Metaphors and politics (was: Prime number algo...)

[Terry Reedy]

"Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters" <mertz at gnosis.cx> wrote in message
news:mailman.1048875737.24642.python-list at python.org...

> As a rule, the anti-war folks--as well as being generally better
> educated on geography, history, and the like

You mean like the 'anti-war' leaders who praise the thugs ruling North
Korea?
Perhaps you should visit Iraq and talk to the people like certain
ex-anti-war folks did

"
In a dispatch from Amman, Jordan, distributed by UPI and published in
the Washington Times on March 23, veteran foreign correspondent Arnaud
de Borchgrave reported that a group of Americans who had joined a
delegation of Japanese "human shields" in Iraq had changed their minds
and fled the country with 14 hours of videotaped interviews with
Iraqis who hoped the Coalition forces would be their liberators.

The spokesman for the group, the Rev. Kenneth Joseph, a pastor of the
Assyrian Church of the East, an ancient Christian church that has a
substantial membership in the United States, told de Borchgrave that
his trip to Iraq "had shocked me back to reality."

He said that his talks with Iraqis convinced him that Saddam is "a
monster the likes of which the world had not seen since Stalin and
Hitler. He and his sons are sick sadists. Their tales of slow torture
and killing made me ill, such as people put in a huge shredder for
plastic products, feet first so [the torture masters] could hear their
screams as bodies got chewed up from foot to head."

He told de Borchgrave that some of the Iraqis he had interviewed on
camera told him they would commit suicide if the American bombing didn
't start and that they were willing to see their homes destroyed if it
would free them from Saddam's bloody tyranny.

The Rev. Joseph and his group were not the only would-be human shields
who changed their minds after hearing what Iraqi civilians had to say
about Saddam. Daniel Pepper, a 23-year-old Jewish American living in
London who had traveled in the Middle East as a student and a
photographer for Newsweek, went to Iraq on Jan. 25 with a group that
intended to serve as human shields to call attention to the anti-war
movement. He wrote about his experience in the London Telegraph on
March 23.

He said, "The human shields appealed to my anti-war stance, but by the
time I had left Baghdad five weeks later my views had changed
drastically. I wouldn't say that I was exactly pro-war. No, I am
ambivalent, but I have a strong desire to see Saddam removed. I was
shocked when I first met a pro-war Iraqi in Baghdad - a taxi driver
taking me back to my hotel late at night. I explained that I was
American and said, as we shields always did, 'Bush bad, war bad, Iraq
good.' He looked at me with an expression of incredulity.

"He slowed down and started to speak in broken English about the evils
of Saddam's regime. Until then I had only heard the president spoken
of with respect, but now this guy was telling me how all of Iraq's oil
money went into Saddam's pocket and that if you opposed him
politically he would kill your whole family. It scared the hell out of
me. ... I had read reports that Iraqis hated Saddam Hussein, but this
was the real thing. Someone had explained it to me face to face. ... I
became increasingly concerned about the way the Iraqi regime was
restricting the movement of the shields, so a few days later I left
Baghdad for Jordan by taxi with five others."

Safely over the border, they asked the driver "what he felt about the
regime and the threat of an aerial bombardment." He surprised them,
saying: "The Americans don't want to bomb civilians. They want to bomb
the government and Saddam's palaces. We want America to bomb Saddam.
All Iraqi people want this war."

He was convinced that Saddam had paid them to come to Iraq. Pepper
concluded his article saying, "Anyone with half a brain must see that
Saddam has to be taken out. It is extraordinarily ironic that the
anti-war protesters are marching to defend a government which stops
people from exercising that freedom
"

Or perhaps we should stick to Python and leave geopolitical
disagreements aside.

Terry J. Reedy