Letters
November 21 2005
Page 11
letters@gairrhydd.com
letter of the week Error on terror As I read Piers Horner’s response to Mark, I was struck by his repetition of a number of fallacies about the current war on terror. I shall not address them all, as this is only a letter. I shall only mention his use of the example of Northern Ireland (and Palestine, Israel, India, etc.) in showing we should negotiate with the terrorists. The examples Horner quotes are good instances of the old sort of terrorism. However, they fail to take into account that we face something very different today.
TERROR: New school
Chill out Mark
IN RESPONSE to Mark, first, I want to make it clear that I only stated how hard it is to get a job here because most employers do NOT (or can’t be bothered to) get a work permit for an international student like me. I’m NOT whining about living expenses either (as you’ve stated) ten grand an annum for me is for tuition fees ALONE. I honestly don’t think it’s fair, considering the amount a British citizen would pay. You see, I couldn’t have gone to a Sri Lankan university either, because from nursery to grade 12 I studied in an international school, in English medium, and did my London O/Ls and A/Ls back in Sri Lanka. So I HAD to come to the UK to start my uni’ career. I had no choice. If you call Sri Lanka a shit-hole, did you know that we are in fact more developed than India? Then what do you call India? So next time Mark, when you make a cuppa tea or put on a Durex condom, remember it just could be the tea or rubber from OUR country you might be using. My sister is also in the UK, she did a MSc in Chemical Engineering at Imperial College and for now, is a manager at William Hill and she gets paid £20k per annum. At least she got a work permit from William Hill. But it’s gonna be much harder for me with only a BSc. I want to study further, but my finances are pretty exhausted. Do you seriously think my parents would have planned-out how easy or hard it is for me to get a job in the UK while they were trying to put me to a good school when I was like five?! Since we got our independence from the British in 1948, our country has been in a state of ethnic conflict. In fact, the British have brought Indian Tamils from South India to work in our tea plantations and soon the Sinhalese and Tamils divided and the inevitable racial conflict began. Still the majority is Sinhalese, but most Tamils want an independent state. The country has been peaceful for the past three or four years, but only a few days ago, a suicide-bomb jacket was discovered near the President’s house in Colombo. Thankfully, my Mom and Step-dad have now moved to New Zealand, which is much more peaceful, and of course the living standards are great.
Enough arguing; chill out Mark, let’s all go to the pub and grab a beer! From Kenny the Sri Lankan Kenneth Ranasinghe
Think about it!
I WOULD JUST like to point out how dangerous opinions can be with this quote from Mark’s response last week: ‘We can afford to spill blood for oil...’ Can we? I saw no actual reasoning for this. Maybe he meant, ‘We can afford to spill oil for blood’… or perhaps not. Now I am neither agreeing nor disagreeing with the quote. My point is this; opinion stated as fact, with no foundations, can only lead to greaterconflict. So when we are writing letters, I suggest that we keep in mind what we are actually trying to say - it is a tad similar to essay writing, which we have all done to some degree of success. Otherwise, people get pissed off, blood/oil spills; the argument isn’t furthered. Also, I don’t know why Mark’s oil paragraph came up, it does remind me of a certain Texan though: ‘We can liberate the oil and maybe help the Iraqis along the way!’ Or something like that. Tobias First-year theology, history & history of ideas MENON SAYS: You make a good point here. Everyone should always think before they write. Oh, and I liked the Bush gag by the way.
Who’s the daddy?
HAVING FOLLOWED the debate between Mark (post-grad history) and others on the subject of terrorism, I would like to share a few thoughts: Every ‘terrorist’ group has its own roots. The IRA, the Chechens, the Kurdish PKK, the Tamil Tigers, the ANC, Hezbollah, the Shining Path, the Contras, the Irguns - to name but a few. All born for different reasons: lack of civil rights; a wish for independence; to fight an invasion of their lands; to win a homeland; as pawns in a war fought by other powers. Let's not forget the equal cruelties of official and unofficial State Terrorism. The difference between a suicide bomber on a London bus and a
missile exploding a car in a crowded Gaza street is one of semantics - the result in innocent lives lost is the same. Regime change via a car bomb in Lebanon or a cooked-up invasion in Iraq costs more innocent lives. The difference - and here I will be controversial - is that, whereas the terrorist realises the value of the innocent lives they take (in fact, counts on it as a way of putting pressure on the enemy), the 'civilised' states regard the innocent lives they take as expendable, or sometimes as a political embarrassment. "We don't do body counts", said Colin Powell. Remember Madeleine Albright declaring that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children as a result of sanctions was “a price worth paying” to keep one tin-pot dictator “in his box”? If bin Laden had expressed similar sentiments regarding the number of lives to be sacrificed in order to drive the Western powers from the Middle East - what would have been said? Compare and contrast... If it is good enough for democratic governments to say: "You can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs." Why is the attitude so terrible when terrorists take that view? These terrorists are just like us! We wish to lash out at things: so do they. Everything's a retaliation for something! There is serious hypocrisy in international politics. We here in Wales are not the obvious victims of it, so what we see as ‘mindless violence’ shocks us. After all, how many of us find something so compelling, so hateful, so important in our lives that we would willingly sacrifice ourselves to do something to change it; or how many of us would feel so worthless that we could be persuaded to strap explosives to ourselves in order to say: ‘In life you treated me as nothing - less than nothing - in death I will make you know me! I will visit my misery upon you who gave it to me?’ If we are not informed enough to empathise then we have no right to judge. Terrorism is a tactic to achieve an end. When we make serious efforts to address the roots of these conflicts we will make serious progress in eliminating the terrorism. The ‘War on Terror’ is nothing but the strong attempting to protect their ‘interests’ overseas. This is what hap-
These were movements for national liberation. They had a clearly defined, limited objective, namely to secure freedom for a people in a defined area. To negotiate, concessions can be made, and movement towards civil rights/independence made. Bin Laden’s objectives are far more extensive. He aims at nothing less than the creation of a panIslamic state, with himself as Caliph (successor to the Prophet), its aim the total subjection of the World to Islam (this information is freely available). Remember, it was the terrorists who attacked the West, not the other way around. Negotiation pens all around the globe. The boot just happens to be on the other foot and people have to lead lives of misery and degradation because of it. Whilst the strong can strike with impunity and make up justifications based on the well-established interplay of spin with public apathy, the terrorist is merely visiting some of that feeling of vulnerability back to us. Like Piers Horner, I don't believe there is a war against Islam: It is just coincidence that the West's oil interests lie in a predominantly Muslim region along with some of the more blatant examples of double-standards. Similarly, I don't believe that bin Laden and his ilk hate us for ‘our democracy and freedoms’ and wish to destroy us willy-nilly. We are fed that line because to acknowledge that they may have any genuine grievance and that our conduct could be at the root of it is unacceptable to us. That is not to say, after all of this, that I condone killing the innocent, no matter what the provocation. What I do say, however, is that evil is evil no matter who does the deed, or is behind the doer of the deed, or in whatever name the deed is done.
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would mean nothing less than the sacrifice of the freedom of millions of people forever. We cannot allow that, for when freedom is diminished, we are all diminished. To go to war and to fight, is a terrible thing. But to surrender liberty, especially the liberty of others, is more terrible still. To quote La Passionara: “It is better to die on our feet than to live on our knees.” We cannot give in to these terrorists, and surrender the people of ‘a far-off country of which we know nothing’ to a lifetime of slavery and suffering. Yours sincerely, Gerard Charmley. The world reaps what it sows: to simplify a phenomenon like terrorism is to bury your head in the sand. It won't go away by doing that. Yours, Piers' Dad.
Heroic Helen
I WOULD LIKE to thank a medical student, Helen, who helped me on Saturday. I fainted at a friend’s party and banged my head. She went with me to the hospital and we had to wait for 2 hours. My parents and myself are very grateful for the kindness that Helen showed me. I’m sure there are many others things she would rather have been doing on a Saturday night! Yours, Juliet Heath
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