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To: epicure who wrote (2076)	9/12/2001 4:10:54 PM
From: E	Respond to of 51708

<<Bin Laden doesn't throw his own life away, though, you will notice. No, he needs poor, uneducated, unsophisticated Palestinians for that. >> I believe you are mixing up two different things. 'Contextualizing' the international criminal terrorist activities of bin Laden to make them appear derivative of Palestinian outrage is ill-founded, imo. The operatives who have so far been brought to justice in the aftermath of bin Laden's crimes are a diverse group coming from all over the middle east. They are playing their roles in the carrying out of his grandiose agenda, which involves advancing the status of fundamentalist Islam in a number of settings, including the Philippines and those Arab countries he deems insufficiently pure for his taste. He has a zealot's agenda, and it's true that the Palestinian cause is a part of it, but it is one of many parts. (Actually, it has been pointed out that neither Islamic Jihad nor Hamas, the two most militant Palestinian factions, have carried out terror acts outside of Palestine/Israel. Fatah has an explicit policy restricting armed actions to the occupied territories and to military targets, however imperfectly this is carried out. So so far, we have no reason to believe the poor Palestinians are involved in this international episode of violence you are by implication associating with their oppression and poverty, by doing which, you make this religious absolutist violence partly the fault of... Guess who?) If you want to argue strictly about the deadly combo of the miserable leadership the Palestinians have been saddled with plus the terrible mistakes of Israeli occupation policy, especially the settlements, I think you're on firmer ground, but even then the embrace of hate-inculcation and terror-tactics as a leading form of struggle has not always been automatically the only choice for the oppressed. <<On the other hand E- the Israeli children are being raised with a virulent hatred for Palestinians. Many Israelis just want to kill them all. An understandable reaction, but not a solution.>> "The Israeli children" makes it sound as though there is an approximate parity between the Jew-hate-curricula to which virtually all Palestinian children are subjected in their very lullabies, and the standard teachings given to Israeli children. That is untrue. Jewish kindergartens do not teach the little ones songs about Pig-Palestinians, for example. Nationalism is certainly inculcated in young people, and hate and fear certainly exists where terror-bombings in cafes and attacks on school buses are a constant threat, but drenching each Israeli child with a systematic, murderous, personal, ethnic, mind-numbing killing-lust is not SOP. Under the last Labor government a new curriculum was introduced which was less nationalistic and which acknowledged many unpleasant truths about Israeli actions in the past. Can you imagine such a scenario in Palestinian education? It's an absurd thought. Unfortunately, it was scrapped under Sharon, but there is still no parity. There has always been a significant, humanist peace movement among Israelis which, for example, has fought to end the settlement policy. The peace movement on the other side is minescule and has always been. It's my personal, depressed belief that there is nothing the Israelis can ever do involving love and trust and compassion that will soften the will of the Palestinians to drive them into the sea. And if I were a Jew in Israel, I would minimize my vulnerability, thinking, daily, Never again. What the answer is, I don't know, and this is my last post on this subject.