INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM

Bin Laden Threatens USA
Afghanistan And Iraq
The Lockerbie Bomber

 

 

Bin Laden Threatens USA again 25/1/2010

 

Bin Laden has offered yet another ultimatum, threatening further violence against the USA, it’s citizens and it’s interests, unless it ceases to support Israel.

However, Bin Laden’s naivety is that he presumes that the Israelis are the bad guys and that the Palestinians are the good guys. He also believes that the Americans can be defeated, just because he holds what he thinks is the one and only correct religion. The Americans believe that they hold the religious high ground, and the Palestinians just want some of their land back.

Such a fundamental misinterpretation of religion, and it’s effects within World powers, could easily make global warming look like a candle lit dinner for two.

I believe that we have all had quite enough of the Israeli arguments for what the Palestinians have done to them in the past, and I am equally sure that we have also had quite enough of the Palestinians arguments concerning what the Israelis have done to them too. All their arguments and justifications, on both sides, for their own barbaric and murderous actions, are extremely well based in fact. They are perfectly true and they are reasonably accurate.

Were it not for the fear of some sort of global escalation of the conflict, most of the rest of us would simply say that both sides richly deserve each other, and then simply let them get on with it.

However, all of this misses the point.

The point is that it is the women and children that are getting maimed and killed, and they are getting maimed and killed because of extreme and intolerant religious believers. Whether that is the extreme religious believer in New York, The Gaza Strip, Tel Aviv, or in some cave in the Pakistani mountains is a complete irrelevance. It could just as easily be in a Synagogue or a Mosque in north London.

The problem is that once you start killing people, you will always leave behind close relatives of the dead who will then want to kill you, and to their minds it is perfectly justifiable if that is also in the name of religion too.

Having said that, religion itself is not always the cause of war, but it is often man’s interpretation of religion that causes wars, or at the very least perpetuates them.

The Israeli / Palestinian crisis has been going on for literally thousands of years. However, from the crusades of the middle ages to the latest atrocity that occurred yesterday, you will not be able to find the individual act which started the problem in the first place. That has long since been forgotten and replaced with subsequent deeply felt injustices, which have then been harnessed by th0se who choose to pervert their religion. They believe that theirs is the only way.

The Palestinians and the Israelis both have their religious perverts, and Bin Laden is no less such a person. But before we become too critical, we should also look to our own religions at home. Northern Ireland is no fluke of modern history, it is a war that has been going on for just about as long as the one in the middle east, and it was ably supported by two of the most respected religions in the World, who even have the same God.

I am a religious man, and I have spoken to my God, and it turned out that he is the same bloke as your God. He told me that if all the religions in the World could speak to their respective Gods, they would discover two things –

ONE – Their Gods are all the same person, it is just the interpretation which is a bit different.

TWO – Their God wants them to stop killing each other.

How do we do this?

Certainly not by killing Bin Laden, That will simply create a vacancy.

One idea might be to get all the heads of all the religions of the World to talk to each other – face to face – perhaps their first meeting should be in the middle east.

 

 

Afghanistan

 

Week after week we are, as a Country, having to deal with the tragedy and the horror of some of our courageous soldiers losing their lives in Afghanistan and coming home to be mourned by their friends and families.

However, the very least that we owe to our troops, is some uniformity of purpose, the truthful purpose, and not the “politically correct” waffle and excuse that we have been fed so often in the past. The British people are well able to cope with the real truth behind such conflicts. Then we can cope with the casualties that tragically occur.

That does not mean that we, as a nation, will all agree unanimously with the reasons for it, any more than we did in any of the past wars, be it the Falklands War, or even the Second World War. There will always be those amongst us who will disagree, regardless of the true purpose. However, we are undoubtedly stronger as a nation if our leaders speak the truth, and we are certainly stronger as a nation because of our freedom of speech.

Indeed, it is a perverse but interesting thought that many of our adversaries in past conflicts, did not allow any form of dissention in their own public or their own press. The Taliban are probably one of the more repulsive examples of such repression, be it through their perverted interpretation of religion, or indeed their subjugation of women, who apparently are not even allowed a formal education.

However, I think if I was one of the unfortunate parents going through that dreadful process of bringing my dead son back from the war, and saying goodbye to him for the last time, the very last thing I would want to be confronted by, is the pseudo grief of a politician trying to score some sort of publicity coup, or even worse, by a politician venturing his doubts in pubic about the purpose of our being in the conflict in the first place.

We need our leaders, the politicians in government, to be clear and united in our determined purpose for being in Afghanistan, or any other such conflict. Either we really do need to be in Afghanistan, or we don’t, but we need the truth.

To me, our reasons for being there are perfectly clear, albeit that they may not be politically acceptable to some people. The fact is that Afghanistan was the training ground for international terrorism, and as soon as that began to impact in London and in New York, resulting in the deaths of our own people on the streets of London, then military action was not only viable with such an under-developed country such as Afghanistan, but it was inevitable and completely and utterly necessary.

Of course, the argument then ranges into “when” should we get out, and “how” should we get out? It seems to me that the answer is – “when” the rise of international terrorism in Afghanistan is unlikely to re-occur; and “how” it can be achieved is by replicating some of our own institutions in Afghanistan, enabling them to govern, and police themselves effectively. Unfortunately – a long time.

It is impossible to qualify or quantify the ultimate gift of one’s life in the pursuit of a dangerous but justifiable task. However, we also need to be very aware of the statistics that we are not given; those of the wounded and the maimed, who will now have to live with their injuries and disabilities for the rest of their lives.

One thing is abundantly clear. At some point, as a nation, we will need to be very generous with our gratitude to them all, the living, the dead, and the injured.

 

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Why We Did And Why We Will Not

 

 -          We went into Iraq because World oil supplies, and therefore our economies in the western World, were threatened through international terrorism, which was being nurtured by  a despot called Saddam Hussein.

-          We are in Afghanistan because that is where the international terrorists, who blew up the Twin Towers and our tube stations, were being trained.

-          If Mugabe had the Oil that Iraq had, we would go into Zimbabwe too – but he hasn’t – so we won’t.

-          We will not go into Iran, simply because they would destroy us, probably along with themselves, all at the same time.

 

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International Terrorism - Iraq and Afghanistan 

 

 The facts are not in great dispute for those who are not bound by their political party politics and political correctness.

Afghanistan and Iraq, amongst other countries, were harbouring and nurturing international terrorists, whose intent and direct actions were to try and destroy the western World economies, as usual in the name of religion.

Furthermore, Iraq has something in the order of 1/3^rd of the World’s oil reserves, and was in a position to use it to blackmail, control, or destroy, our economies, and therefore our societies and our communities.

The relative military strengths and comparisons between us simply meant that we could attack, and so we did attack. Given the same such circumstances again, we would attack them again, although I am sure that the politicians would think up some other reason for doing so.

The fact is that, on this occasion, we were lucky in as much that we had the military strength, alongside the USA, to attack Iraq with reasonable confidence. Had it been a different country, with that proportion of the World oil reserves, and a country with greater military options than Iraq had, we would now be in the process of being economically destroyed, probably over many decades.

I don’t think many people in this country would be complaining about the issues of war, if they knew that the alternative was watching their way of life, their communities, and their personal wealth being destroyed, and eventually watching their children and grandchildren starve to death on the streets of the United Kingdom.

Of course, for the people of Iraq, it was all dressed up as fundamental religious oppression. The tragedy is that, as in all wars, the ordinary people were sucked into this deception, on the back of their religion, and many thousands of them subsequently gave their lives in vain.

It is worth reflecting on that fact, and that by comparison, very few of our own military personnel lost their lives.

We in the western World, need to learn how to reasonably share our resources, knowledge, technology and general wealth. As a first step, we particularly need to learn how to share our food and power resources.

Of course, alongside these realisations will come some enormous international and social issues that will also need to be resolved, such as social and financial security in families and communities, throughout the entire World, without breeding like rabbits.

 

 

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The Lockerbie Bomber Ali Mohamed Al-Megradie – 24/8/2009

 

I am not sure if Mr MacAskill, the Scottish Justice Secretary, was just showing his inexperience, or if he was just enjoying his own sense of self-importance by putting himself in the public gaze  – and let’s face it, there are plenty of Westminster MPs who do the same – regularly.

I am not sure if there was some other hidden international influence from Westminster, or Gordon Brown, or even if there was an “oil” factor that we are all hitherto unaware of.

I am not even sure if our justice system worked as well as we would have liked in this wretched man’s original case. 

However, I am absolutely sure that he was found guilty in the fair Courts of this land and I am absolutely sure that he was sentenced fairly.

I am told that he had only served eight years of his sentence. Simple mathematics tells me that he served a mere ten days in prison for each individual person that he murdered.

I am also absolutely certain, along with most of the rest of this Country, that he should not have been let out, completely and utterly regardless of whatever reason was being dreamt up by the politicians.

If the justice system was flawed at the time of his sentence – please fix it and then appeal through the proper channels.

Tragedy is heaped upon tragedy in as much that, once again, our politicians prove themselves to be seriously out of touch with pubic feelings and beliefs, and completely at odds with our concept of what is right and what is obviously wrong.