Looks like Greg and USMCdaughter1 reeled one in, Aye (reference comment #1).

Ringo,

Most of the photos come from DoD, taken by military photographers…of course it’s pushing a perspective! You’re on a pro-American conservative blog. Duh! But the photo-ops, both candid moments and posed for, is a far cry from the staged fauxtography propaganda.

There happens to be a photographer around at just the right heart wrenching moments.

Riiiight….an AP photographer just happened to be in the right place at the right time to capture this:

The following two photos made frontpage headlines around the world a few years ago, as clear evidence of how U.S. soldiers utilize Iraqi children as human shields:

A boy seeks shelter behind a U.S. soldier as gunshots ring out following a car bomb explosion in Baghdad. At least 21 were killed in the bombing and 66 wounded, police and hospital officials said.
Khalid Mohammed- AP

This photo, which appeared on the front page of this morning’s edition of The New York Times, shows an Iraqi boy taking cover behind a U.S. soldier as civilians fled the sound of gunshots following a suicide bombing yesterday in central Baghdad that killed at least 21 people and wounded 66 others.Photo taken by Khalid Mohammed, AP

Must be an elaborately staged hoax with many players, including the boy and the soldier in the photo as paid actors. Or perhaps it’s photoshopped? Why don’t you conduct a fauxtography investigation of your own, Ringo? Prove this isn’t genuine. Prove an Iraqi boy would not run toward a U.S. soldier for protection and cover. He knows who the real peacemaker and good guy is and who the bad guys are. Why don’t you?

Strange none of them happened to be around for the ~100,000 Iraqi or ~7,000 Afghan civilian deaths since our involvement.

Killed by……?

KABUL, 12 November 2009 (IRIN) – Armed conflict in Afghanistan claimed the lives of over 2,000 civilians from January to October 2009, and the numbers are rising, according to the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA).

~~~

More civilians have died in attacks by Taliban insurgents than by aerial strikes and military operations by pro-government Afghan and international forces: According to UNAMA, 1,397 were killed by anti-government elements, 465 by pro-government forces and 165 by other actors.

Again,

Who uses the mentally handicapped to carry out suicide bombings?

Who uses human shields?

Who fights from behind mosques?

Who organized the rape of 80 women to recruit them as suicide bombers?

Who recruited 24 children to act as homicide bombers?

Who is accused of baking children and then serving them up to the parents?

Who is committing violence against Muslims? Who is out there protecting innocent Muslim civilians? Rebuilding hospitals, mosques, schools, infrastructure?

U.S. Navy Seabees and Army soldiers work on a construction project in Kandahar province, Afghanistan, Sept. 25, 2009. The Seabees are assigned to the Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 22, and the soldiers are assigned to 4th Engineer Battalion.
U.S. Navy photo by Petty Officer 1st Class Kenneth

@Ringo #16 :

Controlled by fear, and blinded by overblown patriotism we support a warmongering President,

Do you support President Obama’s initial troop increase? His continuation of Predator drone attacks, which has surely led to collateral damages?

and through his single mindedness he sees war and aggression as the only answer.

Where’s your proof? It’s a caricature you have there, driven by perception and image. Diplomacy abounded during the Bush years.

He starts an oxymoronic “War on Terrorism” and his constituents, bent on vengeance, eat it up.

I think like so many, you misunderstand the war. You also misunderstand the motives of what the Administration was trying to accomplish. They were not at all bent on revenge.

If you think only narrowing the focus to al Qaeda and a strictly law enforcement solution to the problem is the answer, you’re mistaken. We failed to connect the dots, pre-9/11, in part, because we treated each terror act as a separate case, rather than using the terror incident to pursue more cells and uncover future plots.

Military means isn’t the only solution; but when you have state-sponsors of terrorism involved and failed diplomacy (tried for 12 years with Saddam’s Iraq), sometimes war is the answer.

Overtime the death toll rises, even though most are not due to any fault of ours, more and more outraged and mislead faces look our direction for revenge.

Like Nidal Hasan? Whose misguided beliefs and misplaced anger should be directed at the actual killers of innocent Muslims…..ain’t us.

In the end our country is broke, headed down hill,

Then I hope you’re out there stopping President Obama from bankrupting our nation.

and, through our aggression and warmongering, we are surrounded by more enemies than friends.

We are?! Now who’s fear-mongering?

@Ringo #24 : Please elaborate on the humor. I’d love to hear your take on each of your quotes.

I’m going to go nuke up some popcorn, in the meantime.

@Ringo:

I would say Pat is in the wrong to take what a group of Arabs did hundreds of years ago, who happened to practice Islam, and connect it to the entire religion of Islam and use it to justify its complete rejection. It would be like me saying, “the christian people, the KKK, were the ones who lynched blacks and hung them. Why would people in America want to embrace the religion of murderers?”

Now I hope you can see the fallacy in that statement and recognize how ridiculous it is.

Ringo,

I haven’t looked up the context of the quote, in which it was said; I’m also not familiar with where Pat Robertson stands on the issue of Islam, in general. But taking the quote at face value, what I came away with wasn’t a statement condemning Islam today (or at least, not the whole of its practitioners), but a statement in pointing out that the majority of those involved in the slave trade were those who practiced Islam. They hold a 1300 year history of it and enslaved many more blacks than did the New World.

Michael Medved:

The Islamic slave trade involved barbarity and greed that resembled and sometimes exceeded the monstrous cruelty for which European slave merchants stand rightly condemned. Ronald Segal, author of Islam’s Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora, said in an interview that in the Muslim world “the casualties involved in enslavement wars were absolutely unspeakable.” Moreover, slave ownership was more widespread in Islamic societies, so much so that “even small shopkeepers owned slaves.” The wealthy collected concubines as status symbols “the way people in the West collect motorcars”; one ruler had fourteen thousand…
Slavery continued openly in the Islamic world for nearly a century after its elimination in the West. Muslim slavers filled the vacuum left by the British abandonment of the slave trade in royal possessions in 1822. In Britain and Slavery in East Africa, Moses Nwulia asks, “What earthly comfort did the slave derive from being told that henceforth he was beyond the reach of the grasping hands of the white Europeans but good game for the supposedly benign whites from Asia? What spiritual enlightenment did he derive from being told that the same God who created the Christians and Muslims frowned upon Christian slave trade but sanctioned Muslim slavery?”
That same “divine sanction” continued for the Islamic world well into the twentieth century: Saudi Arabia outlawed slave owning only in 1962. The Islamic Republic of Mauritania finally moved toward abolition in 1981, but the practice continued unabated, even after a 2003 law that made slave ownership punishable with jail or a fine…
The organization Christian Solidarity International continues to purchase Sudanese slaves in order to free them, recently paying $100 (or two cows) for an adult captive. A press release revealed that in March 2007 alone the group bought ninety-six male slaves, who had been seized as part of the Muslim northern government’s “jihad” on the nation’s Christian and animist south. Six of the young men had been raped by their Islamic masters, and 99 percent had received frequent and sadistic beatings.
The long, savage history of Muslim slavers and their depredations in every corner of Africa makes a mockery of the trendy sentimental attachment of many African Americans to an alien Islamic culture that not only abused their ancestors but still afflicts their cousins. The fascination with Arab names (Jamal or Ayesha, not to mention Muhammad Ali or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), even among non-Muslims in the black community, and the glamorization of Arab civilization as somehow authentically African grow in spite of the incontrovertible evidence of more than a millennium of brutal Islamic enslavement.
Activists and agitators who obsess over America’s dark history with slavery make scant mention of the undeniable record of Islamic exploitation and viciousness, even though by the most conservative estimate the Muslim world transported and enslaved at least twenty times as many Africans as ever made their way to the British settlements that later became the United States.

Ringo wrote:

Furthermore, I perceive this as an attempt to remove the blame of slavery from us Christians. He asks why would people in America want to embrace the religion of slavers yet there were plenty of Christians who owned slaves and were absolutely fine with it. So does that make Christianity a religion of slavers too Pat?

I have a different take: Perhaps it’s that Pat Robertson is attempting to “set the record straight” in not attributing unique blame on America’s slavery past. It was only through Christians that the first anti-slavery movement in the world began.

While we don’t share unique blame in the history of slavery- practiced for 2,000 years- Christians do deserve unique credit for the beginning of its demise as an institution.

You might find the comment section of this post quite interesting.

USMCdaughter1,

How’s the popcorn? 😉

I see a bit of your point; however, much of the “radicalism” we see today from takfiri terrorists who romanticize and long for a return to the height of Islam’s glorious past, and much of the “backwardness” of other Muslims stuck in the 7th and 12th centuries rather than embrace modernity, can be traced back to a denial of any wrong-doing in their distant and near past, and in its current present. The “extremists” and fundamentalists who have embraced wahhibsm, salafism, Qutb and al Qaeda theologians believe Muslims today are in the state they are in because they have strayed from strict adherence to Sharia and Islam; that they have strayed from their past.

I think Islam’s practitioners are varied and that most are peaceful and just want to go about their business- not out seeking ways to subjugate non-Muslims by conversion or by the sword. But there is a sizable minority- say even 1 to 10% of 1.5 billion- who are posing a violent, intolerant problem to the world, and to their fellow Muslims and secular Muslim states that they live under.

We hold ourselves accountable to our past, hanging our heads in shame over slavery, treatment of Native Americans, racism today, etc.

Many Muslims don’t. They live in denial of relationship to their brethren who act violently in the name of their religion, rather than take ownership of the problem. Or, they act as enablers, apologists, and sympathizers, thereby becoming part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

@Ringo:

No matter what time or what religion you examine there will always be radicalism and extremists, and in mostly all the cases the most extreme tend to know the least about the religion they are contorting to justify their actions and beliefs.

There are extremists (fanatics) in all religions; but it’s the extremists in only one of the 3 major religions who is out there killing in the name of God and his Prophet. Do you see any Jewish homicide bombers? When was the last time you saw Christian leaders issue a “fatwa” on Bill Maher? Or riot and kill in the streets over “Danish cartoons” or Piss Christ? The director of the movie 2012 tempered his film so as not to antagonize Muslims with the destruction of Mecca and Medina; however, he had no qualms over showing other religious sites that hold deep meaning for Christians and Jews being wiped from the face of the earth. Why do you suppose this is? The director was honest enough to admit why Islam was excluded.

Please don’t try to give moral equivalence by using abortion bombers (rare, and roundly condemned by most Christians) and Timothy McVeigh (who didn’t act in the name of Christ) as examples of Christian dysfunction and extremist violence. There’s no comparison.

Islam has a problem. You can find some of the problem within the writings of the Koran. (Jihadis are getting their inspiration from modern works, like the writings of Sayyid Qutb, as much as from the Koran, giving them justifications in killing other Muslims, suicide bombings when the Koran forbids suicide, etc). And when we make excuses for it, live in denial of the existence of those passages that enable and endorse violence, and when we seek to remove the faith as playing a significant part in the radicalization of its worshippers, in the Islamic terrorism and cultural dysfunction worldwide, then we will never be able to help solve the problem. Nor will we be able to prevent the next Nidal Hasan.

Islam is at the heart of this. And I say this, knowing good Muslims and practitioners of Islam who truly believe it to be a religion of peace; as well as being its practitioners for peace.

However, when you write,

and in mostly all the cases the most extreme tend to know the least about the religion they are contorting to justify their actions and beliefs.

I’d say that a significant number of Islam’s practitioners are either ignorant or in denial of aspects of their religious faith and what’s writ in the Koran and Hadith that endorses violent action.

Good Muslims need to confront and come to terms with the reality; and either abandon the faith altogether; or reform it to be compatible with the modern world (in which case, the Spencerian scholars will tell you it is then no longer “Islam”).

In Islam’s case, it might well be that it is the “most extreme” who know most about “true” Islam, as it’s historically been.

@Ringo: Read back through my comments, carefully. You might be talking a little past me, as you and I don’t differ when it comes to the belief that most Muslims are not a terror threat.

The popularity to use Islam as an excuse for violence and the murder of innocents has only come about recently compared to its long life span.

That’s because the “global jihad movement” has only arisen within the last 40 years or so. The popularity to excuse Islam, and let it off the hook, has also arisen in wake of the backlash against the religion of Islam as a result of worldwide Islamic terror. It’s a pandemic problem.

Islam has a bloody and violent history that is not the same as Christianity and Judaism. It has a uniqueness all its own that should not be ignored, as it is the fuel that drives, in large measure, the “jihad” movement as well as the intolerance and rigidity of the fundamentalists for anything that lives outside of governance under Sharia. (Re: Missy’s comment #41 and link, above).

If there really was something wrong with Islam why haven’t the mass killings of innocent lives been consistent throughout the thousands of years.

In the last 1400 years there have always been wannabe Great Mahdis and zealots who declared jihad. But, as I suggested earlier, the global jihad movment is a recent phenomenon (although Islamic imperialism and aggression is not, as Islam at one time conquered 2/3rds of the known Christian world) as a result of the last 100 years of “failed” Muslim states in terms of corrupt political systems and abject poverty amongst the majority populace. This is just the latest wave. Islamists seek to scapegoat “the West”, and the world at large, rejecting modernity and globalization in a desire to return the Islamic world to some mythical “golden age” by restoring the Caliphate and governance under strict adherence to Islamic Law.

Dr. Fadl and Sayyid Qutb are among those Islamic scholars who wrote influential works that inspired the current Islamist Jihad movement (as Ibn Taymiyyah inspired Islamists centuries earlier and Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab in the 18th).

The rise of Shi’a Islamic militancy in Iran is also a religiously-driven problem.

If there really were something wrong with Islam then you would expect violence to be most prevalent in the areas where the greatest concentration of Muslims are; however, this is not the case. The majority of violence comes from the middle east and Arabs while the largest concentrations of Muslims are in China and India. Maybe it is a question of region and not religion.

I think Indonesia has the largest concentration of Muslims within a country. China and India (which in general have the largest populations in the world) have their own domestic terrorism issues by Islamic separatist groups. Are they fueled by the jihadi mindset? Or is their insurgent acts of terror separate? Perhaps some mixture of relationship?

There is plenty of dysfunction going on in the Muslim world; and what is the common underlying thread that they all share in common? Islam. Excusing the religion of its culpability does not help it. Letting Islam off the hook does not foster the confidence that Islam is indeed a “religion of peace”. Only acknowledgment and confrontation of those who murder in its name will achieve the non-stereotype and more positive image of a mature religion that can coexist in the modern world with other faiths.

Can you not see how your earlier quote which you found so humorously misguided is not so innaccurate at all:

Not all Muslims may be terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims.”-Ann Coulter

To be more specific, she is not talking about generic terrorist acts, but Islamic terrorism that targets victims, globally in a push against the modern world and globalization.

If you pick and choose passages from our own Bible you will find passages that enable and endorse violence too. Joshua’s genocide of the Canaanites, the prophets questionable behavior ranging from adultery to murder, and massacre of idol worshipers are all justified in the bible when taken out of context.

In the case of much cited from the Koran, the problem is that it is within the context. As I stated earlier as well, the jihadis are finding inspiration and rationale that goes beyond just what they can find within the Koran, but by wahhabi reformists and influential Islamic scholars who have interpreted for them, what Islam is.

I would have to disagree and say Islam is not the problem but the contorted beliefs of its followers.

This is why I don’t think you are reading me carefully. We are not in disagreement that it is “contorted” belief if not “distorted” belief amongst radical followers of Islam who are the problem. Where we differ, is in your desire not to alienate the pacifist Muslims and non-jihadi-minded “mainstream”/”moderate” Muslims by not holding Islam itself (at least in some measure) accountable for the violence done by those who claim to do it in its name, every bit as much as the peaceful Muslims who insist that Islam is a “religion of peace”.

Both views can and do have merit; but which side will win out in its definition? Who is hijacking whose religion?