Wouter,
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<br>I'm thinking perhaps since you don't live in the US that you don't fully understand the philosophical underpinnings of our society. I'd like to close my end of this discussion with a few quotes from a couple of web-sites I visited recently that may help.
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<br>Although I feel very strongly that you are dead wrong in your assessment of the means that should be taken to drive terrorism from the world, I assume that we would both have that as a mutual goal, so I respect your point of view, as flawed as I think it's basis is.
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<br>"As the gruesome bombings of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon demonstrate—and before that, of the USS Cole, the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the U.S. soldiers in Saudi Arabia, the World Trade Center, Pam Am flight 103—America is at war.
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<br>To understand America's depressingly feeble response to those warring against it, one must understand the fundamental ideas, the philosophic ideas, shaping our leaders' foreign policy. And to understand why America is the hated target of Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, the PLO, Syria, Libya and the hordes of terrorists they finance and harbor, one must understand the philosophic ideas motivating these regimes.
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<br>What ideas have undercut America? Politically, America's policy is one of appeasement, which emboldens our enemies. We occasionally half-heartedly bomb individual terrorists, but we negotiate with and leave unharmed the countries that perpetrate the attacks. Our leaders have been taught in college that pragmatism—the abandonment of a principled stand—is practical. Morally, America has been disarmed by altruism, the idea that sacrifice for the sake of others is the moral ideal. Our leaders think it is wrong to defend, by whatever force is necessary, America's self-interest. And the moral relativism and egalitarianism flowing from our universities causes our leaders to identify our enemies simply as men who have different but equally valid values. Our enemies are not seen as the evil they are.
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<br>Those warring against us are not isolated madmen but people motivated by irrational philosophical ideas. The religious mysticism and supernaturalism of Islam teaches them that the human mind is an impotent nothing that must prostrate itself before Allah, that the individual must sacrifice himself to the supernatural (the suicide bombers believe their self-sacrifice is the ticket to a blessed afterlife). Accordingly, these people hate those who champion not Allah but this earth—not mysticism but science and technology—not faith but reason—not collectivism and obedience to authority but individualism and freedom. In short, they hate and want to destroy the core values of Western Civilization—and its greatest flowering, the United States of America. It is no accident that they targeted the two tallest buildings in New York's skyline, concrete symbols of America's achievements."
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<br>Ford Hall Forum, 1972: "A Nation's Unity"
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<br>Q: What should be done about the killing of innocent people in war?
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<br>Answer: This is a major reason people should be concerned about the nature of their government. Certainly, the majority in any country at war is innocent. But if by neglect, ignorance, or helplessness, they couldn't overthrow their bad government and establish a better one, then they must pay the price for the sins of their government-as we are all paying for the sins of ours. [In this sense] there are no innocent people in war. If some people put up with dictatorship-as some of them do in Soviet Russia, and some of them did in Nazi Germany-then they deserve what their government deserves.
<br> Our only concern should be: who started that war? If you can establish that a given country did it, then there is no need to consider the rights of that country, because it has initiated the use of force, and therefore stepped outside the principle of right.
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<br>I did also want to comment on your notion that retaliation has not helped Israel. It is quite clear that without the use of retaliation, Israel would not exist as a State today.
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<br>ScaredyCat
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