Richard Dawkins Quotes
If Bush and Blair are eventually put on trial for war crimes, I shall not be among those pressing for them to be hanged.
This manual was still in force during the Iraq war 50 years later.
He was a brutal, sadistic war criminal who was assassinated by one of his many enemies in 2000 before he could be brought to trial.
The speech is traditionally written by the government.
South Africa, with the fall of apartheid, instead of arresting, trying, and sentencing the worst of the old regime, elected a truth commission approach instead.
Khanenei failed to make three important distinctions. First, the crimes committed by American forces in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo were NOT the policy of the American government whereas all of Hitler’s crimes were not only government policy but Hitler had laws passed to enable these atrocities. Bush and the American Military command may have not been competent enough to prevent the problems, and may have been too lenient to punish the guilty, but they never intended them to occur. Second is scale. Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo illegalities led at most to the deaths of one or two people. Hitler killed over 6 million in his prisons. Third, as soon as Bush found out about the problems, they were stopped whereas Hitler continued until militarily removed from power and neutralized.
This quotation is a good example of how tolerant some nations can be in terms of maintaining diplomatic relations and trade relations with other countries. The American and English governments chose to simply protest and condemn the slanderous statement but decided that the Prime Minister was pandering to his political local Islamic base, so took no further action and kept open diplomatic relations. Mahathir had a history of being very accusatory of the West with respect to anything that affected the Arab Muslims. The number of Muslims killed by the Americans and British in the Iraq War was very small compared to the huge number of Muslims killed by other Muslims in their Sunni Shiite civil war. While Bush and Blair both generated support for the Iraq invasion by making claims of WMD development in Iraq that were false, it is not clear whether or not they knew their statements were false, should have known that they were false, created an atmosphere against Iraq that was likely to produce false accusations, or were simple misled by poor intelligence. Mahathir, of course, chose to assume the worst case, and claim it was true, which is what many people think Bush and Blair did in analyzing the intelligence on Iraq.
Richard Dawkins FRS FRSL is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist, and author. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was the University of Oxford's Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008. An atheist, he is well known for his criticism of creationism and intelligent design.
