Here's why we are losing the war for Arab opinion

[mbuttons]

Which brings up one thing we haven't worried about yet ... what's going to
happen to political asylum?

love
m-a




on 10/18/2001 4:05 PM, Roger Baker at rcbaker@infohiwy.net wrote:

> 
> Our basic problem is that any reasonable definition of terrorism
> condemns the previous and current foreign policy of the US government
> just as much as Osama bin Laden. Therefore the Arab world sees bin
> Laden as a brave underdog who fights US terrorism with Islamic terrorism,
> much like Pancho Villa or Emiliano Zapata were seen by the Mexicans,
> I think. This point of view is predictable among those who have stored
> up smoldering resentment against the USA based on this double standard;
> one man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist.
> 
> This is the way humans think (we're all tribal apes, right?) and no
> amount of bombs dropped on Afghanistan in the name of "Enduring Freedom"
> can wipe out the human instinctive tendency of underdogs to side with
> the many other underdogs caught up in a barbaric war without any rules
> involving morality or justice. Look at the piece at the bottom.
> 
> If you don't like it that way then you can scream and jump around and
> pull your hair out until the cows come home to roost, and little difference
> will it make. Our president is a fool and those who make his decisions
> for him are by their background beholden only to corporate greed, and not
> compassion toward those who reap the results of the resulting policies.
> 
> Such is life. The history on mankind is the history of class struggle,
> as Marx pointed out. And furthermore those who cannot learn from history
> are condemned to repeat it, etc.
> 
> (and, BTW, anthrax can be dispersed as an effective bio-warfare weapon
> with crop dusters if and only only the spores are dispersed as dry clusters
> of powder of the right size to float over a city and get deep into the lungs,
> rather than as a liquid aerosol of spores or bacteria in water base
> suspension, which is not a very infective mode of transmission. The guys
> putting the stuff in the envelopes apparently have engineered the right sort
> of spore clusters but may lack the crop dusters, or they may oppose taking
> the lives of too many innocent civilians in favor of targeting the government
> and media, etc.)
> 
> -- Roger 
> 
> ****************************
> 
> "When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world, and you knew exactly
> who they were," he said. "It was us vs. them, and it was clear who
> them was. Today, we are not so sure who the they are, but we know
> they're there."
> 
> - George W. Bush, Iowa Western Community College, Jan 21, 2000
> 
-- Mary Ann Wilson
mbuttons@gate.net