terrorism

    …with a primary focus on: U.S. forms of terrorism  

          The U.S. must look at why terrorism exists and why people hate the United States, [Schriner] said.  – Ashland (OH) Times Gazette

          [Schriner] expressed disdain for the Bush administration’s willingness to tolerate civilian deaths (post 9/11 Afghanistan bombing) as “inevitable collateral damage.”  -- The Athens (OH) Post

            categories covered below include: 1) the plan (a synopsis); 2) axis of evil?; 3) nuclear terrorists; 4) food terrorists; 5) environmental terrorists; 6) backing terror elsewhere (School of the Americas); 7) free trade terrorists; 8) cultural terrorists; 9) eugenics terrorists; 10) suburban terrorists; 11) *significant roots of terrorism (Iraq sanctions, U.S. backed Israeli military, U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia, abject Third World poverty…); 12)  What if the Amish were in charge of the War on Terror? 

            1) the plan (a synopsis):

            Our administration would fight terrorism on a multitude of fronts.

            We would seek to avoid future threats to our soil.  Such threats include those that could come through bio-terror in the air and/or water, dirty bombs (limited, portable nuclear devices), cyber-terror to electronic linkages connecting transportation, energy, commerce, food…

            We would combat these, and other threats, with strategic Homeland Security initiatives.  And we would continue, in part, some of what the Bush Administration has already put into place for Homeland Security.

            However, we would not agree with any form of torture to get information about terrorist threats, including the torture of terrorist suspects held in military prisons like Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.   Our administration would hold strictly to Article 17 of the Third Geneva Convention:  “No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion may be inflicted on a prisoner of war.”

And we would not approve of phone wire-tapping and the building of a massive data-base of phone calls of U.S. citizens – as has recently been carried out by the National Security Agency.

*Also, we would not support a U.S. National ID Card and/or a biochip implant for security tracking purposes.

            What’s more, there needs to be more than just basic Homeland Security measures.

            Way more.

            It is our belief that to effectively “fight” terrorism at its roots, we have to deeply analyze and stridently work to eradicate U.S. forms of international (and domestic) terrorism. It is, we believe, this U.S. terrorism that is starting to create a tremendous, worldwide backlash.

            Some of these forms of U.S. terrorism include: nuclear terrorism; environmental terrorism; food terrorism; cultural terrorism; free trade terrorism; eugenics terrorism…

            Each of these will be explained more in the following sections.  But first, here is an overarching lens through which I believe we should view our significant contribution to the world of terrorism:

            2) axis of evil?

            While campaigning in Utah several years ago, I went to a talk about the late Thomas Merton.  Merton was a monk and a well-known author.

            Fr. George Kilcourse, who was the presenter that evening, said Merton’s take on terrorism would have been much different than modern, mainstream America’s take on terrorism.

            Some 50 years prior, Merton wrote that hatred of ourselves is often too deep and too powerful to be consciously faced.  So we minimize our “sins,” and exaggerate the faults of others – in order to take the focus off our excruciating self-hate.

            We are the righteous.

            The other is the demonic (Or put another contemporary way: “the axis of evil.”)

            The enemy’s bombs are always from Hell.

            Our bombs are always from “Divine Providence.”

            And speaking of bombs…

            3) nuclear terrorists

            “What if we let the weapons inspectors into Montana?”  I posed to an ABC News reporter out of Toledo, Ohio.

            That is, we are currently concerned with North Korea, Iran and other “rogue” nations developing nuclear weapons – while we have 10,000 nuclear warheads aimed all over the world!

            During an interview with the Loudonville (OH) Times, I said that outside of this country (with our deadly nuclear arsenal aimed all over), we must look like the biggest “(nuclear) terrorist” in the world.  Why wouldn’t other countries be racing to get their own nuclear weapons to defend themselves?

            Now, why don’t we want to look at our own “shadow self” (as Merton would put it) on this nuclear weapons proliferation?

            Because it is too ugly, that’s why.

            We have squandered billions and billions of dollars on our own over-protection (we could blow the world up a 100 times over) -- while 24,000 people starve to death every day in the Third World!  Our concern about ourselves has trumped the concern about little children, worldwide, slowly, and agonizingly, starving to death.

            At a Peace & Justice meeting in Cleveland, Ohio, I learned that Fr. Charles McCarthy, who is the founder of the Center For Non-Violence at the University of Notre Dame, said:  “Apathy in the face of relievable human misery is radical evil.”

            That’s us in spades on this one.

            What’s more, whether we want to look at our shadow self, or not, the U.S., indeed, is perceived as a “nuclear terrorist threat” worldwide.  And what’s more, we have, to no small degree, fueled a nuclear arms race that has prompted eight other major countries to amass rather significant nuclear arsenals, with more countries getting in line as I write this.

            Which means by domino effect, that we have been a catalyst in helping divert even more billions of dollars (other countries’ nuclear weapons expenditure) that could have gone to help end world hunger and disease, clean up the environment… including nuclear waste.

            And that’s where the domestic terrorism comes in on this one.

            The Hanford Nuclear Power Plant in Southeast Washington made nuclear weapons.  It also had a significant amount of controlled, and documented, radiation releases in the middle part of last century.

            According to a Seattle Times article, in early December of 1949, scientists conducted a secret experiment.  They poured caustic chemicals on a ton of radioactive uranium, fresh from a nuclear reactor.  This spewed a plume of radiation that was carried downwind to, among other places, Walla Walla, Washington.

            Walla Walla’s Steve Stanton was five-years-old at the time.  He went on to become the father of three, a civil engineer, and in his mid-30s  -- contracted thyroid cancer.  The Times article said Mr. Stanton, and some 2,300 “Hanford Down Winders” with cancer, birth defects, respiratory illness and other physical maladies that could possibly be tied to the radiation releases, were suing the companies that built and ran Hanford.

            On a stop in Walla Walla, I interviewed a woman who grew up here during some of the radiation releases.  Her career was cut short when she contracted a brain tumor, and a number of other debilitating physical problems.  This woman (who chooses anonymity), too, believes her physical problems were tied to the radiation releases from Hanford.

            In Luck, Wisconsin, we interviewed the co-director of Nuke Watch, Bonnie Urfer.  To stay on the domestic terrorism theme, she said there were more than 300 above ground tests of hydrogen and atomic bombs over 20 years during the middle part of last century.  The Limited Test Ban Treaty succeeded in finally stopping above ground tests.  (Yet more tests continue below ground today.)

            Again depending on the wind with these above ground tests, “this contaminated a whole lot of people,” Ms. Urfer said.

            One of them might have been Janet Chisolm.  We heard Ms. Chisolm talk at a National Conference at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas for the: Many Stories, One Vision for a Nuclear-Free World.

            Ms. Chisolm is the chair of the National Episcopal Peace Fellowship.  And she grew up in Las Vegas during the era of the above ground nuclear tests.

            She said Las Vegas was a small town then and the test site provided jobs.  What’s more, she said the bomb was considered “patriotic” at the time.  And  times of the bomb testing and maps of where to view it best were published in the local newspaper.

            Ms. Chisolm said she and her family would stand with sunglasses at daybreak, with thousands of others, hearing the massive explosion and watching the mushroom cloud form.

            “The government violated the land, the people… and they knew it wasn’t safe,” she lamented.

            And it still isn’t safe.  Whether that is the below ground testing of current nuclear weapons, or the mining of raw uranium itself for that matter.  And the government knows these aren’t safe either. 

            Ms. Urfer also said that the mining and milling process for uranium, which is the main ingredient in nuclear energy, contaminates the surrounding water, air and soil in countries like Canada, Africa…

            And high-level nuclear waste might contaminate the soil below Yucca Mountain in Nevada some day.   That’s where 77,000 tons (and counting…) of high-level nuclear waste are slated to be buried.

            On a west coast campaign swing, we interviewed Mohave Community College geology professor John Squibb.  The college is in the Yucca Mountain region, and Professor Squibb has followed Yucca Mountain developments closely.

            He told me geographic fault lines could develop near Yucca Mountain, triggering an earthquake(s) or volcanic reaction, sparking a ‘high level’ radioactive release that could put the region in tremendous peril – as if a number of terrorist “dirty bombs” were detonated.

            On the containment end, Professor Squibb noted that there’s a good possibility the containment vessels for the nuclear waste will break down long before the tens of thousands of years it will take for the nuclear reaction inside to stop.

            Professor Squibb said he believes the safest way to dispose of the high-level nuclear waste is one proposed by former Atomic Energy Chairperson Dr. Dixie Lee Ray.  Professor Squibb said Dr. Ray explained to him that this proposal is to drill a hole in a “desert region” of the Pacific Ocean near North America.  The reinforced hole would extend quite deep to the “Moharavcic Zone of Discontinuity.”  Then the nuclear waste would be injected into this hole in such a way that the North American platelet (which is in slow, continual motion) would fold it over toward the core of the earth.  Professor Squibb added that the core of the earth is radioactive, and this nuclear waste would dissolve into the original atoms.

            According to Professor Squibb, this option would be much more expensive than the Yucca Mountain burial proposal.

            I told the Kingman (AZ) Daily Miner newspaper that even though this proposal would be more expensive, I would be in favor of the disposal of the nuclear waste in the safest way possible.

In tandem, we would propose unilateral nuclear disarmament – and count on other countries following suit.  At a stop in Omaha, Nebraska, Fr. Tom McCaslin, the former Social Action Coordinator for the Omaha Diocese, told us he believes in unilateral nuclear disarmament as well.  He said his theory is that: You do the right thing. Then you trust God.

We would also lobby for the closing of all nuclear power plants in this country.  Not only are they terrorists targets, but, as we’ve experienced with the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Russia (and almost experienced with the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant here), they are nuclear time bombs – whether in reactor cores or in Yucca Mountain storage barrels.

            4) “food terrorists”

            And besides all the money diverted from the hungry on our nuclear weapons build-up, we in the U.S. are “food terrorists” in a most dramatic, and “evil,” way.

            At a talk in northwest Ohio, I heard Sr. Christine Pratt, the head of the Toledo Diocese’s Catholic Rural Life Association say that Americans waste (throw away, let spoil…) an astronomical amount of food – about one-third.

            And along with all this, Americans yearly waste billions of dollars on non-nutritional junk food.

            What’s more, some 59% of Americans are now overweight, with 33% of these people being “obese,” Joe Sneed told me during an interview in Marysville, Tennessee. (Sneed is a certified personal trainer and writes a newspaper column on health issues.)

            Sneed also said the American Medical Association Journal notes obesity in America has increased 25% since 1960.

            Then if you add in all the people who obsessively over-eat, then just as obsessively over-exercise…

            In a word, we have collectively become massively gluttonous when it comes to food in this society – while, again, 24,000 people starve to death every day in the world.

            Connecting the dots:

Gluttony in many religions is a sin.  Sin is evil.

            Gluttony while little children starve, as Fr. McCarthy puts it, would seem “radical evil” in the face of relievable human misery.

            So using deductive reasoning: 

Wouldn’t we be a major part of the ‘axis of evil’ in the world’s (and God’s) eyes?

            Fr. Jim Noonan thinks so.

            Fr. Noonan is a Maryknoll missionary in Cambodia.  I interviewed him in Shelburn, Vermont, while he was home for a few weeks.

            He said 50% of the children in Cambodia are malnourished and he, too, noted the high daily starvation rates around the world.

            Fr. Noonan then said some 3,000 people died in the Twin Towers in New York on 9/11 at the hands of terrorists.  Yet every day, eight times as many people starve to death worldwide, in large part, because the U.S., and other First World countries, are tremendously selfish with the gifts God has given them.

            Given this, Fr. Noonan said we in the U.S. are, in a very real sense, “food terrorists” -- of the worst kind.

            And the world (especially those with malnourished children in the Third World) recognizes this. 

And the anger towards us grows.

Our administration would wage war on worldwide hunger.

We would ask the American people to tremendously sacrifice, as they have during wartime before.  We would ask them to cut back on their lifestyles and fund a significant cross section of initiatives to end world hunger, in our time.

5) “environmental terrorists”

And some of this sacrifice would be asked in the arena of energy.  You see, America has become extreme “environmental terrorists.”

We have six percent of the world population and are responsible for generating some 25% (by far, the most in the world) of the greenhouse gases, which are causing global warming.

Carbon dioxide spews from our motor vehicles as we drive practically everywhere.  Carbon dioxide pumps out of our coal and gas plants as they generate power for our air-conditioned and centrally heated homes and businesses – while half the world has no air conditioning, no central heating (often just fires, if that), no power…

What’s more, our factories pump out huge amounts of even more carbon dioxide to create most of the products that we consume at a higher rate than any other country on the planet.

Bluffton College Environmental Science Professor Bob Antibus told me if every country consumed like the U.S. – we’d need three planets.

Once again, this is tremendous gluttony.

What’s more, studies are showing the emission of these greenhouse gases is starting to wreak “terror” worldwide with the byproducts of global warming.

As the oceans heat up, some scientists speculate more and more super charged hurricanes (like Katrina) and typhoons will be crashing into shorelines.  In addition, consistent data shows polar ice caps are melting at record paces and glaciers are dramatically receding, like in Peru.

During a talk in Wellington, Ohio, in the midst of our End Global Warming Bicycle Tour, I read an excerpt from a recent Washington Post article:

“When Peruvian farmers look upon the Andes Mountains, instead of ice and snow, they see the bare brown edges of the mountain top.  They’ve heard the scientific talk that the blue ice that dressed these peaks for thousands of years and fed the streams below is disappearing rapidly.

“This they don’t dispute.  They despair.

“The steady supply of water they need to grow crops has become erratic.

“’If there is no water, this land becomes desert,” said Benedicto Loayza, a 52-year-old farmer in Cuzco, Peru.”

Because of our energy gluttonous lifestyles, I said at the talk, we are contributing significantly to what could become famine in Peru, and to perhaps some of the famine that is already happening in more arid countries like Africa.

I then said that this is the all too real metaphoric equivalent of Americans (terrorists) aiming guns at these people in, say, Peru, and firing slow motion bullets at them.

I mean, if our lifestyles ‘trigger’ this…

Our administration would sign the Kyoto Protocol to curb greenhouse gas emissions, immediately.  We would stridently push for alternative forms of energy and transportation, immediately.  We would spark a nationwide movement to cut back on energy use in general.  (For more, see our Energy platform.)

6) backing terror elsewhere (School of the Americas)

To get the oil and other natural resources to fuel our gluttonous lifestyles, we sometimes back terrorist activity to help governments that are friendly to our natural resource interests.

And some of the governments we back, or paramilitary groups bent on overthrowing a particular government, can be best described as terrorist organizations.

At a talk on social justice in Bluffton, Ohio, I heard Fr. Tom Hemm speak about this issue.  Fr. Hemm, who pastors a church in Ottawa, Ohio, was formerly in Chile for almost 30 years.  

While in Chile, Fr. Hemm said he watched horrified as the School of America’s (Ft. Benning, Georgia) trained militia worked to undermine a government in Chile, with a reign of terror.  Fr. Hemm said the government under attack had been favorable to the poor, but not necessarily to U.S. interests.

Fr. Hemm said many average U.S. citizens are unaware of this offshore military maneuvering. (Read: clandestine, third party sponsored terrorist activity.)

Sr. Paulette Schroeder in Tiffin, Ohio, is aware of it.

She went to Nicaragua on a Witness for Peace Tour.  She told me she learned the U.S. government was secretly supplying the Contra forces in Nicaragua so we could have more of a hand in controlling the government there.  (She said some of the leaders of these forces had also been trained at the School of the Americas as well.)

Sr. Paulette said they had been trained in coercion, torture tactics, abduction of the innocent…

Sr. Paulette continued that she learned the Sandanista Labor Movement, under the direction of Daniel Ortega, was trying to help shift the country to allow people to rise from extreme poverty.  Education was coming to many impoverished villages, as were medical clinics and the like.

However, Sr. Paulette said the Contra forces were trying to undermine this with a campaign of terror.

Sr. Paulette’s group arrived in one of these Nicaraguan villages shortly after one of these terrorist raids.  

It was just after sunrise the day the raid happened.

People in the village were preparing for another day of farming in nearby fields.

There were shots, explosions.

A mother, Heraldina, grabbed her eight-month-old baby and began to run.

“BASTANTE! (STOP!)” Someone yelled.

To stop was to die.  She kept running.

A bullet pierced Heraldina’s lower back and lodged in her baby Louis’s leg.

Heraldina survived, barely.

Louis lost his leg.

Sr. Paulette told me that was almost as appalling as the terror in Nicaragua, was what she perceived to be the “spin” she’d see about all this in the American media once she returned.  (For instance, Ortega was being characterized as a communist, when what he simply wanted was social justice and basic human rights for all people in Nicaragua, said Sr. Paulette.)

As a presidential candidate, I have stood in solidarity with people protesting to close the School of the America’s.   As president, I would continue to protest and work stridently to close the School of the America’s.

What’s more, I would work just as stridently to end American clandestine activities in other countries intended to promote U.S. interests.

7) free-trade terrorists

In a more overt way, the U.S. has become “free trade” terrorist in pursuit of a globalization paradigm that is not only primarily about promoting U.S. interests, but it is also wreaking economic havoc and terror in other countries.

For instance in the agricultural arena, we parlay huge corporate profits into buying mega-farms that utilize the most advanced modern technology (huge computerized combines, high-tech tractors…)

In turn, these farms, because of the volume and speed of productivity, are able to regularly undercut small, subsistence family farmers selling to local markets in, say, Guatemala.

At a talk in northwest Ohio, I heard Bluffton College Economics Professor James Harder explain with this advanced agricultural technology in the First World, combined with cheap transportation and evolving free-trade, the small farmers in Central and South America are regularly being undercut – creating a tremendous social justice travesty.

With the passing of NAFTA, CAFTA (with the U.S. being a significant influence behind each of these), markets are being opened all over, often giving a distinct advantage, again, to First World countries like the U.S.

This in turn, is creating even more “terror.”

Like on the streets of Juarez, Mexico.

In El Paso, Texas, just across the border from Juarez, we met with Fr. Justis Wirth, who teaches at Roger Bacon College.  Fr. Wirth is a leading authority on the effects of globalization on Mexico and has written numerous articles on the subject.

Fr. Wirth said globalization had all sorts of possibilities to build one world and one people based on love, social equality and sharing “but the sad thing is that globalization has become all about economics.”  Economics that is favorable to big business.

 For instance, Fr. Wirth said the year NAFTA passed (again, with strong U.S. backing), the Mexican government stopped small subsidies to the family farmers in the interior of Mexico.  Families that had been on these family farms for generations, lost their land.  This translated to some 15 million people.

These people, for the most part, had no place to go but to northern border towns where multi-national corporations (including many American companies) needed cheap labor for the factories they were rushing to put up once NAFTA passed.

In these factories, laborers make an average of $3 an eight-hour shift.  That’s not $3 an hour, that’s $3 a shift – in a country that’s inflation rate is higher than in the U.S.

We walked the streets of Juarez.

Some 200,000 people live in cobbled-together shacks, where there is no running water and no electricity.  People there are tremendously malnourished.

Parents are working two shifts just to get by (barely) and youth are roaming the streets in gangs.  The crime rate is skyrocketing.  And the murder rate in Juarez is the highest in Mexico.

Terror everywhere.

Yet the average American has little understanding about these free-trade dynamics, much less about the U.S. government and corporate collusion that goes on behind the scenes to set things like NAFTA in motion.

What’s more, the American people tremendously fuel this system by continually buying (if not becoming addicted to) the cheaper products coming out of these multi-national corporations that have, in a very real sense, set up unconscionable sweatshops, not only in Mexico, but around the world.

            At Missouri University, in Columbia, Missouri, I attended a talk on Third World sweatshops.

            Global Exchange’s Medium Benjamin said it would take a Nike Company worker in Indonesia two and a half month’s wages to afford one pair of company shoes, while Nike’s CEO, Benjamin continued, is personally worth $5 billion.

            “There’s something wrong with this system,” she said.

            We believe that to.

            And our administration would push to back out of NAFTA, CAFTA, etc.  We would also push to forgive Third World debt.  And we would mobilize as many forces as available (both financially and through organizations like the Peace Corp) to help Third World countries become as sustainable as possible in helping build their local economies.

            We would also work to stop American-sponsored, international “cultural terrorism.”

            8) cultural terrorists

            America has also graphically become a “cultural terrorist.”

            That is through media/entertainment, we are now beaming sex, violence and rampant materialistic messages (massive amounts of advertising) into countries worldwide -- hijacking and altering their cultures severely.

            Author Richard Horsley in his book Religion and Empire said the 9/11 terrorist attacks were, in part, motivated by those “angry at the western capitalist consumerism that has invaded their lives and undermined their traditional values.”

            Leah Anjali Sonwani would agree.

            Several years ago, I interviewed Ms. Sonwani, who is from India.  (She was in America visiting friends.)

            She said in India two generations ago, it was slower paced with people generally focused on things of the spirit, on family, on friends…  But now India is becoming “westernized,” she lamented.

            Because of the influence of western media on the culture, Ms. Sonwani continued, that this generation is much more materialistically oriented.  What’s more, she said there is more immodest dress, divorce, crime, illegal drugs from this influence as well.

            And, Ms. Sonwani said youth in India used to generally respect their elders.  Now with the messages coming from western shows, within a generation there has been a dramatic diminishment of that respect, she continued.

            This scenario is now playing out in countries all over the world.

            And it’s not hard to envision the terror in parents’ hearts as they watch their children incrementally lose their spiritual and cultural moorings in this sea of western influence (primarily coming out of Hollywood). 

Given all this, objectively, it’s also not hard to see how yet even more anger is being generated toward the U.S.

            On one front, many countries now look at us as a “nation of pornographers” because of what they see portrayed in much of our mainstream media entertainment, Gordon Clark told me.  Clark is Ohio’s Ashland University Director for the Center for English Studies, which is offered to international students.

            During a talk I gave to a graduate theology class at Bluffton College, I said Americans have become incrementally desensitized to the sin of immodesty, and to sexual sins in general.

            As a result, it would be easy to see how people from more conservative cultures would look at us as “evil” in this area. 

And, with even a modicum of objectivity, it would be easy to see how, on the domestic front, this media/entertainment is helping spike incidence of sexual acting out, violence, rampant consumerism… in America as well.

I told the Bangor (ME) News that we have become a society fixated on material wealth to the detriment of social health.

And while you can’t necessarily legislate the media/entertainment influence away because of First Amendment rights, you can try to educate about it at every turn – including using the presidency as a bully pulpit to help people see this for what it is.

9) eugenics terrorists

Now to an American terrorist activity that darkens the collective ‘shadow-self’ exponentially.

Eugenics.

Our culture has adopted selective breeding and selective killing.

Dale Ahlquist, in his book G.K. Chesterton (The Apostle of Common Sense), points out that one of the biggest proponents for eugenics was Margaret Sanger, who founded Planned Parenthood.  (She was a member of the American Eugenics Society and lobbied for sterilization laws that targeted society’s undesirables and unwanted, wrote Ahlquist.)

Adolf Hitler not only advocated for eugenics, he instituted it.

Ahlquist noted Chesteron referred to eugenics as “terrorism.”

            So as an example, we kill and dismember (terrorize) unborn babies in their mothers’ wombs.

            I met with anti-abortion activist Jonathan Martin in Great Falls, Montana.  He takes his family to abortion clinics all around the U.S. to protest.  Martin told me he and his family hold protest signs with graphic pictures of post abortion, dismembered babies.

            He said people will sometimes chastise him because of how graphic the pictures are.  And his reply simply is that it is the “truth.”

            “With abortion we have become our own worst terrorists,” I told The Range News in Arizona.  During the interview, I also noted there were 3,000 people killed on 9/11/01 in America, while the same day some 4,400 people (unborn babies) were killed on American soil as well, as they are every day.

            But it’s often not just about the abortionist, or the women and men choosing to have abortions – it’s about the whole American system.

            That is, Ahlquist writes that G.K. Chesterton would be quick to point out that society has “created a whole class of people who are unwanted.  They are permanently poor.”

            And many abortions are the byproduct of this.

            10) suburban terrorists

            In the U.S., for instance, these are people stuck in backwater rural poverty loops or inner city poverty loops.

            We went to Green County, Alabama, the poorest county in the country.  Downtown Boligee here used to have a bank, a grocery, a mechanics shop and a number of other businesses. Now it has: nothing.  Boligee’s Gary Burton told me a “good paying job” in these parts is $7 an hour.

            Kids here, if they make it to this world at all, grow up without much of a chance.  As they grow up without much of a chance in inner city Cleveland. 

(We moved our family here after Campaign 2004 to try to be part of the solution to inner city poverty.)

            Kids here consistently grow up trying to dodge drugs, gangs, hunger, bullets… They are, in every sense, terrorized. 

            But are they more terrorized by a gang member’s gun, a drug addicted parent… or by an apathetic suburban culture that has built an invisible wall (higher property values, zoning ordinances…) to keep them out?  By a suburban culture that leaves them abandoned, while suburban kids have every advantage.

            And just as we terrorize, and abandon, much of the Third World, we allow for the terrorizing and abandonment of those of the inner cities here.

            We just don’t look at it that way.

            It’s too painful.

            It’s too ugly.

            It is, indeed, “apathy in the face of relievable human misery.”

            It’s evil.

            All told in regard to every category above, would it be safe to say America is part of the ‘Axis of Evil?’

            Sure, if you connect the dots.

            So to “fight terrorism,” our administration would primarily start at home, on ourselves.

            And we would look to even more creative ways to stop terrorism, at its roots.

            11) significant roots of terrorism (Iraq sanctions, U.S. backed Israeli military, U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia, abject Third World poverty…)

            Just after 9/11, I told The Athens (OH) Post that we had to look at the “whole set of precipitating factors” behind the terrorist attacks on September 11.

            For one, Islamic militants (and others in the Arab world) had become enraged by

U.S. urged, and U.N. imposed, sweeping sanctions against Iraq.

            These sanctions followed the first Gulf War and set up a full trade embargo that excluded medical supplies, food and other items of humanitarian necessity.  President George H.W. Bush stated:  “By making life uncomfortable for the Iraqi people (the sanctions) would eventually encourage them to remove President Saddam Hussein from power.” – Seattle Post Intelligencer.

            This didn’t happen.

            What’s more, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia reported these were perhaps the toughest, most comprehensive sanctions in history.  And they were responsible for the deaths of some 500,000 children, according to UNICEF figures.

            Given that innocent children were dying, it’s not hard to see why a significant amount of anger was generated toward the U.S.

            Our administration would have not backed those sanctions from the start, because of the potential humanitarian crisis.

            And to help with a “regime change” (if that’s what the Iraqi people had wanted), our administration would have clandestinely inserted experts on non-violent resistance to train key people in the general populace.  Non-violent resistance worked in India with Ghandi, in the Civil Rights Movement, in Denmark during World War II….

            Another source of great animosity in the parts of the Arab world is the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia., where 15 of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers were from, and the U.S. backing of the Israeli military.

            In his book Religion and Empire (mentioned earlier), Richard Horsley also notes that terrorists are “frustrated by a political powerlessness to resist repressive regimes backed by the United States.

            A Fox News report noted that Osama bin Laden said he, in part, carried out the 9/11 attacks because of injustices against the Lebanese and Palestinians by Israel and the United States.

            The Representative Press carried the following quote by bin Laden:  “We swore that America wouldn’t live in security until we live it truly in Palestine.”

            According to the Winter 2006/2007 Christian Peacemaker Teams newsletter:  “Palestine is still under occupation” by the Israelis.  And the abuses continue.

            CPT representatives consistently report on home invasions, home demolitions, intimidation, beatings and imprisonment of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers and settlers.

            I interviewed CPT member Art Gish, who has gone to Palestine many times and is the author of the book Hebron Journal.

            Gish said he has witnessed some of these abuses and he has stood in front of Israeli tank in protest at one point.

            For more information on the Israel/Palestinian conflict, I attended a talk at Bluffton College by Ziad M. Abu-Rish who works for the Middle East program / Peace Building Unit of the American Friends Service Committee.

            Abu-Rish, who is a Palestinian, said the Israeli / Palestinian conflict today basically boils down to the “oppressor versus the oppressed.”

            He said the Palestinians, who have no state now, are considered the largest refugee population in the world.  There are 3.6 million registered refugees, one-third of whom live in 59 refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, said Mr. Abu-Rish.

            He continued that the Palestinian refugees are discriminated against when it comes to laws of citizenship, education, land ownership…

            As president, I would call for a suspension of military funds to Israel until a thorough investigation of these allegations was pursued (on both sides).  This investigation would be carried out by an Independent Commission and the findings would be presented to the American people.

            Also, terrorism is a complex problem and going after it in war is not the right tact, I believe.  We must put our efforts into long-term programs to stem some of the precipitating factors behind it.

            One of the main ones of those being poverty. 

            I told the Ashland (OH) Times that if a kid grows up in dead end poverty situations in the inner city of Cleveland (LA, Chicago, Detroit…), they are often apt to join gangs.  If a kid grows up in dead end Third World poverty situations in Kabul (Baghdad, Calcutta…) they are apt to join a: terrorist cell.

            I attended a talk by William Hartung, who is a President’s Fellow for the World Policy Institute.  He said there is tremendous economic inequality worldwide between the First and Third worlds.  And Hartung said there should be many more “programs for constructive opportunities for youth in the Third World (so they aren’t as apt to join a terrorist cell).

            So another way to fight terrorism at its roots, is to pump a lot more humanitarian aid and other forms of help into Third World countries.

            In Piqua, Ohio, we interviewed Ellen Johns.

            She and her husband live in a modest, one-story home there.  They have cut back considerably on their lifestyle to financially adopt 11 children worldwide through Child Reach International.

            Their response to 9/11 was, not to get behind the bombing in Afghanistan, but rather to adopt their 11^th child who was living in an orphanage near the Afghan/Pakistan border.

            And in addition, if we are the victim of terrorism – maybe we should consider other responses.

            Like that of the Amish.

            12) What if the Amish were in charge of the War on Terror?

            I recently gave a talk to a group in Oberlin, Ohio.

            During the talk, I referred to the recent, and absolutely horrific, killings of eight young Amish girls in Nickels Mines, Pennsylvania.  I then referred to a Sojourners Magazine article by Diana Butler Bass that ran shortly after the killings.

            She noted the Amish practice of forgiveness unfolded in four public acts.  First, some elders visited Marie Roberts, the wife of the murderer, to offer forgiveness.  Then, the families of the slain girls invited the widow to their own children’s funerals.  Next, they requested that all relief monies, intended for Amish families, be shared with Roberts and her children.  And finally, in an astonishing act of reconciliation, more than 30 members of the Amish community attended the funeral of the killer.

            They were “actively making peace,” Ms. Butler Bass wrote.

            And then she added the following:

            “What if the Amish were in charge of the War on Terror?  What if, on the evening of Sept. 12, 2001, we had gone to Osama bin Laden’s house (metaphorically, of course, since we didn’t know where he lived) and offered him forgiveness?  What if we had invited the families of the hijackers to the funerals of the victims of 9/11?  What if a portion of the September 11^th Fund had been dedicated to relieving poverty in a Muslim country?

            “What if, instead of seeking vengeance, we had stood together in human pain, looking honestly at the shared sin and sadness we suffered?
            “What if we had tried to make peace?”

            Ms. Butler Bass proposes we stand together in human pain, honestly looking at our “shared sin.”

            Given the U.S. “shadow self” chronicled in this paper, it is not a stretch to say there is “shared sin.”  In fact, it’s not a stretch to say the U.S. may well be perpetrating a lot more “terrorism,” in all its forms, than most of the other countries out there.

            Our administration would acknowledge this.  Ask forgiveness.  And work overtime to change it.

            “…number one, there should be a while lot of bumper stickers all across America that say ‘God bless Afghanistan, too,” said Schriner.  – The Athens (OH) Post 11/12/01