Terror / Vantage Point
“
- we can’t just bomb a neutral arab country?
- but mr President, they’re harboring terrorists!
“
Newsflash; all countries are harbouring terrorists. There are people in all regions of the world, who are sympathetic to what “most people” find unsympathetic causes. However, to use the retoric “but they’re harbouring terrorists” in order to do what we please, we might just as well rephrase and say “we can bomb the shit out of any given country on any given day, because we don’t aprove of what maybe ten of their citizens are thinking or doing. In the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorra the city wouldn’t be destroyed if there were ten decent people in the city. In this case people are seriously opting for countries, cities, lives and homes to be destroyed if the country turn out to harbour ten indecent people …
Furthermore, many of the ideals we today hold dear (closely related to values with a cultural and historical background in christianity) stems from a small jewish sect in the mighty roman empire
(the jewish population in itself was a small part of the roman empire). A sect that caused much turmoil and irritation for the romans who wanted their gods, their hedonism, infanticide, domestic violence, subordinate role of women etc to remain unchallenged.For more good reading on the topic of early christianity, I recommend “The Rise of Christianity” by sociologist of religion Rodney Stark.
For more good reading on the dangers of dividing the world into civilisations like “the western world” and “the muslim world” or whatever classification you propose, I recommend “Identity and Violence” by nobel peace prize winner Amartya Sen.
