I forget, which was Timothy McVeigh an Arab, or a Muslim?
I suppose that there are a lot of Arab Muslims in Ireland too,
pretending to be Irish Christians.
Terrorism is terrorism, it knows no boundaries. Statements
such as yours and Bills are just the result of bigotry.
Amen. You can generalize further to "religeous fundamentalists" and
find this appropriately includes the terror of the crusades,
Inquisition, and genocidal invasions of South America.
You can then generalize further to "fundamentalists" and find this
appropriately includes Hitler, Stalin and countless off-radar tribal
massacres through the ages.
As an aside: It speaks volumes on US cultural blindness that the brand
name "Crusade Against Terror" was not only coined, but perculated
through all the think-tank and spin-doctor layers to the point that
Bush used the phrase publically while attempting to rally supprt from
former Gulf War Arab allies - whose perspective on the word "crusade"
was understandably different and counter-productive to the cause.
Everyone can experience directly that they are special, unique,
different to everything else that is not within the body. It's the
inherent nature of our consciousness.
Most of us learn as children that other humans are like us, and
perceive themselves similarly special in the same way as we experience
ourselves as special. From birth, we know that to bite hard on a
finger becomes a *special* experience when it's out own finger, and
all a child needs to hear to join the dots from there is: "How would
you like it if someone did that to you?"
The difficulty in raising kids (assuming they aren't already damaged
by their environment before you start trying) isn't in establishing a
sense of justice; it's preserving that sense while you teach them all
the exceptions - that it's OK to shoot ppl if it's your duty as a
security guard, that what we watch as "entertainment" makes sense even
though it's so at odds with what we do in real life, etc.
Most self-inflicted large-scale human suffering is driven by ideology,
and the "Poland Line" is crossed when the perps believe their ideology
to be so fundamental as to undercut a sense of common humanity. That
happens when one falls into the "PLU" (People Like Us) syndrome, such
that human rights become only selectively applicable.
Or maybe you want a tighter definition of "terrorism" that doesn't
include warfare and violence in general? When the powerful exert
power, that's governance or conquest; when the powerless unexpectedly
play the same game any way they can, call that terrorism.
OK; if you define "terrorism" as military-grade violence conducted for
ploitical ends outside of an established political framework, then the
WW2 French Resistance an early model of modern terrorism. After all,
had not the democratically elected French govt surrendered to the
occupying German forces, establishing them as the legitimate govt?
To rail against human nature is to rail against the darker aspects of
human nature. As humans, we are all on shaky ground there.
For example; how many 3rd-world AIDS deaths result from the artificial
witholding of access to retrovirals, done to preserve the pecunary
interests of the ethical drug companies? Once you drop your own
fundamentalism from your eyes, things get terrifyingly clearer.
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The rights you save may be your own
