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On Sat, 14 Jan 2006 04:10:53 -0600, Larry Elmore

Me. After someone in this group described Syria as a `fundamentalist (sp?) Muslim state', and being in a semi-retired state, I decided to go touring there. I found a country with several faiths expressing themselves freely, some problems (overpopulation, poor rubbish collection), a lot going for it compared with my own country, old people are cared for as part of the family, not sent off to retirement homes, wealth seems to be fairly well distributed, wealth seems to be owned as part of a general family, some problems with Israel which seems to think it is its right to overfly the country, and have its planes break the sound barrier over Damascus, and Israel still occupies a large part of the country, and uses this area to supply Israel's water needs. I toured the Ummayid Mosque in Damascus with a group, lots of people worshipping God in their own way (There is a shrine to John the Baptist in the Mosque, the site of which was once the Basilica of John the Baptist(The Muslims bought it from the local Christians)).. Security was tight, if not immediatly noticable, men in leather jackets touring the streets in Range Rovers, coming back through Damascus airport we had to go through two sets of metal detectors.

Reading the quality papers later, which seems to agree that after the mess the US-Uk made in Iraq, any attack on Syria would look like a very bad idea.

Another thing I dug up. Before the Crusades, the population of the Levant was largely Christian, with Muslim rulers. The Crusaders didn't recognize many of these as really Christian, and dissolutioned them along with the Muslims and Jews whenever they captured a city. GW Bush is not the first idiot to intefere with the Middle East!.. The Crusaders stopped Egyptian Copts from going on pilgrimage to Jerusalem.. God, the idiocy of these people.

-- greymaus