students seen dressed as Arabs mocking them by carrying toy machine guns

The ones on the picture do not look like the typical terrorists, but the kind of Arabs that carry and shoot their machine guns during cellebrations.

  1. I didnt know terrorists have a specific look. Please educate us, what does a real terrorist look like?

  2. When have you seen an arab dressed that way shooting a machine gun into the air? Why would he have a machine gun? You have been watching too much TV.

Don’t talk nonsense. Security check in metro. Security check entering railway station. That’s it, unless you somehow exit the railway station and need to re enter - which can happen but is hardly standard.

Sick of reading idiotic lies about China.

The truth is surely sufficiently negative?

Somehow I feel that the message did not come fully across here.

Not usually like the ones on the picture

Yes. Check youtube. No, I don’t own a TV.

VS

It depends on which city/region you’re in and whether or not there’s a heightened level of security because of a major event (Olympics, World’s Fair etc.) or other incident (anniversary of a day when people died etc.).

People shooting guns in the air to celebrate is not exclusively an Arab custom. It has been known to happen in the US (among non-Arabs), or so I’ve heard. Of course what goes up usually comes down, so safety-minded people don’t do it.

I’m astonished that the predominant local image of “a Muslim” is a guy in an Arab headdress, rather than an Indonesian caregiver. There must be six or seven of them on my block.

3 Likes

Interesting, I’d really like to know what they were trying to look like.

While I agree this seems quite respectless and certainly out of place especially at such an event, I’m not sure if they were indeed aiming for a “terrorist look”, which would stereotypically include some kind of suicide bombing device I would think. Maybe different terrorist stereotypes in Taiwan?

PS (since we are talking about education already): those are assault rifle toys, not machine gun toys. One main distinction is an MG being designed for sustained full auto or burst fire. It’s like calling a motorcycle a scooter. Take this as fun useless fact of the day :stuck_out_tongue:

Why are you guys defending these kids? Why is everyone making excuses for their actions? Going as far as condoning it because its not a suicide vest, wrong clothes etc etc.

An apple is an apple and it is very clear these kids were poking fun at arbs, muslims etc. They were mocking them and picking by far the worst stereo type…that of violence.

I dont give a rats ass what lame excuses any of you come up with. What they did was socially unacceptable on an international scale. Where the fuck were their teachers? A teacher thinking this is an acceptable idea has no place being a teacher.

These kids are not that naive. They knew exactly what they were doing.

2 Likes

Yeah, I think some folks don’t understand that, and I confess that I myself haven’t give the caregivers much thought, even though I’ve seen them outside in the parks, and in other places, for years.

I know at least two Muslims of Chinese ethnicity (I say at least because for all I know, I may have encountered other ethnically Chinese people who are Muslims).

As to Arabs, most of the Arabs I’ve known have either been teachers or university students. Years ago, I took an Arabic class (though I didn’t really learn Arabic very well), in which I had a native-speaker teacher. I say without hyperbole that my teacher was one of the nicest people I’ve ever met in my life.

Here’s a small sampling of the West’s influence, from David H. Finnie’s Shifting Lines in the Sand: Kuwait’s Elusive Frontier with Iraq:

T. E. Lawrence, sent in 1916 by the Arab Bureau in Cairo to assess Anglo-Indian intelligence capabilities in Basra, reported with considerable prescience: “Sir Percy Cox is High Commissioner except in name. He is absolute dictator in the Gulf, and will remain so as long as he is there.” (49)

I think this is an example of what Lawrence meant by “absolute dictator in the Gulf” (quoting H. R. P. Dickson in the Finnie book cited above):

“Sir Percy took a red pencil and very carefully drew in on the map of Arabia a boundary line. . . This gave Iraq a large area of the territory claimed by Najd. Obviously to placate Ibn Saud, he ruthlessly deprived Kuwait of nearly two-thirds of her territory and gave it to Najd.” (59)

Quite influential, I would say.

Here’s some more influence:

We keep ninety thousand men, with aeroplanes, armoured cars, gunboats, and armoured trains. We have killed about ten thousand Arabs in this rising this summer.

–T. E. Lawrence, London Sunday Times, August 22, 1920, on the Global Policy website

And a little more:

The RAF has done wonders bombing insurgent villages in extremely difficult country, but it takes them all their time to keep a sufficient number of machines in the air and now if we are called upon to bomb Rawanduz intensively, our resources will be strained to the utmost.

–Letter from Gertrude Bell to her father, July 2, 1924, “Excerpts from the Letters of Gertrude Bell,” on the Global Policy website

Here is a health, my brothers, to you,
However your prayers are said,
And praised be Allah Who gave me two
Separate sides to my head !

–Rudyard Kipling, “The Two-Sided Man,” on the Kipling Society website

2 Likes

Morons. Someone should slap the shit out of these dimwitted rugrats and their retarded teachers.

2 Likes

Yup, and the media.

seems like a lot of fun and pretty accurate if referring to Aaaaarabs in Saudi ! They need ginger beards though

Saudi Arabians are a small percentage of the world’s Muslims (32 million vs 1.6 billion). To give this event some context the government is promoting Taiwan as a Muslim-friendly destination. The opening up to South East Asian tourists has already been a big success and this is the next step in a very praise-worthy move to wean Taiwan off of the Mainland tourist dollar.

1 Like

Well, that’s one more thing I didn’t know:

http://english.alarabiya.net/en/life-style/travel-and-tourism/2017/12/19/How-Taiwan-is-going-halal-to-woo-Middle-East-tourists.html

http://news.rti.org.tw/news/view/id/357748

That brought back this memory.

1 Like

Why are you selectively quoting only one small part of what I wrote? I made it abundantly clear that I think what they did was not ok. I was merely wondering what was going on in their heads, eg. Which stereotype exactly they were having. I guess, just as you said, “violent”… Plus the sheikh stereotype costume that’s easy to make from a bedsheet.

It’s really self-absorbed that anyone would think Taiwan can attract Arab tourists. Lol give me a fucking break.

The only way to attract tourists is to stop being a dump. All these friendliness or food or motherfucking vibrancy talk is so cringey that I can’t even.

Also, you can’t try to attract both the gay tourists and the Arab tourists. Not that Arabs are all necessarily homophobic and there are plenty of closeted Arabs for sure, but most of them stone LGBTs to death.

3 Likes

In the first place, I didn’t say that I thought Taiwan could attract Arab tourists. Here’s what I said:

Well, that’s one more thing I didn’t know[.]

I posted the links as a way of admitting that I had missed something that had been in the news quite a bit.

In the second place, as someone has stated, and as should be obvious, not all Muslims are Arabs (and I might add incidentally that not all Arabs are Muslims).

In the third place:

It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, from a speech at Oglethorpe University, May 22, 1932 (transcription on the website of Pepperdine School of Public Policy)

In the fourth place: