[QUOTE=retina;419585]If we'd stop teaching children that magical mythical beings are real then none of this would be a problem. Wake up people, it is all a huge scam. See it for what it is.[/QUOTE]
Exactly.

[QUOTE=kladner;419584]I wonder if the "little girl" cried herself to sleep because her raging zealot mother [U][I]told[/I][/U] her that she had renounced her god.[/QUOTE]

Any 'renunciation' scenario betrays gross ignorance because Judaism, Christianity and Islam all profess to believing in the same One True God. At worst one might worry about having done wrong by the designated-one-true-prophet of one's faith (and in fact Muslims also revere Jesus, just in the *a* prophet rather than the *the* prophet sense, and consider the whole son-of-God idea to be appalling apostasy, since God is the eternal highest in their eyes). Of course ignorance and zealotry have longstanding historical linkages, so no surprise on any front here.

[url]http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/ted-cruzs-religious-test-for-syrian-refugees[/url]

[QUOTE]Cruz told reporters that we should accept Christians from Syria, and only Christians, because “there is no meaningful risk of Christians committing acts of terror.” [/QUOTE]

[url]http://www.restore-christian-america.org/schoolprayer.html[/url]

Compare:
The removal of [B][U]P[/U][/B]rayer from the [U][B]S[/B][/U]chools.
The removal of [U][B]P[/B][/U]irates from the [B][U]S[/U][/B]eas:

Coincidence? I don't think so! rAmen!

An Idiot’s Guide to Why They Hate Us
 

[URL="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/12/22/an-idiots-guide-to-why-they-hate-us/"]A rundown of US foreign policy[/URL], and of Blowback. The "Aerial Traffic Jam" is only the first of a collection of horrors.
[QUOTE]“Without looking at the various polling data” Trump later elaborated, [U]“it is obvious to anybody the hatred is [I]beyond comprehension. Where this hatred comes from and why we will have to determine[/I],” [/U]Trump said in a statement. “[I]Until we are able to determine and understand this problem [/I]and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad, that have [U][I]no sense of reason or respect for human life[/I]”[/U] (emphasis added).

The statement is either incredibly disingenuous or astonishingly foolish. Nobody who is reasonably knowledgeable and honest about the long and ongoing history of U.S.- and Western-imperial policy in the Middle East, Southwest Asia, and Africa has any business claiming to find the origins of anti-American and anti-Western terrorism in the Muslim world mysterious.

[B]An “Aerial Traffic Jam” of “One-Sided Massacre” (1991)[/B]
“No sense of reason or respect for human life”? Seriously? Among the countless episodes of mass-murderous U.S. savagery in the Muslim world, one that I can never seem to forget occurred a quarter-century ago. I am referring to the epic carnage wreaked by the U.S. military on Iraq’s notorious “Highway of Death,” where U.S. forces massacred tens of thousands of surrendered Iraqi troops retreating from Kuwait on February 26 and 27, 1991. The Lebanese-American journalist Joyce Chediac testified that:[INDENT]“U.S. planes trapped the long convoys by disabling vehicles in the front, and at the rear, and then pounded the resulting traffic jams for hours. ‘It was like shooting fish in a barrel,’ said one U.S. pilot. On the sixty miles of coastal highway, Iraqi military units sit in gruesome repose, scorched skeletons of vehicles and men alike, black and awful under the sun…for 60 miles every vehicle was strafed or bombed, every windshield is shattered, every tank is burned, every truck is riddled with shell fragments. No survivors are known or likely…. ‘Even in Vietnam I didn’t see anything like this. It’s pathetic,’ said Major Bob Nugent, an Army intelligence officer…U.S. pilots took whatever bombs happened to be close to the flight deck, from cluster bombs to 500 pound bombs…U.S. forces continued to drop bombs on the convoys [I]until all humans were killed[/I]. So many jets swarmed over the inland road that it created [I]an aerial traffic jam, and combat air controllers feared midair collisions[/I]…. The victims were not offering resistance…it was simply a one-sided massacre of tens of thousands of people who had no ability to fight back or defend.” (Ramsey Clark et al., [URL="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0944624154/counterpunchmaga"]W[/URL][I][URL="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0944624154/counterpunchmaga"]ar Crimes: A Report on United States War Crimes Against Iraq to the Commission of Inquiry for the International War Crimes Tribunal[/URL], [/I]testimony of Joyce Chediac, emphasis added).
[/INDENT][/QUOTE]

Re. Trump: And yet for every blowhard-populist statement he makes on foreign policy he also makes some quite-cogent ones. Compare Trump and Sanders in the last debate of their respective parties (h/t Jim Haygood):

TRUMP: [I]"In my opinion, we’ve spent \$4 trillion trying to topple various people that frankly, if they were there and if we could’ve spent that \$4 trillion in the United States to fix our roads, our bridges, and all of the other problems; our airports and all of the other problems we’ve had, we would’ve been a lot better off. I can tell you that right now.

We have done a tremendous disservice, not only to Middle East, we’ve done a tremendous disservice to humanity. The people that have been killed, the people that have wiped away, and for what? It’s not like we had victory.

It’s a mess. The Middle East is totally destabilized. A total and complete mess. I wish we had the \$4 trillion or \$5 trillion. I wish it were spent right here in the United States, on our schools, hospitals, roads, airports, and everything else that are all falling apart."[/I]

SANDERS: [I]"I’m running for president because I want a new foreign policy; one that takes on Isis, one that destroys ISIS, but one that does not get us involved in perpetual warfare in the quagmire of the Middle East but rather works around a major coalition of wealthy and powerful nations supporting Muslim troops on the ground. That’s the kind of coalition we need and that’s the kind of coalition I will put together."[/I]

Which one sounds more like a typical Republican? I mean Sanders takes the straight reactionary neocon line w.r.to the GWOT and 'moderates' it by throwing in some completely silly crap about 'wealthy and powerful nations supporting Muslim troops on the ground.' You mean like the Saudis, who are supporting ISIS and busily committing their own atrocities in Yemen while the U.S. (and by extension the rest of the western world) politely looks away?


Or [URL="http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/263086-trump-hillary-has-killed-hundreds-of-thousands-of-people"]Trump on Hillary's dismal record of warmongering and chaos-spreading[/URL]:
[quote]Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump is pinning blame for the Syrian civil war and the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria on Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

“She is the one that caused all this problem with her stupid policies,” Trump said on “Fox News Sunday.” “You look at what she did with Libya, what she did with Syria.”

“You look, she was truly, if not the, one of the worst secretary of States in the history of the country,” he added. “She talks about me being dangerous; she’s killed hundreds of thousands of people with her stupidity.”

Fox News host Chris Wallace questioned Trump about the claim.

“What do you mean, ‘hundreds of thousands?’” Wallace asked.

“She was secretary of State. Obama was president, the team,” Trump responded. “Two real geniuses.”

Clinton has publicly broken from the Obama administration on Syria since stepping down as secretary of State, advocating for increased U.S. involvement in the conflict, such as by implementing a no-fly zone.[/quote]How many of the other candidates are talking truth about the same inane, murderous overseas adventures of our dear elite 'deciderers'? Anyone? Bueller?

And note Hillary's latest 'break from the Obama administration on Syria' is in the pro-warmongering direction -- i.e. all she has 'learned' from the neverending terror-fueling wars of the last 2 administrations is that the U.S. needs to do even more of this kind of thing - and preferably also get into a serious tussle with Russia. And worse, in her case, beyond mere political-campaign verbiage we have an extensive record of mass-murderous policies. She scares me a lot more than Trump because we know with near-certainty what another Clinton presidency would look like in terms of both foreign policy, the domestic economy and that whole 'rule of law' thing that was once at least imagined as occasionally applying to the mighty and the meek in similar fashion.

Perhaps some people misunderstand the [i]real[/i] point of wars and warmongering. It is not to "win" or to be a "victor" (under the various definitions of those words), but instead to enrich the political elite and strengthen their positions of power over others. And in that sense the wars have been a tremendous success for the US. So well done to the US politicians and their cronies, you succeeded in your task. But let's not think about all those people that were killed and maimed and traumatised by their policies, that might make people see the truth, and we can't have that.

[B]US stops British Muslim family from boarding flight to visit Disneyland
[/B]
[QUOTE]A British Muslim family heading for Disneyland was barred from boarding a flight to Los Angeles by US authorities at London’s Gatwick airport amid concerns of an American overreaction to the perceived terrorist threat. US Department of Homeland Security officials provided no explanation for why the country refused to allow the family of 11 to board the plane even though they had been granted travel authorization online ahead of their planned 15 December flight.

Senior politicians have been drawn into the case, warning that a growing number of British Muslims are being barred from the US without being told the reason for their exclusion.
[/QUOTE]Press article: [B][URL]http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/22/us-stops-british-muslim-family-flight-disneyland-david-cameron[/URL][/B]

Also at the Beeb: [url]http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-35167511[/url]

Cost them £9000+ with no refund in sight ATM.

The US is becoming an ever less attractive place to visit, whether for business or pleasure. I gave up years ago.

"Concerns of an *American* overreaction"?

'Look, folks - we're so concerned about what the idiot Yanks might do to you once on their soil, we're going to detain you right here and now, for your own safety, obviously. Oh please, no need to thank us...'