I almost died in Syria | Hacker News Reader

I almost died in Syria

salon.com

25 pointsrdl24 comments

I remember meeting this journalist in Iraq; seemed fairly "well-hinged" then, relative to everyone else, so I can only imagine how screwed up Syria must be.

The Frontline video of the bombing mentioned in this article is posted now: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/foreign-affairs-defe.... Be warned the footage is graphic and quite disturbing.

IMHO this video should be nominated for Pulitzer Prize, the way he captured the chaos and human response to the bombing is incredible. Rarely does a piece of journalism make me feel emotions as visceral and real as this video does. What a terrible conflict going on in Syria right now.

Thanks for the link, just watched it all the way through. I felt disturbed thousands of miles away - can't imagine what it's like to actually be there, so close to death and destruction every second of every day.

    There’s a private bar in London whose members are nearly all war correspondents.

He must be referring to the Frontline Club (frontlineclub.com). They're just up the road from Paddington. While the bar is private, they host ticketed events that are open to the public.

This kind of reminds me of that journalist in the movie Das Boat, reflecting on his motives while stuck at the bottom of the sea.

Between this and the Vice story on Afghan child suicide bombers, the notion of peace in the middle east seems like the cruelest and blackest of jokes. Arabs and Muslims will blow the fuck out of each other's sons and daughters without a second thought.

It is very unfortunate to see such comments on hacker news.

I think it's unfortunate that someone with a view different from the popular one is being shut down so aggressively. How can we hope to have a diverse and even discussion if we refuse to listen to any but those that we agree with?

HN is a great place and as long as politics aren't involved we can usually expect an open discussion, but the minute someone says anything that differs from the standard liberal playbook on race or religion he's shoved out the door.

The ironic part is I'll probably receive downvotes for bringing this to light.

> anything that differs from the standard liberal playbook on race or religion

... and economics. You forgot that point :) If you happen not to agree with the Welfare State Theory and Keynesians, you are bound to get downvotes, too.

Okay, I'll bite.

> The ironic part is I'll probably receive downvotes for bringing this to light.

Of course you won't because you made a well thought-out observation.

Contrast that to this generic, baseless statement:

> Arabs and Muslims will blow the fuck out of each other's sons and daughters without a second thought.

That is a not only a very simplistic view, it is also incorrect. It puts blame on some inherent personality trait of Arabs and "muslims". Anyone with a minuscule ability to critically think can see how this parallels statements like "black people have less intelligence". The OP is not bringing a new opinion; they are trolling.

I would be more interested in seeing a thought out analysis by the OP, that takes into account the complex geopolitical landscape of the last 100 years, including armament of these so called terrorists by the US, drone strikes that kill Afghan and Pakistani children, etc.

The irony is that if he'd just said "Middle east is the blackest of jokes; people will blow the fuck out of themselves, others, and their children, for generations", that would be both more true (since non-Muslims do this too), and less offensive. Humanity is the problem.

Oh where to start... Afghanistan is hardly in the middle east and there are hardly any Arabs in Afghanistan. You may or may not be right about peace in the middle east being a cruel joke, but if you happen to be right it'll be for all the wrong reasons...

Actually there are/were a lot of very bad Arabs (and other non-indigenous people) in Afghanistan, at least as the backbone of AQ and some of the other forces. A small number vs. the overall population, but a high percentage of the hardcore bad guys. Less true of Taliban or local gangs (who are who we fight now, for no particularly good reason -- the Taliban is "bad" from a liberal Western perspective, but not bad enough, IMO, to justify invading/occupying. We're in Afghanistan now because we were in Afghanistan yesterday; it's the sunk costs fallacy in blood.).

No doubt, I was (perhaps incorrectly) assuming that the parent him/herself was assuming that afghanistan was an arab country in the middle east. The finer details (that Afghanistan has no majority ethnicity, that many arabs came to fight the soviets during the soviet-afghan war, that by some definitions afghanistan is a middle-eastern nation) are not lost on me, but given the seemingly sweepingly ignorant nature of the post I was replying to I was going for a more high level rebuttal.

If you're concerned about semantics...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Middle_East

And I said, 'Arabs and Muslims'. I am aware that Afghans and Pakistanis are not Arab.

What about the 350M muslims in Bangladesh and Indonesia? Do these fit into your 'and Muslims' as well?

Please stop characterising multiple demographics with such simple terms. It's as meaningless as saying Americans are fat and loud, the French are smelly and arrogant, so on and so forth.

I think it's just that there are large sections of the Islamic world where people feel they have no hope (which, largely, is accurate based on observing the world around them), and so they don't value their own lives very highly, or those of others.

The problem isn't the people inherently, or the religion, as much as the situation they're in. In similarly-bad situations, other religions or cultures were used in the same way by other oppressed people.

The particularly fucked-up part of the situation is that while colonial powers and then US/USSR cold war used to be major external factors causing the horrible conditions, now it's pretty much internal -- some powerful people making other people suffer, all from (largely) the same groups. Adding energy to the system in the form of oil, other mineral, or heroin wealth keeps it self-sustaining.

Seems like a poor explanation given the astronomical wealth quite literally sloshing around in the Middle East, and the fact that all of the 9/11 hijackers were wealthy and educated and that many of the leaders of Al Qaida are western educated engineers.

The wealth in the middle east isn't particularly equally distributed, even in Saudi (especially in Saudi?). And, getting a government sinecure where it is essentially oil-funded welfare for life, if you're one of the winners, isn't character-building in the way that a middle class engineering job is in another country.

Just being rich isn't going to make you better/less violent/etc. -- look at how unhappy lottery winners often are, or ghetto drug dealers, etc.

The other interesting part about Iraq and Syria's Baath parties is that they were initially quite secular; in Syria, it's mainly an ethnic thing. In Iraq, it turned into Sunni v. Shia largely due to the Iran/Iraq war, but also was relatively secular before that, in the 1970s.

Our nominal "allies" in Syria are actually fairly hardline Islamists (among others).

Glossing over the European "Christians" in Serbia & Croatia.

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