Captain Pprune.
I have got to take issue with the Sunday Times article you posted.
"America has more soul, culture and a lot more God than any of her critics"
Do you believe this? Isn't this more of the flag-waving nationalism that we all have to overcome if this world is going to get anywhere? People are people the world over. Some have soul, some have culture, some have God. National boundaries - governments and geography - have nothing to do with it. I'm a humanist, so I don't pray for those who died on the 11th - but I think of them. They were individual people whose lives were horrifically cut short - they deserve our utmost respect. Their families deserve our utmost compassion. And the world deserves that we attempt to be rational. We can talk about this. We can say that the government of the US is founded on basic ideas of freedom and democracy. We can say (funny no-one has mentioned it so far) that rulers and governments that deny women a franchise or an education stifle and kill the voice of half the world. We can nevertheless point out that US foreign policy has preferred short term gain over long term benefits (and let's not forget what that has a cost in lives or that the position of enslaved women can never have figured in US backing of the Mujahadeen). We can also point out, WITHOUT ANY DISRESPECT to those who died or to their families that some people in the US have quite legally funded terrorism through Noraid. Also, we should remember that in our life times (at least in mine) mass murder has been carried out in Cambodia, Ruanda and Indonesia. That's not to belittle the lives that were lost last week, it's to put it in perspective. I feel the loss of life last week very personally and strongly, and I realise to my shame that it's because I feel those people's lives were closer to my own than some of the others who have died senselessly, in huge forgotten numbers in the past 40 years.
Our world is a messy hypocritical ideological melting pot, so let's give over appeals to nationalism. If you believe that people are homogenous, if you belive that in all their complexity and differences a mass of people can be represented by a single government, by an accident of geography, your simplicity and naivity makes atrocities and terrorism possible.
Thadiashadow.