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Pastimes : Kosovo -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: D. Long who wrote (2599)	4/7/1999 11:20:00 PM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 17770

No. Bin Laden is an agent of destruction that hides behind religion. I thought so until I read the interview with him in either Time or Newsweek a few months ago. It intrigued me, so I made a point of reading more of what he himself said, not what people said about him. It was VERY interesting. He actually has a very clear world view that I find deplorable but intellectually quite compelling given his assumptions. Basically and very simplistically, he sees the U.S. as having made the Arab world subservient to its economic interests (which is certainly true of the pre-OPEC world if you have read of those times--we treated he Arabs like dirt and virtually raped their land of its natural resources for peanuts, a skill we learned from our treatment of the Native American). He also sees the U.S. as spreading an aethistic and nihilistic philosophy which denigrates and atempts to destroy the religion of Mohammed (who, if you know your religious history, looked to Jesus as one of his spiritual teachers). Thus, the U.S. has a long history of violence against and attempted destruction of his people and their truths. The only answer to this is to drive the U.S. out of the Moslem world and back to the United States. Since his world and religion have been attacked by the U.S., he has the right to attack back. And since the U.S. promulgates its evil not only through military but through civilians, civilians are fair game because they have made themselves part of the enemy. That's greatly simplified, and he might disagree entirely with my interpretation, and I certainly (as should be obvious from my commitment to international law) think he is totally wrong. But his logic and that of Clinton are cut from the same cloth -- defending against a perceived threat justifies any means of attack against that threat, whether lawful or not. (They both have another thing in common -- a fascination with military toys and the ultimate power to send people off and kill in their names.)