I accept the "dym" bit of your username may be a typo but I'm struggling with the "an" & "1988"

I hear they have an ancient and skilled flag making tradition.

Such as who?

Shouldn't you be somewhere else, tipping losers, or telling racist jokes?

Talk about idiotic posts. The vast majority on here want people like him punished for what they do and I would imagine few will object to the whole life tariff imposed on Mark Bridger, where there is a difference in general is the two camps of 'yes' and 'no' to the death penalty. I would by astounded if even one subscribed to your theory.

Not normally one to bite, but isn't admission of guilt normally the first step to rehabilitation? On that basis he has no chance.

Astonished are you?
You guessed 100% wrong then didn't you?
Going to come back and apologise are you?

Absolutely.

You give them credibility or kudos by, in effect, giving them the 'honour' of censorship.



Agreed.

Something else that comes into the mix too is our relationship with Saudi Arabia – more pussyfooting, if you will. IIRC, a huge amount of the funding for extremist/fundamentalist forms of Islam (Wahhabism, certainly) is coming out of Saudi – and yet we continue to sell it arms and be 'friends'.

I'd be more worried about supplying weapons to the rebels in Syria. Could easily fall into the hands of Islamist nutjobs. Say Assad is defeated, what's saying that Syria wouldn't go from moderate to fundamentalist, A La Egypt?

If there had been no uprising in Syria then our govenment wouldn't be giving two poops about Assad's regime.

There are already stories coming out of Syria that at least some of the rebels are Islamic extremists. So what with Russia backing Assad's regime and Israel rattling the sabres over that, it has the potential to get very messy.

And what happened in Iran, with Islamic fundamentalists taking over that revolution should teach us something. I couldn't quite 'get' why so many people were so excited about the Arab Spring. It seemed more like a case of: 'let's wait and see what actually happens'.

But I still think the point about Saudi Arabia stands: there's a lot of money form there that has gone into promoting that particularly fundamentalist Muslim sect and yet we happily continue to do business with them (albeit there being a difference between the regime/monarchy and the clerics).

Oil, I guess.

And the whole 'better the devil you know', perhaps.



Israel claims to be happy because of the links between the Assad regime and Hezbollah, but yes, it would make it a damned sight harder.

The (latest mentioned) Russian weapons are surface-to-air missiles.
As the rebels don't have any planes, these weapons are not to "balance out" anything that the UK, France or US might supply, they are to deter the likes of Syria's neighbours from bombing anything in Syria.
Russia's message is to those states primarily and I suspect those missiles would have been supplied regardless of the recent EU talks outcome.
Nonetheless, it is another ramping-up of the stakes in preparation for a proxy war that could and probably will be unwinnable by anyone and will kill hundreds of thousands of innocents.

This is not actually "about" Syria, it is about the differing agendas of Russia and the US regarding the middle-East in general, centred on attitudes towards Israel.
Syria is to be the battleground.

^ This.

Eee, it's almost like the good old days.