Thanks, Barman. A tough call for the judge. There were similar cases involving US troops in Vietnam in particular.
Cool Hand has been to a few war museums in eastern Europe recently: not pretty. The poor bastards who survived Hitler and his local Fascist allies then had to suffer under Stalin, of course, and in many ways he was just as cruel. Between the pair I'm guessing 30 or 40 million died from the gas chambers or plain starvation. So if you were a Bulgarian or Hungarian or Ukrainian born, say, in 1920, life was no bed of roses.
I don't know why the West gets militarily involved in Muslim countries. Not good for the countries themselves, catastrophic for the lives of the soldiers, and inviting retaliation like the London bombings.
Quite right CHL... 
Also not clear to me why Muslims are made quite so welcome in the UK.....
In Australia there's a not a great deal of tension involving Muslims. Different from the UK in the sense that we've had waves of migration from southern Europe post WWII (Melbourne has more Greeks than any city outside Athens), Vietnam post 1970, China more recently and now Muslims and Hindus from various countries, so we're fairly used to it. By and large, migration has been successful.
There's about the same level here as in Oz CLH. You get a few incidents and so do we. Outside of the web the dominant ethnic/religious tension in the UK is still Catholic v Protestant. I blame that Anne Boleyn tart, she started it.
I don't live there any more....
But...
It has been a while since the Catholics blew anybody up in the UK or beheaded anybody on the streets for that matter....
...and I don't recall the approved humane processes of slaughtering our food being changed to appease Catholics....
...and I don't remember schools or prisons falling over themselves to apologise for serving food not approved by the Catholics...
...or Catholic versions of Tower Hamlets where anybody not conforming to the Catholic ideal would be harassed and excluded...
...or Catholics grooming and gang-raping young white girls....
... to name but a few examples of the difference between the Catholic v Protestant tension and that between the great British public and 'The Religion of Peace'.... 
Agreed CHL, but Catholicism is an extremely outdated faith and responsible for untold suffering throughout the world. See "cant use condoms" and the spread of HIV in Africa.
Also, endemic paedophile priests.
I suspect, Moan, that you're attributing Barman's views to me. This is disappointing, as Barman is right of Genghis, probably a fan of Ollie Cromwell and clearly a bigot, and Cool Hand is a well-reasoned human being except perhaps when wrestling crocs.
The simple fact is that religion in any form is complete crap. My mother died a few weeks ago, and my sister put a death notice in the Melbourne press claiming that she'd gone to heaven. Probably the most offensive thing I've encountered in a long time.
