Rachel,
Unfortunately I really do believe that what you are predicting is highly
probable and I would suspect lthat chemical biological wweapons will be the
the next tool. It is a truly frightening landscape we behold now that the
shroud has been ripped from our eyes.
Paul H. Dillon
----- Original Message -----
From: Karen R Heckert <heckertr@juno.com>
To: <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Sent: Sunday, September 16, 2001 10:14 AM
Subject: New York City
> I am reading a lot of agonizing about war-mongering and collateral
> damage. As a person who very recently lived in New York, who had friends
> working close to Ground Zero (all, thank God, OK as of last check) I
> would like to add the following.
>
> Five thousand (5,000) people are currently dead somewhere in the rubble
> of the World Trade Center. These people were ALL civilians, average
> working type clerks, secretaries, cleaning personnel, computer
> programmers (except for the firemen, who chose to be in harm's way out of
> a sense of duty to their fellow New Yorkers). As was pointed out in some
> news article, the VIP's, the real Capitalists, aren't at their desks at 9
> AM. The dead were regular, normal CIVILIANS. Like in collateral damage
> (?!).
>
> But note: in this case the objective was not to take out some military
> target, with the civilians just unfortunate bystanders. In this case the
> civilians were themselves the target. This is not just a "statement"
> about someone's suffering. This is mass murder and itself the cause of
> unimaginable suffering. There are five thousand times how many families
> who are grieving today. Not capitalists, not military, just average
> people like me and you.
>
> Is it somehow that civilian American blood just isn't as red as, say,
> civilian Afghan blood? If it's wrong to kill Afghani civilians (and it
> is), isn't it also wrong to kill American civilians?
>
> If Jay had been one of those five thousand, had been one of those people
> jumping from the top floors as the only alternative to burning alive, how
> would you have felt? Would you have talked about justified revenge for
> imperialist wrongs? If it had been Eugene's wife and child on one of the
> highjacked planes, dying horribly with no hope of rescue, would he have
> been so quick to talk about Afghani anguish as justifying American
> bodies? Perhaps it's just a little too easy to rhetoricize when it's not
> the blood of people you know.
>
> So these militants (not terrorists, of course, just "somebody else's
> freedom fighters") must be allowed to on about their business of making
> political statements with civilian blood because bringing them to justice
> might involve collateral damage? Perhaps we should excuse Milosevic
> because, after all, the Serbian militants were only living out their
> distress at the collapse of the old order in Eastern Europe?
>
> No, I don't recommend carpet-bombing Afghanistan. And a lot of the
> people I work with are fine, normal people who are also Muslims. But I
> know one person who was the only survivor of a large German-Jewish family
> because when Hitler came to power, and threatened to destroy the Jews,
> they didn't believe it. They thought it was all rhetoric to comfort the
> Germans in their anguish at the Depression's effects. She believed
> Hitler, and left, and every other member of her family who stayed behind
> was exterminated in the death camps. When bin Laden and company say they
> mean to destroy America with terrorism, they mean it. This isn't the
> "end of the beginning", to quote Churchill, it's only the BEGINNING of
> the beginning. As someone in the field of public health, I am now
> reading all I can get about disaster response and counseling, because it
> looks like it's going to be a busy season.
>
> And if it's you or yours, next time, remember I told you so, and remember
> the contempt you have been showing for the victims and their families on
> this list.
>
> Rachel Heckert
>
> PS If you really believe the conflict between Islamic civilization and
> the West is a recent development, try getting out a history book and
> checking out the Crusades (a millennium ago), one cause for which was
> Moslem interdict of European shipping on the Mediterranean Sea, or the
> battles in which Roland stopped the invading Moors at the foot of the
> Pyrenees (if he hadn't all Europe would be Muslim), the days when the
> Ottoman Turks reached the gates of Vienna, and so on. Islam is a complex
> faith with many facets, and one of them indeed is quite martial. And as
> for terrorism against civilian targets, one of my childhood memories is
> of Algerian terrorists bombing in France in the Algerian civil war.
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Oct 10 2001 - 15:49:16 PDT