To: Ilaine who wrote (4654 ) 10/13/2001 4:43:54 PM From: Hawkmoon Read Replies (4) | Respond to of 281500 I loved this part of De Borchgrave's article:And CBS's Dan Rather wondered out loud on Larry King Live, "How did we get sucker punched?" The dumbing down of the media was the slippery slope that led to the dumbing down of America. Well, maybe Dan Rather should have a little conversation with Tom Brokaw and see how "personal" this has now become to him... Big mistake going after the US media like they have with this Anthrax.. I have a feeling we're about to see a bunch of bleeding heart liberals suddenly looking for membership in the John Birch society. Also, I think this part of his comments were spot on:"The ruling royal families of the Gulf are the third most hated by the "fundos" (local jargon for fundamentalists) after the United States and Israel. For democracy to be meaningful to the masses, the divine right of rulers in the Gulf would have to morph into constitutional monarchies as unifying symbols over non-royal governments elected by popular mandate. The ruler of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al Thani, buys time by subsidizing the Qatari-based Al Jazeera TV station that acts as a mouthpiece for Osama bin Laden. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates keep their flat-earth clerics at bay by ladling out largess to Pakistan's madrassas - religious schools that produced recruits for Osama bin Laden's terrorist training camps in Afghanistan." We have provided cover for some of these Arab regimes who have not advanced and modernized their societies properly, or eliminated the extreme corruption that the common people see every day. And once extremist Islam has been "pacified" sufficiently, we're going to have to take our "allies" to task and force some change upon them so that such extremism is not permitted, or motivated, to take root again. But we have to get rid of the bad guy's networks first.. Hawk