Suggested Discussion Outline

CHANGE OF VENUE – Please note that we will be meeting on Wed Nov 16 at the home of Ted and Elizabeth (Tucker) Gurney because the library did not have room for us. If you plan to attend and haven’t RSVP’d yet, please do so and you will be informed of the address of the Gurneys’ home.
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johnkarls
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Joined: Fri Jun 29, 2007 8:43 pm

Suggested Discussion Outline

Post by johnkarls »

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CHANGE OF VENUE

Please note that we will be meeting on Wed Nov 16 at the home of Ted and Elizabeth (Tucker) Gurney because the library did not have room for us. If you plan to attend and haven’t RSVP’d yet, please do so and you will be informed of the address of the Gurneys’ home.

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SUGGESTED DISCUSSION OUTLINE

It is respectfully suggested that we budget 10 minutes to discuss each of our author’s 10 chapters.

This will leave 15 minutes at the end (assuming that we adhere to our policy of voting promptly at 7:00 pm for the following month’s topic) to discuss the broad sweep of history described in the Suggested Answers to the Short Quiz.

That is to say, that long-time (1963-2008) Harvard Political Science Professor Samuel Huntington who, BTW, co-founded and was the long-time co-editor of Foreign Policy Magazine before he sold it to the Washington Post upon his retirement, makes the case in his earth-shaking article entitled “Clash of Civilizations” in the Summer 1993 Issue of Foreign Affairs (the OTHER pre-eminent foreign policy magazine) that for the 1400 years of its existence, Islam has had “bloody borders.”

Islam’s “bloody borders” according to Prof. Huntington (as elaborated in his classic best-seller “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order” - Simon & Shuster 1996) are attributable to Islam’s bedrock beliefs (A) that all Muslims should wage Holy War (“Jihad”) in order to bring the entire world under Islamic domination, and (B) that each Islamic Martyr (“Holy Warrior” who sacrifices her/his life for the cause of world domination by Islam) will, together with 70 close relatives, by-pass a truly fearsome Judgment Day upon which they would otherwise have been prosecuted by Avenging Angels.

[Apologists claim that this is not “true” Islam. However, in reality, this is not “true” Islam only in the same sense that many modern-day “Christians” and many modern-day adherents of many other faiths, no longer take seriously the bed-rock doctrines of their religions.]

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TORTURE

Our author discusses at length in one of his chapters the issue of torture.

He turns a blind eye to (or perhaps he is ignorant of) many inconvenient truths that are set forth in detail in the materials for our 5/4/2008 meeting 8.5 years ago on “Bush’s Law: The Remaking of American Justice” by Eric Lichtblau (Pantheon 2008). For example --

(1) Tim Russert, moderator of the first Democratic-Party Primary Debate in the 2008 cycle, asked candidate Hillary Clinton whether she would favor “water boarding” in order to save American lives and, when she responded negatively, Tim Russert imperiously informed her that doing so had been the policy of her husband while he had been president (Hillary had the presence of mind to retort – “I’ll speak to him later."]

(2) All or virtually all of the so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” employed by the Bush Administration had been approved by The European Court of Human Rights, which has jurisdiction over 47 European countries, in litigation in 1978 between the United Kingdom and the Irish Republican Army -- approved by the Court both for separate use, and approved for simultaneous use of all half dozen or so interrogation methods at issue in the litigation.

(3) When Congress subsequently outlawed “torture,” the majority in the Senate was led by Sen. Ted Kennedy who famously refused to permit “torture” to be defined in the legislation so that he and his colleagues would not have to take responsibility for any American deaths that might result from the prohibition against President Bill Clinton’s policy of “water boarding” but that did not prevent Sen. Kennedy from subsequently badgering Bush Administration Officials at every opportunity to define “torture” and to go on record whether “torture” as specified in his legislation included “water boarding.”

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Since those issues and materials are so voluminous, I do NOT intend to discuss them at our meeting.

But the failure to do so should not be mis-construed as agreeing with the statements of our author.

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THE ISRALI-PALESTINIAN CONFLICT

Our author discusses at length in one of his chapters the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

These issues were addressed in excruciating detail in my 8/26/2014 Topic Proposal entitled “The Presbyterian Church Bearing False Witness Against Israel.”

The reason for that proposal was that several RSVP’ers for our 9/3/2014 meeting on “Hillary Distancing Herself from President Obama Re The Islamic State” noticed that in her interview by The Atlantic, she had made some comments in support of Israel and the RSVP’ers believed that the Palestinian issue was relevant to our discussion of The Islamic State. Since the Palestinian issue itself is more than could be discussed in one session, particularly if there is no agreement beforehand on what the facts are, I promised the RSVP’ers who wanted to discuss the Palestinian issue (1) a meeting-topic proposal so that the Palestinian issue could be the sole focus of one of our meetings, and (2) an extensive recital of the facts so that anyone who disagreed with anything could try to disprove it with research before the meeting, because discussions bog down in frustration if instead of discussing principles, participants are arguing over facts. It was hoped that this proposal and its extensive recital of “facts” alleged by Yours Truly would preserve the major focus of our 9/3/2014 meeting on The Islamic State exclusively of the Palestinian issue. [Which it did.]

The Israeli-Palestinian topic proposal expired under our policy of what happens if a proposal fails to receive any votes for 6 successive meetings.

However, that proposal is preserved in the second section of http://www.ReadingLiberally-SaltLake.org entitled “Possible Topics for Future Meetings” pursuant to our policy set forth on the face of that section which says --

“EXPIRATION. We have always had a rule that a Possible Topic remains active so long as it receives at least one vote every six meetings. However, if a possible-topic proposal contains a wealth of information that is worth preserving but has not received a vote for six consecutive meetings, it is retained but listed as “Expired.”

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Since those issues and materials are so voluminous, I do NOT intend to discuss them at our meeting.

But the failure to do so should not be mis-construed as agreeing with the statements of our author.

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