Date: Tue, 25 Sep 2001 22:29:00 +0200 From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> To: Salvo Bartolotta <bartequi@neomedia.it> Cc: Konstantinos Konstantinidis <kkonstan@duth.gr>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: helping victims of terror Message-ID: <20010925222900.A71817@lpt.ens.fr> In-Reply-To: <1001447850.3bb0e1aa11dfc@webmail.neomedia.it>; from bartequi@neomedia.it on Tue, Sep 25, 2001 at 09:57:30PM %2B0200 References: <1001447850.3bb0e1aa11dfc@webmail.neomedia.it>
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Salvo Bartolotta said on Sep 25, 2001 at 21:57:30: <snip> > The cavemen which^H^H^H^H^Hwho live in Afghanistan and other ahem "Islamic" > countries have NOTHING to do with Islam. They could be using **any** > **other** **pretext** for their troglodyte behavio(u)r. In other words, > religio instrumentum regni. <snip further> > I am afraid that the ahem troglodytes in question would perpetrate > horrible crimes on the western peoples all the same, sooner or > later; otherwise stated, such a disaster as the WTC one would just > be a question of time. > > It is their **ideology** that leads them to believe that the Western > World, its culture, its art, and its way of life have to be > destroyed. <snip some more; hope I retained the essence of what you're saying, anyway> > Sorry for the pessimism. Am I missing something? Yes, you're missing a *lot* by apparently characterising the general population of Afghanistan as "cavemen". I've also seen your argument about "they'd have done this anyway" elsewhere. It's bullshit. Every society has its share of fringe lunatics: America has its Jerry Falwell too. But in a normal society these people stay in a fringe where they belong. It's only at times of repression and difficulty, when a noticeable chunk of the population is feeling unjustly dealt with and getting desperate (these are mild words, read about these countries sometime) that the violent fringe can actually gather a following. Even now, Bin Laden has only a few thousand in his fold. The other 23 million or so in Afghanistan are victims; they are literally starving to death, and in between they are trying to escape the violence. The argument goes, the US may have made mistakes with bombing Afghanistan, Iraq and the rest, but these dirty Muslims have been hostile to America much earlier, such as the Iran hostage crisis in 1979 [1]. Yes indeed, but that was not unprovoked either. For years, America, in its famous support of democracy, had been propping up the Shah of Iran, just as it props up the Saudi royal family today; and at some point some Iranians decided they'd had enough. Iran went into a fundamentalist backlash, but now seems to be coming out of it. But even at the worst times, Iranian women could vote, work, legislate: things that are denied to Saudi women even today. That was I think the earliest confrontation of America with Islamic militancy; lets now turn to America's next enemy, Libya (ruled then and now by Muammar Gadhafi, a dictator but by no means a fundamentalist.) America bombed Tripoli (killing, among others, Gadhafi's infant daughter) because of broadcasts emanating from Tripoli apparently proclaiming Libya's guilt in a Berlin nightclub bombing a little earlier. But there has since been a claim [2], by former Mossad worker Victor Ostrovsky, that it was the Mossad who tricked the US into believing this by planting a transmitter in Tripoli. The US didn't much care about researching these things, and bombed anyway. Irony of ironies: Gadhafi has proclaimed his sympathy for the US victims (as has Iran) and has supported America's right to retaliate. Remaining history is more recent. The Iraq thing was provoked by Saddam Hussein, who invaded Kuwait, and Bush Sr had the support of most of the Muslim world in liberating them. Where the US went wrong was in the continued bombings and embargo on Iraq for ten years afterwards, which did not hurt Saddam at all, caused untold suffering on his people, and convinced most Arabs that the US does not value Arab lives at all. The Afghan Mujahedin were, as we already discussed, funded by the CIA, and then dropped by them, as were the Pakistan military, leading a Pakistani general to be quoted recently as saying "The US thinks we are like a condom: they can just use us and then throw us away." The roots of this present militancy are as much as in the extremist elements in Pakistan as in Afghanistan. And, of course, there's America's consistent "right or wrong" support and immense financial aid to Israel, an issue I won't even bother getting into. In short, it is this sort of thing, accumulated over years and years, which gives the violent fringe lunatics their chance at gathering a following and converting their talk to action. It is only a desperate people who would think of such a horrendous thing as the September 11 events. And, as I've said earlier, it looks like the upcoming US actions are going to follow the same pattern. [1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4260146,00.html [2] http://www.washington-report.org/backissues/0495/9504058.htm To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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