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Politics : War -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: lorne who wrote (17566)	11/6/2002 4:31:03 AM
From: zonder	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 23908

I am not sure it is a good idea, or fair for that matter, to bundle all conflicts on this planet to which there is a Muslim side, and declare the Muslim side is always wrong and it is their civilization that we are fighting. First and foremost - Terrorism is a method employed by the "small people" fighting against states or similar powerful entities. States have tanks and armies. Groups fighting states have bombs and hence are terrorists. What I am trying to say is that each case should be separately assessed. Example: IRA were and are terrorists. However, they are not Muslim. They are fighting for self-rule. So is ETA, Basque separatist group responsible for various attacks in Spain and France. They are not Muslim, either. So it is not possible to equate terror with a single religion. Terror is a method used by David to attack Goliath. It is horrible, it is despicable, but it is not in the monopoly of Islam. I know something about it, Iorne - I come from a country where more than 10,000 people were lost to terrorism in the past decade. Oh of course they were called "freedom fighters" then, and supported by Western Europe :) What my country learned over the course of the past decade is that you cannot fight terrorism by bombs and tanks, because you cannot very well go in and bomb whole cities because you suspect there are ten terrorists there. As the article you have posted states, there are a handful of extremists feeding on the suffering of the masses who support them to get back at their "Goliath" - Spain/France for the Basque, England for the Irish, Israel for Palestinians. The only way to successfully fight terrorism is to improve the lives of the public and thereby cut off support for the terrorist organization. Remember that these people are weary of long decades of struggle and all the general masses want is peace and quite and enough food to feed their families. Give them hope for a future in this direction and they will gradually shun the extremists. Once marginalized thus, terrorist organizations will wither and die. Otherwise, the support just grows. There is no stopping a person who has given up on his own life to get back at "Goliath", as anyone watching the news in Israel can tell. Do you think dropping more bombs on homes and establishing more settlements in Palestinian territory will exterminate terrorism? Unfortunately, it will just increase the number of young people who have lost parents, husbands, babies and who are hence willing to strap bombs around themselves for revenge. Similarly, do you think the popular support for terrorist organizations decreases or increases with each news of the US keeping prisoners at Guantanamo Bay with no outside contact and no hopes of seeing the light of a courtroom, or with each bully speech from W. Bush in the lines of "We will attack Iraq whether UN approves or not because he is evil and he tried to kill my daddy"? I worry about all this because if you are any indication of the average American public, and also knowing just how ignorant about the rest of the world the Average Middle East person is, the coming clash of civilizations is going to be one of ignorance. The most violent and irrational kind of war, that is, one built on fear of the unknown.