Terrorism: October 2004 Archives

By Robert H. Reid, Associated Press, 10/22/2004 15:38

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) Trembling, haggard and weeping into a tissue, Margaret Hassan, the kidnapped British aid worker who has spent nearly half her life delivering food and medicine in Iraq, begged Britain on Friday to help save her by withdrawing its troops, saying these ''might be my last hours.''

The gaunt woman's wrenching televised statement delivered in between sobs puts new political pressure on Prime Minister Tony Blair's government, a day after it agreed to a U.S. request to transfer 850 British soldiers from southern Iraq to the Baghdad area to free American forces for new offensives against insurgents.

By Ibn Warraq

Islam is a totalitarian ideology that aims to control the religious, social and political life of mankind in all its aspects -- the life of its followers without qualification, and the life of those who follow the so-called tolerated religions to a degree that prevents their activities from getting in the way of Islam in any manner. And I mean Islam. I do not accept some spurious distinction between Islam and “Islamic fundamentalism” or “Islamic terrorism.” The terrorists who planted bombs in Madrid on March 11, 2004, and those responsible for the death of approximately 3000 people on September 11, 2001 in New York, and the Ayatollahs of Iran, were and are all acting canonically. Their actions reflect the teachings of Islam, whether found in the Koran, in the acts and teachings of the Prophet Mohammed, or in Islamic Law that is based upon them.
Islamic Law, the Sharia, is the total collection of theoretical laws that apply in an ideal Muslim community that has surrendered to the will of God. According to Muslims, it is based on divine authority that must be accepted without criticism, doubts and questions. As an all-embracing system of duties to God, Sharia controls the entire life of the believer and the Islamic community. An individual living under Islamic Law is not free to think for himself.

by Howard Zinn

10/18/04 "The Progressive" -- I am calling it "our" war on terrorism because I want to distinguish it from Bush's war on terrorism, and from Sharon's, and from Putin's. What their wars have in common is that they are based on an enormous deception: persuading the people of their countries that you can deal with terrorism by war. These rulers say you can end our fear of terrorism--of sudden, deadly, vicious attacks, a fear new to Americans--by drawing an enormous circle around an area of the world where terrorists come from (Afghanistan, Palestine, Chechnya) or can be claimed to be connected with (Iraq), and by sending in tanks and planes to bomb and terrorize whoever lives within that circle.

PROUT Editor's note: The Sangh Parivar, alias the BJP, RSS and VHP, are shameless in attacking Christian sisters/nuns whose only crime was to bring food to the neglected and downtrodden Dalits. Why could not the Sangh Parivar likewise bring rice and other foods to the Dalits and thereby win their love and loyalty? Why are the Hindutva members such cowardly wimps that they primarily attack the helpless, defenseless women? Shame on them!! It is their venemous hatred, their cruelty, their vicious nature that in fact drives the Dalits of India into the arms of Christianity, Islam and Buddhism. For this very reason thousands or millions of lower-caste Hindus over centuries have converted - to escape the torture and oppression of the upper castes - represented at present by the Sangh Parivar. The fact that the cowardly state government 'obeyed' the RSS demands and deported Brother Leonard back to Kenya (a complete misuse of the POTA) is a blight on the otherwise beautiful and progressive state of Kerala. It is the duty of each one of us to expose and condemn this genocidal, hatred-filled, venemous serpent that calls itself BJP, VHP, and RSS. Let their leaders be imprisoned until they learn to function and feel like universal human beings.

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"Terrorism is the war of the poor.
War is the terrorism of the rich."

Leon Uris
Novelist

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

September 29, 2004

EERWALA, Pakistan — I'm still trying to help out President Bush by tracking down Osama bin Laden. After poking through remote parts of Pakistan, asking for a tall Arab with a beard, I can't say I've earned that $25 million reward.

But I did come across someone even more extraordinary than Osama.

Usually we journalists write about rogues, but Mukhtaran Bibi could not be more altruistic or brave, as the men who gang-raped her discovered. I firmly believe that the central moral challenge of this century, equivalent to the struggles against slavery in the 19th century or against totalitarianism in the 20th, will be to address sex inequality in the third world - and it's the stories of women like Ms. Mukhtaran that convince me this is so.