After Pres Trump tweeted about 52 possible targets in Iran, Iranian Pres.Rouhani tweeted back to remember the number 290.
In 1988, the US Navy accidentally shot down an Iranian commercial airliner, flight IR66, and all 290 people on board lost their lives.
A few weeks later, a terrorist blew up a PanAm airliner over Lockerbie, Scottland, and a similar number of people lost their lives. The news media and our government told us that Libya was the culprit, even though our intel agencies suspected Iran to be behind this act.
Now, Rouhani is making it quite obvious that the Lockerbie event was indeed a Iran-organized terrorist act to revenge the Iranian flight IR66 incident.
Rouhani's tweet also gives us a clue, what to expect after their General was assassinated. If they can, they will try to make an equivalent assassination of US VIPs..
Thanks Gunter!
Lots of good information from the link.
The Iranians are clearly a country that sponsors terrorism.
There is a 0% chance that their frame of mind will come around to think like we do in the West. They will always be confrontational. The different factions will always be at war with each other.
Whether you believe in God or not(anymore), the evidence is overwhelming that much of the rest of the world in the developed nations was so powerfully influenced by those countries main religion for over 1,000 years that it caused those people to become different than the Muslim world.
The stuff below is not intended to promote religion but mainly to explain why things are the way they are based on religion.
Jesus taught that we should not just love our neighbor but to love our enemy. Most people find that almost impossible to do and human nature causes many Christians to hate people that they perceive as being against them or even, are different than them.
But until very recently, the message of love your neighbor/enemy was programmed into children for generations because it was in the 4 Gospels, which define the teachings/parables of Jesus. The Good Samaritan parable in Luke for instance is my favorite example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Good_Samaritan
"Jesus' target audience, the Jews, hated Samaritans[7] to such a degree that they destroyed the Samaritans' temple on Mount Gerizim. Due to this hatred, some think that the Lawyer's phrase "The one who had mercy on him" (Luke 10:37) may indicate a reluctance to name the Samaritan.[9] Or, on another, more positive note, it may indicate that the lawyer has recognized that both his questions have been answered and now concludes by generally expressing that anyone behaving thus is a (Lev 19:18) "neighbor" eligible to inherit eternal life.[10] The Samaritans in turn hated the Jews.[11] Tensions were particularly high in the early decades of the 1st century because Samaritans had desecrated the Jewish Temple at Passover with human bones."
So the point is, before Jesus walked the earth, people didn't have a reason to NOT hate their enemies and to love their neighbors. Then much of todays developed world embraced the messages of Jesus(over 1,000 years ago. Not like today, in the material, complex world that competes with religion(which is getting put aside) but for many people, was there TOP priority. They had almost nothing by todays standards and following the teachings of Jesus offered to give them everything..........life after death for eternity.
Pretty powerful incentive.
So they changed and brought up their children who were raised from the start to be this way.........love their neighbor/enemy.
This has resulted in thousands of Christian charities(Catholic Church has always led the way) to help the less fortunate and trillions of hours of service by people who want to help others.
To see a president that has always led by this code, we have had Jimmy Carter as a role model.
Believe it or not, I am not pushing religion here. I am stating science................which is, that the Muslim world follows a religion that does not teach them to love their enemies. Muslims in the Middle East, are much stricter in following their religion than Christians now a days.............and this is a double whammy!
1. Muslims have never had a religion/leader to teach them to love their neighbor/enemy, so why in the heck would they if human nature causes them to hate their enemies? Answer, they wouldn't!
2. Christians in the West are losing touch with the teachings that were instilled in past generations, though society as a whole still represents compassion and the ethical code of Jesus when it operates at its best.
So the mindset of people in #2 is such that it doesn't understand the REASON for the mindset of #1, especially with regards to the manly failed policies of our government for decades in the Middle East.
Nobody is going to convert them to Christianity for sure so as mentioned above, the mindset of a terrorist country like Iran and many of the 80 million people is to hate the US.
But here's the thing.
They don't know any better and never will. They were raised to be this way. However, we do. Our distant relatives passed on a different ethical standard that defines much of the developed world today.
I am not condemning Muslims here, in fact, in a way I'm justifying their behavior as being something they have no control over because they had the great misfortune of never having ancestors that were taught the 4 Gospels of Jesus as guides to living their lives.
We in the West, however know and understand the messages, whether we are currently a Christian or not because it defines our society...........even for atheists raised in our society today.
Utter. Rubbish.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/is-forgiving-my-enemy-a-muslim-tradition_b_59318216e4b00573ab57a2b5
A few years ago, I was speaking to a group of Muslims about forgiving your enemy and a young lady said to me, “But forgiving your enemy is a Christian tradition and it’s not for Muslims.” Her statement shook me to my core as it contradicted many basic concepts I had found in the Qur’an after spending more than six years translating it from the original Arabic into simple English.
The first of these concepts is that the Qur’an confirms previous books such as the Torah, the Psalms and the Gospels [1]. The second concept I learned from the Qur’an is that Jesus was supported by the Holy Spirit from the moment he was born. As such, every word he uttered was Gospel. In fact, he was the Injeel as the Qur’an calls the Gospels. Hence, we Muslims revere him and we consider every one of Jesus’ principles worth following because it is confirmed in the Qur’an [2]. The third concept is that forgiving transgressors is an integral concept in the Qur’an and believers are always urged to forgive [3]. This was confirmed by the daily practice of the Prophet (PBUH) any chance he had. A prime example is when he entered Mecca, which rejected him and tortured him for eleven years with a large army. He forgave all of its population, including those sworn enemies who waged war against him and wanted to kill him.
And on the Christian side,
https://www.publicpolicypolling.com/polls/trump-lead-grows-nationally-41-of-his-voters-want-to-bomb-country-from-aladdin-clinton-maintains-big-lead/
To put some of these findings about real modern day issues and Trump voters in context, 41% of his voters think Japanese internment was a good thing, to 37% who don’t. And 41% of his supporters would favor bombing Agrabah to only 9% who are opposed to doing that. Agrabah is the country from Aladdin. Overall 30% of Republican primary voters say they support bombing it to 13% who are opposed. We asked the same question of Democrats, and 36% of them opposed bombing Agrabah to 19% in support.
that's good news, Patrick. If I understand you correctly, Iran will forgive Trump for his transgressions
Oh, no. I've been pretty clear that I expect escalation, and Iran is explicitly talking retaliation.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif told CBS News correspondent Elizabeth Palmer on Tuesday that his country would retaliate for the U.S. strike that killed a top Iranian general, but he said that "unlike Trump" has threatened to do, the Islamic Republic will respond in a proportionate manner "against legitimate targets."
Zarif would not tell Palmer what Iran's leaders consider legitimate targets, nor when Iran would launch its retaliation.
"The international law of war is very clear about legitimate targets," he insisted, pointing Palmer to the Geneva Convention which lists such targets as military or infrastructure sites.
Thanks Patrick,
I realize that I'm biased as a Christian, also objective too because I was raised in a Detroit suburb, Dearborn that has a 30%+ Muslim population.
I should add that one of the five pillars of Islam, is the compulsory giving of a proportion of one's wealth to charity, so Muslims do help charities.
"Zakat does not refer to charitable gifts given out of kindness or generosity, but to the systematic giving of 2.5% of one's wealth each year to benefit the poor."
"The benefits of Zakat, apart from helping the poor, are as follows:
This is quite a bit different than our version of charity which emphasizes kindness, compassion and generosity. Muslims give out of duty to God.
Your link from 2015 only proves my point that most individual Christians find it almost impossible to forgive their enemies...........which is not practicing Christianity as an individual.
But my point was about society........entire countries and rules/laws, actions as a whole. The USA has completely different laws that stress providing humans rights.........to women, gays whatever as an example. We recognize gay marriages for instance.
It's a crime in the Middle East and they treat women like we are still in the Stone Age.
And they adhere strictly to their beliefs..........including, for many of them, that the Western World is evil and deserves to be punished. How many parents pass this belief on to their Muslim children?
There are plenty of xenophobes in the US that pass that on to their kids individually but our society has the opposite stance. The US has more immigrants than the rest of the world and we don't do it to obey God anymore. We do it to be "Good Samaritans", feeling compassion, showing kindness to the less fortunate.
This is how our society has grown over the past hundreds of years, again based on the Gospels/parables that engrained the code of ethics into our ancestors, who passed it down thru generations.
Showing me hipocritical positions of Christians acting as individuals does not change that.
We and the Western world treat our people and the rest of the world differently than does the Middle Eastern Countries.
Muslims strictly adhere to the principles of their religious faith. I have known many Muslims and ALL of them were very good people..........but all of them were American Muslims..........being raised in our society, with norms determined by the Christian faith of our fathers.
Such is not the case in Iran. I don't have a handle on what actual individuals think in Iran about the US but based on the country as a whole can pretty much know that many millions hate our guts.
We have people like that here too. In fact, in the last 3 years they have been coming out of the woodwork...........but again, I think that most people have lost sight of what our society was built on........Christian principles from Jesus teachings and INDIVIDUALS are allowing human nature........hatred to overpower what previous generations were taught was wrong(hating others).
I have no doubt that you can find links that tell us otherwise and welcome them. I am not providing links because this is metmike's personal opinion based on his analysis and observations. I could be wrong of course.....as a meteorologist, that happens all the time (-: and my favorite posts are ones that teach why I am wrong............which is the only way to learn something.
OK,.........my favorite posts are actually when somebody posts something bogus about the fake climate emergency, which allows for me to share authentic science and empirical data they are not provided with by the gate keepers.
Is this science, or paternalistic drivel from someone who has never been to Iran or read the Koran? Can you imagine reading something like this about you? Seriously, if you talked this way about anyone, even Quakers, they'd go nuclear.
Believe it or not, I am not pushing religion here. I am stating science................which is, that the Muslim world follows a religion that does not teach them to love their enemies. Muslims in the Middle East, are much stricter in following their religion than Christians now a days.............and this is a double whammy!
1. Muslims have never had a religion/leader to teach them to love their neighbor/enemy, so why in the heck would they if human nature causes them to hate their enemies? Answer, they wouldn't!
2. Christians in the West are losing touch with the teachings that were instilled in past generations, though society as a whole still represents compassion and the ethical code of Jesus when it operates at its best.
So the mindset of people in #2 is such that it doesn't understand the REASON for the mindset of #1, especially with regards to the manly failed policies of our government for decades in the Middle East.
Nobody is going to convert them to Christianity for sure so as mentioned above, the mindset of a terrorist country like Iran and many of the 80 million people is to hate the US.
But here's the thing.
They don't know any better and never will. They were raised to be this way. However, we do. Our distant relatives passed on a different ethical standard that defines much of the developed world today.
Yeah, I know it sounds bad and sort of makes me cringe to read it but the facts are the facts from my observations and yes, it's absolutely science:
Social science is the branch of science devoted to the study of human societies and the relationships among individuals within those societies. The term was formerly used to refer to the field of sociology, the original "science of society", established in the 19th century. In addition to sociology, it now encompasses a wide array of academic disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, economics, human geography, linguistics, media studies, musicology, political science, psychology, and social history. (For a more detailed list of sub-disciplines within the social sciences see: Outline of social science.)
"Positivist social scientists use methods resembling those of the natural sciences as tools for understanding society, and so define science in its stricter modern sense. Interpretivist social scientists, by contrast, may use social critique or symbolic interpretation rather than constructing empirically falsifiable theories, and thus treat science in its broader sense. In modern academic practice, researchers are often eclectic, using multiple methodologies (for instance, by combining both quantitative and qualitative research). The term "social research" has also acquired a degree of autonomy as practitioners from various disciplines share in its aims and methods."
Patrick,
I actually don't like having that view because it contradicts who I am personally. But when I look at a weather model that predicts 4 inches of rain for our city, I also hate seeing it.........and still tell everybody that 4 inches of rain is coming anyway.
https://neonnettle.com/news/9892-obama-granted-amnesty-to-terrorist-soleimani-as-part-of-iran-deal for anybody that thinks appeasement is an answer to terrorists....you are kidding nobody
Just so that you'll understand.
This view is coming from somebody that has been actively involved in a dozen charities for 30 years. I've spent more time doing that than anything else, other than raising our kids.
I retired from television, in part to do this(which is the main reason I have all this time to post here).
This is one of them: https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/34791/
So my observations come with some experience and yes, I did read most of the Koran ( Quran) 15 years ago. I also taught religion for 15 years at St. Johns Catholic Church.
Thus my bias.
I can always turn peoples heads when the topic of religions comes up by stating "I know the absolute true religion. The one that is authentic and everybody should follow!"
The religion that you were raised with growing up!
That's actually what defines most peoples religious views later in life and in the Middle East, much, much more so than in the West.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/01/ask_an_iranian.html and then read this article and please advise as to where the author is in error
mcfarm,
It's hard to know what % of people feel the same way. Talk to 100 Muslims in the US and you might get some different opinions than if you asked the same question to 100 in Iran.
I was just in Detroit 10 days ago to see my Dad and one of his caretakers at the assisted living facility is Muslim. Her nickname(American name) is RU, rhyming with Moo because her other name is too hard to people to pronounce.
If I had seen her 2 weeks later, after these incidents we could have had a better discussion but I will sometimes bring up her religion in a positive way.
She wears the head garb and I asked her what its called.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hijab
So we did some happy talk about why she wears it and I mentioned that all Muslims that I know are good people but she stated that too bad they aren't all that way and was kind of apologetic for radical Muslim behavior.........even though she is the sweetest, most likable person you could ever meet.
Patient and kind with my 94 year old Dad.
I am quite sure she kind, likeable etc. I am also sure, if muslim as you say, she is and push came to shove and she had to make a choice her first loyalty would be to Allah. And America be damned. All the proof I need is over there in Irag on that bridge attending a devil's funeral. I realize many of them are forced to participate but sorry we left too much of our blood and treasure over there to give them a real chance at freedom and they chose slavery.
Mcfarm,
This lady is the BEST of all the caregivers at this facility. My 5 siblings all agree.
I have had the pleasure to interact with her dozens of times over the last 1.5 years. She really cares deeply for my dad and others.
She not only has assimilated but she is a model citizen with the most admirable of traits in our society. Of course she cares for old people for a living. Usually this profession requires compassion and wanting to help others as a requirement.
The point is that although I am stereotyping Iran's society as a group.
1. Almost all the Muslims in this country are good people. I coached 2 boys in soccer from Muslim families. One of the dads went back to the Middle East every year for Ramadan, so they were serious about religion. One of the Muslim kids I coached in chess came from an extremely strict family. Their dad was a professor at the university of evansville and we had some wonderful conversations about our religions. He made numerous points about significant people in our books of worship that we had in common that I never realized.
Sad thing about that family. This was a couple of years after the 9-11 attacks. And xenophobia was at its worst. They had actually moved from California because he said they were being persecuted for being Muslim. You would think that somebody would move there to be persecuted less but each community is different and obviously his was racist.
So the sad thing was how his son Muhammad got treated by the principle at school. One of the most amazing, well respected middle school principles that I've ever worked with(I've coached 3,000 kids in chess the past 25 years). This principle would come to our chess practices every once in awhile and tell the kids how smart they were to be playing chess and how he admired them and so on. However, he had something against Muhammad.
I sometimes am more baby sitter than chess coach. We often have more than 50 kids going to practice and just me there. I have 5 schools right now. They are all great kids but they are still just kids and this means sometimes getting out of control and I have to take control and make threats and even contact parents........no big deal but I understand uacceptable behavior and how to deal with effectively.
Well, on 2 different occasions, this principle came to our chess practice and just tore into Muhammad, who was the sweetest, quietest kid and never bothered anybody while he was there. In an angry voice he was scolding him in front of everyone, apparently trying to embarrass him. It was shocking but to happen twice told me that he had targeted Muhammad. What a cruel thing to do to this sweet boy.
So this was in 6th grade. In 7th grade, Muhammad was gone. The principle got his wish I suppose. This same principle had told me on our very first meeting "mike, there are no bad kids, just good actors"
Goes to show you how prejudice can blind anyone and cause them to violate ethical standards ....even people who you would least expect it from.