Please Help me Reply to this Anti-American Email

[Kbick]

I just got this email from my Aunt. It was forwarded to me and about 35 other people. She asked that I not reply to all, but Fuck that I am. Please help me reply in some fashion. I lack the persuasive writing skills of so many posters here. Unless you think I should just ignore it.
Thanks
-----------------------------------------------

Just had to share this e-mail that came to me--So much has been quickly
forgotten & gone by the wayside with the concentration of what a few wayward,
poorly disciplined troops have brought about. This, and 911, embassies, ships,
planes, lives, etc. that have been destroyed by terrorists is being completely
disregarded! Thought might be of interest to some of you!
Family, please do not hit Reply All as many others are on this e-mail.
Thanks! Margie

This e-mail was written by Harem Sheik. Please read and I am sure that
you will agree. Thanks............... AFTERNOON MY FRIENDS..............
I am not condoning what happened to the Iraqi prisoners...however, I
think it is vitally important that in my head I have these matters in
proper perspective...
`
Saddam had Iraqi men, women and children put to death in human meat
grinders on a daily basis...NO OUTCRY FROM THE IRAQI PEOPLE OR THE ARAB
COMMUNITY... *Saddam had people thrown off of 3 - 4 story buildings,
while their relatives were forced to watch...NO OUTCRY FROM THE IRAQI
PEOPLE OR THE ARAB COMMUNITY... * Saddam had people's tongues cut
out, limbs chopped of, and even beheaded, while their families were
forced to watch...NO OUTCRY FROM THE IRAQI PEOPLE OR THE ARAB
COMMUNITY... * Saddam's sons, as well as other Administrators and
military personnel raped and sodomized Iraqi girls, some as young as 8
years old, on a daily basis...NO OUTCRY FROM THE IRAQI PEOPLE OR THE
ARAB COMMUNITY... * Saddam's regime indiscriminately put to death
millions of Iraqi citizens on a daily basis, during the term of his
brutal dictatorship, as evidenced by the mass graves recently uncovered
in various parts of Iraq...NO OUTCRY FROM THE IRAQI PEOPLE OR THE ARAB
COMMUNITY... * Terrorists recently exploded several car bombs in
Baghdad, killing 17 innocent Iraqi children and several dozen innocent
Iraqi citizens...NO OUTCRY FROM THE IRAQI PEOPLE OR THE ARAB
COMMUNITY... * Terrorists have been killing American/Coalition
soldiers on a daily basis since we sent our troops, many of whom gave
their lives on Iraqi soil, used US taxpayer dollars to liberate the
Iraqi people...NO OUTCRY FROM THE IRAQI PEOPLE OR THE ARAB COMMUNITY...
Four Americans were killed in Fallujah, their bodies were burned,
mutilated, dragged through the streets and hung on a bridge...while
Iraqi people cheered and stoned the bodies...NO OUTCRY FROM THE IRAQI
PEOPLE OR THE ARAB COMMUNITY............
`
AND NOW, A FEW IRAQI PRISONERS HAVE BEEN HUMILITATED (poor babies)... A
PAIR OF WOMENS Underwear PUT ON THE PRISONERS HEADS, A FEW NAKED
PHOTOGRAPHS...AND THE IRAQI PEOPLE AND THE ENTIRE ARAB COMMUNITY GO
Ballistic...GIVE ME A BREAK!!!!! .............! As said, I don't
condone what happened to the prisoners..but until the Iraqi's and the
Arab Community gets their act together.........
`
I DON'T WANT MY PRESIDENT TO APOLOGIZE TO THE ARABS FOR ANYTHING!!!!! WE
ARE AT WAR!!!!

[Burma Jones]

1. I would say........

No outcry from the Iraqi people means they don't want us there. Maybe we should take the hint.

or

Americans are supposed to set an example

or

Boy, looks more like Viet Nam every day, doesn't it?

or

There was no outcry from the Arab community when we killed Saddams sons.....

or

Aren't YOU being an over-sensitive little cry baby, who gives a fuck what they think? Let's take over the oil fields, quit pretending we gave a shit about the Iraqi people, and just start pumping that oil so we can get those Gas prices down.



(I think the last comment will probably play the best amongst our less cerebral countrymen/women)

[ablbodyed]

2. E-mail her some quotes on a....

brain transplant. Perhaps she can get upgraded to a rat brain.

[bleedingheart]

3. We should lead by example.

We were going to bring them democracy but instead we gave them another variation on Saddam Hussein.

Sorry but when we degrade ourselves by participating in such depravity we are no better than those we were rallying against...

(note: I was vehemently against this war)

[Citizen Daryl]

4. "HAREM SHEIK" ?!? BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!

:dunce:

[SheilaT]

5. I was hoping this had

already been dealt with at Snopes, but apparently it's not.

First of all, the allegations that those atrocities occurred daily, that millions of Iraqis were killed, are gross exaggerations. Somewhere in the past here on DU was a thread which gave the numbers of Iraqis killed on a yearly basis by Saddam's regime, and fewer Iraqis died then than are dying now under the U.S. occupation. Our soldiers have been killing men, women, and children also on a daily basis.

And it's a lot more than just a few prisoners who have been humiliated, it appears that many, maybe most of them have been abused and tortured. There are stories of rapes, which because no one seems to have taken photos, are being overlooked.

And it's wrong that the Iraqis didn't care.

This is the kind of twisted logic that says anything the U.S. does is all right because it can't possibly be as bad as what was done by the previous regime. So maybe there's some number of Iraqis we can kill before it counts?

Yeah, if we're supposed to be the good guys we should be behaving impeccably. And we're not. A lot of what's going on is a bit like the way the Nazis behaved in the opening days of WWII.

[Citizen Daryl]

6. Seriously, though, it makes me sick.

First the lie about WMD ...
Then the lie that Americans gave a shit about the Iraqi people and were supposedly trying to "liberate them" ...
Now people like this are showing their true colors. "We own their fucking country and if they don't like it, they can just die like the worthless little brown turds that they are."

I can only hope that we can shove them back under the rocks from which they've squirmed.

[Bridget Burke]

7. While Saddam is not a good guy, where's the evidence....

For all the atrocities cited in this memo. Not to excuse him, but most of these claims are folklore. When's the trial?

The prisoner abuse involves more than humiliation. There have been deaths--& rapes of boys & women.

And we are "at war" because we started it. Over 800 Americans & thousands of Iraqis have died just to allow "kinder & gentler" methods of torture to flourish in Iraq.

[2bfree]

8. Maybe you could send EVERYONE on this forward.......

a copy of the Washington Post article about the abuses (if only it was a few naked pictures and making them wear panties) in that prison. I hate these sorts of forwards, do something about it.

[radwriter0555]

9. The lies and gossip about saddam are hysterical. none of this is true...

there are no news stories, no witnesses, no photographs, no mass graves, nothing to prove any of these fairy tales ever took place.

bush is the proven liar and terrorist here, we have EVIDENCE. saddam was telling the truth all along, when he said he had no weapons of mass destruction.

everything about saddam was invented BY the bush regime to stage this invasion and holocaust of the iraqi people.

bush has slaughtered and tortured more iraqis than saddam.

[Hubert Flottz]

10. Saddam never promised to liberate the Iraqi people! Bush Did!

Saddam was put in his place when he invaded another country for oil, by a REAL coalition!

[oblivious]

11. Ask for evidence

Virtually all of this is propaganda, I guess. I can't prove that none of it happened, but I had a good chuckle over this one:

Saddam's regime indiscriminately put to death millions of Iraqi citizens on a daily basis, during the term of his brutal dictatorship, as evidenced by the mass graves recently uncovered in various parts of Iraq.

millions of citizens on a daily basis...hmm, say just 2 million a day, that's over 700 million per year x 30 years...yikes.

About those mass graves, most discovered so far have been proved to be dead soldiers from the Iraq-Iran war. I know one big one - about 6,000 Iraqis - was created at the end of Desert Storm:

...Thousands of Iraqi soldiers, some of them alive and firing their weapons from World War I-style trenches, were buried by plows mounted on Abrams main battle tanks. The Abrams flanked the trench lines so that tons of sand from the plow spoil funneled into the trenches. Just behind the tanks, actually straddling the trench line, came M2 Bradleys pumping 7.62mm machine gun bullets into the Iraqi troops.

"I came through right after the lead company," said Army Col. Anthony Moreno, who commanded the lead brigade during the 1st Mech's assault. "What you saw was a bunch of buried trenches with people's arms and legs sticking out of them. For all I know, we could have killed thousands."

...One reason there was no trace of what happened in the Neutral Zone on those two days were the ACEs. It stands for Armored Combat Earth movers and they came behind the armored burial brigade leveling the ground and smoothing away projecting Iraqi arms, legs and equipment.

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=14633

I know there's now another mass grave in the soccer stadium in Fallugha.

[Minstrel Boy]

12. "put to death in human meat grinders on a daily basis"

um...yeah. :eyes:

The missing people-shredder
Brendan O'Neill
Wednesday February 25, 2004

The horror of one of Saddam's execution methods made a powerful pro-war rallying cry - but the evidence suggests it never existed

...

The shredding machine was first mentioned in public by James Mahon, then head of research at Indict, at a meeting in the House of Commons on March 12. Mahon had just returned from northern Iraq, where Indict researchers, along with Clwyd, interviewed Iraqis who had suffered under Saddam. One of them said Iraqis had been fed into a shredder. "Sometimes they were put in feet first and died screaming. It was horrible. I saw 30 die like this ..." In subsequent interviews and articles, Clwyd said this shredding machine was in Abu Ghraib prison, Saddam's most notorious jail. Indict refuses to tell me the names of the researchers who were in Iraq with Mahon and Clwyd; and, I am told, Mahon, who no longer works at Indict, "does not want to speak to journalists about his work with us". But Clwyd tells me: "We heard it from a victim; we heard it and we believed it."

This is all that Indict had to go on - uncorroborated and quite amazing claims made by a single person from northern Iraq. When I suggest that this does not constitute proof of the existence of a human shredder, Clwyd responds: "Who are you to say that chap is a liar?" Yet to call for witness statements to be corroborated before being turned into the subject of national newspaper articles is to follow good practice in the collection of evidence, particularly evidence with which Indict hopes to "seek indictments by national prosecutors" against former Ba'athists.

An Iraqi who worked as a doctor in the hospital attached to Abu Ghraib prison tells me there was no shredding machine in the prison. The Iraqi, who wishes to remain anonymous, describes the prison as "horrific". Part of his job was to attend to those who had been executed. Did he ever attend to, or hear of, prisoners who had been shredded? "No." Did any of the other doctors at Abu Ghraib speak of a shredding machine used to execute prisoners? "No, never. As far as I know hanging was the only form of execution used there."

...

Other groups have no recorded accounts of a human shredder. An Amnesty International spokesman tells me that his inquiries into the shredder "drew a blank". Widney Brown, the deputy programme director of Human Rights Watch, says: "We have not heard of that particular form of execution or torture."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/analysis/story/0,3604,1155399,00.html

Tom Watson, Labour MP:

Now that Saddam has been overthrown, can we re-visit these allegations and find out whether there is really a scrap of truth behind them?

Where is this plastic shredder, who were the witnesses, when was all of this supposed to be going on?

We've been monstrously lied to over this war - and defectors were discovered to have cynically made up a whole pile of stuff to justify the invasion.
http://www.tom-watson.co.uk/cgi-bin/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=272

[tandot]

13. People with little intellect fail to understand the gravity of

the situation.

First of all, Saddam had absolutely ZERO, NOTHING,ZILCH to do with 9/11. He was no immediate threat to us whatsoever. The whole situation could have been resolved by the UN. That is, if our president wouldn't be such an incompetent, arrogant a**hole whose foreign policy "my way or the highway" has p*ssed of most of our allies.

Iraqis DIDN'T ask us to invade their country. Well, Chalabi did ask us to "free" his people so he can be crowned president. He did this by telling us a bunch of lies about WMD for which we (the tax payer) paid him 30 Million.

The act of torturing prisoners discredited every thing America is supposed to stand for. Freedom, Justice, Democracy. The act of those few soldiers and the people in charge (including Rumsfeld) changed the way the whole world views us. More hate was created in the Arab world and more terrorists will be recruited because of this. Most of the World has lost respect. They don't see us as liberators but as big bullies who, without reasons, invade other countries, kill innocent civilians, and torture prisoners.

How would we feel if this would happen to us. Imagine if our soldiers would be held POW by another country and would be sodomized, terrorized, and some of them even killed. And than that country would show all the photos of our soldiers being treated like that.

Is your aunt seriously telling us that we wouldn't go ballistic. Please, give ME a break. Your aunt shouldn't even be voting if she can't understand simple things like that.

[progdonkey]

14. No outcry

First of all, of course there was no outcry from the Iraqi people: THEY WERE LIVING IN A DICTATORSHIP! And of course there was no outcry from Arab countries, since they were doing the same thing (chop-chop square in Riyadh where the public beheadings occur). But the most important point is that THERE WAS NO OUTCRY FROM THE US EITHER. Saddam gassed Iranian soldiers and civilians during the Iran-Iraq war with US-supplied weapons, and the Reagan administration subsequently resumed normal relations with Saddam (Rumsfeld was Reagan's special envoy to Saddam). In 1988, I believe, Saddam gassed the Kurds with, again, US-supplied chemical weapons and helicopters. (We didn't give him the chemicals per se, but provided the precursors with a wink and a nod.) There was nary a peep from Reagan after this, other than a bland "we're disappointed in Saddam." After Bush, Sr., called on the Shiites to rise up in the first Gulf War, he abandoned them to Saddam's wrath. Saddam was extraordinarily evil, but his evil never provoked any response until he tried to take our Kuwaiti oil.

The mass graves almost all date from the massacres of the Shiites and Kurds listed above. Maybe it might have been better to actually try to prevent the mass graves from being filled in the first place; feigning shock fifteen years after the fact doesn't bring those people back, especially when you were in a direct position to stop it at the time (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell in Reagan and Bush I admins).

The Americans who were killed and dragged through the street were MERCENARIES. The media and the Right wing love using the term "contractors," as if they're oil refinery workers; they were goons hired to protect Halliburton's oil interests. This doesn't excuse their deaths and the horrendous public display of their charred corpses, but they went there for money; not for any sense of duty, honor, or trying to spread democracy. Just money.

Have we fallen so low that we look to Saddam as proof that we're not all that bad? This would be like Ted Bundy saying that at least he wasn't as bad as John Wayne Gacy!

The torture wasn't just men having women's panties placed on their heads. To quote the Taguba report:

"a. (U) Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees;

b.  (U) Threatening detainees with a charged 9mm pistol;

c.  (U) Pouring cold water on naked detainees;

d.  (U) Beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair;

e.  (U) Threatening male detainees with rape;

f.   (U) Allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell;

g.  (U) Sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick.

h.  (U) Using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee."


"Poor babies" indeed! After all, isn't it really just good fun to sodomize prisoners with broomsticks? The writer says twice that he isn't condoning the abuse, but when you belittle the victims ("poor babies") aren't you rather directly condoning the abuse? For instance, if a woman is raped, and you say, "What a little bitch," aren't you rather plainly condoning the rape?

Saddam put "millions to death on a daily basis"? Wow, wouldn't that mean that, in his 25 years in power, he would have killed like 10 billion people? Damn, he really was worse than Hitler!

The e-mail ends with "WE ARE AT WAR." Yes, but with whom? Isn't this war supposed to be one of liberation of the Iraqi people? Yet, the writer would have you believe that we shouldn't apologize because we are it war WITH the Iraqis. Who's the enemy? Is the Right finally ready to admit that this is a war of conquest and not of liberation?

Lastly, I simply don't believe that this e-mail was written by an Arab. It's just a hunch, but "Harem Sheik" sounds like a bullshit name. The first word, "harem," is another word for "whorehouse," and the second, "sheik," is the equivalent of "lord" or "sir." So, "Harem Sheik" could be translated rather directly to the equivalent of "pimp" or "lord of whores." Right wing in-joke?

If you want to reply to the e-mail, feel free to use any of this, but I doubt you'll get much traction, since these people are so far gone that it would probably take a lobotomy to get them back to the light.

[Hubert Flottz]

15. Very good job!

That ought to do it!

[oblivious]

16. There was also the rape of women prisoners and at least one boy.

The women were also forced to strip naked in front of men and were photographed and videotaped.

And waterborading where the prisoners were pushed under water to the point of suffocation.

And at Al Mahmudia prison, we now hear prisoners were zapped.

Good God! They are so depraved.

[devinsgram]

17. So in other words, you want us to be like they are?

[Kbick]

18. Thanks a Million!

I don't know what I would do if there was no DU