Dealing with Terrorism and Domestic Turmoil

No one wants to acknowledge any legitimacy in terrorist acts. That goes against everything we believe, everything we've been taught. But, if we are to have any hope of putting terrorism behind us, we had better look at what terrorists are saying and why they are doing what they are doing.

Terrorists are not orchestrating suicide bomb attacks out of spite for us. They are trying to kill people to send a message to us. We're not getting the message. If we had listened to their message before they started to attack, we might have avoided the awful events of September 11 and the horrors of the Madrid and London bombings. I'm not defending the terrorists; their actions are barbaric. But, we could have diffused the situation if we had acknowledged that different cultures have different values and different expectations. Instead, we operate under policies that attempt to insist that everyone see the world from our vantage point. We exercise the ultimate bigotry by insisting that our world-view is the right world-view.

We need to really listen to what terrorists are saying and we need to acknowledge their statements. In many respects, we need to change our policies to reflect the fact that other countries, other cultures, do not share our values.

Many would argue that any change in policy now would be capitulation; we would be bending to the terrorists and "the terrorists would have won." I argue that we should have been listening to the warnings for years and we should have shaken our bigotries and opened our minds to other world-views. Now, if we steadfastly refuse to bend because it would be seen a capitulation to the enemy, we will be sealing our own fates; ongoing terrorist attacks, a world increasingly hostile to us and to our policies, and a deepening resentment for our excessively materialistic lifestyle. Blind nationalism is a very stupid path to take.

Our decision to unilaterally attack Iraq, without provocation (or with George Bush's fabricated rationale) was yet another reason for the Muslim world, and to a greater extent the extremists who launch terror attacks, to view us as a hostile country that must be confronted to reduce our imperialist ambitions.

Successfully dealing with terror will require a new government (free of rabid bible-thumpers and blindly superpatriotic nationalists) populated by people who are willing to concede that cultures can have different values. We need to engage in a truly global dialogue and shape our policies to embrace a world-view that acknowledges diversity in social, religious, and political institutions worldwide. If we keep doing what we've been doing, we're likely to see the institutionalization of radical religious policies that target the United States in every way. And, we're likely to see the growth of religious zealotry here, with the attendant attacks on our civil liberties.

Unless we change our policies and our view of the world around us, we are steering toward a world in which the rest of the world is our enemy and we have a domestic turmoil the likes of which we have not seen since the Civil War.