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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated
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To: carranza2 who wrote (67508)9/6/2004 5:22:43 PM
From: Lane3  Read Replies (2) of 793954
 
Would we, as a presumptively moral society, countenance the kinds of acts of terror we see being done against us and our friends if we were as similarly aggrieved as the terrorists claim to be?"

That was your question.

I do it all the time.

I think you still have one foot inside the box. You are imagining yourself a radical Islamist through an American prism. To get the other foot out of the box you have to flip the scenario and imagine yourself an American terrorist or a Christian terrorist fighting off some enemy that has left you "similarly aggrieved."

Try the model of the Palestinian claim. (Nadine, before you get on my case please note that I said "claim.") Imagine that your home and olive business were lost to people you already hated who ran you off to a refugee camp outside Oklahoma City and where your previous moral society had been replaced by a ghetto culture over the couple of decades that you've been living like an animal. Do you really think you'd be analyzing and philosophizing about "global goals"? Do you think you'd even have the vocabulary to debate "repugnant atrocities"? Do you think that you would understand the world enough to accurately assess the feasibility of your global strategy? If you really were a Muslim, do you think you'd care about your death being in vain?

I would conclude that radical Islamic terrorism is ultimately self-defeating. I would start looking for another way.

Me, too. If I put myself, as I am now and given what I know now, through the exercise that you did, I'd come out pretty much where you did. I would not feel, though, that I had even gotten the aggrieved party's moccasins out of the shoe box.
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