Who’s responsible?
By UsaydOkay so i’m reading through my daily collection of mailinglist emails and yet again I come across an interesting article from the Information Clearing house. Yep I don’t fully agree with it - and the ideologies that the author has portrayed about Islam are, like usual, strangely foreign to anyone who actually has any idea about the faith -
And a home-grown suicide bomber, dreaming of 72 virgins for himself and "a painful doom" (in the Qur’an’s words) for his victims, seems an unpleasantly self-absorbed figure
Doesn’t seem like the most educated of sentances, but y’know as you find in these strange articles (even for the Guardian), there is always something to learn. The next two paragraphs are what really caught my attention.
How do you prosecute a war against the US and Britain? Muslims fight us on their own soil, but why should they not carry the fight to our homelands as we carry it to theirs? They do not possess the aircraft to fly over Washington and London and carry out "precision bombing". The security around US and British leaders is almost impenetrable, at least compared with that around buses and tubes. Most importantly, Muslim warriors may think, bombing western civilians gets results: the things that make it horrible to us make it more effective in their eyes (shock and awe, perhaps) and if there are enough such outrages, we will demand a retreat from Iraq. They may be wrong on this. But it is the price we pay for living in a democracy: theoretically, we are in charge so we are frontline targets.
"Responsibility" is a better word than "blame". We demand it, rightly, of those who carry out the atrocities; we should demand it also of ourselves and our rulers. The bombers, or rather those who control and influence them, are clear they are at war. President Bush seemed to agree when he declared a "war on terror". Is our role in this war a just one? Do we want to continue the war? If not, what will we do to stop it? Those are the questions we need to ask ourselves.
Well i’m a young Muslim living in the UK - am I a threat? Is my mosque brainwashing me into believing i’m going to get a shourtcut to heaven by blowing myself up? Amusing as the suggestions that politicians throw out - they always forget to be even slightly realistic in their comments towards race and religion, as though they can just make something up and somehow justify it. Anyways the article itself highlights how at the end of the day those who waged war in the first place (US&UK) are now feeling the consequences of their actions.