At 2:12 AM -0400 22/10/01, llevitt wrote:

>As to colonialism: after all, every country of the world was "colonized" at one time or another. Some countries (like Pakistan and Jordan) were created by the great powers are buffers against perceived enemies. Israel was created out of the cauldron of the Holocaust and recognized by the U.S. in a sincere gesture of understanding that if there were no such nation, the Jewish remnant would have no place to go. Perhaps it was out of guilt for the sorry performance of the U.S during World War II and the strong strain of anti-semitism that characterized attitudes  in the highest offices of the nation as late as the presidency of Richard Nixon. The Jews chose a lousy location, without water or oil and surrounded by hundred of millions of people who oppose them; but there was no other on which the Jews had a legitimate claim.  And they do have such a claim, as there is no statute of limitations on the Law of Return.

I haven't come across this law of return before, I gather the Jewish state doesn't recognise it either.

In any case, I don't see how it could apply to people on the basis of their adopted religion. I don't see any legitimate basis for claiming a right to occupy a particular geographic area, displacing the existing occupants, merely on the pretext that this was where a particular region was founded. Especially given that the Jewish religion was not the only one founded in that particular spot.

Most people of European cultural descent have as much "claim" to "return" as Jews, surely? Though Christians haven't actually staked such a claim for several hundred years.

Stripped of its religious mumbo-jumbo, the claim is without justification. There is no "Law of Return". Zionism seems to be little more than a reflection, a mirror-image, of Nazism. An understandable reaction to the holocaust perhaps, but no more than September 11 was an understandable reaction to US policy in the middle-east.

Two wrongs don't make a right. In fact to use the holocaust as a justification for genocide seems particularly obnoxious.

> What will you say if the West loses, Israel is destroyed, and your country falls to the Taliban?

I suspect the conquering barbarians will succumb to civilisation fairly quickly, they usually do. But there is not the remotest chance of the west succumbing to the Taliban, so the question isn't even passably rhetorical.

Frankly, I'm not at all satisfied with the options though. The Taliban and Osama don't even count as fair dinkum barbarians. "The West" is actually the US, most of the civilised world is is just tagging along for the ride. Given the choice, it is obviously better that the US prevails as quickly and cleanly as possible, but I would still prefer another option. One that does not entail the risks of continuing the spiral of reaction and retribution.

> Will your Western ways be permitted to survive? Will your wives, sisters and daughters be permitted to go to school and university, to work, to enter government,   to be bare-armed and bareheaded, to bask in the sun in the presence of strangers (men), to have premarital sex or commit adultery or be homosexual,  to be equal before the law, to eat pork, to drive cars, to choose their own religion or non-religion as they see fit?

Yeah, we know, they'll eat our babies.

> Will your museums and libraries be destroyed as the Buddhas were and the fanatics wish to do to the Pyramids?
>Put yourself in the place of the naive Christian missionaries being tried by the Taliban Supreme Court, by men who have never read Western or Asian philosophy, never watched "I Love Lucy" on television, never seen a play by Pinter, Ibsen, or Chekhov,

Chekhov who?

>  never seen a Bergman motion picture or a painting by Picasso,  never heard the music of Mozart or of Louis Armstrong, never read Shakespeare or Dickens or Rushdie, know nothing of other faiths than their own, men who believe that all who do not espouse their version of Islam are infidels

A closed mind is the essence of monotheistic religion. First thing they teach you I gather. (Sadly I didn't get that far.)

> -- so it says in the Qur'an -- and to proselytize a Muslim to Christianity is punishable by death. It's not anthrax that worries me, it is the loss of freedom, equality, even mere existence as a human being that I  see in the eyes of the fanatics.
>It is simply monstrous to imply, as one post did, that the WTC catastrophe may have been engineered by the Bush administration. They're bad, but they are not so evil as is the unenlightened mindset of a Bin Laden, under whom our exchange could never happen, as our ideas would not exist. We would be reduced to the state of barbarians, or we would die.

Dead is bad, I'll grant you. Better they die than "us" if these are the only choices, but I haven't entirely abandoned the hope that there might be other choices if we just keep an open mind.

Bill Bartlett
Bracknell Tas