911

Day Nine. This is going to be tough for you to read. I apologize, but it’s a tough day. I had hoped this post would come toward the end of the 100 Days, after you understood me more.

You have a choice to make during your four minutes of silence today, four minutes, or at least to start making if it requires you to change course. You have to decide what kind of world you want to live in the next 50 years, that you want your children and grandchildren to live in. You can continue the bogus “war on terror”. You can continue to work for, contribute to and vote for politicians who will perpetuate U.S. military aid and support of authoritarian anti-Islamic regimes across this planet. That is why Al Qaeda attacked you six years ago today and why they will continue to try to attack you. Here. You can continue to pour billions and billions of your tax dollars into your country’s killing Al Qaeda and the dozens of other Islamic militant political movements who are forced to arms by the dictatorships that your country props up. You can watch America continue to slip into more and more of a police state. I learned just this morning that Bush is now turning the spy satellites onto our homeland. Watching you. You can live in more and more fear and watch this country driven farther and farther to the right each time an attack evades the police state security apparatus, of which YOU are a suspect.

Several years ago I had the honor to meet Sen. Ted Kennedy at a meeting of gay rights activists. F gay rights. I asked him why Al Qaeda tried to destroy his capitol and kill him. He said he didn’t know. Or was it he wouldn’t tell? He said we need to investigate it, called for an investigation. I was shocked. You tell me what’s going on. I can, but that’s for another post.

Bruce Hoffman knows. Here’s an amazing paragraph buried in this morning’s paper. You’ll be amazed what truths and insights pop out of the depths of stories written by people who lack the education, or values, or is it intelligence?, to see wholistically and get their thesis right. This one is from an op-ed piece by Hoffman, professor of security studies at Georgetown University and a senior fellow at the U.S. Military Academy Combating Terrorism Center.

“…. Al Zawahari is the superior strategist. It was he who, more than a decade ago, defined al Qaeda’s strategy in terms of “far” and “near” enemies. The United States is the “far enemy” whose defeat, he argued, was an essential prerequisite to the elimination of the “near enemy” — the corrupt and authoritarian anti-Islamic regimes in the Middle East, Central Asia, South Asia and Southeast Asia that could not remain in power without U.S. support. All Zawahri’s strategic vision set off the chain of events that led to 9/11.”

So that’s one choice. Or you can work to stop the war on the militant Islamic movements, demand that your party and your candidates and the media and the right wingers stop it. Just stop it. It’s none of my or your business what kind of governments these countries have, regardless of our personal preferences on all sorts of different governments. Worry about your own.

Stop it. And in time …. so much damage has already been done it will take years and years to reverse this, the Islamists will forget about us, you, they will do what they will do in their own countries and have only ‘near enemies’. And if they do come to power here and there, you will no longer be their enemy. You can deal with them the same way we deal with China, or Pakistan, or Egypt (okay, maybe not military aid) or every other country whose government we don’t like.

Peace out.