Tag Archives: al qaeda

Bin Laden: An Abused Symbol of Terror

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Bin Laden was reportedly killed yesterday. I was stunned to see so many Americans celebrate this report in a way that was somehow reminiscent of how I celebrated when the Packers (my favorite team) won the Superbowl earlier this year.

This saddened me very much. Why? Let me try to explain…

Bin Laden is an evil man, who orchestrated a horrific crime of mass murder of American citizens. It’s a tragedy that feels personal to me. It brought into the foreground of my relatively naive mind that the world is full of evil, and is unlikely to ever rid itself of it. What saddened me is not this realization, but that fighting evil is treated almost like a game, not in that it’s fun, but that evil can and ought to be defeated, beaten, crushed in the same way that a football team can be defeated, beaten, crushed.

In my view, you cannot crush evil. By “crush”, I mean the use of hard military power. Evil cannot be destroyed. All we can hope to do is to convert as many vulnerable impoverished minds to the way of peaceful co-existence. The most effective way to achieve such conversion is to lead by example. The United States (in its ideal) is the counter-symbol to Bin Laden: a symbol of freedom, individual rights, the rule of law and compassionate justice. The moment we pick up a gun and step onto a foreign land, we are no longer a symbol of compassionate justice. We are viewed as occupiers, not liberators.

War should only be waged defensively. I know that every time I take the train to West Philly late at night, I run the danger of getting into a confrontation with a few teenagers that are looking to mess with someone like me (partially because I’m of a different race than them, but also because I’m different in other ways). The solution is be low key and defend myself with aggression only if such a confrontation occurs. Now, if someone robs me on said train, do I then go on a rampage the next day and start shooting anyone that I find suspicious as a preemptive policy of aggression? It might be effective in the short term as a way to get a reputation of someone you don’t want to f*** with, but in the long-term I’m statistically putting myself in much higher likelihood of danger.

Of course, once we escalate, it’s hard to stop. Bin Laden as a symbol is just another source of fuel for the propaganda machine that drives the military industrial complex. Now that he is killed, his death will become another symbol: one that says that we indeed can win something like a “war on terror”. This of course is an ugly, abused, and self-serving lie which has and will lead to the suffering of millions.

Justice in the War on Hatred

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It appears U.S. has no intention of closing Gitmo. Why did Obama promise he would, and is now failing the world on that promise? Because of the shallow political reality of the “war on terror”?

Here’s a good article providing 4 reasons in predicting why Obama will fail to close Gitmo. The article was written more than two years ago.

The problem is that there may not be enough hard evidence to convict the prisoners of Gitmo were they brought to trial, especially for those suspected to be higher ups in terrorist organizations. It’s kind of like convicting Al Capone. It is a fundamentally different challenge than convicting the Nazi leaders during the Nuremberg Trials. Al-Qaeda is not a nation state; it is a criminal organization. For example, were we to capture Bin Laden, what is the actual evidence except a bunch of threatening video tapes that would link him to 9/11?

I think about the torture and obvious violations of the Geneva conventions going on at Gitmo…

The question to me is two-fold:

First, suppose none of the world knew about the practices in Gitmo. Would it be just, in that case, to violate the basic human rights of many innocent people in order to detain the few terrorist leaders?

Second, suppose the world knows (as it does now) of the fact that U.S. is torturing these prisoners and detaining them without trial. Is it just, in this case, to violate the basic human rights of many innocent people in order to detain the few terrorist leaders?

What is the difference between those two questions? I can’t escape the thought that every legitimate terrorist we don’t put on trial (and potentially, though unlikely, having to let him go) we are creating hundreds, thousands more potential terrorists… Young kids in the Middle East now growing up (in poverty) with a fundamental hatred for the United States. Should we not be fighting this hatred as opposed to the symptom of it: terrorism. Should we not declare a “war on hatred”, where the weapons are schools, hospitals, etc?

Nuremberg Laws

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In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws established the legal basis for racial discrimination, with almost no opposition from the German people.

The image to the left shows the method for determining whether you were Jewish blood or German blood based on what your grandparents were.

Not only marriage, but sex between those labeled as Jewish and those labeled as Germans was forbidden. Also Jews were no longer permitted to display German colors (national flag) but were encouraged to display Jewish colors.

I came across these laws recently in researching the Nuremberg Trials, which by the way I recommend highly if ever you wonder about the limits of human nature. Here’s a link to the complete transcripts. It’s the darkest play you will ever read.

I bring up the Nuremberg Laws because of the question that has worried me for a long time: “Can the Holocaust happen again?”. Particularly, can I envision a reasonable downward path into a society that can breed the same mix of hatred, nationalism, and mass-conformity as was present in Nazi Germany. The Nuremberg Laws to me represent a critical step that I can envision many modern countries taking if the populous is deceived through a large propaganda campaign, most likely amidst a major war and/or an economic crisis. Or, for example, suppose that an organization like Al Qaeda detonates a nuclear weapon in a major American city, and declares that it did so in the name of Islam. Can a major horrific event erase the progress of the civil rights movement in the 20th century by forcing all Muslim citizens of the United States into concentration camps? It’s sick to think about, and surely seems impossible, but is it?

Human rights are violated world-wide on a mass scale, every day, still. We need to learn, ask questions, and help. A book I’m currently reading (Mountains Beyond Mountains) covers just one example of human suffering and an American that gives all his time to make the tiniest incremental improvements in their quality of life.