--
-Time flies like the wind. Fruit flies like a banana. Stranger things have -
-happened but none stranger than this. Does your driver's license say Organ
-Donor?Black holes are where God divided by zero. Listen to me! We are all-
-individuals! What if this weren't a hypothetical question? [EMAIL PROTECTED]
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 16 Sep 2001 11:00:14 EDT
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED],
[EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED],
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Subject: Letter From an Afghani in this country
(While any letter passed around the net could be a hoax. In the past ten
years, I have met in the US with refuge teens, from Kabul, Afghanistan,
Kosovo, Yugoslavia and from Baghdad, Iraq. The messages are all similar,
either join the Islamic terrorists or starve slowly or worse; Oppose them and
watch your family be ritually tortured, so you'll want to die quickly. From
past EM's I've seen, there were efforts to inform anyone willing to listen
that in Iraq the so called "soldiers" who fought us, and mostly were killed
by us, had guns pointed at their backs from Saddam's elite royal guard, and
real military which remained relatively unharmed. Hoaxes or not, there is a
consistent theme worth paying attention to.
My point all along has been to truly identify the enemy prior to rash acts
against their hostages. We need to offer more choices to these people than 1.
Be killed by your captors (who at least offer to defend you from the
invaders) or 2. Be killed by your invaders (even though the intent may be
freedom, they cant think that way). The terrorists have brainwashed millions
into aspiring to be suicidal lunatics for their cause. We must fight a holy
war, with a HOLY war. Fight propaganda with the same. Deprogram those who are
deluded. Convert the billion or more Muslims in the world toward this
righteous cause from the eyes of freedom and justice loving peoples, they
would be moved to root out their own heretics and impostors. Consider if the
world had a billion or more Christians, OB laden and his thugs, no doubt
would be more like David Choresh, devout Biblical Christians, agents of the
revelation or apocalypse. Hitler exploited the power of Christian doctrine
and desecrated it. These terrorists must be exposed as doing the same to the
Muslim faith. If even 10% buy their crap that they are the messengers of
God's justice, there's 100 million lunatic wannabes running around this
planet. How easy is it to dupe people? I suggest 10% is a low number. Any
danger, forgive, is that any religion can get followers to believe things
which are not for their own good, but will demand conformance for the
empowerment of the institution. We generally value freedom of religion, but
that is an easily exploitable error, too often we substitute an overvaluation
for tolerance when intolerance is called for. Nearly a generation of post WW2
leaders and teachers espouse this notion of there is no such thing as good
and evil, right/wrong, heaven/hell, the PC movement, etc., have done great
damage to the free and wealthy nations consciousness. Yet we simultaneously
gained great knowledge of the issues of the powerful against the inferior, as
batterers against wives or children only recently have been taken seriously,
or when "no means no", or the issue of equal pay/opportunity for women
compared to men, still is only measured as progress in the ratio - we are
more aware of and sensitive to these injustices than ever. Yet the treatment
of only half of the human race, women, in certain faiths/countries has
becomes so horrendous a global outrage and revolt against this has been oddly
silent. Blow up a few buildings, and THAT's another matter, worthy of quick
moves towards war. The injustices of the Taliban against women, continual
denial of it, has lowered the standards of all human dignity for over a
decade, where is the outrage?
In many Muslim extremist nations these practices are legal and go unpunished.
Cutting out the tongues of women who speak out against inhuman crimes, can be
a very consistent reason these lunatic men have no regard for human life.
When the Marine's hymn states: we will fight for right and freedom and to
keep our honor clean.
This is what I want to hear our leaders state, and then identify the wrongs.
Some of them are our own doing and complacency about them. Take the instant
of our incessant demand for (mostly Arab) oil. Our entire wealth's dependency
on cheap foreign oil, was proven in the Arab oil embargoes in the early 70's.
It is a proven economic fact, learned by foreign nationals in our schools,
which lead to the creation of OPEC and other cartels. We are once again
buying huge amounts of oil from Saddam Hussein, who, only a decade ago, was
considered the most dangerous leader in the world. Why fund this lunatic -
because he claims they are using the funds for humanitarians needs. Heck the
Taliban denies things too, like sheltering OBL, yet if provoked to act in our
interests, or turn him in, they will attack their neighbors or us. SH recall
also extradited all the weapons inspectors claiming for disrespect of their
culture? WHY? because they were doing their jobs. Think those denials mean
anything? Think again.
Most of my passion for reducing energy waste has been because of the billions
of dollars we sent each day to countries and people who hate us enough to do
things like this, then gain more insane favors by using our money to buy our
most advanced weapons. Then offer to turn on the oil spout in exchange for
other unthinkable concessions. Since the first embargo, I felt our great
national error and ignorance of the true threat, was to not become completely
oil free in the next decade or two. Blindness or indifference to injustice,
even those we collude with unwittingly, has been our real enemy. I wish us
all compassion in our hearts and wisdom in our deeds, and conviction in our
generosity. DD
Punishing institutionalized abusers without collateral suffering is
exceedingly difficult if not impossible. Eliminating it is Quixotic.
Here's the letter (thanks to AndyG)-
***************************************
>This was posted on my UU church's email list. - Peg
>
>Dear Friends,
>
>Yesterday I heard a lot of talk about "bombing Afghanistan back to the
>Stone Age." Ronn Owens, on KGO Talk Radio allowed that this would mean
>killing innocent people, people who had nothing to do with this atrocity,
>but "we're at war, we have to accept collateral damage," and he asked,
>"What else can we do? What is your suggestion?" Minutes later I heard a TV
>pundit discussing whether we "have the belly to do what must be done."
>
>And I thought about these issues especially hard because I am from
>Afghanistan, and even though I've lived here for 35 years I've never lost
>track of what's been going on over there. So I want to share a few thoughts
>with anyone who will listen.
>
>I speak as one who hates the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. There is no doubt
>in my mind that these people were responsible for the atrocity in New York.
>I fervently wish to see those monsters punished.
>
>But the Taliban and Bin Laden are not Afghanistan. They're not even the
>government of Afghanistan. The Taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics
>who captured Afghanistan in 1997 and have been holding the country in
>bondage ever since. Bin Laden is a political criminal with a master plan.
>When you think Taliban, think Nazis. When you think Bin Laden, think
>Hitler. And when you think "the people of Afghanistan" think "the Jews in
>the concentration camps." It's not only that the Afghan people had nothing
>to do with this atrocity. They were the first victims of the perpetrators.
>They would love for someone to eliminate the Taliban and clear out the rats
>nest of international thugs holed up in their country. I guarantee it.
>
>Some say, if that's the case, why don't the Afghans rise up and overthrow
>the Taliban themselves? The answer is, they're starved, exhausted, damaged,
>and incapacitated. A few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there
>are 500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan--a country with no economy, no
>food. Millions of Afghans are widows of the approximately two million men
>killed during the war with the Soviets. And the Taliban has been executing
>these women for being women and have buried some of their opponents alive
>in mass graves. The soil of Afghanistan is littered with land mines and
>almost all the farms have been destroyed . The Afghan people have tried to
>overthrow the Taliban. They haven't been able to.
>
>We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age.
>Trouble with that scheme is, it's already been done. The Soviets took care
>of it . Make the Afghans suffer? They're already suffering. Level their
>houses? Done. Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate
>their hospitals? Done. Destroy their infrastructure? There is no
>infrastructure. Cut them off from medicine and health care? Too late.
>Someone already did all that.
>
>New bombs would only land in the rubble of earlier bombs. Would they at
>least get the Taliban? Not likely. In today's Afghanistan, only the Taliban
>eat, only they have the means to move around. They'd slip away and hide.
>(They have already, I hear.) Maybe the bombs would get some of those
>disabled orphans, they don't move too fast, they don't even have
>wheelchairs. But flying over Kabul and dropping bombs wouldn't really be a
>strike against the criminals who did this horrific thing. Actually it would
>be making common cause with the Taliban--by raping once again the people
>they've been raping all this time
>
>So what else can be done, then? Let me now speak with true fear and
>trembling. The only way to get Bin Laden is to go in there with ground
>troops. I think that when people speak of "having the belly to do what
>needs to be done" many of them are thinking in terms of having the belly to
>kill as many as needed. They are thinking about overcoming moral qualms
>about killing innocent people. But it's the belly to die not kill that's
>actually on the table. Americans will die in a land war to get Bin Laden.
>And not just because some Americans would die fighting their way through
>Afghanistan to Bin Laden's hideout. It's much bigger than that, folks. To
>get any troops to Afghanistan, we'd have to go through Pakistan. Would they
>let us? Not likely. The conquest of Pakistan would have to be first. Will
>other Muslim nations just stand by? You see where I'm going. The invasion
>approach is a flirtation with global war between Islam and the West.
>
>And that is Bin Laden's program. That's exactly what he wants and why he
>did this thing. Read his speeches and statements. It's all right there. AT
>the moment, of course, "Islam" as such does not exist. There are Muslims
>and there are Muslim countries, but no such political entity as Islam. Bin
>Laden believes that if he can get a war started, he can constitute this
>entity and he'd be running it. He really believes Islam would beat the
>west. It might seem ridiculous, but he figures if he can polarize the world
>into Islam and the West, he's got a billion soldiers. If the West wreaks a
>holocaust in Muslim lands, that's a billion people with nothing left to
>lose, even better from Bin Laden's point of view. He's probably wrong about
>winning, in the end the west would probably overcome--whatever that would
>mean in such a war; but the war would last for years and millions would
>die, not just theirs but ours. Who has the belly for that? Bin Laden yes,
>but anyone else?
>
>I don't have a solution. But I do believe that suffering and poverty are
>the soil in which terrorism grows. Bin Laden and his cohorts want to bait
>us into creating more such soil, so they and their kind can flourish. We
>can't let him do that. That's my humble opinion.
>
>Tamim Ansary
>
>
>
>
>
>Peg
>_____________________________________________
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