The wonders of human stupidity and hypocrisy continue. In the West Bank, an Israeli sniper killed a Palestinian man the Israeli claims was behind several terrorist attacks and was about to commit another. No trial; no evidence provided; no arrest; nothing. They just shot the man in his own home. Possibly in front of his children.
Now the question is this: does this constitute terrorism? I’m not really sure how you can argue that it doesn’t. Execution without a trial — that’s pretty much what the five thousand plus in the World Trade Center received last month. They were found guilty (of what exactly, we don’t know, because the responsible party has not officially taken responsibility for the action, and as such has not tried to provide a justification for it) and summarily executed.
This kind of action is what people like bin Laden must have in mind when they say that Israel is a terrorist state. And yet will this fall prey to America’s “war on terrorism?” Certainly not, because America is a staunch backer of the Israeli state, though the reasons for this are most curious. A great deal of it is because of religious motivations — conservative Christians believe that when the Jews rebuild the temple it will herald the second coming of Christ. So in a country that supposedly exercises the “separation of church and state” we have a foreign policy largely informed by religious views.
Religion strikes once again.
More outbreaks of anthrax. A package mailed from Malaysia to Microsoft offices in Reno, Nevada, tested positive for anthrax. There was a plane emptied when a mysterious white powder was found in the lavatory and another emptied when a passenger seemed to be spraying a white powered — it turned out to be confetti from a greeting card. So America is, to say the least, a little jumpy. And it also seems that I (and several others) were right in saying that the 11 September attacks were just the beginning.
There was a statement released by someone in the al Queeda group — bin Laden’s little group of likeminded fanatics — who said essentially that the war on America was just beginning. He said that Britain and America would stuff more attacks because of the attack on Afghanistan, that the earth would shake beneath them. He also warned Muslims living in England and America to avoid air travel and tall buildings — a statement which the western world is regarding as an admission for the attacks last month. I think that might be stretching it a bit, but it is certainly plausible.
Now, onto the events of my personal life. Last night, of course, I went to Quattro and I sat there listening to Marcin J. talk about how he has no future in Poland and it suddenly dawned on me that I have even less of a future here. I certainly don’t want to go back don’t want to go back to America at the moment, but I realize that there’s really nothing here for me. I don’t regret having come back, but I also understand now that it’s probably just a one-year thing. I’ll have gotten it out of my system, so to speak. I’ll have shown myself that what everyone said was right. There’s nothing here for me.