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Interested to see you 'demonstrate' your claim that Britain 'illegally colonised' Palestine in 1917, a full year before WWI ended and whilst we were still fighting the Ottoman Turks there.
I'm amazed at the amount of people who seem to be ignorant of the rivalry between us and Luton.
Fair enough if you're too young to remember the 80s and 90s or weren't even born, but surely you've talked to those who were, isn't this kind of tribalism part and parcel of supporting a football club?
Also seems to be some kind of sense that we should be rather ashamed of said rivalry, or any rivalry in general that involves anything more than raising an eyebrow or tutting in disapproval.Seeks fake to me and smacks of the aforementioned virtue-signalling.
This one is more about the start of some journeys and some firsts-a musical journey, the journey from school-kid to adult, first part-time job, first clubbing experiences, first season actually going to watch the Rs play....
Every year is getting shorter never seem to find the time. Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way The time is gone, the song is over, Thought I'd something more to say.
I was in Sardinia for 5 days to see the Holland game with 6 or 7 other mates and all manner of mayhem and japery ensued, it was definitely one of the most memorable trips of my life to date.
If anyone has read Bill Buford's passage about the day of the game in ‘Among The Thugs’, I reckon the fella must have been about six foot away from me all day, because it's more or less exactly what I would write.
As anyone who followed England in those days may remember, we rarely had more than 5-6000 at tournaments all told, 95% of whom were ‘erberts.
In 1990 I had shoulder length hair (sadly long-gone) and wore mostly Chipie, Chevignon, Classic Nouveau, CP Company and Stone Island, whilst my Walkman was busting hip-hop, hardcore, house and techno- basically whatever I had taped from Kiss- plus the Roses and the Mondays et al.
I actually remember exactly what I was wearing the day of the Holland game, which included a white fishing hat with an SAS badge on it (well, I was 19 at the time).
After returning to Blighty with a very sore shoulder (courtesy of the Carabinieri) I watched the Belgium and Cameroon games in our local de jour, which was rammed throughout the tournament. I remember well the roller-coaster ride of both games and the wild celebrations after we won them.
We watched the semi there too, another roller coaster until the infamous ending. It’s fair to say the mood in the pub at the end of the game was somewhat tetchy, as it was across much of the country, and local pubs emptied as we all headed into town for a punch-up with anyone (or anything) looking vaguely foreign or uninterested in football.
Cue more mayhem.
The team returned from the tournament on the next Sunday; on the spur of the moment and being just down the M1 from Luton Airport three carloads of us set off from the pub to meet the team bus, along with thousands of other people, rounding off a very memorable couple of weeks that had contained almost every possible emotion for a callow youth!
I visited Almondvale a number of times back in the 90s and early 2000s during their original rise to the top and did a couple of aways. My best mate lived in East Calder from '92 until 2001 and was a season ticket holder at Livi for several years.
The Crusades came about because the Byzantines appealed to the Pope for help in halting the expansion of the Seljuk Turks.
He called for a Crusade and a Holy War began, which as these things, do eventually evolved into a free for all for anyone in the West who fancied a power and land grab and share of the riches of the Orient. At one point Crusaders even sacked Contstantinople, more brutally than any Muslim city they captured.
Imagine if you will that the Islamic Holy of Holies had been left in Spain following the Reconquista, what do you think the Mulsims would have been trying to do about that since 1492, probably with far more determination?
I also acknowleged that the tide of recent history has flowed the West's way, just as it flowed East in the past. You're wedded to a window of a couple of centuries and Imperial guilt. Even the jihadis think further back than that, although of course they're even more convinced they've always been the victims than you are.
The Ottoman Empire sat as a big, fat, powerful buffer between Europe and Arabia for six centuries until it's defeat in WW1 and expanded in mainly two directions, North and West. There was no repeat of the Crusades in that time or anything like it that threatened the Muslim word until the scramble for Africa began.
You talk of tipping points, well 9/11 was a bright shining one and whether you agree with what has followed or not, we're living with the consequences of it every day. Why do the Islamist extremists get to be the only ones who can have a tipping point for a 'crusade'?
I'm not claiming anything for myself, but you've made a rather large assumption that no-one on here has been previously involved in any kind of mass disorder/mayhem or been in a situation of conflict/combat etc, which is just as statistically likely on a message board as it is on a busy Saturday night high street.
That's true, but it's happening inside mosques almost as much as outside.
My wife works with a fella from the UAE, when they moved premises last year he duly began to worship at the local mosque and was approached within days by a group trying to 'enlighten' him, shall we say, about the current conflict. He told them in no uncertain terms he wasn't interested.
As far as I'm aware this mosque isn't known as a hotbed of extremism but he told my wife they were quite open about it, it's no secret among the congregation and that a blind eye is being turned by those in charge there.
Just a snapshot of what is potentially going on all around us.
Did Catholic churches ever play the same role in the Troubles that some mosques are doing in the current conflict, i.e. places where extremist ideology is tolerated, even fomented and disseminated?
I'm no Tory but Theresa May did well to highlight yesterday that there is too much tolerance or tacit acceptance of extremism in the Muslim community.
I think we can argue about watershed dates until the cows come home, my point is that real history does not reflect a one-sided conflict between Western Europe and the Muslim world, where the former is always the aggressor and oppressor.
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