I have been reading with interest recent columns by John Quick,
and letters to the editor regarding terrorism and the
Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
Dear Editor,
I have been reading with interest recent columns by John Quick, and letters to the editor regarding terrorism and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. When I strip away the arm wrestling over background and credentials, the name calling, and emotional content, I see issues crying out to be objectively discussed. I agree with Quick that our national policy is terribly biased toward Israel and I see this bias as an obstacle to discovering a path to peace. It obscures an objective view of the claims and causes of both the Israelis and the Palestinians. I also feel our national policy is to demonize our new state enemy, the terrorist, beyond reason in a highly emotional indictment to gain popular support for our war on terror. We can’t find words to define just how evil and depraved our enemy is, or how righteous it would be to exterminate the terrorist. Burton Anderson’s questioning whether we would strap a bomb to our children and send them out as suicide bombers says it all. We, of course would never do that, right? I certainly can’t imagine myself doing that, but neither can I imagine being possessed by the intensity of hatred they seem to have. Dare I consider the possibility they feel their hatred is justified?
I take my hat off to Burton Anderson for the soaring and inspirational call to arms of his last paragraph. It made the hair on the back of my neck (the only place I have hair) stand up, until I thought about it further. The only things lacking in the triumphal appeal of that final paragraph were the resounding tones of The Battle Hymn of the Republic, and banners held on high to herald America’s new crusade against muslim terror. America has clearly replaced the evil communist with the evil terrorist, and in this new crusade, the ultimate victim again will be reason.
In the name of reason, consider the list of Iranian transgressions Anderson cites: Attacks on American embassies is Tehran and Beirut, the attack on the Beirut marine barracks, and Pan Am flight 103. These are mentioned without any reference to the major transgressions of the United States against Iran which preceded them: our CIA coup to reinstate the repressive regime of the Shah of Iran for 26 years, and our downing of an Iranian airliner on July 3, 1988. If we expect to be seen by the world as fair minded, we need to be a little more forthcoming. This kind of bias would be the equivalent of evaluating World War II against the Japanese without mentioning Pearl Harbor, or the War on Terror without mentioning the Sept. 11 attacks.
We have defined the terrorist as a bad guy beyond any hope of redemption, and our cause in the war on terror as lofty and righteous, and the extermination of terrorists as our goal. It’s time to get real, and abandon such good versus evil miracle tales and engage in the unglamorous task of patching together workable schemes for everyone to have a reasonable chance in life. This is not a utopian vision, but a simple and powerful, practical vision of what we could actually achieve with weapons no more awesome than the golden rule.
