WAS NOT AND IS NOT A DICTATOR!

> I liked Arafat. The Palestinians needed a secular leader like him who wasn't going to turn Palestine into some hotbed of religious idiocy like Hamas is doing.

That certainly must be coming from an ignorant jerk who doesn't know at all the reality. Arafat was a corrupted selfish leader who stole the money belonging to the people (offered as aid internationally) and sending that to his wife living in Paris. The Palestinians became fed up with the corruption and incompetence of the Fatah. While Gaza is a bit different, the west-bank people voted for Hamas because they are not corrupted, and because the political wing of Hamas have been doing significant efforts to save the poor.

Right after the election that Ismail Haniyeh won, a public poll indicated that 80% of the Palestinians are against a religious state. Haniyeh , of course being aware of that, claimed he would not make Palestine a religious state, was making realistic and reasonable but nevertheless strong policies dealing with Israel, saying plainly that the 1967 lines are the starting point. It's the American propaganda who destroyed Haniyeh's reasonable realistic propositions, and eventually made him lose his position (actually, he got fed up and left). The incompetence of Olmert also certainly contributed to that.

> How dare you compare a man who was forced out of his own country by the Chinese communists who INVADED, killed thousands of tibetians, desecrated holy sites that had been in existance for hundreds of years to people like Arafat and the head of the Vietnamese Communist Party?

I would totally disagree to put the Dalai Lama into the same category as the awfully corrupted selfish Arafat who was very much hated by the majority of the Palestinians, but as for comparing him to Ho Chi Minh, that is a fair comparison--they are even very much alike. They both behaved, or is behaving as genuine leaders, unselfish, devoted to their own people. Ho too was more or less like a priest, as modest and compassionate as the present Dalai Lama is.

Quoting Tenzin Gyatzo himself, he confirms that "After all, all ideologies are originally conceived for the betterment and happiness of human lives." Communism is no different, and Ho certainly devoted his life for the happiness of his people, with an ideology which after all is the most theoretically well-developed in human history among secular thoughts.

By the way, its fundamental ideas also very close to some religion--notably Christianity. After all, both Marx and Jesus of Nazareth were tormented Jews. The irony in history is that both Christianity and Marxism in their applications to reality brought more misery than happiness to human lives, when those who pretended to exercise these betrayed the original idea. I have to say that Christianity is worse since while one of its fundamental ideas is that we cannot kill, many people have been killed in the name of Christianity, arguably more than being caused by any other names of ideologies or thoughts or beliefs. Like how many people were killed in Latin America "to spread Christianity" there? A few nations disappeared entirely. Christianity was also the main cause of Anti Semitism in Europe for centuries, and of course the end result was the Shoah, killing 6 millions Jews and 5 millions other "minorities," many of them also considered as "undesirable" by the Christian conservatism; political leftists, mentally handicapped, not to forget sexual minorities like homosexuals.

Getting back to the present support of the Tibetan cause, many supporters of the Dalai Lama in the US were back in the 60's-70's supporters of Ho, fihgting against the American invasion of Vietnam. They may be seeing similar qualities in both men--and that generation includes of course Martin Scorsese.

> he did not kill Chinese people and rather than forsake his own deeply held beliefs about peaceful resistance that he would rather be killed than use force.

If he were in the position of Ho, fighting a war that he knew it could be won, he may have taken a different method. In the film it is mentioned that Tibet had 5000 soldiers, and the young Dalai Lama naively thinks it was good enough a protection. Of course that was what a child thought, far from the reality. Tibet had no way to continue a struggle against China. Non-violence and Tenzin Gyatzo's exile was the only way to protect Tibet, even at the cost of losing the land, he (and they) could protect the spirit.

> What leader of a country do YOU know that would leave his own country of which he was a rightful leader without using whatever military means that were at their disposal?

But he hadn't any, at the first place.

In a way, what turned to be so unfortunate for Tibet in the actual politics turned out to be very fortunate in term of spirituality, and about their national identity. The only way they could fight was to use what Scorsese calls the last revolutionary ideology left to us; Non-Violence, which also meant getting back to the basics of their cultural identity.