Israel's foreign minister, Shimon Peres, offers the following possibility: Several decades ago, he notes, they discovered that smoking causes cancer. Soon after that, people started to demand smoking and non-smoking sections. "Well, terrorism is the cancer of our age," says Mr. Peres. "For the past decade, a lot of countries wanted to deny that, or make excuses for why they could go on dealing with terrorists. But after what's happened in New York and Washington, now everyone knows. This is a cancer. It's a danger to us all. So every country must now decide whether it wants to be a smoking or non-smoking country, a country that supports terrorism or one that doesn't."
An interesting statement, coming from an official of a country that is one of the world's leading practitioners of state terrorism.
This is a distinction that will be difficult to discuss at the moment, but that will eventually have to be confronted: is terrorism always evil, or is it only evil when we disapprove of its aims? |
