[Peace-discuss] A global war on terrorism

[C. G. Estabrook]

    The events that affected my soul in a direct way started in 1982
when America permitted the Israelis to invade Lebanon and the American
Sixth Fleet helped them in that. This bombardment began and many were
killed and injured and others were terrorized and displaced.

    I couldn't forget those moving scenes, blood and severed limbs,
women and children sprawled everywhere. Houses destroyed along with
their occupants and high rises demolished over their residents, rockets
raining down on our home without mercy.

    The situation was like a crocodile meeting a helpless child,
powerless except for his screams. Does the crocodile understand a
conversation that doesn't include a weapon? And the whole world saw and
heard but it didn't respond.

    In those difficult moments many hard-to-describe ideas bubbled in my
soul, but in the end they produced an intense feeling of rejection of
tyranny, and gave birth to a strong resolve to punish the oppressors.

    And as I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon, it entered my
mind that we should punish the oppressor in kind and that we should
destroy towers in America in order that they taste some of what we
tasted and so that they be deterred from killing our women and children.

    And that day, it was confirmed to me that oppression and the
intentional killing of innocent women and children is a deliberate
American policy. Destruction is freedom and democracy, while resistance
is terrorism and intolerance.

    This means the oppressing and embargoing to death of millions as
Bush Sr did in Iraq in the greatest mass slaughter of children mankind
has ever known, and it means the throwing of millions of pounds of bombs
and explosives at millions of children—also in Iraq—as Bush Jr did, in
order to remove an old agent and replace him with a new puppet to assist
in the pilfering of Iraq's oil and other outrages.

--Osama bin Laden, videotape broadcast October 29, 2004