Read "War against Islam".

Not once in the weeks after the world trade center attack in New York were terrorist organisations other than so called Islamic ones mentioned.

What happened to the IRA? What about ETA? Have we stopped counting their steadily rising death tolls? Are we not interested in their source of funds? Lets be honest, this war on terrorism isn't really about that at all. Like the war on drugs a few years back it is about control. It's not that they oppose the slaughtering of innocents, American foreign policy has been responsible for the deaths of at least 500,000 innocent people by the UN's last count. That's half a million people for those of you who were a little stunned by the length of the figure, I know I was. Then there are the British whose enlightened western orientated policies of divide and conquer enslaved nearly a quarter of the globe at one point and have been involved in starting virtually all of today's trouble spots, leading to a rising death toll well into the millions.

So much death for such a tiny little country.

Were we to scale up the idea of terrorists, people who use terror or the threat of terror to achieve political goals otherwise inaccessible,, we would find that the most bloody, cruel, merciless and sadistic regimes in the world are those listed above.

Lets cast our minds back to Vietnam shall we, and then the Gulf War. Perhaps we should remember that in both cases the governments of the west funded and trained the very butchers who later turned on them, now Vietnam is barely recovering from the scars, and Iraqi children die at the rate of 5000 a month. This isn't a statistic, this is genocide.

Now that it is in the West's interest they have turned their sight to a new enemy, a faceless enemy, a world faith of over a billion. Could it be the fact that the fastest growing religion on the planet was going to overtake Christianity in a couple of years in being the largest? Maybe this is inspiring those leaders of the west, who so readily subsribe to democracy, to cull a few of those with an opposing view.

They will hit Afghanistan one of the poorest countries on the planet, then they will turn their attentions to Africa, the poorest continent on earth, and devastate some already decimated little country, and for what? So that they feel a little better about themselves and how powerful they are.

How many people actually believe that Bush and Blair's war on terrorism will actually succeed?

They cannot examine the heart of every muslim man can they? They were asked to produce evidence of their suspicions regarding Bin Laden, and the Taliban said they would produce Osama Bin Laden for them without delay. No evidence came forward, and the week before the evidence was due to be given, the USA suddenly decided to isolate the Taliban and make them victims of their vengeance. Yet still not a shred of evidence has been shown to suggest the man they are after is indeed responsible. If they are using threats of violence to achieve their ends, (which incidentally is a political killing, make no mistake about it..) then aren't they the real terrorists?

An idea worth examining in the light of upcoming events.


A response to custodian, is long overdue. However, seeing the war that erupted between Jurph and I, I will limit my comments to a general devastation of the ethos behind Custodian's pro American stance.

I personally have a great deal of sympathy for Custodian, and admire the work he has done recently in other nodes, especially detailing the killing machinery to be employed in the war against Afghani's elsewhere, his statistics are meticulous as they are chilling, and one must admire his noding ability, if not his morals.

The point he seems unable to grasp, or even approach, is that I am not trying to defend the attack on the World Trade Centre, or indeed Osama bin Laden, or even the Taliban. I wish, just like every other sane person that the perpetrators of the attacks are brought to justice, I also believe that Osama Bin Laden should answer for his alleged crimes against the West in a court of Law, and that the Taliban are an overly harsh regime that has much moderation to achieve before it can be said to rule sensibly, if at all. This central fact, that I am not his enemy, seems to have eluded Custodian, whose main concern seems to be justifying the wholesale slaughter of civilian populations in what is essentially a revenge-catharsis exercise for the West on an innocent population.

He seems to believe very much in a subjectivist viewpoint, citing relativist terminology to escape from central terms in my thesis such as 'justice'. In short I don't believe he accepts that there can be any such thing as justice, or right or wrong, and he seems to be implying that there is no fundamentally true morality in the universe. This is diamatrically opposed to my views as a Muslim, which are that there is Good, and Evil, and that morality is absolute, and to be discovered, not made up. He doesn't seem to understand that relativism has had it's day in philosophical circles, and is now more or less looked upon as a curiousity, very much like the Flat Earth Theory. The one simple argument that achieved this was the fact that every relativist statement has a context, and each context is embedded in the overall context of Reality, so each relativistic position has an absolute value, be that co-ordinate, or moral. The primary concerns of philosophy today are reconciliation of absolute moral imperatives with an increasingly individualistic societal framework, and he might find such an exploration fruitful, and perhaps enlightening.

With a belief in justice, one is able to look clearly and with stability at the actions of the West following the horror of the Sept 11 attacks, and see that there has been much lacking, and much immoral. The Taliban, for all my personal detestation of them, have acted in the proper Islamic way and offered to hand over the accused, Osama Bin Laden on display of evidence to them, presumably the same evidence that was deemed worthy to be shown to virtually every other country involved apart from Afghanistan. He would have been handed over to a neutral country, and that would have been that. Trial taken place, if guilty, he would have been executed, otherwise if innocent, set free. This doesn't sound that unreasonable to me, does it to you? Were he located in the USA that would have happened, or in Germany, or in Italy, but why does Afghanistan not get the same rights of extradition procedure for those within it's borders? It's a mute point now anyway, thousand more innocents will die in the War, and thousands more will become incensed and carry out terrorist attacks against the West. Security measures or not, many more will die, and I find this to be the saddest thing. There is no escape, we pay for the violence of our ancestors. Sadly Custodian seems incapable of apprehending this in his noding of the killing machines, and his irrationalisation of the American position.