Jonathan, All
Jonathan said:
Rasheed, I continue to identify with a lot of your thinking. I
sympathize with your dislike for the shameful scenes in some countries,
with children (and adults) celebrating the WTC bombings. However, it is
naïve to distance those misguided people from their countries and their
leaderships. Yasser Arafat is quite simply a hypocrite. It is no
accident that thousands took to the streets in Nablus to cheer the WTC
bombers. The Palestinian leadership has harnessed this hate for years,
and continues to do so. Evidence of this is ubiquitous in their
schoolbooks and media. Of course the kids know no better - that is the
tragedy.
Furthermore, the message of hate emanates even from some Mosques - not
only in Palestine, but also in Europe and the USA. I hope and pray that
this represents a minority view, but even so, it is a problem, a tragedy
for Islam. Bin Laden is just the tip of this very dangerous iceberg. The
wisest pre-emptive action should be to dissolve this iceberg.
Unfortunately, the hand that the free world has reached out is
traditionally a patronizing hand. It is counterproductive to give Muslim
kids money so that they can wear designer clothes, drink coke and sit in
MacDonalds eating halal hamburgers.
First of all, it's quite a statement to call Yasser Arafat a hypocrite with
no material backing whatsoever. I'm not a hardcore defender of him or
anything, but i do think that you should factually explain to me why you
think the way you do. I think the Palestinians need to move on and need to
see things in a more pragmatic light than they are now. Many of them are
brainwashed into believing anti-Islamic teachings when they are very young,
and i am totally against this.
I have never seen nor heard of any hate teachings spread in the many US
mosques to which i have been. I'm quite sure that this would represent a
minority view, and if you can provide specifics to your assertion, i would
like to see them.
I would like to see Bin Laden destroyed as much as, if not more than, anyone
else. Even if he wasn't responsible for the attack, he still gives Islam a
bad name to people not wise enough to research its true meaning. But i fail
to see how killing this one person would do anything besides make him a
martyr for his cause and increase zealousy among his followers. This attack
was performed by citizens of this country, which should be the scariest part
of it. There are thousands of terrorists (Muslim and otherwise) who are
citizens of this country. This war on terrorism is similar to the war on
drugs, the only difference being that because of our need to have a clear-cut
enemy, we use Bin Laden, whereas in the drug war, we have no one to put the
blame on. The war on drugs certainly didnt end when Carillo Fuentes or any
other drug lord was killed, and i have a feeling that the war on terrorism
will take the same path.
One last thing. I'll bet a lot of people are thinking about better air
security to prevent something like this from happening, which last week
involved denying an Arab-American a flight and will soon cause my mother not
to wear her traditional sari to the airport when she visits my brother in
Philadelphia. But think about this: the average salary for a pilot is
$13,000 a year. In one case, a pilot had four kids and qualified for
welfare. Can you stomach the thought that when you are on a plane, the guy
entrusted with your lives and the lives around you, might be on welfare?
It's up to big businesses to remedy that problem and find it in their hearts
to maybe raise ticket prices a little so those bloodsuckers can actually pay
pilots an amount commensurate to the entailments of their job. But they just
figured that instead of doing that, they'd just lay off thousands of people.
I think a reformation of flight policies might be a good starting point for
the war on terrorism.
Rasheed
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