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To: Frederick Langford who wrote (17742)	9/21/2001 8:54:18 PM
From: 2MAR$	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 208838

tell me we need to try understand these people. For now Fred , all we need to do is just "see" them @ 60k ft. spaceimaging.com i imagine these have become even better since the gulf ...also moving heat bodies must stand out very well against the cold bare rock as opposed to hiding underground in jungles . Like OJ said ...a hard rain's gonna fall...they do have a choice .

To: Frederick Langford who wrote (17742)	9/22/2001 12:36:07 PM
From: SirRealist	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 208838

I don't think in terms of dove or hawk; justice demands the murderers be stopped, via life imprisonment or death. The legitimacy of their grievances is not the understanding I seek, because there's no legitimacy to the murders. I want to understand them in the same way I want to understand all enemies of life and civilized behavior, the better to defeat them. I am a lifelong adherent to pacifist principle and an opponent to capital punishment. I would have set all that aside to stop Hitler or Stalin or the Armenian massacre or the killing fields of Cambodia or the Hutu/Tutsi genocide, or murderers like these. Principle and reason cannot spare civilization from the onward rush of rabid dogs. Pacifism and respect for life are principles that better civilization and humanity, but they are useless if there is no civilization left to better. Appeasement is not an option imo. There's an added point I'd make, too. Our government is put in the diplomatic box of clarifying that our war is against murdering criminals and not a nationality or religion. This is not a war against Arab peoples or Muslims. I have no quarrel with that. But I would broaden my definition of terror. It would include the practice of suttee - burning the widow on her husband's funeral pyre, which occurs in India still, though the government outlaws it. It would include foot-binding, still practiced in China, where small feet are considered sexy and results in disfigurement and disability. It would include clitoridectomy, practiced in parts of Africa and elsewhere. It would also include fundamentalist religious practices that are so adamant about confining women that they would enforce those confines by throwing acid in a woman's face or shooting her, as has been reported recently because such women did not comply with orders to remain completely veiled. Such brutal practices as these are archaic in origin and part of the ignorant past the world should have evolved from long ago. To require strict adherence to Dark Ages practices because they were embodied in a family or social custom, or in a text viewed as sacred, is neither moral nor just nor defensible, except by the weak of mind, heart and spirit. Acts committed today are choices we each have. The brutal repression of women today cannot be blamed on Muhammed any more than blaming Jesus Christ if we decided to justify a return to witch burning. We make our own choices today, and hiding behind the claim that such practices are ordained by God, Allah or whoever, is a form of cowardice and nothing more than a well-dressed lie. It is interesting to note that the Western religions of Islam, Judaism and Christianity each proclaim theirs is a God of Peace and Love. And fundamentalists in each choose practices of intolerance, hate and criminal behavior to demonstrate their adherence to their so-called 'loving' higher power. Fortunately, most Indians I know would not practice suttee. Most Muslim men I've met do not harm their women with bullets and acid. Most Christians I know do not practice the bigotry that Falwell and Robertson do when they make claims that homosexuality and feminism convinced God of our need to be punished with the WTC/Pentagon bombings. Those are not the practices of the holy; they are the practices of barbarians. If such gods as these exist, they have my permission to send me to their Hell, from which I will still try to defeat them. On that point, I'd rather be wrong than blindly justifying cruelty and calling it love, peace or especially, faith.