trolling for fragments of information (I won't even give them the credibility of calling them facts) that you can spin and weave into your complex cloak of deception...you are the Fundie. Your views (and they are nothing more than that) only serve to support the cause of the violent Fundamentalist....you subvert your own culture in which you live....your views are traitorous....you are a disgrace and you dishonour the men and women who fight and give their lives in defence of you and our culture. To use a phrase which you use so mockingly in your previous posts "you are either with us or against us" it is a phrase quite rightly used in times of conflict (which I believe are here now) when "loyalty" is required....you will probably have to google that as it is obviously an alien concept to you. So instead of spouting your venom while hypocritically living within the sucker and security of the culture which is your target....go and live elsewhere.....perhaps Iran or better still Libya they give murdering terrorists a heroes welcome there and I'm sure with your views they would welcome you with open arms. I'm not going to waste any more time discussing the matter with the likes of you or those that share your opinions....you disgust me.
All these facts have been known for years by anyone on this forum. We've been following the news, see? But is this your reasoned argument? Your challenge of the facts that you dispute but appear too scared to check out for yourself? Calling me a traitor to the cause and grasping at nationalist sentimentalities and that time-honoured cliche that I'm dishonouring the memory of our brave soldiers? Laughing condescendingly and then throwing a tantrum with insults? Your mention of Lybia again shows that you have no clue. Even many of the families of the victims of Lockerbie don't believe that Lybia had anything to do with it, and they have more reason than anybody to want to know what happened. Please... you have been weighed and found wanting. I never thought I would say this to anybody on this forum, because I like to think that people have complex views and complex reasons for them, but you really are just a racist. Hush and go play HALO, kid. Grown-ups are debating here.
As an aside, this is true. Various parties in the UN are estimated to have made about $1 billion in illegal profits by breaching embargo rules. Various parties in the US made about $2 billion. Kofi may have been dodgy (his son certainly was), but UN law shows that the invasion was indeed illegal.
I never read/watch it, to be honest. I get my news from Reuter, BBC, New York Times, Washington Post and the like. Try them for yourself some time. They use bigger words than The Sun and the Daily Mail but they tend to dwell more on the facts and less on prejudicial opinion.
wow technogiant chill out. You don't need to go onto personal attacks no matter what you feel about nexxo, he was just giving his viewpoint and supporting evidence. If you gave supporting evidence and listened to what people said in this thread maybe you would gain more credibility and everyone would be less confrontational, you are entitled to express your opinion, this is the west after all and not some backward Islamic country *cough*, but nexxo is also entitled to his opinion too, but you questioning nexxo's "loyalty" is the same as American conservatives saying that any one with differing opinions to them is "unpatriotic" which is something that really gets on my proverbial tits. So technogiant, with you annoying me as much as nexxo seemed to annoy you, its time for me to play devils advocate, and show you that you didn't have to sink to personal attacks and calling people traitors to the west because they have differing fact based view points, mmk? The Shah was unpopular in Iran, there were protests against him and the fact that he was replaced wasn't the doing of the west, but his own doing, the people of Iran gave the Ayatollah power not the west (and as good devils advocate im going to ignore the fact that we helped to get rid of the democratically elected government that was in place before the shah) The arms for Iran scandal you may argue was wrong for the US to do, but they were trying to release US hostages, and improve relations with Iran, you might argue that if this scandal didn't come to light, everyone in the deal would have been happy, and however short sighted the deal was, it was for the good of America. The Gulf war was a legal war (unlike the second) and Iraq had to be stopped from invading Kuwait, and it wasn't just the west that participated in that was against Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Egypt were also leading contributes to the war. The second war with Iraq may have been less "legal", but we were trying to protect ourselves from terrorists. Argue as you might that Iraq is more ****ed up now than it was under Saddam, getting rid of a tyrannical dictator has to be better than leaving him in power right? I have been over most of this, but throwing the Iranian government over was short sighted and was to secure oil, but Iran was the doorway to the middle eastern oil reserves, if Russia had become allies with Iran then it could have been conceivable that there would be no middle eastern oil for the west, (except from maybe Saudi Arabia), the people in charge did what they felt they needed to at the time against a much bigger threat (the cold war and USSR) than we currently have in the world. The US navy taking down an Iranian airliner, well i have no counter arguement against that, it was just stupid. Again on the hothousing of fundamentalists i say that the the cold war was much more of a threat to the west than the current terrorist threat, and the west did what it had to do to protect itself, and also kick the soviets out of a country they invaded. Everything you've said about arms deals and the west messing with the middle east, it all had the wests interests at heart, and you can say what you want you "unpatriotic traitor to the crown"!!!! (yes out of arguments and bored of being on the losing side) Techno, this is how to get your point across, now go play halo and leave the adults to discuss the issues, thank you have a good day, take care now, byebye (*Rare Nexxo spelling error, repossession has 4 s's :O (well at least in English English, not sure on American English)
How did I know that you would try to find a way to justify or demean the evil of giving a heroes welcome to a murdering terrorist even before you did.....In your view the West is never the good guy is it, and the other side is always right. Crack on Fundie sellout. Ps Isn't the fact that Lybia has paid compensation to American victims of Lockerbie kind of an admission of their involvement...or doesn't that fact sit easily with your bad West good East mentality.
Personal attacks make your arguements look weak. The man jailed for the Lockerbie bombing was never 100% proved to have been involved and there is evidence he was a scapegoat given by Lybia to the UK to improve relations. Hell Nexxo isn't even defending what happened in Lockerbie, he is raising a question, which many residents of Lockerbie themselves (the ones who were hurt the most) have asked. That being said I for one do NOT agree with the "heroes welcome" he got upon arriving in Lybia. Also Nexxo's arguements so far are based on factual evidence and independent sources, while you are just spewing hatred for someone who is merely discussing a point. Seriously technogiant you need to lay off the direct personal attacks when trying to get your point across, as direct personal attacks will eventually get you banned on here.
