From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: happening in Delhi, and that we did not have to buy an expensive plane ticket and worry about a rapidly dwindling set of dollar bills. So, the cost factor being brought into this argument is doubly perverse. You cannot argue first, that the event is colonialist and then that it would be better if the 'ex-colonized' such as us were kept out of it by holding it in some place geographically near to where you are, where we would never try and catch a flight to unless someone was paying for the ticket. We think it reveals some foresight on the part of the organizers to actually have platforms dispersed in four continents, so that people get a chance to participate even if they don't buy expensive plane tickets. As for your suggestion that the event have better online dissemination strategies, we agree that a discussion list for the platforms, as well as a more imaginative form of web presence on the part of Documenta XI would have helped. (Incidentally, the website - www.documenta.de - has begun to stream the Vienna presentations and the responses on their web site, with the Delhi ones to follow.) 3. The institutional setting of the location of Platform 2 in Delhi - The India Habitat Centre This has been addressed in the introductory remarks prior to the discussion of point 1. 4. The paucity of local participation This charge is not backed by any material evidence. There were five Indian featured panelists out of a total of twenty presentations from four continents. That means 25% of the featured presenters were Indians. The majority of Chairpersons and moderators were from India. And there was no paucity of Indian discussants after each of the presentations. For someone who was not present to pass judgement over the quantity of local participation in the event is very strange. 5. The lack of local back up and research What organizational problems may or may not have occurred due to the quality and level of local institutional back up and research is for the organisers of the event and the curatorial team to judge. We can say that we personally were contacted and met in New Delhi by a researcher working to assist the curatorial team as far back as the January 2000. We also know that this researcher met and had discussions with many other artists and practitioners in Delhi and other parts of India. We were pleasantly surprised to see the curatorial team well briefed about the local scene here, as a result of this and other inputs. 6. . The lack of attention to local concerns - and to the " the spiritual dimension of truth which underpins india's identity even today" At least four of the presentations, by Urvashi Butalia, Dilip Simeon, Shahid Amin and Rustom Bharucha - were specifically addressing difficult and contentious episodes in recent Indian history. By this count, India and concerns that could be called local in New Delhi got top billing. There have been reservations expressed in the discussion about the event on this list about the fact that many of the speakers from outside did not do more than offer a token obeisance to the specificities of history, society and culture in this part of the world. This is a general malaise, and has to do with the self-obsessive nature of much of intellectual production, due to which people are reluctant to productively engage with those elements of experience or discourse that are not immediately available to them. This is more of a problem in the west than it is in intellectual circles in India. Indian intellectuals happen to know more about Europe and North America, than most European and North American Intellectuals know about India. This 'asymmetry of ignorance' that has to do with a skewed intimacy with European intellectual culture and the English language is one of those legacies of colonialism which contributes to the ascent of the Indian intellectual in a global market of ideas. He/she is and is able to appear in some ways far more sophisticated. However, the average Indian intellectual would be just as ignorant or unaware of matters pertaining to Africa, or Latin America, or West, Central and Southeast Asia or even Australia. Intellectuals in India are often pleasantly surprised by how well his/her African counterpart knows the history of Indian cinema, (because of the long history of the hegemony of Indian popular cinema in Africa) but would be hard put to speak about any of the many African cinema cultures with any degree of knowledge or understanding. This is an instance of a never ending chain of the 'asymmetry of ignorance'. As for "the spiritual dimension of truth which underpins india's identity even today", we find any normative statements about 'India's Identity' flawed by their inherent essentialism. To claim, for or on behalf of any culture, greater or lesser reservoirs of 'spirituality' or 'reason' or 'aesthetic sensitivity' is to do violence to the complex and contradictory nature of cultural history. It is also to posit, what in our opinion is, always a false boundary. We have never been able to get a satisfactory answer to the question as to where the boundaries of India's identity lie, and where the boundary of a non-Indian, or western identity begins. with warm regards Raqs Media Collective (Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta) -- Shuddhabrata Sengupta SARAI:The New Media Initiative Centre for the Study of Developing Societies 29 Rajpur Road Delhi 110 054 India Phone : (00 91 11) 3960040 From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: happening in Delhi, and that we did not have to buy an expensive plane ticket and worry about a rapidly dwindling set of dollar bills. So, the cost factor being brought into this argument is doubly perverse. You cannot argue first, that the event is colonialist and then that it would be better if the 'ex-colonized' such as us were kept out of it by holding it in some place geographically near to where you are, where we would never try and catch a flight to unless someone was paying for the ticket. We think it reveals some foresight on the part of the organizers to actually have platforms dispersed in four continents, so that people get a chance to participate even if they don't buy expensive plane tickets. As for your suggestion that the event have better online dissemination strategies, we agree that a discussion list for the platforms, as well as a more imaginative form of web presence on the part of Documenta XI would have helped. (Incidentally, the website - www.documenta.de - has begun to stream the Vienna presentations and the responses on their web site, with the Delhi ones to follow.) 3. The institutional setting of the location of Platform 2 in Delhi - The India Habitat Centre This has been addressed in the introductory remarks prior to the discussion of point 1. 4. The paucity of local participation This charge is not backed by any material evidence. There were five Indian featured panelists out of a total of twenty presentations from four continents. That means 25% of the featured presenters were Indians. The majority of Chairpersons and moderators were from India. And there was no paucity of Indian discussants after each of the presentations. For someone who was not present to pass judgement over the quantity of local participation in the event is very strange. 5. The lack of local back up and research What organizational problems may or may not have occurred due to the quality and level of local institutional back up and research is for the organisers of the event and the curatorial team to judge. We can say that we personally were contacted and met in New Delhi by a researcher working to assist the curatorial team as far back as the January 2000. We also know that this researcher met and had discussions with many other artists and practitioners in Delhi and other parts of India. We were pleasantly surprised to see the curatorial team well briefed about the local scene here, as a result of this and other inputs. 6. . The lack of attention to local concerns - and to the " the spiritual dimension of truth which underpins india's identity even today" At least four of the presentations, by Urvashi Butalia, Dilip Simeon, Shahid Amin and Rustom Bharucha - were specifically addressing difficult and contentious episodes in recent Indian history. By this count, India and concerns that could be called local in New Delhi got top billing. There have been reservations expressed in the discussion about the event on this list about the fact that many of the speakers from outside did not do more than offer a token obeisance to the specificities of history, society and culture in this part of the world. This is a general malaise, and has to do with the self-obsessive nature of much of intellectual production, due to which people are reluctant to productively engage with those elements of experience or discourse that are not immediately available to them. This is more of a problem in the west than it is in intellectual circles in India. Indian intellectuals happen to know more about Europe and North America, than most European and North American Intellectuals know about India. This 'asymmetry of ignorance' that has to do with a skewed intimacy with European intellectual culture and the English language is one of those legacies of colonialism which contributes to the ascent of the Indian intellectual in a global market of ideas. He/she is and is able to appear in some ways far more sophisticated. However, the average Indian intellectual would be just as ignorant or unaware of matters pertaining to Africa, or Latin America, or West, Central and Southeast Asia or even Australia. Intellectuals in India are often pleasantly surprised by how well his/her African counterpart knows the history of Indian cinema, (because of the long history of the hegemony of Indian popular cinema in Africa) but would be hard put to speak about any of the many African cinema cultures with any degree of knowledge or understanding. This is an instance of a never ending chain of the 'asymmetry of ignorance'. As for "the spiritual dimension of truth which underpins india's identity even today", we find any normative statements about 'India's Identity' flawed by their inherent essentialism. To claim, for or on behalf of any culture, greater or lesser reservoirs of 'spirituality' or 'reason' or 'aesthetic sensitivity' is to do violence to the complex and contradictory nature of cultural history. It is also to posit, what in our opinion is, always a false boundary. We have never been able to get a satisfactory answer to the question as to where the boundaries of India's identity lie, and where the boundary of a non-Indian, or western identity begins. with warm regards Raqs Media Collective (Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta) -- Shuddhabrata Sengupta SARAI:The New Media Initiative Centre for the Study of Developing Societies 29 Rajpur Road Delhi 110 054 India Phone : (00 91 11) 3960040 From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: When I read Catherine David�s texts before I came to see the documenta, I had already gotten the impression that she was resisting works from the other parts of the world. She had used two or three terms like �I�m not interested in culture shopping,� or �I�m not going to have an ethnic feast,� and had said that works from other cultures appear in Europe as exotic or even as neocolonial if they are not contextualized. I was not sure whether this was a defense mechanism, or if she was really thinking these things. After having had some dialogs with her, I think that this is just part of a general preoccupation, so I�m more respectful now of her position. David does seem to have one very strong inclination as an art historian and art critic, which is to contextualize historically. She does not want to show any art object, even a Western object, without making sure that its historicity is apparent in some way. It must be available to the viewer and sufficiently contextualized either by supporting information or by supporting works. I�m basically very sympathetic to this curatorial position. The other preoccupation she has is trying to resist commodification, reification, as it is occurring in the Western art market. I think that the reification of the art object is not the only way that reification takes place, and I did comment upon this to her. Reification cannot be avoided: whatever is put out in an exhibition like the documenta is already reified, and the documenta itself is the most reified art event of Europe or of the world (it has private sponsors, and is seen everywhere as an advertising image, etc.). There is no way to overcome that. One can, however, try to resist it by keeping the documenta from becoming an art festival for the galleries, and I think David has done that. In relation to the �100 Days 100 Guests� program, I raised the question as to whether the exchange through discourse isn�t too easy of a way out. It has of course its advantages: people use a similar code in discourse, which allows 100 guests from everywhere to communicate, and allows a general audience to listen and make sense of it all. However, discourse and intellectual life are also prone to a certain degree of commodification. It is an easy packet to get Geeta Kapur, Gayatri Spivak, and Edward Sa�to Kassel. I see it as a problem that one encapsulates entire cultures by expelling their art works while at the same time including their discourses. It�s like substituing an easily transportable commodity for one which is more difficult and more expensive to install. I think that David�s point of view is that, though a piece of art may sit in the exhibition and look like an exotic object, by the very nature of the people she invites, issues will be raised, the documenta, its concept, and the Euro-American situation may be critiqued, so that contextualizing and historicising is already taking place. I think this is a fair assumption. One statement which she clearly made in the introduction to the shortguide, is that in the art of many non-Western cultures there are local modernities, but not what one might call advanced or avantgarde works. The dynamic, she says, is in other forms of expression: in cinema, theater, literature, music, and in the oral traditions. There are cases in which this is true. For instance she has said that in Iran, cinema is the most advanced art form, and we all seem to have the same impression. But I wouldn�t say that this is true for India, for Indonesia, Korea, nor the Philippines, because I know that in these countries, the visual arts have a very definite positioning within the cultural complex. The same is true for Singapore and Thailand, and certainly South Africa (where David took Kentridge from), has one of the most vital visual art scenes. And Cuba�s, as we know, is one of the most advanced in South America, in terms not only of the production of art, but having become the point of convergence for the Latin American avantgarde. I have actually had quite a lot of problems with this assumption. Even though she wants to open up the critical discourse on art, she is still protecting the nature of the art object as it has developed in the West. Also, she is more comfortable addressing the other arts, where strong intervention from her is not required. She is interested in cinema, but she is not a curator of film. Literature, music, and theatre are not her fields either, so she isn�t held responsible when she says there is a greater dynamic in these areas. It is easier for her to protect a certain ground where she is very particular in what she wants to show. David is very stringent and has a clear idea of where the avantgarde comes out of modernity. She has narrowed it down from the general historical avantgarde to what she calles �critical art.� This is a critical intervention into the avantgarde itself. She understands very clearly the ways in which artists have intervened in, disrupted, and interrogated urban lives, society, and contemporary history, artistic positions commonly found in Europe and the USA, and to an extent in Latin America. She is much more confident and convinced about these, and the �rest� she is literally seeing as simply the rest. In response to her comment that there exists �elsewhere� some other dynamic, I said to her that she is speaking as though it is an abstract dynamic. I believe this is a shortcut, and not a real investigation of the cultures involved. One of the reasons for her position, is that in these other art forms, (music, performing arts, cinema, etc.), the axis between the traditional form and the popular, urban form is more easily located. And that is what usually interests the Western intellectual, critic or curator. One thing I would like to add is that, though I come from India, I�m no longer interesed in repeatedly telling European curators that they must include Asian art in their exhibitions. There is a certain kind of parallel developement of regions now, and that�s for the best. I�m not saying that regionalism is important; what I�m saying is that there are parallel expositions and parallel discourses, and it�s not necessary to have everything come to Europe or go to America. If it happens, then good: it means that there is a greater balance of exchange, that a new form of internationalism is developing. On the other hand, it doesn�t seem to trouble me very much anymore. One can now be sure that there will be something in Kwangju, or in Queensland, or in Johannesburg. Sao Paulo has always had an interesting viewpoint. I would not be very concerned that the documenta X doesn�t have more Asian or African artists. Of course, it would have been a more complete understanding of contemporary art, and if she is interested in the historical avantgarde then she should have taken into account the historical avantgarde in different parts of the world. If she means to present just the Euro-American avantgarde with supplementary discourses, it remains just one point of view, and she and other curators will have to go elsewhere to see what�s happening in the world. If David said that she was going to present a resume of contemporary culture, this is not represented by the actual exhibition. But, if she claims to be interested in the deconstruction of cultural practices through very rapid (and often destructive) processes of urban acculturation, then I think that she has made her point. In my mind, she has created a phenomenology of urban culture in the European-American context, concentrated (if you have noticed the works) on negative species, on species of destruction and death, of abuse and marginilization of peoples and populations in Western cultures. There is definetely a point of view on which she is putting a critical edge. However, the objects she recognizes come out of the Western avantgarde. She doesn�t seem to recognize other objects, or when she does recognize them, she fears that they are �exotic.� To some degree, as a European curator she makes a very exclusive choice in the matter, and that choice is based on criteria that come out of Western modernism. How radically she makes her choices, or whatever cutting edge she tries to give the exhibition, she is still in an exclusionary mode rather than in an inclusive one. From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: To the casual observer, Microsoft seems to have changed its ways. Closer inspection shows that it remains a heavy-handed monopolist THREE things have changed for Microsoft, the world�s biggest software company, since it was declared an �abusive monopolist� and ordered to be split in two by Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson last year. After an appeals-court hearing in February, which went well for the company, the threat of break-up seems to have receded. Second, Microsoft has devised a new strategy, called .NET, under which it will try to recast itself as a provider of Internet-based software services rather than PC-based products, and thus grab a large share of the potentially vast new market for �web services�. And third, even though its profits and share price have held up far better than they have at technology companies that depend on hardware sales or telecoms-equipment orders, Microsoft has been doing its best to seem to have abandoned its old monopolistic behaviour. It is not that Microsoft admits any wrongdoing in its antitrust case, you understand. But it has twigged that good behaviour may undermine Judge Jackson�s contention that it is predatory and untrustworthy�and might encourage the appeals court to overturn his ruling. Playing well with others also fits with Microsoft�s new software strategy, which, unusually, depends heavily on open (rather than proprietary) standards and on co-operation with other software makers. So has Microsoft really become a kinder, gentler company? There is some evidence that it has. Take, for instance, its long-standing opposition to �open-source� software, in which the source code revealing a program�s inner workings is made freely available. Microsoft has only ever made its own source code available to a handful of close allies. Last month, however, the firm announced that it would grant around 1,000 of its largest corporate customers access to 95% of the source code of its Windows 2000 and Windows XP operating systems. Unlike true open-source software, whose openness means that bugs can be more easily found and fixed, the Windows source code will be made available only on condition that it is not modified. Even so, it will help large firms to ensure that their own software works smoothly with Windows. Another area in which Microsoft seems to have taken a step towards the co-operative, open approach of the Internet is in the development of new standards for web services, which have such quirky names as XML, SOAP, UDDI and WSDL. Microsoft is generally deemed to have been a well-behaved participant in the standard-setting process�in marked contrast to the old Microsoft, which often produced its own incompatible versions of industry standards. This time around, says David Winer, an independent software engineer who is working on the SOAP standard, the company seems to have realised that the emergence of unified standards is in its own best interests. That does not necessarily mean that Microsoft is a willing convert, however. �I think the world changed, and it�s sucking them along with it,� says Mr Winer. In order to convince its rivals that it really does want their products to work together, Microsoft recently hired Dan�l Lewin to act as its ambassador to Silicon Valley, where he has worked for 25 years at several firms, including Apple and NeXT. Mr Lewin insists that, when it comes to interoperability with other firms� products and embracing open standards, Microsoft has changed. �This is a fundamental movement,� he says. Another sign of change is Microsoft�s new advertising campaign, in which the company�s usual po-facedness is replaced by a more humorous approach, including a hitherto unseen ability to laugh at itself. One ad pokes fun at Clippy, the annoying paperclip character that pops up to provide help to users of Office, and jokes that the XP in Office XP, the latest version of the software, stands for �ex-paperclip�. For a company that never normally admits mistakes and championed the use of the word �issue� in place of �bug�, this is quite a change. No laughing matter Yet despite all this, there are good reasons to be sceptical about Microsoft�s intentions (or even ability) to reform itself. Granting limited access to the Windows source code, for example, may help to soften Microsoft�s image, but it is a far cry from embracing the open-source model. Microsoft has falsely portrayed itself as the champion of open standards in the past, notably during its �browser war� with Netscape, only to revert to its old tactics later. Might the company not simply be waiting for XML, SOAP and the other new standards to take off, ask its critics, before hijacking them by creating its own proprietary versions? Such fears were heightened last month when Microsoft announced a batch of services, codenamed HailStorm, that form part of its .NET strategy. Just as Windows provides PC programmers with access to basic functions, such as drawing on the screen or accessing the network, HailStorm will provide similar �building block� functions (e-mail, instant messaging and so on) for programmers to incorporate into the software for their web-based services. The idea is that users will sign up with Microsoft for HailStorm services and pay a monthly fee; this will enable them to use web services that rely on HailStorm�s building blocks. Microsoft hopes that this will make .NET an attractive platform for programmers, and thus encourage them to adopt .NET rather than the approach based on Java, a programming language that is being promoted by Microsoft�s rivals, chief among them Sun Microsystems. Already, American Express, eBay, Expedia and Groove Networks have all announced plans to build .NET web services using HailStorm. What is worrying, however, is that HailStorm will be closely integrated with Windows XP, the next version of Windows, so that once a user has logged into Windows no further action is required to make use of HailStorm services. Indeed, the log-on and registration systems for Windows XP and HailStorm will be the same. Microsoft will, in other words, be able to turn millions of Windows users into HailStorm users, and to offer programmers an enormous potential audience for .NET web services. Similarly, by funnelling millions of users into HailStorm from HotMail and MSN, its Internet properties, Microsoft may be able to sign up as many as 100m HailStorm users by the end of 2003. The firm thus has a golden opportunity to exploit the dominance of Windows to ensure that .NET takes off. It is, as one analyst puts it, �vintage Microsoft�. The company is up to its old tricks in other ways, too. Windows XP contains several new functions, including media-playback and remote-troubleshooting features, that previously required the purchase of additional software. Makers of such software may now face the same fate as Netscape�Microsoft can extinguish them whenever it chooses. Windows XP also includes the latest version of Microsoft�s music and video player, Windows Media Player 8, which will not work with previous versions of Windows. As well as encouraging users to switch to Windows XP, it contains a new music-compression format called WMA, which is being positioned as an alternative to the popular MP3 format. Microsoft argues, with good reason, that WMA has several technical advantages over MP3, including smaller file-sizes; but the fact remains that Microsoft is using the clout of Windows to promote its own playback software and music format. The parallels with the Netscape case, in which Microsoft used Windows to promote its web browser, are ominously clear. In short, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that, if Microsoft has changed at all, it has done so only superficially. Inside the software industry�s 800-pound gorilla, the heart of an incorrigible monopolist beats still. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get personalized email addresses from Yahoo! Mail - only $35 a year! http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/ From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: June 26, 2001 Freelancers Win in Case of Work Kept in Databases By LINDA GREENHOUSE WASHINGTON, June 25 � The Supreme Court ruled today that a group of newspaper and magazine publishers infringed the copyrights of freelance contributors by making their articles accessible without permission in electronic databases after publication. As a result, the publishers, including The New York Times, face the prospect of paying substantial damages to the six freelancers who brought the lawsuit in 1993 and perhaps to thousands of others who have joined in three class-action lawsuits against providers of electronic databases, which the court also found liable for copyright infringement today. The court did not rule today on a remedy for the violation that it found in a 7-to-2 majority opinion by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The case now returns to Federal District Court in Manhattan. In a 1999 ruling against the publishers, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit did not address the remedy issue. There are a number of unresolved questions that were not part of the Supreme Court case and that may take months or years to resolve, lawyers involved in the case said today. The Times and the other publishers, Time Inc. and Newsday, had warned the Supreme Court that a finding of liability would lead them to remove freelance contributions from the databases, a threat that the court appeared to have found something of an irritant. "Speculation about future harms is no basis for this court to shrink authorial rights," Justice Ginsburg said. Referring to the licensing arrangements that are commonly used to apportion royalties in the music industry, she said the parties to the case "may draw on numerous models for distributing copyrighted words and remunerating authors for their distribution." Arthur Sulzberger Jr., chairman of The New York Times Company and publisher of The Times, said today that the company "will now undertake the difficult and sad process of removing significant portions from its electronic historical archive." He added, "Unfortunately, today's decision means that everyone loses." The Times Company said in a statement that freelance writers who wanted their articles to remain in the electronic archives should notify the company. Since the mid-1990's, The Times and most other publishers that use freelance work have required authors to waive their electronic republication rights. For that reason, the decision today has little prospective importance in terms of changing current industry practice. But liability for past infringement could be considerable, depending in part on how the lower courts deal with complex statute of limitations issues. It is not clear, for example, whether there has been a new infringement each time a freelance article has been made available for viewing on a user's computer screen. Jonathan Tasini, president of the National Writers Union and the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit, said in a statement, "Now it's time for the media industry to pay creators their fair share and let's sit down and negotiate over this today." In 1993, the union, which has 7,000 members, set up a "publication rights clearinghouse" through which writers can register their work and publishers can track copyright ownership and payment obligations. The case, New York Times Company v. Tasini, No. 00-201, dealt only with freelance work; publishers own the copyright on articles produced by staff members. The three publishers in the case license their contents to Lexis/Nexis, an electronic database by which individual articles are retrieved in a text-only format. The Times has a separate arrangement with another defendant in the case, University Microfilms International, which reproduces Times material in other electronic formats that also result in the display of individual articles. It was this feature � that what the electronic user retrieves, views or downloads is an individual article, divorced from its original context � that was most significant for the court's legal analysis. The case called on the court to interpret a section of the Copyright Act of 1976 that gives newspapers and magazines, which hold a collective copyright in the entirety of each issue, the right also to publish "any revision of that collective work." The question for the court was whether the electronic version was a revision or something else, in which case the copyright on individual articles would revert to any freelance contributors who had not agreed to give up that right. The publishers argued that the electronic versions were simply a technologically more sophisticated version of the printed issues that should be seen as a mere "revision" under the "media-neutral" approach of the Copyright Act. In a dissenting opinion, Justice John Paul Stevens, who was joined by Justice Stephen G. Breyer, said there was nothing more to the case than that. "Neither the conversion of the print publishers' collective works from printed to electronic form, nor the transmission of those electronic versions of the collective works to the electronic databases, nor even the actions of the electronic databases once they receive those electronic versions does anything to deprive those electronic versions of their status as mere `revisions' of the original collective works," Justice Stevens said. But Justice Ginsburg's majority opinion said the publishers' "encompassing construction" of their republication privilege was "unacceptable." She said the massive database, encompassing many published issues, "no more constitutes a `revision' of each constituent edition than a 400-page novel quoting a sonnet in passing would represent a `revision' of that poem." The electronic databases are not simply modern versions of old-fashioned microfilm, Justice Ginsburg said. Even though a microfilm roll combines multiple editions, "the user first encounters the article in context," she said, in contrast to someone calling up an article on their computer, where individual articles appear "disconnected from their original context." She said the principle of media neutrality "should protect the authors' rights in the individual articles to the extent those articles are now presented individually, outside the collective work context, within the databases' new media." The court may soon have a chance to expand on the role of context that Justice Ginsburg emphasized. National Geographic said today that it would soon file an appeal to the Supreme Court from a ruling by the federal appeals court in Atlanta, which said that a 30-disc CD-ROM set that reproduced every page of every issue of the magazine was a new work rather than a revision, even though each article appeared in its original context. From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: Cracking the Code of Online Censorship By JENNIFER 8. LEE EVERY year the Electronic Frontier Foundation hands out its Pioneer Awards to people who have played crucial roles in the history of technology. Recipients have included visionaries like Ivan Sutherland, creator of some of the first computer graphics programs; Douglas C. Engelbart, an inventor of the mouse; and Linus Torvalds, inventor of the popular Linux operating system. This year one of the three winners was Seth Finkelstein, an activist who decrypts filtering programs, the software used by private companies, libraries and schools to block out undesirable sites. As a founder of the Censorware Project, an anti-filtering advocacy group, Mr. Finkelstein has influenced public debate and legal decisions, including a First Amendment case on filtering policy at a public library in Virginia. But most people have probably never heard of him, and until recently that is the way Mr. Finkelstein, a reclusive 36-year-old computer programmer, wanted it. Over the last six years he has spent hundreds of hours decrypting the blacklists of popular Web filtering programs like Cyber Patrol and X-Gear. Most filters work by sending out programs that comb the Web for banned words and then produce a list of Web sites containing those words. Those sites are compiled into the closely guarded blacklists that Mr. Finkelstein tries to uncover. But don't call him a hacker. He gets prickly when he hears that word. Instead he describes himself as a civil-libertarian software engineer. Mr. Finkelstein contends that filtering is not only inherently flawed but that in many cases it even acts as a deliberate censor. Many of the Web sites on the blacklists � feminist sites, gay and lesbian information sites, health sites and religious sites � are more political than pornographic in nature. "This is inevitable," Mr. Finkelstein said. "Once you give censors free rein, they go after sex. They go after sex education. They go after feminism. They go after gay rights." The makers of filtering software say that criticism of their products' accuracy is old news and they are addressing the problems. "Technology evolves," said Susan Getgood, vice president for home and education markets at SurfControl, a maker of Web and e- mail filtering products. "It is a long way from the Model T to the BMW Z3 and a long way from the early days of filtering to the products on the market today." But Mr. Finkelstein argues that even if filters were free of political bias, they would block some sites in error because they cannot understand context. Most of the software no longer mistakenly blocks sites involving breast cancer or chicken breast recipes, but much of the blocking remains problematic nonetheless. Mr. Finkelstein said he was now analyzing a list that blocked the National Institutes of Health's Spanish-language site on diabetes. The Spanish word hora, which means hour and is used often on the page, also happens to be a Swedish word for prostitute. "Computers are extremely stupid," he said. "Talk to any computer scientists, not the marketing people. They'll tell you artificial intelligence cannot determine context." Mr. Finkelstein grew up in the Bronx, where his interest in cryptography was fostered by Sherlock Holmes tales and newspaper cryptograms. He studied mathematics and physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with the goal of becoming a theoretical physicist. When he was rejected by all the top graduate physics programs, he said, he turned to computer programming as a job that paid the bills. But he finds that his technical skills have more meaning in urgent social debates. Mr. Finkelstein said he began cracking the filtering blacklists in 1995 because he was concerned about how the software was being promoted as an alternative to government censorship. "There was a big social campaign among civil libertarians to talk up and tout censorware as both a legal and social argument against government censorship," he said. "While I did not oppose the legal argument, I thought strongly that the social campaign was a huge mistake.` To crack a filter, Mr. Finkelstein engages in a dance of decryption that is part mathematics, part intuition and part brute force. In 1998, his blend of technical skills and political convictions helped the American Civil Liberties Union win a federal lawsuit challenging the library Internet filtering policy in Loudoun County, Va., on First Amendment grounds. Among the sites that the organization said the library blocked was an informative site on safe sex and the American Association of University Women's Maryland site. A federal judge ruled against the library. The A.C.L.U. and the American Library Association have also filed suits challenging the Children's Internet Protection Act, passed by Congress last year. The law requires that libraries receiving federal financing and discounts for Internet service under certain federal statutes must install filtering software. Mr. Finkelstein's work exposes him to the threat of legal action, too. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act generally forbids the circumvention of digital encryptions, although one of the exemptions granted by the Librarian of Congress is for the decryption of blacklists, largely because of Mr. Finkelstein's lobbying. But even if decrypting the blacklists may be legal, releasing them to the public may not be, since they are a form of intellectual property. He said his concerns about the potential for legal trouble were validated when two computer programmers who posted a program that could circumvent Cyber Patrol were sued by Mattel, which was then the parent company of the software's maker. In a settlement last year the programmers agreed to stop posting it on the Web. So Mr. Finkelstein had until recently worked relatively anonymously from his cluttered apartment in Cambridge, Mass., passing his information to journalists, lawyers and other activists to publicize. Much of his work involves analyzing and documenting incongruities in filtering software. In a report on SmartFilter that he wrote a couple of years ago, for example, Mr. Finkelstein pointed out that it blocked WrestlePages ("The best source for wrestling news"); MotoWorld.com, a motorcycle sport magazine produced by ESPN; and Affirmation: Gay and Lesbian Mormons, a support site. Company officials at Secure Computing (news/quote), which makes SmartFilter, declined to be interviewed about the software but released a statement. "It is not technology such as SmartFilter that makes the rules; it is organizations themselves," it said. Mr. Finkelstein is particularly annoyed that language translation sites are blocked simply because they can circumvent filters. Visitors to a language translation site can enter the Web address of a banned site and then see a translation at a different address. "It shows that censorware is about control, not filtering," he said. So Mr. Finkelstein intends to continue decrypting, as he scoffs at claims that computer technology is close to acquiring the contextual intelligence needed to identify inappropriate sites. "It will be a phenomenal advance," he said of contextual ability. "They will get the equivalent of a Nobel Prize. They will not be selling it in a tawdry program for a couple of hundred dollars." From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: "The best guide yet on a subject of central importance to anyone interested in the future of media, and the growing marriage between art and science....The collection is historically significant, given that nobody has ever woven together the different threads, thoughts and impulses that become multimedia, a new form both of media and culture.... The book flows skillfully from one idea to the next, each section building on the one that preceded it." - Jon Katz, Slashdot "In the Norton Anthology tradition, Packer and Jordan bring together seminal contributions that artists and scientists have made to the field of computer-human interaction... An evocative whirlwind tour through 100 years of work... Excellent..." - S. Joy Mountford, Wired "[MULTIMEDIA is] a key source book in the field of art, science and technology. This book is excellent in all respects." - Annick Bureaud, Leonardo Digital Reviews "Readers interested in the history of multimedia should be enthralled by this collection of hard-to-find essays.... A remarkable blending of past and present, these essays remind us that today's wondrous inventions didn't just spring into existence out of nothingness." - Booklist MULTIMEDIA: FROM WAGNER TO VIRTUAL REALITY Table of Contents Foreword by William Gibson Overture by Randall Packer and Ken Jordan I. Integration 1. Richard Wagner, "Outlines of the Artwork of the Future" 2. F. T. Marinetti, Bruno Corra, Emilio Settimelli, Arnaldo Ginna, Giacomo Balla, Remo Chiti, "The Futurist Cinema" 3. L�l�holy-Nagy, "Theater, Circus, Variety" 4. Richard Higgins, "Intermedia" 5. Billy Kl�"The Great Northeastern Power Failure" 6. Nam June Paik, "Cybernated Art" and "Art and Satellite" II. Interactivity 7. Norbert Wiener, "Cybernetics in History" 8. J.C.R. Licklider, "Man-Computer Symbiosis" 9. Douglas Engelbart, "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework" 10. John Cage, "Diary: Audience 1966" 11. Roy Ascott, "Behaviourist Art and the Cybernetic Vision" 12. Myron Krueger, "Responsive Environments" 13. Alan Kay, "User Interface: A Personal View" III. Hypermedia 14. Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think" 15. Ted Nelson, excerpt from Computer Lib/Dream Machines 16. Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg, "Personal Dynamic Media" 17. Marc Canter, "The New Workstation: CD ROM Authoring Systems" 18. Tim Berners-Lee, "Information Management: A Proposal" 19. George Landow and Paul Delany, "Hypertext, Hypermedia and Literary Studies: The State of the Art" IV. Immersion 20. Morton Heilig, "The Cinema of the Future" 21. Ivan Sutherland, "The Ultimate Display" 22. Scott Fisher, "Virtual Interface Environments" 23. William Gibson, "Academy Leader" 24. Marcos Novak, "Liquid Architectures in Cyberspace" 25. Daniel Sandin, Thomas DeFanti, and Carolina Cruz-Neira, "A Room with a View" V. Narrativity 26. William Burroughs, "The Future of the Novel" 27. Allan Kaprow, "Untitled Guidelines for Happenings" 28. Bill Viola, "Will There Be Condominiums in Data Space?" 29. Lynn Hershman, "The Fantasy Beyond Control" 30. Roy Ascott, "Is There Love in the Telematic Embrace?" 31. Pavel Curtis, "Mudding: Social Phenomena in Text-Based Virtual Realities" 32. Pierre L�, "The Art and Architecture of Cyberspace" -- Monica Narula Sarai:The New Media Initiative 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054 www.sarai.net From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: is the technical-programming team and the other is composed of media practitioners and researchers. While the techie team has taken apart the hardware to explain how it all works and have ensured that the Linux operating system and various free software that are being used are running smoothly, the team of old and new media practitioners have imparted a variety of skills. These include a knowledge and facility with the software of course, but also and very importantly, the opening out of modes of narrative and reflection upon one's experiences and environment. So there were sessions in which photographs were analysed, stories written singly and collaboratively, sounds recorded, soundscapes developed, the economic and social layers within the basti unpeeled, and so on. The software and the media tools that were available were: drawing sheets, crayons, simple audio recorders, an instamatic camera, a scanner, and GIMP and Star Office on a Gnome desktop with innumerable games! (now Audacity - a sound editing software - has also been added) This process that we all went through was exciting and fulfilling for all of us - participants and practitioners, but during this we faced a number of what can be termed as problems as far as appropriate technology is concerned. The games that the participants played, even though very useful in making them comfortable with the keyboard and great fun, were unable to speak to them of their personal experience of mobility, space and time. Basically there were no familiar cultural referents in the design. The even bigger problem was that in the process of learning text, image and sound editing, their descriptions and understanding of an experience became fragmented. The software began to take over the complex web of imagination, and began to direct them in fairly unidirectional ways. This is because it expects of you to represent your experience, or your space, in only one media at a time. The mode in which they described their experience of space and time of their everyday routine, was a complex web of images, sounds and narrations. These narrations, in the speaking and in the writing, portrayed different levels of intensities. The chaos and the immediacy of the spoken narration was brought into order in the act of writing. For example, if the spoken text describing a road accident gave a very visualized rendering of the incident with a complex soundscape, the written text would be not only much more ordered, but it would also bring in the self of the writer in very direct ways. In that sense, the registers of representation would change with the media of narration. But the fact is that if one is to truly "experience" the narrative of the incident as an audience, it would best emerge when all the narrations are made available to us. And this probably holds true for the creator as well. It can be argued that this fragmentation will lessen once there is a greater facility with using software, or by using specifically multi media software, like Director for example. Personally, as someone who has been educated as a filmmaker and has worked as one, and thus comfortable in thinking about sound, image and text in connected ways, I still find my work on a computer unable to become adequately woven together. And where software like Director is concerned, we cannot use it as we are working on configurations for the community which are low-cost, as also inspired and informed by the free software model. This is very pertinent as community media labs cannot afford to buy expensive software - as a matter of fact we have also been working on finding out low-cost hardware solutions as well - nor can they be pirated as NASSCOM, India's software 'police' organisation, is working overtime to ensure that. But more importantly, we feel that the ideas that invigorate the free software model: sharing, collaboration, open distribution and modification, are ideas that are part of the philosophical basis of the CyberMohalla project. Although here I must add that there is one worrying aspect of much of the software design that is happening within the free software model - too often it merely replicates what proprietary software does, and does not seek a fundamentally different perceptual experience of the software. The argument for this is obvious - there is need to prove that free software can do it as well - but it can still lead to a stilling of newer experiential models of software, newer understandings of interfaces. Yet another problem: It seemed to us that the collaborative nature of describing a collective experience or space that the participants were very comfortable with in oral renditions began to get very individuated. In the normal course of the day, while they would share all their other resources - such as food, transport money etc. - they would not share their files. I cannot definitely say that this is due to the ways software makes you relate to them, but we are wondering if that may have a role to play. After all, in all their oral narratives, many voices jostled together to express an experience� So when we media practitioners began to discuss this with the programmers, we started thinking about "what are the different possible software structures that can emerge from this problem?" The conceptual derivative that has emerged for us - by which creativity and expressivity can be adequately addressed - is the notion of "interlinked media", where image, sound and text (spoken and written) are seen as part of an unravelable web within the narration of an experience. This is the primary experience from which the Coding Collaboration note emerged, and here the terms of collaboration are not between programmers and other programmers but between programmers and participants, programmers and practitioners. The participants here, and in this case completely marginal to the digital wave (sometimes conceptualized as those on the other side of the digital divide), have given rise to an enigmatic problem. The response to this problem could give rise to technological modifications which are unexpected. -- Monica Narula Sarai:The New Media Initiative 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054 www.sarai.net From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: Finally, Kiran walked in and told the most remarkable story of all. From her classroom they could not see what was going on, their windows didn' t face the WTC. But they saw people running in the streets. When she announced to the class of 13-year-olds that perhaps it was an accident since the cause was unknown, one kid pointed out that it was 9:30 in the morning, it was two separate incidents, it was obviously on purpose. Another said maybe it was the Puerto Ricans from Vieques (that' s the island where the US Navy practices bombing and the site of recent protests). When Kiran left the class to go to the other side of the building to see for herself she saw one of the one of the towers come down. Fellow teachers were talking about attacks on the Pentagon and in Pittsburgh. A parent came screaming down the hall: the planes are coming, the planes are coming. from www.chalomumbai.com --------------------------------- Terrorist Attacks on U.S. - How can you help? Donate cash, emergency relief information inYahoo! News. --0-1889309596-1000408402=:6625 Content-Type: text/html; charset=us-ascii
On Tuesday, September 11
 By: Rehan Ansari
 September 13,2001

I woke up this morning to an absolutely gorgeous blue day outside my window in Brooklyn, New York and hysterical voices over the television. As I got out of my room, a housemate, Mark, walked in and said the World Trade Center Towers were burning and one of them had collapsed. I went with him to the television screaming in his room and within minutes saw the other twin tower give way. The event on the screen was so filmi, it didn't register.

The doorbell rang frantically. It was Gabriel, a young woman asking for Heidi, another housemate. They both work for the mayor's office and September 11 being municipal election day, they were supervising polling booths and assigned Wall St. She had seen the WTC burning and had immediately started moving away from the area. She walked from Fulton Street in the financial district over the Brooklyn Bridge to this house in Fort Greene in Brooklyn (a walk that should been an hour-long stroll in normal circumstances).

She was intensely worried that Heidi had not come back nor phoned her safety. Since the time she had left the area, the 110 storey buildings had essentially collapsed on everybody on Wall St.
After letting a cup of tea compose me, I walked out of the house to a nearby park which gives a panoramic view of south Manhattan from across the East River. It was still a perfectly blue sky and the Fort Greene neighbourhood, a remarkable example of mid 19th century domestic architecture, as beautiful as ever. The highest point in the park has The Martyr' s Monument, a symbolic tomb of 11,500 men who died on British prison ships during the Revolutionary War. From the vantage point of the monument I saw a huge plume of black and brown smoke rising from where the WTC stood. The plume was going straight up in the air.

I went back to the house to call everybody that I knew who was working in Manhattan. As I got in another co-worker of Heidi showed up, sweating profusely and covered with soot, asking if she made it back. We went inside and Chazz told me of the scene at the Brooklyn Bridge: people walking in unbroken numbers from Manhattan to Brooklyn. Paper was flying everywhere, burnt currency and, most of all, legal-sized paper. He swore some of the ash that was falling was human remains. He also asked where I was from. When I told him I was from Pakistan in New York for the summer he said, gently, that the xenophobia is going to begin and I better keep my face and accent from the streets. By the end of the day, with the media painting a picture in the face of unclaimed responsibility - somehow bin Ladin's operatives were more and more visible to surveillance and leaving trails everywhere as the day progressed, whereas they were invisible over the course of the planning of this incredible operation - I had shaved off my beard.

From the dark clouds of irresponsible statements over the course of the day, including those of news anchors Dan Rather, Peter Jennings and ex general Schwarzkopf, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani' s shone through. He said no vigilante justice would be tolerated. Heidi finally called but there was little relief as one other housemate, Kiran, a school teacher in Chinatown had still not been heard of. Two friends who worked on Wall St called. Devi, who worked in the next building from WTC, spoke of the sky going black, smoke filled elevator shafts and having been evacuated wearing gas masks. Her husband Sameer spoke about watching the planes crash into WTC from his office where he was conducting a morning meeting.

Finally, Kiran walked in and told the most remarkable story of all. From her classroom they could not see what was going on, their windows didn' t face the WTC. But they saw people running in the streets. When she announced to the class of 13-year-olds that perhaps it was an accident since the cause was unknown, one kid pointed out that it was 9:30 in the morning, it was two separate incidents, it was obviously on purpose. Another said maybe it was the Puerto Ricans from Vieques (that' s the island where the US Navy practices bombing and the site of recent protests). When Kiran left the class to go to the other side of the building to see for herself she saw one of the one of the towers come down. Fellow teachers were talking about attacks on the Pentagon and in Pittsburgh. A parent came screaming down the hall: the planes are coming, the planes are coming.

from www.chalomumbai.com


Terrorist Attacks on U.S. - How can you help?
Donate cash, emergency relief information in Yahoo! News. --0-1889309596-1000408402=:6625-- From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: STATEMENT BY THE FORUM OF INDIAN LEFTISTS ON THE EVENTS OF SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 We, the members of the Forum of Indian Leftists, deeply grieve the human loss sustained in the attacks on New York City and Washington of September 11, 2001. Our deepest condolences go out to the friends and loved ones of those who were killed or injured. We see these actions not as an attack on America alone, but as an assault on humanity in general. As citizens of the world, we unequivocally condemn these acts of horrific and unconscionable violence. We call on all those who deplore such acts to act now to prevent the proliferation of hatred, retribution, and war. We condemn the precipitous drive to put the world on a war footing against an as yet unconfirmed assailant--a move that can only compound the already immense human tragedy we have witnessed. We reiterate our belief that violence is not the solution to violence, nor can it provide a solution to longstanding political problems anywhere in the globe. It is of critical importance to stand united at this moment and denounce all acts of violence against civilians, whether by terrorists, the state, or our fellow civilians. A cycle of violence can only be broken if we work to create alternatives to violent retaliation. In the words of M.K. Gandhi, "An eye for an eye only makes the whole world blind." Therefore we stand together to demand in the loudest possible voice that the US state not retaliate with violence, and in the same voice to condemn any attempts to undermine civilian life and democratic freedoms in New York City, Washington, and elsewhere in the USA. As a group with a particular stake in working for peace and justice in India and its fellow South Asian nations, we are especially distressed by certain responses to this tragedy from within India. At a time when the world must stand together in unity and find ways toward peace and justice for all, we condemn polarizing and opportunistic statements from members of the Indian government and sections of the Indian press suggesting that certain nation-states such as India, Israel, and the USA must band together against others such as Pakistan and Afghanistan. We do not believe that advocating retribution against the scapegoat of "Islamic Fundamentalism" reflects the rational, democratic, non-violent, and tolerant values espoused by the majority of the Indian people. We call on the Indian government to respond to this calamity in a way that befits these values, and to stand firm against demands for uncritical support and abetment of acts of vengeance. As ordinary citizens, groups, and governments reflect and deliberate upon their responses to this terrible tragedy, we hope that all nations and peoples will use this opportunity to abandon the pursuit of intolerance, repression, and hatred in favor of reconciliation, solidarity, and reconstruction. In this moment of grief and mourning, let us proclaim our commitment to working towards peace and justice everywhere in the world. ======== 8. Subject: Statement of solidarity for the victims of wanton violence in the USA Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2001 Organization: South Asia Forum for Human Rights [ Kathmandu, Nepal ] Statement of solidarity for the victims of wanton violence in the USA We the members of South Asia Forum for Human Rights express our anguish and shock over the criminal attacks against innocent people in the United States of America. We express our most sincere sympathy to the victims and families and people of the United States of America. The manner in which these acts of violence were perpetrated by unknown actors or agencies leave no room for doubt about their utter disregard for human life. The use of civilian aircrafts full of innocent travellers as a weapon to strike at buildings housing thousands of people adds a new chapter to the book of horrors that the sickness of the human mind is capable of conceiving.The fact that these violent acts were carried out inside the United States, targeting the biggest commercial centre and the most secure military command centre, shows that today no nation, however powerful and security conscious, is safe from such attacks. Justice demands that the perpetrators of these heinous crime againt innocent persons be found and punished. The world community should assist the United States in this task. However, we would appeal to the USA and other governments that in their search for the perpetrators of these crimes, governments should be careful about the methods they apply. They should use law and established forms of legal investigation to bring the perpetrators to justice. We caution against the use of force, illegal means and methods and indiscriminate unilateral military retaliation, which unfortunately, has been done by powerful western states in the past. Such actions destroy the people's faith in rule of law and justice and cause more innocent deaths. It also perpetuates the cycle of recrimination, revenge and terrorism. We appeal to the leaders of the world governments, particularly the west to strive for a just social and political world order which alone can remove the sense of injustice and discrimination that motivates desperate people to perpetrate such acts of violence against innocent peoples. ______ #9. 13 September 2001 President George W Bush President of the United States of America. Dear Mr President, I am submitting to you condolences on behalf of concerned scholars, writers, human rights activists and others - Pakistanis, Indians, Bangladeshis, Swedes, British, Americans and others - expressing our deep sympathies on the very sad loss of innocent American and other lives on 11 September 2001 in various US cities as a result of a terrible terrorist slaughter. Dr. Ishtiaq Ahmed Campaign Organizer Associate Professor Department of Political Science Stockholm University SWEDEN. SOUTH ASIANS AND OTHER PEACE-LOVING PEOPLE OF THE WORLD CONDEMN TERRORIST ATTACKS AGAINST INNOCENT PEOPLE IN US CITIES The terrorist outrage against innocent men, women and children in various US cities on 11 September 2001 is feared to have claimed several thousand lives and inflicted injuries to even more people. Crimes against innocent people are crimes against all humanity and the perpetrators of these grotesque crimes should be brought to justice. At the same time, it is important that the Government of the United States does not fall prey to the same sort of perverted psychology that drives fanatics to perpetuate terrorist acts against innocent people. Military retaliation and revenge can result in grievous injury to innocent lives in areas suspected of harbouring suspects. Just as civilized governments are not deterred by dastardly acts of terror similarly victims of indiscriminate revenge attacks cannot accept that they should be punished for crimes they have not committed. It is therefore important that no action is taken without proper investigation and identification of the culprits. It is imperative that the terrorists involved in the present crime and others all over the world are denied safe haven everywhere, and the whole world community works together to exclude and isolate such barbarians and they are brought to justice. In the longer run one has to consider in a rational and dispassionate manner what drives people to such acts of utter desperation. Unless those causes are removed the spectre of violence will continue to loom large over the horizons the world over. Therefore it is important that justice is provided to all. It is now, more than ever before, necessary to examine seriously the non-violent alternative provided by Mahatma Gandhi and effectively employed by Dr Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders of the world to challenge and defeat forces representing brute might. 1. Ishtiaq Ahmed Associate Professor of Political Science Stockholm University I support this statement: 2. Dr Ajaz Anwar Lahore, Pakistan. 3. Prof. Hassan Gardezi Ontario, Canada. 4. Harsh Kapoor France. 5. Prof. Asghar Ali Engineer Centre for the Study of Secularism in Society Mumbai, India. 6. Prof. Pervez Hoodbhoy Islamabad, Pakistan 7.Michele Micheletti Associate Professor of Political Science Stockholm University 8.Anil Viakara CEO, Invenio Technologies Cambridge, Massachussetts USA: 9. Rafi Khawaja Software Quality Engineering LifeScan, Inc., Milpitas, CA (408) 942 5754 10. Gulzar Ahmed USA. 11. Prof. Bilal Hashmi USA. 12. Group Captain (rtd), Cecil Chaudhry St. Anthony's High School Lahore, Pakistan. 13. Ameek A. Ponda Sullivan & Worcester LLP One Post Office Square Boston, Massachusetts 02109 14. Dr. Leo Rebello, Senator-Minister for India of the International Parliament for Safety and Peace Bombay 15. Dr. Partha S. Ghosh Director Indian Council of Social Science Research P.O.Box 10528 Aruna Asaf Ali Marg New Delhi-110067 16. Kripa Sundar, Ph.D. Software Engineer USA. 17. Sharmila Gopinathan Software Engineer Boston, USA 18. Pritam Singh Brookes Oxford University UK. 19. J. Sri Raman Convenor Journalists Against Nuclear Weapons & Movement Against Nuclear Weapons Chennai India 20.. Razia Malik, USA 21. Ameek Ponda USA. 22. Robin Khundkar, USA 23. Pritam K. Rohila, Keizer, OR, USA 24. Mustafa Hussain Knastebakken 151.1. DK-2750 Ballerup, Danmark 25. Kaushik Thakrar Business Development Manager Egroupe AB. 26. Colonel Brian Cloughley Writer UK. 27. Prof. Susan M. Akram Associate Professor Boston University School of Law (for identification purposes only). 28. Ilyas Khan Campaigner against Child Labour and Peace Activist, Sweden. 29. Sain Sucha, Writer and publisher, Sweden. 30. Dr Babar Mumtaz Reader, UK. 31. Prof. Bj�Beckman Department of Political Science Stockholm University. 32. Dr Henrik Berglund Researcher and Teacher Department of Political Science Stockholm University. 33. Dr Ghazala Anwar Lecturer, University of Canterbury Christchurch, New Zealand. 34. Geoffrey Cook, Vice Chair East Bay, Sanctuary Covenant Berkeley, California U.S.A. 35. Abul Fazal Mahmud Pakistan. 36. SM & Asha Shahed, Los Angeles, USA. 37. Syeda Khundkar USA. 38. Dr. Zafar Iqbal Health Science Specialist Washington, DC, USA 39. Nuzaira Azam Journalist, USA 40. SM & Asha Shahed, Los Angeles, USA. 41. Fr. Joe Mangalam SJ Movement for Secular Democracy Ahmedabad 42. Sukla Sen India. 43. Prof. A.H. Nayyar Department of Physics Islamabad, Pakistan. 44. T.N.GOPALAN JOURNALIST, CHENNAI, INDIA 4/A PRAJWAL SQUARE, ELANGO NAGAR ANNEXE VIRUGAMPAKKAM CHENNAI 600 092. 45. Ammu Abraham, Women's Centre, Bombay, India. 46. Khalid Lakhani, Chief Executive Officer Rabico, Karachi, Pakistan. 47. R.ARUL, Secretary, PASUMAI THAAYAGAM, PASUMAI THAAYAGAM (Green Mother Land), No. 9,(old No: 5) Lynwood Lane, Mahalingapuram, CHENNAI -600 034, India. 48. Dr. Yahya Hassan Bajwa (Member World Conference on Religion and Peace/Peace Education Standing Commission / TransCommunication - Baden - Switzerland. 49. Dr. Khalid Duran; Editor, Transislam Magazine; Provisional President, IbnKhaldun Society. 50. Prof. Paul Wallace Dept. of Political Science University of Missouri, USA. 51. Prakash N. Shah Editor, Nirikshak ( views fortnightly ) Convener, Movement for Secular Democracy. �Prakash� B/H Navrangpura Postoffice, Ahmedabad �380 009 India. 52. Dr Ajay K Mehra Director Centre for Public Affairs New Delhi, India. 53. Dr Inayatullah Islamabad, Pakistan. 54. Dr Pramod Kumar Director Institute for Development and Communication (IDC) Chandigarh, India. 55. Welay Songur Doctoral Student Department of Political Science Stockholm University, Sweden. 56. Riaz Cheema B.A. LL.B Solna, Sweden. 57. Prof. Vikram Vyas The Ajit Foundation, Jaipur, India. 58. Prof. Satish Saberwal Professor Emiritus, Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi, India. 59. Prof. Khushi Muhammad Khan Hamburg, Germany. 60. Magnus Lembke Doctoral Student Department of Political Science Stockholm University Sweden. ========= 10. > >>RAWA statement on the terrorist attacks in the US >> >>The people of Afghanistan have nothing to do with Osama and his accomplices >>On September 11, 2001 the world was stunned with the horrific >>terrorist attacks on the United States. RAWA stands with the rest of >>the world in expressing our sorrow and condemnation for this >>barbaric act of violence and terror. RAWA had already warned that >>the United States should not support the most treacherous, most >>criminal, most anti-democracy and anti-women Islamic fundamentalist >>parties because after both the Jehadi and the Taliban have committed >>every possible type of heinous crimes against our people, they would >>feel no shame in committing such crimes against the American people >>whom they consider "infidel". In order to gain and maintain their >>power, these barbaric criminals are ready to turn easily to any >>criminal force. >> >>But unfortunately we must say that it was the government of the >>United States who supported Pakistani dictator Gen. Zia-ul Haq in >>creating thousands of religious schools from which the germs of >>Taliban emerged. In the similar way, as is clear to all, Osama Bin >>Laden has been the blue-eyed boy of CIA. But what is more painful is >>that American politicians have not drawn a lesson from their >>pro-fundamentalist policies in our country and are still supporting >>this or that fundamentalist band or leader. In our opinion any kind >>of support to the fundamentalist Taliban and Jehadies is actually >>trampling democratic, women's rights and human rights values. >> >>If it is established that the suspects of the terrorist attacks are >>outside the US, our constant claim that fundamentalist terrorists >>would devour their creators, is proved once more. >> >>The US government should consider the root cause of this terrible >>event, which has not been the first and will not be the last one >>too. The US should stop supporting Afghan terrorists and their >>supporters once and for all. >> >>Now that the Taliban and Osama are the prime suspects by the US >>officials after the criminal attacks, will the US subject >>Afghanistan to a military attack similar to the one in 1998 and kill >>thousands of innocent Afghans for the crimes committed by the >>Taliban and Osama? Does the US think that through such attacks, with >>thousands of deprived, poor and innocent people of Afghanistan as >>its victims, will be able to wipe out the root-cause of terrorism, >>or will it spread terrorism even to a larger scale? >> >>From our point of view a vast and indiscriminate military attacks on >>a country that has been facing permanent disasters for more than two >>decades will not be a matter of pride. We don't think such an attack >>would be the expression of the will of the American people. >> >>The US government and people should know that there is a vast >>difference between the poor and devastated people of Afghanistan and >>the terrorist Jehadi and Taliban criminals. >> >>While we once again announce our solidarity and deep sorrow with the >>people of the US, we also believe that attacking Afghanistan and >>killing its most ruined and destitute people will not in any way >>decrease the grief of the American people. We sincerely hope that >>the great American people could DIFFERENTIATE between the people of >>Afghanistan and a handful of fundamentalist terrorists. Our hearts >>go out to the people of the US. >> >>Down with terrorism! >> >>Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) >>September 14, 2001 >> >> ====== 11. 17th September, 2001. PRESS RELEASE The Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace (CNDP) condemns the indiscriminate mass murder perpetrated in the USA on 11 September, 2001 using hijacked passenger aircraft as weapons. CNDP joins the world in expressing its heartfelt condolences to the bereaved families and the American people. There can be no justification for mass murder committed either by stateless fanatical groups or by states. This is the reason that the peace movement, all over the world, opposes weapons of mass destruction such as nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. September 11 has shown that mass murder today does not need sophisticated technology. Such barbaric activity poisons all peace processes, and sets back all efforts at disarmament. This crime also shows that neither nuclear weapons nor defence shields (NMD/TMD) provide any additional 'security'. There will be forces in the United States government and elsewhere calling for retaliatory strikes and reprisals. Any response that does not distinguish between perpetrators and innocent people will be no different from the barbaric acts of 11th September that have drawn justified worldwide condemnation. It is also necessary to distinguish between the acts of terrorism and the causes driving it. Addressing only terrorist acts will not stop the current spiral of violence. Negotiated and just settlements of various conflicts around the world are the only long term guarantees for peace and against terrorism. It appears that the United States, is now preparing for unilateral action in Afghanistan. CNDP strongly believes that any such action should only be under the aegis of the UN. CNDP believes that India should not be a party to such unilateral US action and, deplores the Vajpayee government's willingness to compromise India's sovereignty. (sd/) (Prabir Purkayastha) (Praful Bidwai) ======== 12. The Dalai Lama's message to President George Bush 12 September, 2001 Your Excellency, I am deeply shocked by the terrorist attacks that took place involving four apparently hijacked aircrafts and the immense devastation these caused. It is a terrible tragedy that so many innocent lives have been lost and it seems unbelievable that anyone would choose to target the world trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington D.C. We are deeply saddened. On behalf of the Tibetan people I would like to convey our deepest condolence and solidarity with the American people during this painful time. Our prayers go out to the many who have lost their lives, those who have been injured and the many more who have been traumatized by this senseless act of violence. I am attending a special prayer for the United States and it's people at our main temple today. I am confident that the United States as a great and powerful nation will be able to overcome this present tragedy. The American people have shown their resilience, courage and determination when faced with such difficult and sad situation. It may seem presumptuous on my part, but I personally believe we need to think seriously whether a violent action is the right thing to do and in the greater interest of the nation and people in the long run. I believe violence will only increase the cycle of violence. But how do we deal with hatred and anger, which are often the root causes of such senseless violence? This is a very difficult question, especially when it concerns a nation and we have certain fixed conceptions of how to deal with such attacks. I am sure that you will make the right decision. With my prayers and good wishes The Dalai Lama ========== 13. >MEDIA STATEMENT >Contact: William R. Pace +1 917-214-5535 > or Jayne Stoyles +1 212-687-2176 > >U.S TRAGEDY HIGHLIGHTS NEED FOR >AN INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT > >New York, July 2001 >On behalf of the more than 1000 members of the NGO Coalition for the >International Criminal Court, we wish to express our horror and shock over >the criminal attacks perpetrated yesterday against innocent people in the >USA. > >We express our most sincere sympathy to the victims, their families and the >people of the United States of America. We are also thinking of the many >people affected every day by terrorism, genocide, crimes against humanity >and other atrocities in all parts of the world. > >As has been stated by USA authorities, this catastrophe represents a >massive failure of USA intelligence and national defense. The inability of >the most powerful nation, with the greatest resources, to prevent such a >crime reinforces the need for enhanced cooperation throughout the >international community in outlawing, investigating and prosecuting these >most serious crimes - which is what the International Criminal Court will >do. > >This horrific crime clearly demonstrates the need for a fundamentally >strengthened system of international criminal justice. The International >Criminal Court is expected to be established in 2002-2003 after entry into >force of the Rome Statute of the ICC. It will be permanent and >independent and will prosecute individuals who commit genocide, war crimes, >and crimes against humanity. > >Though the international community has not been able to agree on the >definition of the crime of international terrorism, it is our unanimous >opinion that yesterday's acts of terrorism were crimes against humanity - >the murder of hundreds if not thousands of innocent civilians. > >We appeal to the government of the US and its allies to focus on bringing >the perpetrators to justice and warn against indiscriminate military >retaliation. Such retaliation has been the response to past terrorist >attacks - it is not only illegal but has been ineffective and will >inevitably result in more deaths and a cycle of recrimination, revenge and >terrorism. This cannot be the response of a civilized nation hoping to put >an end to this kind of violence. > >The world community must join together in condemning this terrorist crime >against humanity and join in using national and international laws in >bringing those responsible to justice. > >Note: The Rome Statute was adopted by a vote of 120-7 on July 17, 1998. >It has been signed by 139 nations and ratified by 37. The Rome Statute >will enter into force after 60 nations have ratified the treaty. > > > >+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ >Jayne Stoyles >Program Director >NGO Coalition for an International Criminal Court > >777 U.N. Plaza 12th Floor >New York, NY 10017 >U.S.A. >Phone 212 687 2176 Fax 212 599 1332 >Email cicc1 at iccnow.org >Web http://www.iccnow.org > >+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ > ====== 14. > >Human Rights Watch Response to Attacks on the U.S. >Civilian Life Must Be Respected > >(New York, September 12, 2001) -- We profoundly condemn yesterday's cruel >attacks in the United States and express our condolences to the victims and > This was an assault not merely on one nation or one >people, but on principles of respect for civilian life cherished by all > We urge all governments to unite to investigate this crime, to >prevent its recurrence, and to bring to justice those who are responsible. > >Last night, President Bush said that the United States "will make no >distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who > Yet distinctions must be made: between the guilty and the >innocent; between the perpetrators and the civilians who may surround them; >between those who commit atrocities and those who may simply share their >religious beliefs, ethnicity or national origin. People committed to justice >and law and human rights must never descend to the level of the perpetrators > That is the most important distinction of all. > >There are people and governments in the world who believe that in the > But that is also the > Whatever the response to this outrage, it must not > Rather, it must uphold the principles that came under > That is >the way to deny the perpetrators of this crime their ultimate victory. > From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime. Our nation has been put on notice, we're not immune from attack. We will take defensive measures against terrorism to protect Americans. Today, dozens of federal departments and agencies, as well as state and local governments, have responsibilities affecting homeland security. These efforts must be coordinated at the highest level. So tonight, I announce the creation of a Cabinet-level position reporting directly to me, the Office of Homeland Security. And tonight, I also announce a distinguished American to lead this effort, to strengthen American security: a military veteran, an effective governor, a true patriot, a trusted friend, Pennsylvania's Tom Ridge. He will lead, oversee and coordinate a comprehensive national strategy to safeguard our country against terrorism and respond to any attacks that may come. These measures are essential. The only way to defeat terrorism as a threat to our way of life is to stop it, eliminate it and destroy it where it grows. Many will be involved in this effort, from FBI agents, to intelligence operatives, to the reservists we have called to active duty. All deserve our thanks, and all have our prayers. And tonight a few miles from the damaged Pentagon, I have a message for our military: Be ready. I have called the armed forces to alert, and there is a reason. The hour is coming when America will act, and you will make us proud. This is not, however, just America's fight. And what is at stake is not just America's freedom. This is the world's fight. This is civilization's fight. This is the fight of all who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom. We ask every nation to join us. We will ask and we will need the help of police forces, intelligence services and banking systems around the world. The United States is grateful that many nations and many international organizations have already responded with sympathy and with support - nations from Latin America, to Asia, to Africa, to Europe, to the Islamic world. Perhaps the NATO charter reflects best the attitude of the world: An attack on one is an attack on all. The civilized world is rallying to America's side. They understand that if this terror goes unpunished, their own cities, their own citizens may be next. Terror unanswered cannot only bring down buildings, it can threaten the stability of legitimate governments. And you know what? We're not going to allow it. Americans are asking, ''What is expected of us?'' I ask you to live your lives and hug your children. I know many citizens have fears tonight, and I ask you to be calm and resolute, even in the face of a continuing threat. I ask you to uphold the values of America and remember why so many have come here. We're in a fight for our principles, and our first responsibility is to live by them. No one should be singled out for unfair treatment or unkind words because of their ethnic background or religious faith. I ask you to continue to support the victims of this tragedy with your contributions. Those who want to give can go to a central source of information, libertyunites.org, to find the names of groups providing direct help in New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia. The thousands of FBI agents who are now at work in this investigation may need your cooperation, and I ask you to give it. I ask for your patience with the delays and inconveniences that may accompany tighter security and for your patience in what will be a long struggle. I ask your continued participation and confidence in the American economy. Terrorists attacked a symbol of American prosperity; they did not touch its source. America is successful because of the hard work and creativity and enterprise of our people. These were the true strengths of our economy before Sept. 11, and they are our strengths today. And finally, please continue praying for the victims of terror and their families, for those in uniform and for our great country. Prayer has comforted us in sorrow and will help strengthen us for the journey ahead. Tonight I thank my fellow Americans for what you have already done and for what you will do. And ladies and gentlemen of the Congress, I thank you, their representatives, for what you have already done and for what we will do together. Tonight we face new and sudden national challenges. We will come together to improve air safety, to dramatically expand the number of air marshals on domestic flights and take new measures to prevent hijacking. We will come together to promote stability and keep our airlines flying with direct assistance during this emergency. We will come together to give law enforcement the additional tools it needs to track down terror here at home. We will come together to strengthen our intelligence capabilities to know the plans of terrorists before they act and to find them before they strike. We will come together to take active steps that strengthen America's economy and put our people back to work. Tonight, we welcome two leaders who embody the extraordinary spirit of all New Yorkers, Gov. George Pataki and Mayor Rudolf Giuliani. As a symbol of America's resolve, my administration will work with Congress and these two leaders to show the world that we will rebuild New York City. After all that has just passed, all the lives taken and all the possibilities and hopes that died with them, it is natural to wonder if America's future is one of fear. Some speak of an age of terror. I know there are struggles ahead and dangers to face. But this country will define our times, not be defined by them. As long as the United States of America is determined and strong, this will not be an age of terror. This will be an age of liberty here and across the world. Great harm has been done to us. We have suffered great loss. And in our grief and anger, we have found our mission and our moment. Freedom and fear are at war. The advance of human freedom, the great achievement of our time and the great hope of every time, now depends on us. Our nation, this generation, will lift the dark threat of violence from our people and our future. We will rally the world to this cause by our efforts, by our courage. We will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail. It is my hope that in the months and years ahead life will return almost to normal. We'll go back to our lives and routines, and that is good. Even grief recedes with time and grace. But our resolve must not pass. Each of us will remember what happened that day and to whom it happened. We will remember the moment the news came, where we were and what we were doing. Some will remember an image of a fire or story or rescue. Some will carry memories of a face and a voice gone forever. And I will carry this. It is the police shield of a man named George Howard, who died at the World Trade Center trying to save others. It was given to me by his mom, Arlene, as a proud memorial to her son. It is my reminder of lives that ended and a task that does not end. I will not forget the wound to our country and those who inflicted it. I will not yield, I will not rest, I will not relent in waging this struggle for freedom and security for the American people. The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them. Fellow citizens, we'll meet violence with patient justice, assured of the rightness of our cause and confident of the victories to come. In all that lies before us, may God grant us wisdom, and may he watch over the United States of America. Thank you. __________________________________________________ Terrorist Attacks on U.S. - How can you help? Donate cash, emergency relief information http://dailynews.yahoo.com/fc/US/Emergency_Information/ From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: 1952). 49 years ago. The right to make war, like the right to strike, but in a far higher degree, is very dangerous in a world governed by scientific technique. Neither can be simply abolished, since that would open the road to tyranny. But in each case it must be recognised that groups cannot, in the name of freedom, justly claim the right to inflict great injuries upon others. As regards war, the principle of unrestricted national sovereignty, cherished by liberals in the nineteenth century and by the Kremlin in the present day, must be abandoned. Means must be found of subjecting the relations of nations to the rule of law, so that a single nation will no longer be, as at present, the judge in its own cause. If this is not done, the world will quickly return to barbarism. In that case, scientific technique will disappear along with science, and men will be able to go on being quarrelsome because their quarrels will no longer do much harm. It is, however, just possible that mankind may prefer to survive and prosper rather than to perish in misery, and, if so, national liberty will have to be effectively restrained. [...] The atom bomb, and still more the hydrogen bomb, have caused new fears, involving new doubts as to the effects of science on human life. Some eminent authorities, including Einstein, have pointed out that there is a danger of the extinction of all life on this planet. I do not myself think that this will happen in the next war, but I think it may well happen in the next but one, if that is allowed to occur. If this expectation is correct, we have to choose within the next fifty years or so between two alternatives. Either we must allow the human race to exterminate itself, or we must forgo certain liberties which are very dear to us, more especially the liberty to kill foreigners whenever we feel so disposed. I think it probable that mankind will choose its own extermination as the preferable alternative. The choice will be made, of course, by persuading ourselves that it is not being made, since (so militarists on both sides will say) the victory of the right is certain without risk of universal disaster. We are perhaps living in the last age of man, and, if so, it is to science that he will owe his extinction. If, however, the human race decides to let itself go on living, it will have to make very drastic changes in its ways of thinking, feeling and behaving. We must learn not to say: 'Never! better death than dishonour!' We must learn to submit to law, even when imposed by aliens whom we hate and despise, and whom we believe to be blind to all considerations of righteousness. Consider some concrete examples. Jews and Arabs will have to agree to submit to arbitration; if the award goes against the Jews, the President of the United States will have to ensure the victory of the party to which he is opposed, since, if he supports the international authority, he will lose the Jewish vote in new York State. On the other hand, if the award goes in favour of the Jews, the Mohammedan world will be indignant, and will be supported by all other malcontents. Or, to take another instance, Eire, will demand the right to oppress the Protestants of Ulster, and on this issue the United States will support Eire while Britain will support Ulster. Could an international authority survive such a dissension? Again: India and Pakistan cannot agree about Kashmir, therefore one of them must support Russia and the other the United States. It will be obvious to anyone who is an interested party in one of these disputes that the issue is far more important than the continuance of life on our planet. The hope that the human race will allow itself to survive is therefore somewhat slender. But if human life *is* to continue in spite of science, mankind will have to learn a discipline of the passions which, in the past, has not been necessary. Men will have to submit to the law, even when they think the law unjust and iniquitous. Nations which are persuaded that they are only demanding the barest justice will have to acquiesce when this demand is denied the by the neutral authority. I do not say that this is easy; I do not prophesy that it will happen; I say only that if it does not happen the human race will perish , and will perish as a result of science. A clear choice must be made within fifty years, the choice between Reason and Death. And by 'Reason' I mean willingness to submit to law as declared by an international authority. I fear that mankind may choose Death. I hope I am mistaken. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get email alerts & NEW webcam video instant messaging with Yahoo! Messenger. http://im.yahoo.com From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: the face of overwhelming grief. But there is also a growing moral revulsion and perhaps an understandable expression of the need for vengeance. Even as some people unfairly, even preposterously, become the victims of this newest hatred, the American President has promised revenge. Can anything be wrong with hating ruthless strategists who achieve their political goals by the indiscriminate slaughter of innocent civilians? How can it be wrong for a woman to hate the rapist who has permanently scarred her, or for victims to hate leaders or organisers of mobs that lynched them? At issue here is not the feeling of an intense desire to hurt others in order to gain advantage for oneself. Of course, malicious hatred is obnoxious. But those who hate the perpetrators of the carnage on September 11are not driven by malice or spite. Hating the wrong-doer is not morally inappropriate. If so, it must be morally permissible to desire to hurt the wrong-doer. It is extremely abnormal if self-respecting persons do not experience righteous anger, even hatred towards those who have wronged them.There must be some room in our moral topography for what the philosopher, Jeffrie Murphy calls retributive hatred. Yet it may not be wise or morally appropriate for victims to act on these feelings. It is imprudent because retaliatory action sparks off escalating cycles of revenge and reciprocal violence. Retaliation by the US and counter retaliation will almost certainly plunge the entire world into greater suffering, pain, vulnerability and insecurity. Revenge can unleash even greater tragedies. How do we make sure that today's victims do not become tomorrow's perpetrators of much worse? What if the original motive of revenge unravels an unappeasable thirst for violence? If lessons of history teach us anything at all, it is that the barbaric acts of one group solicit equally barbaric acts from others. No matter on whom the first blow was struck, if our aim is to terminate barbarism, then, it must be stalled now, suddenly, and abruptly. In the shifting sands of the complex ethic at work here, the entire moral advantage rests with victims of the immediate crime. If the vision that generally motivates them is to come good eventually, it is best, all things considered, to forgo the temptation to act on retributive hatred and feelings of vengeance. Retribution, not revenge To restrain vengeful motives is wise for another reason. Undoubtedly, the massacre on the East coast is motivated by the desire to question the economic, political and cultural supremacy of the USA in a radically unequal world. If and when the mightiest nation in the world retaliates, it will not be to grant equal status to offenders. It is rather more likely that, by a massive display of strength, they will be shoved further back in their less than equal place. The not so hidden text of American retaliation will be an abject lesson to all to never again dare American supremacy. Will it surprise anyone if a disproportionate and symbolic show of force to maim and crush the enemy flows from the very same motive of vengeance? It is true, of course, that some acts of revenge are the wellspring of equality and refute claims of supremacy by wrong-doers. However, the spectacular show of violence on September 11 and in the days to come is likely to reveal a different,warped logic of alternating claims of superiority. We need retribution for sure, but not revenge. In the days to come, we must not be forced to witness ghost towns in other parts of the world with more terror-stricken faces, choked voices, desperately crying for help. American might must be restrained, perpetrators must be brought to book in an international court of justice and tried for crimes against humanity, our common humanity. This would just be a beginning. To set a larger process of reconciliation in motion, the messages of marginalised collectives hidden under the gruesome rubble of Tuesday's destruction must be decoded and discussed by moderates from all over the world. Only by properly understanding the social, cultural and spiritual basis of self-respect in our troubled times can we ever begin to address the problems violently thrown at us on September 11. From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: 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 stranded 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 photocopied 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, descriptions 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 wheelchair. 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 expressing 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 worker "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 Robertson (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 �bombing� 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 >>barbara.lee at mail.house.gov<<.) 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 newspapers, 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 dramatic, 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 fundamentalisms 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� thrivesalong 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 Rwanda�s screams . . . Ground Zero is a huge mass grave. And I think: Bosnia. Uganda. More than 6300 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, circling the plazas in Argentina. 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 immediate 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 are wounded, who feel 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 same emotional condition--for four generations. Last weekend, many Manhattanites left town to visit concerned families, 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 50,000 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, gesturing 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 in absurd, tenacious hope, Robin Morgan September 18, 2001 New York City Robin Morgan is an award-winning writer, feminist leader, political theorist, journalist, and activist. She has published 17 books, including six of poetry, two of fiction, and the now-classic anthologies SISTERHOOD IS POWERFUL (Random House/Vintage Books, 1970), and SISTERHOOD IS GLOBAL (Doubleday/Anchor, l984; Feminist Press edition 1996), and her own acclaimed THE DEMON LOVER; ON THE SEXUALITY OF TERRORISM (Norton, 1989). Her newest book of poetry is A HOT JANUARY: POEMS 1996-1999 (Norton, 1999), and her memoir, SATURDAY'S CHILD was recently published (Norton, December 2000). From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: ENTERPRISE CREW SPLIT OVER VIOLATING PRIME DIRECTIVE, INTERVENING TO SAVE EARTH FROM ITSELF Star Fleet Strictly Forbids Meddling, But Christ, Just Look at the Place In Stationary Orbit (SatireWire.com) � Disturbed by ruthless terrorist attacks and talk of war, the crew of the starship Enterprise, which has been stealthily orbiting Earth since August, is reportedly torn over whether to violate Star Fleet's Prime Directive and intervene in Earth affairs, or gather for drinks in the forward observation lounge and watch the planet go to shit. According to Enterprise Capt. Jean-Luc Picard, the crew is evenly split between Earth-born personnel who believe they have an obligation to quell the recent violence and bring lasting peace to their home world, and non-Earth-born personnel, who point out that Picard didn't lift a finger when Boral II self-destructed, so what's so special about this place? "Hey, we let most of the Boralans die. We wouldn't help the Klingon's in their civil war. What's the big deal here?" said Guinan, the ship's lounge hostess and a native of El-Auria. "Besides, every time we do intervene, we leave the inhabitants more screwed up than they were before." "How could we possibly make the people on this planet more screwed up?" countered Earth-born First Officer Will Riker. "They think golf is a sport!" According to the Prime Directive, "the right of each sentient species to live in accordance with its normal cultural evolution is considered sacred, and no Star Fleet personnel may interfere with the healthy development of alien life and culture." While officers are honor-bound to uphold it, Earth-born Ensign Wesley Crusher argued the Enterprise has broken the rules before. "Gee, this could be just like Episode 141, where Data tries to save the life of that little girl whose planet is gonna blow up, or Episode 109, where Capt. Picard interfered to save my life because I broke one of the Edo's laws," said Crusher. "I mean, look, it's really cool to sit up here in our sexless spandex uniforms, downing Klavorian Synth-Ale and pretending we're not all running the Caligula program on the Holodeck, but the people of Earth are gearing up to, like, kill each other. "I know we're not supposed to mess with the 'healthy development' of other cultures,' but this is not fuckin' healthy," he added. "I disagree," answered Lt. Cmdr. Worf, a Klingon. "I am not of Earth, but some differences can only be solved through violence. Truly, I fail to understand why the humans from this planet's Western Hemisphere have not already attacked the humans from the Eastern Hemisphere. Or perhaps I have that backwards. This planet keeps spinning in an annoying way." "Exactly, Mr. Worf," said Earth-born Capt. Picard. "It is ever-changing. East becomes West, West becomes East, right becomes wrong. We should be patient. After all, on whose behalf do we intercede?" "God, you are so French," mumbled Riker. "I say we... we attack them all!" said Worf. "This way there is no confusion." "Dude, are you sure you're not from Earth?" asked Crusher. At press time, Capt. Picard had yet to make a decision, but he is expected to rely heavily on ship's counselor Deanna Troi, a telepathic Betazoid who said the planet below was a roiling sea of emotions. "I sense great hostility, fear and sadness among the people," she announced. "But I also sense something else, something even stronger. It is... It is..." "Love?" interrupted the android, Cmdr. Data. "No, it is relief. There is widespread relief that there now may be no more Die Hard movies." Copyright � 2001, SatireWire. -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- Anyway, the :// part is an 'emoticon' representing a man with a strip of sticky tape across his mouth. -R. Douglas, alt.sysadmin.recovery --------------------------------------------------------------------- From bogus@does.not.exist.com Tue Jan 22 18:01:32 2008 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:31:32 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: This is not Islam any more than the Ku Klux Klan is Christianity. No concessions can be made to either mindset which have more in common with one another than they do with the religions they claim to represent. To argue, as many Arabs and Muslims are doing today (and not a few liberal Western voices), that 'Americans should ask themselves why they are so hated in the world' is to make such a concession; it is to provide a justification, however unwittingly, for this kind of warped mindset. The thinking is the same as the 'linkage' dreamed up by Saddam Hussein when he tried to get the Arab world to believe that he had occupied Kuwait in 1990 in order to liberate Palestine. The difference being that if the argument was intellectually vacuous then, it is a thousand times more so now. Worse than being wrong, however, it is morally bankrupt, to say nothing of being counterproductive. For every attempt to 'rationalise' or 'explain' the new anti-Americanism rampant in so much of the Muslim and Arab worlds bolsters the project of the perpetrators of the heinous act of 11 September, which is to blur the lines that separate their sect of a few hundred people from hundreds of millions of peace-loving Muslims and Arabs. But it is now up to Arabs and Muslims to draw the line that separates them from the Osama bin Ladens of this world just as it was up to Americans to excoriate, isolate, outlaw, imprison and eventually root out the members of the Klan from their midst. Mercifully, the very same Western leaders who are preparing for the coming 'War Against Terrorism' are trying hard, and genuinely, to say their efforts are not directed at Muslims and Arab or Muslim culture. Constantly, they are being seen with Muslim clerics and visiting mosques. That is all for the good. But it is not enough to turn the tide of public opinion which will increasingly need and want to know who is 'the other' in this coming war. Terrorism is a tactic, after all, not a side. Usage of the word 'war', however understandable, was a strategic mistake by the American President. For like the wars on drugs or poverty it inculcates expectations at the risk of showing few results. The problem is deeper than bin Laden and his associates, and will not end with their demise. As I wrote in Cruelty and Silence, citing the 1930s Iraqi alter ego of Tom Lehrer, Aziz Ali, Da' illi beena, minna wa feena: 'The disease that is in us, is from us and within us.' Against this kind of enemy the West can do nothing. We have to do it ourselves. Muslims and Arabs have to be on the front lines of a new kind of war, one that is worth waging for their own salvation and in their own souls. And that, as good out-of-fashion Muslim scholars will tell you, is the true meaning of jihad, a meaning that has been hijacked by terrorists and suicide bombers and all those who applaud or find excuses for them. To exorcise what they have done in our name is the civilisational challenge of the twenty-first century for every Arab and Muslim in the world today. � Kanan Makiya. The author, who was born in Iraq, now teaches in the US. His books include Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising and the Arab World and the forthcoming The Rock. --------------------------------- Do You Yahoo!? Get your free Yahoo! address at Yahoo! Mail: UK or IE. --0-986985521-1002681838=:10397 Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

 Fighting Islam's Ku Klux Klan

The Muslim world cannot forever attribute all its ills to the Great Satan, America, writes the Iraqi dissident, Kanan Makiya

Kanan Makiya
Sunday October 7, 2001
The Observer

The Arab and Muslim worlds suddenly find themselves facing a civilisational challenge such as they have not had to face since the fall of the Ottoman Empire. For, in the years to come, the greatest price of the madness that was unleashed upon New York and Washington on 11 September will be borne by them and by all individuals of Arab or Muslim origin, wherever they might live in the world.

I am not talking about the next war in Afghanistan or greatly redoubled efforts to hunt down Muslim and Arab terrorists from Boston and Hamburg to Cairo and Karachi. The price I am talking about is not paid in blood or by being the victim of the kinds of humiliating slurs and racist attacks that are everywhere on the rise in the West. It is the much greater price brought about by continuing to wallow in the sense of one's own victimhood to the point of losing the essentially universal idea of human dignity and worth that is the only true measure of civility.

Arab and Muslim resentment at the West is grounded in many grievances, some legitimate, others less so. Without question, the West has blundered in its dealings with the Arab world. The United States has in recent years behaved unjustly towards the Palestinians. The Allied victory in the Gulf War of 1990-1991 was a lost opportunity to rectify this record, to show that the West, and the United States in particular, was capable of reaching out the hand of friendship and support to the peoples of the Arab world, to their democrats and civil libertarians, not merely to a host of tyrannical and unrepresentative regimes.

Like Germans after the First World War, Arabs felt they deserved a different lot after the Gulf War. They thought of themselves as having tried to change the ways they did politics in the past, and got nowhere. Palestinian living standards have actually declined since the Oslo accord in 1993, and Iraqi society (much less its polity and economy) is in a state of steady disintegration. So Arabs grew more resentful and angry at the West than at any other time in modern Arab history. This resentment can be felt everywhere; it has taken root in the most Westernised sections of the Arab population, among businessmen and students of science and engineering, and even among the sons of the mega-rich like Osama bin Laden.

However, grievances alone do not explain the apocalyptic act of fury that was unleashed upon New York and Washington. Arabs and Muslims need today to face up to the fact that their resentment at America has long since become unmoored from any rational underpinnings it might once have had; like the anti-Semitism of the interwar years, it is today steeped in deeply embedded conspiratorial patterns of thought rooted in profound ignorance of how a society and a polity like the United States, much less Israel, functions.

Attribution of all of the ills of one's own world to either the great Satan, America, or the little Satan, Israel, has been the driving force of Arab politics since 1967. As a powerful undercurrent of Arab culture and politics, it has been around much longer than that. After 1967, however, it became the legitimising cement upon which such murderous regimes as Saddam Hussein's Iraq were built.

From the hands of secular Arab nationalists, anti-Americanism was passed on to religious zealots. In 1979, it fused with anti-Shah sentiments to become the animating force of the Iranian revolution and, with that seminal event, major sections of the Islamic movement. Today, it has become a murderous brew of passions fuelled by paranoia and frustration.

In the five-page letter left in a suitcase in the car-park of Boston's airport, this passage, giving guidance to the hijackers in case they should meet resistance from a passenger, appears: 'If God grants any one of you a slaughter, you should perform it as an offering on behalf of your father and mother, for they are owed by you. Do not disagree among yourselves, but listen and obey. If you slaughter, you should plunder those you slaughter, for that is a sanctioned custom of the Prophet's, on the condition that you do not get occupied with the plunder so that you would leave what is more important, such as paying attention to the enemy, his treachery and attacks. That is because such action is very harmful [to the mission].'

This is not Islam any more than the Ku Klux Klan is Christianity. No concessions can be made to either mindset which have more in common with one another than they do with the religions they claim to represent.

To argue, as many Arabs and Muslims are doing today (and not a few liberal Western voices), that 'Americans should ask themselves why they are so hated in the world' is to make such a concession; it is to provide a justification, however unwittingly, for this kind of warped mindset. The thinking is the same as the 'linkage' dreamed up by Saddam Hussein when he tried to get the Arab world to believe that he had occupied Kuwait in 1990 in order to liberate Palestine. The difference being that if the argument was intellectually vacuous then, it is a thousand times more so now.

Worse than being wrong, however, it is morally bankrupt, to say nothing of being counterproductive. For every attempt to 'rationalise' or 'explain' the new anti-Americanism rampant in so much of the Muslim and Arab worlds bolsters the project of the perpetrators of the heinous act of 11 September, which is to blur the lines that separate their sect of a few hundred people from hundreds of millions of peace-loving Muslims and Arabs.

But it is now up to Arabs and Muslims to draw the line that separates them from the Osama bin Ladens of this world just as it was up to Americans to excoriate, isolate, outlaw, imprison and eventually root out the members of the Klan from their midst. Mercifully, the very same Western leaders who are preparing for the coming 'War Against Terrorism' are trying hard, and genuinely, to say their efforts are not directed at Muslims and Arab or Muslim culture. Constantly, they are being seen with Muslim clerics and visiting mosques. That is all for the good.

But it is not enough to turn the tide of public opinion which will increasingly need and want to know who is 'the other' in this coming war. Terrorism is a tactic, after all, not a side. Usage of the word 'war', however understandable, was a strategic mistake by the American President. For like the wars on drugs or poverty it inculcates expectations at the risk of showing few results. The problem is deeper than bin Laden and his associates, and will not end with their demise. As I wrote in Cruelty and Silence, citing the 1930s Iraqi alter ego of Tom Lehrer, Aziz Ali, Da' illi beena, minna wa feena: 'The disease that is in us, is from us and within us.' Against this kind of enemy the West can do nothing. We have to do it ourselves.

Muslims and Arabs have to be on the front lines of a new kind of war, one that is worth waging for their own salvation and in their own souls. And that, as good out-of-fashion Muslim scholars will tell you, is the true meaning of jihad, a meaning that has been hijacked by terrorists and suicide bombers and all those who applaud or find excuses for them. To exorcise what they have done in our name is the civilisational challenge of the twenty-first century for every Arab and Muslim in the world today.

� Kanan Makiya. The author, who was born in Iraq, now teaches in the US. His books include Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising and the Arab World and the forthcoming The Rock.


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