I didn’t say minorities are massively targeted yet! Only the occasional racial slurs like “f@#k off you terrorists” when they see a brown man. It is getting bad though with whole post 9/11 and economic crisis.

“just pray that you have white skin WHEN that happens”. When implies some thing that is yet to occur. Again please read before you reply. Or you’re struggling with English.

Anyway if you’re in the ghettos you should be running! A lot are… Hopefully you have a decent job and live in a good neighborhood so you don’t have to run.

on a side note, don’t worry about tourism lol
for the working class people in western countries, holidays in thailand, sri lanka, india are the only places they will get pampered so well and get to sit in a rickshaw and whip a man like a horse heck even toy children to play with if you catch my drift. otherwise would they really bargain at the souvenir shops or flee markets? oh yes they will keep coming!

If Dayan Jayatillake wishes the readers to think a few thousand LTTE guys in rubber slippers were a match for the million-man Chinese army, or nuclear armed Russia, or Pakistan or Iran, I leave the readers to draw their own (unpleasant) conclusions.

You specifically said all bridges were bombed. Now you’re changing your tune and saying they bombed a whole of infrastructure. Clearly your first statement was wrong. The second one might be true but demands elaboration. They did not carpet bomb Iraq; all aerial bombing consisted of precision airstrikes based on UAV’s, satellite imagery, etc. We are talking about an airforce that literally won the Gulf War (if you know what that is) from the air; that is how good the American Airforce is.

“so after americans bombed iraq at their discretion why the hell should iraqis pay for the rebuilding.”

This is the problem I see with the general anti-Western spiel which emanates from the extremists: you ppl make broad generalizations without ever being specific. How much infrastructure was there to begin with? What are the types of infrastructure that were bombed? And how much infrastructure was remaining afterwards? Also, do you even know how much American taxpayer money the USA has invested in Iraq? Why don’t you state the proportion of taxpayer money to Iraqi oil revenue, on an annual basis?

“open your eyes instead of being a slave to your white master. embrace your brown skin and rip the veil that distorts your view of the west.”

There you go spouting your mythology once again. The “brown” people you speak of are among the highest earners here. We don’t have to drive 3-wheelers or cheat tourists by marking up the price 10% at tourist sites. We don’t crowd around tourists like pack dogs ready for an attack either. And there are no lines outside any foreign embassies that stretch for miles (there are no lines outside, period). The best thing is the educational system; practically everyone has access to a decent education and the Government subsidizes university education for everyone with the right credentials. If that fails, then there are still other opportunities to pursue higher education and easily obtain the equivalent of a university education at an extremely low cost. The Government here takes care of the middle class, whereas in S. Lanka it doesn’t take care of anyone, except perhaps the tourists (Sir? Sir? Welcome Sir…)

Nice try! The Sri Lankan conflict has different roots – it is an internal conflict based on 60 years of discrimination by the majority against the minority. Afghanistan was used as a base to house an organization, A’L Q’uida, that only made threats against the entire Western world but also carried them out. Madrid, London, Africa, New York, Iraq, Israel, Saudi Arabia… blowing up foreign skyscrapers, foreign commercial airliners, foreign trains, foreign embassies, foreign planes, foreign ships, car bombs, assassinations, etc… not to mention, it posed a major threat to the stability of Pakistan, which possesses nuclear weapons. By extension, the presence of Al Q’uida in Afghanistan posed a threat to India (we also ready saw what the Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Jaish-e-Mohammad did in Mumbai) and thereby the entire Southeast Asian region. Pervez Musharaf has written an excellent book about the efforts taken by his Government to contain Islamic fundamentalism, which depend heavily on American support. On the other hand, we can say that the LTTE only posed a threat to Sinhala-Buddhist fundamentalism in Sri Lanka. I have written elsewhere that the LTTE could easily have been handled by the diaspora; even the Ranil Wickremasinghe approach was slowly yielding profitable results.

“Really? Name them”

“By April 1971, with at least seven legislative proposals relating to the Vietnam war under consideration, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chaired by Senator William Fulbright (Democrat-Arkansas) began to hear testimony. On the third day of hearings, six members of the committee heard comments by John Kerry, a leader of the major veterans organization opposing continuation of the war. Kerry was the only representative of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) who testified on April 22, but others in VVAW were in the audience and at times supported his remarks with applause.

Statement of Mr. John Kerry

…I am not here as John Kerry. I am here as one member of the group of 1,000 which is a small representation of a very much larger group of veterans in this country, and were it possible for all of them to sit at this table they would be here and have the same kind of testimony….

WINTER SOLDIER INVESTIGATION

I would like to talk, representing all those veterans, and say that several months ago in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command….

They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.”

You can read the rest for yourself: https://facultystaff.richmond.edu/~ebolt/history398/JohnKerryTestimony.html

“FYI secret govt documents released in the 90s listed 320 substantiated atrocities committed by US forces in Indochina.”

You are talking about events that occurred in the 60’s, so that you can justify an events that occurred from 2008-2009. A much more relevant example would be Iraq… why don’t you uncover “secret documents” and reveal to us the number of US Army Personnel convicted for HR violations? Actually there is no need to even uncover such documents, as the media has done an extensive job in publicizing all such incidents.

“India has contributed much more than the West to the relief effort.”

India has also contributed far more weapons. As far as scale goes, Indian products are generally inferior (radar anyone?) and therefore cheaper which explains the massive volume.

“adopting without question the language, beliefs and ways of their conquerors. Only then could they fool themselves into thinking there was an ‘equal’ society under the British.”

The British never forced anyone to convert and/or attend English schools. They offered incentives, however – I see nothing wrong with that. Since Sri Lanka would be administered under a British Parliamentary model, one could not expect a monk, for example, to be competent. One would have to be trained/educated under a British system and of course be able to speak English. Now in the present day, we see the consequences of not following this model – we still have the Westminister Model, but incompetent monks with zero qualifications, as well as home-grown Marxists are allowed an active role in Parliamentary affairs. The consequences are not difficult to ascertain. Fact of the matter is, one needs a classical Western education, at least partially, to prevent paralysis of the Civil Service, unless one is intent on fully rejecting capitalism. Why do you think the USSR collapsed? Even today Russia is afraid of the spread of NATO to Eastern Europe.

“According to Marc W. Herold’s Dossier on Civilian Victims of United States’ Aerial Bombing at least 3,700 and probably closer to 5,000 civilians were killed by the end of 2002 as a result of U.S. bombing.”

20,000 civilians were killed due to Sri Lanka’s refusal to adhere to a No Fire Zone. Furthermore, it is thought that 13,000 civilians have disappeared from internment camps, while 300,000 are being illegally held in violation of every UN Charter known to man. I suggest you try much harder to buttress your 5000 casualty figure.