[Peace] Re: Peace digest, Vol 1 #14 - 3 msgs

[Jay Mittenthal]

BLACK TUESDAY: THE VIEW FROM ISLAMABAD
Pervez Hoodbhoy  (high energy physicist at Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad)
E-mail: hoodbhoy at isb.pol.com.pk
[original available from
http://www.gakushuin.ac.jp/~881791/hoodbhoy/hoodbhoy.html]
Quotations:
"Before all else, Black Tuesday's mass murder must be condemned in the 
harshest possible
terms without qualification or condition....  Analysis comes second, but it 
is just as essential. No "terrorist" gene is known to exist or is likely to 
be found. Therefore, surely the attackers, and their
supporters, who were all presumably born normal, were afflicted by 
something that caused their
metamorphosis from normal human beings capable of gentleness and affection into
desperate, maddened, fiends with nothing but murder in their hearts and 
minds. What was that? "

"Tragically, CNN and the US media have so far made little attempt to 
understand this affliction. The cost for this omission, if it is to stay 
this way, cannot be anything but terrible. What we have seen is probably 
the first of similar tragedies that may come to define the 21st century as 
the century of terror. Only a fool can believe that the services of a 
suicidical terrorist can be purchased, or that they can be bred at will 
anywhere.  Instead, their breeding grounds are in refugee camps and in 
other rubbish dumps of humanity, abandoned by civilization and left to rot. 
A global superpower,
indifferent to their plight, and manifestly on the side of their 
tormentors, has bred boundless hatred for
its policies. In supreme arrogance, indifferent to world opinion, the US 
openly sanctions daily dispossession and torture of the Palestinians by 
Israeli occupation forces. The deafening silence over the massacres in 
Qana, Sabra, and Shatila refugee camps, and the video-gamed slaughter by 
the Pentagon of 70,000 people in Iraq, has brought out the worst that 
humans are capable of. In the words of Robert Fisk, "those who claim to 
represent a crushed, humiliated population struck back with the wickedness 
and awesome cruelty of a doomed people".

"It is stupid and cruel to derive satisfaction from such revenge, or from 
the indisputable fact that Osama and his kind are the blowback of the CIAs 
misadventures in Afghanistan.  Instead, the real question is: where do we, 
the inhabitants of this planet, go from here?  What is the lesson to be 
learnt from the still smouldering ruins of the World Trade Centre? "