…3 of the 24 suspects arrested Thursday, in what the authorities have described as a plot to blow up airliners on trans-Atlantic routes, were converts to Islam.
“Born a Christian,” was the headline in The Sun, in its account of one of the suspects, Don Stewart-Whyte. He is the 19-year-old son of a late Tory politician who was said to have converted about six months ago.
Our nation’s leaders, both in Congress and the White House, still support the bombing, invasion and occupation of Iraq as the most important front in our battle against terrorism. It is certainly the most expensive in lives lost, money spent, our national reputation tarnished and our moral standing in the world diminished.
But if the way we fight terrorism is by bombing, invading and occupying countries that we believe harbor people who may attack us how do we respond to the threat revealed by the arrests on Thursday? Do we bomb London? Do we invade Pakistan?
5 comments:
Did Jim Fisher really say that?!? Just sitting in his chair pontificating he can not come up with a better suggestion than to imprison all Muslims? What an abject admission of the poverty and impracticality of his world view! Why would anyone listen to such a clueless person?
After posting the above comment I remembered that people from all over the world read this blog. I should explain that Jim Fisher is a local radio talk show host with a political philosophy (if you could call it that) that is somewhat right-wing in nature.
Dave, folks from around the world may "visit", using the random blog search feature at the top of every blogger page, but I'm not sure they read, let alone read all the comments. ;-) But who knows?
Who knows? Well, as the blog owner I do. I utilize the free service sitemeter.com which tracks everyone who visits the blog, where in the world they are located and how they got to my site (what link they clicked).
People are coming to my blog from all over the world and not just by randomly asking for the next blog. Someone from Alexandria, Virginia just visited my blog after searching in Google for '"phil hare", congress'.
Earlier today someone from San Antonio, Texas was on the QCOnline bloggers page and clicked one of their links to my blog.
Now some of these people are probably ex-Quad Cities people who understand the local references but I know that some of them have never been near the Quad Cities.
Here's a disturbing report on the state of anti-Muslim sentiment in the US:
"Almost four in ten, 39%, advocate that Muslims here should carry special I.D. That same number admit that they do hold some "prejudice" against Muslims. Forty-four percent say their religious views are too "extreme."
In every case, Americans who actually know any Muslims are more sympathethic."
About the new plane terror plot, Craig Murray, former UK government official, has a very interesting commentary here. He says there's very good reason that we should be very skeptical of the claims that this was as huge a deal as the government says. Seeing as the last huge "foiled terror plot announcement"--the Miami case--turned out to be a big farce, it seems reasonable that we should treat this new announcement with some skepticism.
Craig Murray is a very interesting and important figure. There's a long interview with him
here.
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