some thoughts on the attacks

[larudee@pacbell.net]

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All of these excuses were used to slaughter the American Indian in North
America and the Jew in Nazi Germany.  They were used by Christians to
slaughter Muslems in the Crusades and Jews in Spain during the
Inquisition.  There is nothing special about terrorists using religion
to justify their actions.  Our own Congress sings "God Bless America" as
it plots revenge.

How about looking at the despair of the places in which terrorism
breeds.  How about looking at the role of the most greedy and cynical
American businesses and lobbyists in promulgating injustice and
oppression for profit all over the world.

There is no justification for terrorism, but you don't eliminate
terrorism by eliminating the terrorists.  We are not responsible for all
the injustice in the world, but we are making no attempt to be
responsible for our part in it, and until we do we should not be
surprised that desperate people will sacrifice themselves to hurt us.

Sorry if that's not as popular as revenge.

Paul Larudee

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn:
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

       from W. H. Auden, "September 1, 1939"

isaacah wrote:

> I still can't take it in, can't comprehend it.  I don't think I'll
> ever be able to.  My thoughts keep going from the grief to what has to
> be done to punish, to prevent a recurrance.  These thoughts are
> easier, emotionally, to deal with.  Frnny, I'm not angry because I
> grew up in Israel where we were always under attack by Arabs of one
> kind or another.  Arabs, at one time, had the greatest, most
> enlightened civilization in the west, far more so than Europe but the
> enlightenment has long since been replaced by religious fanaticism
> feeding on and therefore nurrishing rank ignorance and hatred of
> anything foreign, Christian, viz the massacres of Lebanese Christians
> (30000 of them) in the 1970s by the Moslem PLO, or Jewish.  I know
> that, unhappily, the language in which Moslem leaders and rulers speak
> and act is the language of massacre and slaughter.  I don't hate Arabs
> but I know their culture. I also know that terrorism has been a
> constant feature of Moslem history right from the beginning; Mohamed
> and, later Ali, his son-in-law were assassinated by terrorists, an
> early Moslem ruler of Persia sent terrorists to murder a Saracene
> ruler in Jerusalem in the eighth century and so on down the
> centuries.People will say that the attacks in New York took place
> because of the Palestinians' struggle - - nothing could be further
> from reality.  Remember the Mahdi of Omderman in the Sudan? The
> fanatic Moslem leader whose ragtag army killed and beheaded the
> British general Kitchener, remebr the so call national guards, Iranian
> Moslem fanatics who took 52 Americans hostage and kept them for more
> than a year? Moslem terrorism goes back a long way and will go on for
> a long time and there'll always be a convenient hook, like the
> Palestinians, to hang it on.I don't think terrorism, any more than
> murder, can be stopped but, like murder, you can put a dent in it, you
> can slow it down, you can control it if...  only if you're up to
> causing the terrorists and there paymaster (Saudi Arabia and Iran) and
> those who harbor them so much pain as to make it unpalletable for
> anyone to harbor, pay for or volonteer without thinking twice.
> thinking twice means they would probably not  do it because they would
> be sure of the consequences.We, Americans, Canadians, are not people
> who enjoy killing, we used to, more than we do now.  We have come a
> good deal closer to finding other ways to get along.  There are times,
> I'm convinced, we will need to show to what extent we value our life,
> the lives of the thousands of victims in New York and Washington, the
> lives of our loved ones by killing those who do kill and who would
> gladly kill us.  We did it in the first and second world wars for a
> good and worthy cause, we did it in Vietnam for no cause and
> now... Ari Isaac.

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