OK, let me try this again... Arman, Money is only one leg of a multi legged stool that they sit on. You need to cut off the leadership (and since power vacumes get filled quickly, you need to fill the void with another power that is more friendly to the rest of the world). You need to change the ingrained hate that the followers have towards the rest of the world. That's just the tip of the iceberg... /herb Arman Khalili wrote:

The best way to eradicate all terrorists is simply to drain their financial resources. This would have a global support and and no human life would be sacrificed. Imagine if Osama Ben ladin would wake up and find out that he has $0 left. He wouldn't be able to finance any of his efforts. This would expose him and all of his followers where they could be captured and brought to justice (chaining to a building and firing a rocket comes to mind).

arman

----- Original Message ----- From: "Roeland Meyer" <rmeyer@mhsc.com> To: "'Vadim Antonov'" <avg@exigengroup.com>; "Steven M. Bellovin" <smb@research.att.com>

...

|> From: Vadim Antonov [mailto:avg@exigengroup.com] |> Sent: Wednesday, September 12, 2001 2:11 PM |> |> The problem isn't terrorists - people with lunatic worldview |> will always |> exist, and there's no way to prevent that. The problem is |> governments |> which refuse to cooperate in eradicating them because they |> futher their |> goals while leaving their hands "clean". And may I to |> remind the truism |> that any government can govern only because it has support of a |> significant part of (maybe, brainwashed) population? |> |> As for civil liberties - reality check time.

|> Those are people who _believe_ that Western civilization is |> evil and has |> to be destroyed by any means, including suicide. Those |> aren't isolated |> "crazies". Their mothers and neighbours are proud of what |> they did, and this is scary.

Does anyone remember all those hijacking of the mid'70's? Does anyone realize why they stopped? Terrorist groups are like weeds. They grow over time. One has to regulary whack the weeds. We no longer have the weed whackers.

On Thu, 13 Sep 2001 09:50:59 +0200, Hank Nussbacher said:

article called "The Making of a Martyr" (Aug 27). The Christian term martyr refers to someone who was killed at the hand of their enemy due to their religious beliefs. A suicide bomber takes his own life and those of his enemies. For those with a Christian background, don't you consider it an insult to your religion to have a suicide bomber called a martyr after Saint Stephen?

Unfortunately, unlike the hacker/cracker linguistic debate, the English language does not have another word for "martyr". Hmm.. if the Vatican were granted an algorithm patent on the concept of becoming a martyr, and then sued for damages every time it happend, it would put a crimp in the terrorist's finances. After all, prior art or obviousness doesn't seem to be a problem for other software patents. If it hadn't slipped into mainstream usage, they could also have gone the trademark route, and stamped 'Martyr(TM)' on some saints, and sued for infringement.... Naah. I think that word went the way of linoleum, but a millenia before... On the other hand, does anybody know the equivalent Arabic term? Perhaps using that might make for an alternative - it seems that most of the candidates that make the news are Muslim or Judeo-Christian. But then, I'm sure that CNN just isn't reporting on that sort of thing when it involves the other half of the world population.... /Valdis

For those with a Christian background, don't you consider it an insult to your religion to have a suicide bomber called a martyr after Saint Stephen?

no, i consider it a consequence of the self-righteousness that religion often nurtures, i am better than you because my god is better than yours. add fanaticism, and there will always be fanatics of every stripe, and you get the escalating cycle of violence and hate. resist the cycle of violence and hate. randy

Randy - you may not like it, but this is not a conflict of nations; this is a conflict of ideologies ("religions", if you wish). On the one side is secular Western societies which are considered perverse, unclean and sinful not just by mujaheedin ("fanatics", "crazies", etc) but by majority of believers in the Middle-East. On the other side is Western society which considers religious states oppressive and their disregard for human lives absolutely abominable. Framing the conflicts in national (US vs Afganistan, etc) or racial (whites vs arabs) categories is very unhelpful. Anyone who tracked what's going on in, say, Chechnya, knows that Islamic militants have no problems using foreign mercenaries, particularly from Eastern Europe. They pay well. (BTW, the suicide bombers are not "doing that for pure idea" -- their families are usually very well paid, and for most families from the poorest regions this is the only way to wealth). In other words, we _are_ in a religious war, of sorts. And, i'm afraid, this is us or them situation, because by the very nature of their belief they cannot stop. (Again, Western media seems to be very shy about showing what mujaheedin tell about their beliefs themselves. I personally heard from a Chechen that they will not stop until they kill all filthy Russians and then go and kill all filty Americans and Israelis -- it was said chillingly matter-of-factly. In a daylight, on a Moscow street.) Since the all-out no-holds-barred war aimed at wiping the idea out together with carriers of that idea (i.e. "civilian" population) is very out of fashion nowadays (somehow nobody cared about German civilians in WWII, to put it into perspective) - the most likely scenario will be protracted suppression of Islamic states. This may have two outcomes: either their beliefs mutate to become more benign (like Christianity did, crusaders were no better than today's Islamic fanatics; and Islam, like Christianity _does_ teach peacefulness - read Koran to see for yourselves; principles of any religion may be interpreted as applying to "true believers" only); or that they manage to produce a particularly virulent strain resistant to Western defenses. Pushing epidemological analogy further, the ways to deal with the situation are: exterminate infected population (or isolate, and let it die off on its own), go after transmission vectors (TV, radio stations, newsprint, religious leaders, etc pushing the militant ideas), drain parasite's nutrient supplies by direct means (i.e. strangling financial inflows into the region by developing alternative oil sources; in this respect Western policy in regard to dealing with oil fields in Russia seems particularly boneheaded), or by introducing competition for the resources from the benign entities (i.e. promote and support Western way of life in the regions). Note that i'm not passing moral judgments here. The worst thing which could be done is to keep infection going for a long time while doing sporadic bouts of suppression ("antibiotic", i.e. military). This nearly guarantees evolution of resistant strains. The suppression must be permanent until the very idea dies off (when infection rate is below rate of reproduction), alternatively, carriers of the idea must be kept in check by physical elimination (local wars, "anti-terrorist" actions, epidemia or famines) - indefinitely (a chronic form of illness). The third option is, of course, for us to forget the liberal ideas and learn to say "alla akbar" without noticeable accent. Population dynamics is definitely on _their_ side. That option definitely has an advantage of keeping our liberal consciences happy. Chose whatever course is there to deal with the situation, but, please, get your head out of sand. This is not an isolated group of fanatics; and you don't win wars by hating enemies - but by being pragmatic and clear-headed. And any human society so far was built on violence - real or threatened (police is there to do violence, to those who don't behave; _any_ law has behind it a threat of violence to offenders), so I wouldn't declare it absolute evil. In fact, without intra-species agression (aka violence) there couldn't be any frienship or love (see the book by the famous etologist, Konrad Lorenz, "On Agression" for a painstakingly detailed explanation). --vadim On Thu, 13 Sep 2001, Randy Bush wrote:

...

For those with a Christian background, don't you consider it an insult to your religion to have a suicide bomber called a martyr after Saint Stephen?

no, i consider it a consequence of the self-righteousness that religion often nurtures, i am better than you because my god is better than yours. add fanaticism, and there will always be fanatics of every stripe, and you get the escalating cycle of violence and hate.

resist the cycle of violence and hate.

randy

Randy- I find it increasingly difficult to maintain any tolerance of total intolerance. I _want_ to learn to live with 'others' unless they simply want me dead. I cannot and will not tolerate intolerant and fanatical 'true believers.' In that direction lies death. David Leonard ShaysNet On Fri, 14 Sep 2001, Randy Bush wrote:

so, if we did not learn enough following the french into indochina, we can learn more by following the russians into afghanastan? this does not seem like a sucess path to me.

the successful part of our culture is about tolerance and learning to live with folk different than we (for many values of 'we' and 'different').

resist the cycle of violence and hate.

randy

On Fri, 14 Sep 2001, Randy Bush wrote:

the successful part of our culture is about tolerance and learning to live with folk different than we (for many values of 'we' and 'different').

The reality is that American culture is mostly completely ignorant about folks different from Americans. Most immigrants came here precisely because they _share_ the American ideals, and you never encounter those who think differently. Even with that - immigrant communities do not really mix. They merely co-exist. The "successful part" is nothing to be proud of, really. The American culture's broad appeal is mostly in its being the lowest common denominator. If you want the truth - take a look at correlation of school grades and percentage of non-hispanic immigrant children in American public schools. The "success" is based on making people so dumb that they can no longer tell their cultures apart.

resist the cycle of violence and hate.

Resist the cycle of ignorance and isolationism. Instead of reading CNN on the Internet, go and read European, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, Israeli news. You'll find that you're being brainwashed. An average all-American newspaper is no better than Pravda. TV is even worse. A docile population fed on the politically-correct diet of endless repetition of fuzzy warm feelings and little carefully selected facts is much easier to lead into accepting ineptness and stupidity of those in power. Airline security, my ass. Is there anyone seriously thinking the terrorists are stupid enough to do the same trick twice? Missile strikes on the empty bin Laden's bases, yeah, sure, that will help a lot. As for "violence and hate" - those can be quite constructive. Non-violence wasn't invented by hippies or Ghandi, you know. Lev Tolstoy before revolution became quite en vogue in Russia with his absolutist non-violence gospel. The last Russian tzar, Nikolay II, was a decidedly peaceful man. So he sent Lenin in exile. If he did some violence by actually killing him & his elk (and he had all the reasons for that -- his companions were actual terrorists: fire-bombing restaurants, robbing banks, etc), twenty year later there wouldn't be the wave of the red terror which ultimately killed 40-60 _million_ Russians and Ukrainians. If you care for more history lessons - the current situation with US vs "third world" eerily reminds the later years of the Roman republic. --vadim

| This is hardly a revelation...they've been trying to do this for years, to | no avail. BTW, is it "Taleban" or "Taliban"? I always thought the | latter, but that last post spelled it the former, and searches on cnn.com | bring reponses both ways... As the term is not natively English, you will find that different transliterations result in slightly different spellings, depending on how people hear the term and would pronounce the letters. Similarly, Osama bin Lad(i|e)n is called Ussama Ibn Ladin in German news. So I would not worry about the spelling, unless you need to do extensive searched on the term...

It looks like the NYIIX is back up... Does anyone have any info about how long it will stay up for? /herb