The question being of course…

…how many people you know have been in Iran? How many people you know lived there in the last few years?

Perhaps it’s illustrative for you that a dangerous hobby like planespotting is far less dangerous in Iran than it is in Greece, Israel or Mexico. Or that it’s easier to get a beer in Tehran than to get one in Karachi, and most certainly a lot easier than getting a McShake with your Big Mac in a Tel Aviv McDonalds.

Welcome Alex!

As a fellow member of the Insignificant Person Yet Interested In Russian Aircraft it’s good to have you here 😀

Originally posted by Tempest
I would say you are trying to censure me by trying to enforce your world view on me and then you are accusing me of being a bigot and of being less than intelligent.

If i come across as trying to forbid your way of thinking and speaking it out, you’re wrong. My intentions are to show you things i consider flaws in your reasoning, nothing more, nothing less. I am most certainly not censuring you. In that case i would just tell you to shut up 😉 As for me calling you a bigot: well, even as we speak the Christian Army of the Lord in Uganda is butchering villages in names of Christianity. Jewish fundamentalist Rabbis preach ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian territories and Lebanon to create pure Jewish lands. Yet you keep insisting that only fundamentalist Islam is bad, and a threat to civilisation, democracy and human rights? In my book, that is indeed bigotry.

[b]Go back and read my post to INK to understand my position this matter.

[/b]
I understand your position, but i disagree with it. I disagree with it because i find it fundamentally (yes, a pun 😉 ) flawed because you refuse to look at incriminating evidence on other religions, and therefor only consider fundamentalist Islam to be ‘evil.’

North Korea is not a religious fundametalist state. It’s something else.

Their God is Kim Il Sung, their current Messiah is Kim Jong Il, the religion is called Juche. If North Korea is not an absolute theocratically ruled country, then what is it?

[quote]
To see if a country is a democracy it must pass the five follwing criteria, as listed on the UN Website:

1. Universal adult franchise
2. Leaders must be elected by this franchise
3. An independant judiciary
4. Equality under law
5. Freedom of information

Now you work it out if Iran is a democracy.[/quote]
If you take for issues 3,4 and 5, as Hand IMHO correctly remarked, the same reservations you would take for, let’s say, Spain, the US or Greece – yes, Iran is a democracy. Although their democratically elected government is checked by the Islamic clerics which have been appointed through less democratic channels. Just like the House of Lords in Britain.

This begs the question, how can a non-democratic state claim consensus or legitimacy if they do not reflect the will of the people they claim to represent? How can a government like Syria or Iran claim to speak for all its people? It’s a government speaking for itself only.

The Droit Divin, a European concept in which the ruler is in power because of divine permission to do so. It doesn’t make much sense of course in a seculair society like the Western world, but it does in a religious society.

You should of course be aware that i can’t think of any dictatorial government which isn’t aware of it’s lack of populair support and legitimacy. That is why they have several means of opression to keep the population in line with what the government thinks. Rhetorics aside, i have never heard any dictatorial government claim to speak on behalf of all it’s people.

Likewise, if a democratic government speaks of behalf of all their peope, they are lying. Plenty of people who have voted otherwise. But that’s the majority-sponsored dictatorship called democracy for ya.

There weren’t all that many people hospitalised, that’s a fact. Anyone who could take care of himself on a certain level, or be helped by his relatives/friends, only went to the hospital to get first aid and such while they mostly stayed at home. For the simple reason that there was no water and minimal supplies in the hospitals anyway. Only the most serious patients were hospitalised. The footage you saw of overcrowded hospitals after civilians were hit were of the first aid departments of hospitals (the ER), but most of those people went home again after they recieved first aid.

Note that there weren’t all that many civilian wounded in this war. Especially not if measured against the size and number of Iraqi hospitals – back in the 1970s Iraqi healthcare was the most extensive in the non-Western world.

Originally posted by Tempest
No Arthur. This is actually PC tyranny. By correcting me I believe you are actually censoring my right to speak my opinion without ridicule. Islam is the issue here, let us say it without fear.

I’m not censuring you, i’m only accusing you of short-sightedness and a monomanic fear of Islam. I’m trying to show you you are inconsistently intolerant against and afraid of Islam. Accusing me for being politically correct is pretty weak i think, almost like you don’t have any proper arguments against me. You might consider admitting your fear is based on emotional issues rather than solid argumentation.

By the way, Can you think of fundamentalist state that is not Islamic in the present day?

North Korea. Bhutan. Kentucky.

I hope you don’t think Iran is a democracy

It is far more democratic than non-fundamentalist Islamic countries like Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait and Oman. It is far more democratic than non-Islamic countries like Myanmar or Tanzania.

All people deserve the right to enjoy real democracy and freedom. This cannot be argued against, surely

You’re a bit of a fundamentalist democrat, aren’t you?

People firstly have the right to food, water, a roof over their head the ability to read and write and free speech. If the first four are there, you can introduce democracy.

Of course, forcing democracy upon someone is undemocratic.

Reread your post and though i left a stich, so please allow me…

Fundamental Islam is a system of tyranny that enforces the will of few on the masses.

Fundamentalist Islam is an extremely effective form of tyranny since it enforces the will of few on the masses because the masses themselves are religiously convinced/indoctrinated that this will is Right. This is what makes fundamentalist Islam an attractive and effective way of controlling people, since the people generally need less pressure to accept the rules. “The rules are not made up by our leaders, the rules are Divine!”

For which i have to point back to Ivan’s statement above that any form of religion can be equally dangerous, it just happens to be Islam today.

Your statement would have looked far better thought out, and far less xenophobic if it had read “Fundamental religion is a system of tyranny that enforces the will of few on the masses.” I know i am nitpicking and probably thinking on a less current and less practical level than you are (but there’s no need to accuse me of intellectualism :p ), but to me it would appear a bit less… creapy actually.

I think you are comparing apples and oranges. Democracy is a political system which exists because (amongst others) it has cut the connection between state and church, even for countries which repeatedly ask to be blessed by God. Fundamentalist Islam is one extremely dogmatic form of a religion (in which also more liberal forms exist) which also likes to pretend to be a political system through Sharia and a mullah-led government.

I also wonder why you always specifically mention Islam as being evil? I don’t really think other non-democratic forms of government are necessarily any better. Saddam’s Iraq wasn’t particularly democratic, but it was certainly not an Islamic state in the likes of Saudi Arabia or Taliban-led Afghanistan. On the other hand, the most democratic country in the Middle East is in fact Iran, which also happens to be a fundamentalist Islamic state.

But you would rather live under Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, Pol Pot, Adolf Hitler or Videla than you would live in Iran? Sorry, i wouldn’t. While fundamentalist Islam is indeed a repressive way of organising a society, i can’t see why it’s any worse than any other centrally-led dogmatic religious/political/social structure.

Of course, democracy is by far the preferable form of government when a nation is able to provide the basic human needs (food, water, housing) to it’s people. However, i personally believe that only when a reasonable chance of survival is present a democracy can start developing. The Taliban regime was one of Afghanistan’s attempts to create a society in which a person’s survival was more or less assured.

Don’t get me wrong – i am grateful that we live in a free society where i can have a beer and watch your girlfriend in tight jeans. But i think the most important reason for the freedom we have is being tolerant of other people’s opinions, attitudes, views and habits. I’m sure you will agree with that. And i surely agree with you that any person’s freedom to think and act the way he chooses should not have a negative influence on anybody else.

But then you might start wondering why Islam was in general far more tolerant than Christianity a century ago, yet why there currently is a large militant fundamentalist faction within Islam.