"An eye for an eye makes us all blind",
SEE http://home.uchicago.edu/-dhpicker/petition
Subject: Re: ausfem-polnet FW: Vote for war? No way!
Part of a document from Robin Morgan someone forwarded to me.
Eva Cox (Radio Person).
"From a distance, you can see the lattices of one of the Towers, its
skeletal bones the sole remains, eerily beautiful in asymmetry, as if a new
work of abstract art had been erected in a public space.
Elsewhere, you see the transformation of institutions: The New School and
New York University are missing persons' centers. A movie house is now a
rest shelter, a Burger King a first-aid center, a Brooks Brothers' clothing
store a body parts morgue, a record shop a haven for lost animals.
Libraries are counseling centers. Ice rinks are morgues. A bank is now a
supply depot: in the first four days, it distributed 11,000 respirators and
25,000 pairs of protective gloves and suits.
Nearby, a mobile medical unit housed in a Macdonald's has administered
70,000 tetanus shots. The brain tries to process the numbers: "only" 50,000
tons of debris had been cleared by yesterday, out of 1.2 million tons. The
medical examiner's office has readied up to 20,000 DNA tests for
unidentifiable cadaver parts. At all times, night and day, a minimum of
1000 people live and work on the site.
Such numbers daze the mind. It's the details - fragile, individual -that
melt numbness into grief. An anklet with "Joyleen" engraved on it- found on
an ankle. Just that: an ankle.
A pair of hands--one brown, one white--clasped together. Just that. No
wrists. A burly welder who drove from Ohio to help, saying softly, "We're
working in a cemetery. I'm standing in--not on, in--a graveyard."
Each lamppost, storefront, scaffolding, mailbox, is plastered with homemade
photoco-pied posters, a racial/ethnic rainbow of faces and names: death the
great leveler, not only of the financial CEOs - their images usually formal,
white, male, older, with suit-and-tie - but the mailroom workers,
receptionists, waiters.
You pass enough of the MISSING posters and the faces, names, discrip-tions
become familiar. The Albanian window-cleaner guy with the bushy eyebrows.
The teenage Mexican dishwasher who had an American flag tattoo. The
janitor's assistant who'd emigrated from Ethiopia...
The Italian-American grandfather who was a doughnut-cart tender. The
23-year-old Chinese American junior pastry chef at the Windows on the World
restaurant who'd gone in early that day so she could prep a business
breakfast for 500. The firefighter who'd posed jauntily wearing his green
shamrock necktie. The dapper African-American midlevel manager with a small
gold ring in his ear who handled minority" affairs" for one of the
companies.
The middle-aged secretary laughing up at the camera from her wheel-chair.
The maintenance worker with a Polish name, holding his newborn baby.
Most of the faces are smiling; most of the shots are family photos; many are
recent wedding pictures...
I have little national patriotism, but I do have a passion for New York,
partly for our gritty, secular energy of endurance, and because the world
does come here: 80 countries had offices in the Twin Towers; 62 countries
lost citizens in the catastrophe; an estimated 300 of our British cousins
died, either in the planes or the buildings.
My personal comfort is found not in ceremonies or prayer services but in
watching the plain, truly heroic (a word usually misused) work of ordinary
New Yorkers we take for granted every day, who have risen to this moment
unpretentiously, too busy even to notice they're express-ing the splendor of
the human spirit: firefighters, medical aides, nurses, ER doctors, police
officers, sanitation workers, construction-workers, ambulance drivers,
structural engineers, crane-operators, rescue workers, "tunnel rats".
Meanwhile, across the US, the rhetoric of retaliation is in full-throated
roar. Flag sales are up. Gun sales are up. Some radio stations have
banned playing John Lennon's song, "Imagine."
Despite appeals from all officials (even Bush), mosques are being attacked,
firebombed; Arab Americans are hiding their children indoors; two murders in
Arizona have already been categorized as hate crimes - one victim a
Lebanese-American man and one a Sikh man who died merely for wearing a
turban. (Need I say that there were not nationwide attacks against white
Christian males after Timothy McVeigh was apprehended for the Oklahoma City
bombing?)
Last Thursday, right-wing televangelists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robert-son
(our home-grown American Taliban leaders) appeared on Robertson's TV show
"The 700 Club," where Falwell blamed "the pagans, and the abortionists, and
the feminists and the gays and lesbians ... the American Civil Liberties
Union, People for the American Way" and groups "who have tried to secularize
America" for what occurred in New York. Robertson replied, "I totally
concur."
After even the Bush White House called the remarks "inappropriate", Falwell
apologized (though he did not take back his sentiments); Robertson hasn't
even apologized. (The program is carried by the Fox Family Channel,
recently purchased by the Walt Disney Company - in case you'd like to
register a protest.)
The sirens have lessened. But the drums have started. Funeral drums. War
drums. A State of Emergency, with a call-up of 50,000 reservists to active
duty. The Justice Department is seeking increased authority for wider
surveillance, broader detention powers, wiretapping of persons (not, as
previously, just phone numbers), and stringent press restrictions on
military reporting.
And the petitions have begun. For justice but not vengeance. For a
reasoned response but against escalating retaliatory violence. For
vigilance about civil liberties. For the rights of innocent Muslim
Americans. For Afghanistan with food and medical parcels, NOT firepower.
There will be the expectable peace marches, vigils, rallies.... One member
of the House of Representatives - Barbara Lee, Democrat of California, an
African American woman - lodged the sole vote in both houses of Congress
against giving Bush broadened powers for a war response, saying she didn't
believe a massive military campaign would stop terrorism. (She could use
letters of support: email her, if you wish, at
>>[log in to unmask]<<.)
Those of us who have access to the media have been trying to get a different
voice out. But ours are complex messages with long-term solutions - and
this is a moment when people yearn for simplicity and short-term, facile
answers.
Still, I urge all of you to write letters to the editors of newspap-ers,
call in to talk radio shows, and, for those of you who have media access -
as activists, community leaders, elected or appointed officials, academic
experts, whatever--to do as many interviews and TV programs as you can.
Use the tool of the Internet. Talk about the root causes of terrorism,
about the need to diminish this daily climate of patriarchal violence
surrounding us in its state-sanctioned normalcy; the need to recognize
people's despair over ever being heard short of committing such drama-tic,
murderous acts; the need to address a desperation that becomes chronic after
generations of suffering; the need to arouse that most subversive of
emotions - empathy - for "the other"; the need to eliminate hideous
economic and political injustices, to reject all tribal/ethnic hatreds and
fears, to repudiate religious fundamental-isms of every kind.
Especially talk about the need to understand that we must expose the
mystique of violence, separate it from how we conceive of excitement,
eroticism, and "manhood"; the need to comprehend that violence differs in
degree but is related in kind, that it thrives along a spectrum, as do its
effects - from the battered child and raped woman who live in fear to an
entire populace living in fear.
Meanwhile, we cry and cry and cry. I don't even know who my tears are for
anymore, because I keep seeing ghosts, I keep hearing echoes.
The world's sympathy moves me deeply. Yet I hear echoes dying into silence:
the world averting its attention from the Rwanda's screams ...
Ground Zero is a huge mass grave. And I think: Bosnia. Uganda.
More than 5400 people are missing and presumed dead (not even counting the
Washington and Pennsylvania deaths).
The TV anchors choke up: civilians, they say, my god, civilians. And I see
ghosts. Hiroshima. Nagasaki. Dresden. Vietnam.
I watch the mask-covered mouths and noses on the street turn into the faces
of Tokyo citizens who wear such masks every day against toxic pollution. I
watch the scared eyes become the fearful eyes of women forced to wear the
hajib or chodor or burka against their will...
I stare at the missing posters' photos and think of the Mothers of the
Disappeared. And I see the ghosts of other faces. In photographs on the
walls of Holocaust museums. In newspaper clippings from Haiti. In
chronicles from Cambodia...
I worry for people who've lost their homes near the site, though I see how
superbly social-service agencies are trying to meet their immedi-ate and
longer-term needs. But I see ghosts: the perpetually homeless who sleep on
city streets, whose needs are never addressed...
I watch normally unflappable New Yorkers flinch at loud noises, parents
panic when their kids are late from school. And I see my Israeli feminist
friends like Yvonne, who've lived with this dread for decades and still
(even yesterday) stubbornly issue petitions insisting on peace...
I watch sophisticates sob openly in the street, people who've lost
workplaces, who don't know where their next paycheck will come from, who
fear a contaminated water or food supply, who are afraid for their sons in
the army, who are unnerved by security checkpoints, who are in mourning, who
feel wounded, humiliated, outraged.
And I see my friends like Zuhira in the refugee camps of Gaza or West Bank,
Palestinian women who have lived in precisely that emotional condition - for
four generations.
Last weekend, many Manhattanites left town to visit concerned famil-ies, try
to normalize, get away for a break.
As they streamed out of the city, I saw ghosts of other travelers: hundreds
of thousands of Afghan refugees streaming toward their country's borders in
what is to them habitual terror, trying to escape a drought-sucked country
so war-devastated there's nothing left to bomb, a country with 500,000
disabled orphans and two million widows whose sole livelihood is begging;
where the life expectancy of men is 42 and women 40; where women hunch in
secret whispering lessons to girl children forbidden to go to school, women
who risk death by beheading for teaching a child to read.
The ghosts stretch out their hands. Now you know, they weep, gestur-ing at
the carefree, insulated, indifferent, golden innocence that was my country's
safety, arrogance, and pride. Why should it take such horror to make you
see? The echoes sigh, "Oh please do you finally see?"
This is calamity. And opportunity. The United States - what so many of you
call America - could choose now to begin to understand the world. And join
it. Or not.
For now my window still displays no flag, my lapel sports no red-white
and-blue ribbon. Instead, I weep for a city and a world.
Instead, I cling to a different loyalty, affirming my un-flag, my un-anthem,
my un-prayer- the defiant un-pledge of a madwoman who also had mere words as
her only tools in a time of ignorance and carnage, Virginia Woolf: "As a
woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my
country is the whole world."
If this is treason, may I be worthy of it.
In mourning - and absurd, tenacious hope,
Robin Morgan
September 18, 2001
New York City
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Date: Sun, 23 Sep 2001 23:29:06 +1000
From: "Pippa"
Subject: Lateral thinking
This message has attachments.
Double-click here to list them.
Someone sent me this - it's not so stupid.
Regards ............... Pippa
A military response, particularly an attack on Afghanistan, is exactly what
the terrorists want. It will strengthen and swell their small but fanatical
ranks.
Instead, bomb Afghanistan with butter, with rice, bread, clothing and
medicine. It will cost less than conventional arms, poses no threat of US
casualties and just might get the populace thinking that maybe the Taliban
don't have the answers.
After three years of drought and with starvation looming, let's offer the
Afghani people the vision of a new future. One that includes full stomachs.
Bomb them with information. Video players and cassettes of world leaders,
particularly Islamic leaders, condemning terrorism. Carpet the country with
magazines and newspapers showing the horror of terrorism committed by their
"guest". Blitz them with laptop computers and DVD players filled with a
perspective that is denied them by their government. Saturation bombing
with hope will mean that some of it gets through.
Send so much that the Taliban can't collect and hide it all. The Taliban
are telling their people to prepare for Jihad.
Instead, let's give the Afghani people their first good meal in years.
Seeing your family fully fed and the prospect of stability in terms of food
and a future is a powerful deterrent to martyrdom. All we ask in return is
that they, as a people, agree to enter the civilized world. That includes
handing over terrorists in their midst.
In responding to terrorism we need to do something different. Something
unexpected ... something that addresses the root of the problem. We need
to take away the well of despair, ignorance and brutality from which the
Osama bin Laden's of the world water their gardens of terror.
Additionally, please look at this website for some of the most power-ful and
positive images of world wide support for us in our time of national
tragedy: http://thankyou.fast-networks.net/
Subject: Fwd [Hurting Afganistan? Hah!] / PLEASE PASS ON...
I've been hearing a lot of talk about "bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone
Age."
Ronn Owens, on KGO Talk Radio today, allowed that this would mean killing
innocent people, people who had nothing to do with this atrocity, but "we're
at war, we have to accept collateral damage. What else can we do?"
Minutes later I heard some TV pundit discussing whether we "have the belly
to do what must be done."
And I thought about the issues being raised especially hard because I am
from Afghanistan, and even though I've lived here for 35 years I've never
lost track of what's going on there. So I want to tell anyone who will
listen how it all looks from where I'm standing.
I speak as one who hates the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. There is no doubt
in my mind that these people were responsible for the atrocity in New York.
I agree that something must be done about those monsters.
But the Taliban and Bin Laden are not Afghanistan. They're not even the
government of Afghanistan. The Taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics
who took over Afghanistan in... When you think Taliban, think Nazis. When
you think Bin Laden, think Hitler. And when you think "the people of
Afghanistan" think "the Jews in the concentration camps."
It's not only that the Afghan people had nothing to do with this atrocity.
They were the first victims of the perpetrators. They would exult if
someone would come in there, take out the Taliban and clear out the rats
nest of international thugs holed up in their country.
Some say, why don't the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban? he
answer is, they're starved, exhausted, hurt, incapacitated, suffer-ing.
A few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there are 500,000
disabled orphans in Afghanistan - a country with no economy, no food.
There are millions of widows. And the Taliban has been burying these widows
alive in mass graves. The soil is littered with land mines, the farms were
all destroyed by the Soviets. These are a few of the reasons why the Afghan
people have not overthrown the Taliban.
We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age.
Trouble is, that's been done. The Soviets took care of it already. Make
the Afghans suffer? They're already suffering. Level their houses? Done.
Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their hospitals?
Done. Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine and health
care? Too late. Someone already did all that.
New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs. Would they at least
get the Taliban? Not likely.
In today's Afghanistan, only the Taliban eat, only they have the means to
move around. They'd slip away and hide. Maybe the bombs would get some of
those disabled orphans, they don't move too fast, they don't even have
wheelchairs.
But flying over Kabul and dropping bombs wouldn't really be a strike against
the criminals who did this horrific thing. Actually it would only be making
common cause with the Taliban - by raping once again the people they've been
raping all this time.
So what else is there? What can be done, then? Let me now speak with true
fear and trembling. The only way to get Bin Laden is to go in there with
ground troops.
When people speak of "having the belly to do what needs to be done" they're
thinking in terms of having the belly to kill as many as needed. Having the
belly to overcome any moral qualms about killing innocent people.
Let's pull our heads out of the sand. What's actually on the table is
Americans dying. And not just because some Americans would die fight-ing
their way through Afghanistan to Bin Laden's hideout.
It's much bigger than that folks.
Because to get any troops to Afghanistan, we'd have to go through Pakistan.
Would they let us? Not likely. The conquest of Pakistan would have to be
first. Will other Muslim nations just stand by?
You see where I'm going. We're flirting with a world war between Islam and
the West.
And guess what: that's Bin Laden's program. That's exactly what he wants.
That's why he did this. Read his speeches and statements. It's all right
there. He really believes Islam would beat the West. It might seem
ridiculous, but he figures if he can polarize the world into Islam and the
West, he's got a billion soldiers. If the West wreaks a holocaust in those
lands, that's a billion people with nothing left to lose, that's even better
from Bin Laden's point of view.
He's probably wrong, in the end the West would win, whatever that would
mean, but the war would last for years and millions would die, not just
theirs but ours.
Who has the belly for that? Bin Laden does. Anyone else?
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is
essential is invisible to the eye."
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
-----Original Message-----
From: A .[mailto:A.dva.gov.au]
Sent: Tuesday, 18 September 2001 15:31
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: FW: Michael Moore's thoughts
Hi Mike,
I thought you might be interested in Mike Moore's views.
A.
A.
E-Business
Information Management Unit
Department of Veterans' Affairs
Corinna St, Woden
ACT 2606
6289 4792 (w)
From: Z, J
Sent: Tuesday, 18 September 2001 15:21
To: 'J'; 'P, D (DPRS)'; A; A;
Godfrey; C; S;
Subject: FW: Michael Moore's thoughts
From: M,
Sent: Tuesday, September 18, 2001 3:07 PM
Subject: Michael Moore's thoughts
Of "The Awful Truth" fame. Interesting reading.
From:
Sent: Monday, 17 September 2001 10:39
Subject: FW: Michael Moore's thoughts
Here's a short list of my experiences lately with airport security: At the
Newark Airport, the plane is late at boarding everyone. The counter can't
find my seat. So I am told to just *go ahead and get on* - without a
ticket!
Detroit Metro Airport, I don*t want to put the lunch I just bought at the
deli through the x-ray machine so, as I pass through the metal detector, I
hand the sack to the guard through the space between the detector and the
x-ray machine. I tell him "It's just a sandwich."
He believes me and doesn*t bother to check. The sack has gone through
neither security device.
At LaGuardia in New York, I check a piece of luggage, but decide to catch a
later plane. The first plane leaves without me, but with my bag - no one
knowing what is in it.
Back in Detroit, I take my time getting off the commuter plane. By the time
I have come down its stairs, the bus that takes the passengers to the
terminal has left - without me. I am alone on the tarmac, free to wander
wherever I want. So I do. Eventually, I flag down a pick-up truck and an
airplane mechanic gives me a ride the rest of the way to the terminal.
I have brought knives, razors; and once, my traveling companion brought a
hammer and chisel.
No one stopped us.
Of course, I have gotten away with all of this because the airlines consider
my safety SO important, they pay rent-a-cops $5.75 an hour to make sure the
bad guys don*t get on my plane. That is what my life is worth -- less than
the cost of an oil change.
Too harsh, you say? Well, chew on this: a first-year pilot on American
Eagle (the commuter arm of American Airlines) receives around $15,000 a year
in annual pay.
That*s right -- $15,000 for the person who has your life in his hands.
Until recently, Continental Express paid a little over $13,000 a year.
There was one guy, an American Eagle pilot, who had four kids so he went
down to the welfare office and applied for food stamps -- and he was
eligible!
Someone on welfare is flying my plane? Is this for real? Yes, it is. So
spare me the talk about all the precautions the airlines and the FAA is
taking. They, like all businesses, are concerned about one thing -- the
bottom line and the profit margin.
Four teams of 3-5 people were all able to penetrate airport security on the
same morning at 3 different airports and pull off this heinous act? My only
response is -- that*s all?
Well, the pundits are in full diarrhea mode, gushing on about the "terrorist
threat" and today's scariest dude on planet earth - Osama bin Laden. Hey,
who knows, maybe he did it. But, something just doesn*t add up.
Am I being asked to believe that this guy who sleeps in a tent in a desert
has been training pilots to fly our most modern, sophisticated jumbo jets
with such pinpoint accuracy that they are able to hit these three targets
without anyone wondering why these planes were so far off path?
Or am I being asked to believe that there were four religious/poli-tical
fanatics who JUST HAPPENED to be skilled airline pilots who JUST HAPPENED to
want to kill themselves today?
Maybe you can find one jumbo jet pilot willing to die for the cause -- but
FOUR? Ok, maybe you can -- I don't know.
What I do know is that all day long I have heard everything about this bin
Laden guy except this one fact - WE created the monster known as Osama bin
Laden!
Where did he go to terrorist school? At the CIA!
Don*t take my word for it - I saw a piece on MSNBC last year that laid it
all out. When the Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan, the CIA trained him
and his buddies in how to commits acts of terrorism against the Soviet
forces. It worked! The Soviets turned and ran. Bin Laden was grateful
for what we taught him and thought it might be fun to use those same
techniques against us.
We abhor terrorism - unless we're the ones doing the terrorizing.
We paid and trained and armed a group of terrorists in Nicaragua in the
1980s who killed over 30,000 civilians. That was OUR work. You and me.
Thirty thousand murdered civilians and who the hell even remembers!
We fund a lot of oppressive regimes that have killed a lot of innocent
people, and we never let the human suffering THAT causes to interrupt our
day one single bit.
We have orphaned so many children, tens of thousands around the world, with
our taxpayer-funded terrorism (in Chile, in Vietnam, in Gaza, in Salvador)
that I suppose we shouldn't be too surprised when those orphans grow up and
are a little whacked in the head from the horror e have helped cause.
Yet, our recent domestic terrorism bombings have not been conducted by a guy
from the desert but rather by our own citizens: a couple of ex-military guys
who hated the federal government.
From the first minutes of today's events, I never heard that possibility
suggested. Why is that?
Maybe it's because the Arabs are much better foils. A key ingredient in
getting Americans whipped into a frenzy against a new enemy is the
all-important race card. It*s much easier to get us to hate when the object
of our hatred doesn*t look like us.
Congressmen and Senators spent the day calling for more money for the
military; one Senator on CNN even said he didn*t want to hear any more talk
about more money for education or health care -- we should have only one
priority: our self-defense.
Will we ever get to the point that we realize we will be more secure when
the rest of the world isn't living in poverty so we can have nice running
shoes?
In just 8 months, Bush gets the whole world back to hating us again. He
withdraws from the Kyoto agreement, walks us out of the Durban conference on
racism, insists on restarting the arms race -- you name it, and Baby, Bush
has blown it all.
The Senators and Congressmen tonight broke out in a spontaneous version of
"God Bless America".
They're not a bad group of singers!
Yes, God, please do bless us.
Many families have been devastated tonight. This just is not right. They
did not deserve to die.
If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing
thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him! Boston, New York, DC, and
the planes* destination of California - these were places that voted AGAINST
Bush!
Why kill them? Why kill anyone? Such insanity!
Let's mourn, let's grieve, and when it*s appropriate, let's examine our
contribution to the unsafe world we live in.
It doesn't have to be like this.
Yours,
Michael Moore.
Jai Guru Dev,
"Sundari Marks"
PS I e-mailed Michael Moore's site just to make sure he wrote this last
piece. Apparently he did.
S.M.
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