Our US media is the greatest propaganda machine in the world. Our TV stations could make us believe anything they want. And often they actually use that power to influence our opinions. (Ever felt thirsty after a soda commercial?)

Wanna know how powerful the media is? Watch the movie Rambo 3. It's the one where he's in Afghanistan, fighting against Soviets. In that movie Osama and his merry men are the good guys! And the movie makes them look like heros and martyrs. You actually feel good when you see them kill some mean old Russians. And now we're suddenly supposed to believe they're all demons that want nothing else than to harm us without any reason at all?!

The one time CNN actually showed Osama's video tape, a CNN commentator made a remark about Osama mentioning Spain's islamic past. Then the CNN reporter mentioned no matter how far out that statement might sound, we should not just brush it off as an empty threat. We should take what Osama says serious, because a man who's willing to kill for his convictions means what he says.

So how come we don't listen to Osama when he says he is fighting for the liberation of Palestine? (A little known fact is that Osama's Al Queda organization is part of the inter-arabic Palestinian Liberation Front - the so-called"terrorist network")

Our media is supressing certain facts in order to manipulate public opinion. They learned that trick after the Vietnam war. Our media never talks about the true nature of the Israeli-Palestine conflict and tries to downplay the true significance of Palestine in all this.

Moderate moslems despise Osama's terror tactics. And yet they agree with him on one thing: Palestine must be free, and the USA must stop the blind support for Israel's slaughter of innocent Palestinians - which in turn provokes Palestinian violence against their Israeli oppressors.

So should we just give in to Osama's demands? Should we force Israel to stop killing Palestinians because a terrorist said so?

No, of course we shouldn't just roll over and give the terrorists everything they want. But we should do what's right, which means while we try to catch the terrorists, we need to fall in line the with the rest of the United Nations (who condems Israel) and put sanctions on Israel until they pull their troops out of Palestine and stop being an apartheid regime, as Nelson Mandela calls the Israeli government.

That doesn't mean we'll leave Israel to fend for themselves in hostile lands. Of course we'll be there to protect them if any Arab state (Iraq or anybody else) might decide to attack Israel.

But the point is: Moslems are people like you and I. They don't like losing their loved ones any more than we do. And the vast majority are just people who want to be happy and see their kids grow up in peace.

Osama is an extremist. He will probably never stop being a terrorist no matter what we do.

The problem is that right now even the most moderate Moslems, the kind of Moslems who party in clubs, listen to pop music and surf the web, agree with Osama on one thing: Palestine.

That's why he is able to rally so much support in the islamic world.

If we take away this common ground between the"good" Moslems (who have every right to be pissed at us for what's going on in Palestine) and Osama's band of merry extremists (who probably want a lot more than just a free Palestine), then we'll be on the right track to take away Osama's power and suffocate terrorism from within.

Once the modern and more liberal Moslems realize we no longer condone the slaughter of innocent Arabs, they will no longer support Osama. (Case in point: Even Saudi Arabia wants to see Osama dead.)

The most important thing is to make Arabs stop hate us. That has nothing to do with taking the wimpy way out. It's just the right thing to do. We have done wrong by them, and it's time to take the blame for it.

Once we make that first step, those islamic states will actually help us catch Osama.

Even Israel admitted that the only time there ever was peace with the Palestinians was when Arafat's Palestinian police was taking care of their own extremists.

The same thing goes for other Arab extremists - like Osama. Once he loses the support of his own people, he will be nothing else than an arab version of Timothy McVeigh.

But right now Osama is an arab version of Davy Crockett. And until we change that, we can kill Arabs until we turn blue in the face, and it still won't stop terrorism. It will only create more hatred and more terrorism.

Think about this for a second: None of the airplane hijackers involved in the World Trade Center attack were even from Afghanistan. And yet we're killing hords of innocent civilians... mothers, sisters, daughters, grandfathers, babies, sons, brothers and fathers. And for every innocent Afghan we kill, we create 10 new terrorists.

And the longer our bombing of Afghanistan continues, the more upset the other 1 billion moslems around the world are getting. There are huge violent protests against America in every islamic country, and those protests are spreading every single day. It's very possible that all these moslems will unite against us sooner or later if we continue to kill innocent people. And then the shit will really hit the fan. Then we'll have a 3rd World War, which won't do anybody any good.

President Reagan led a war against Lybia to stop terrorism. Did it stop terrorism? No. Terrorism has been alive and well for all these years, and every time we attacked a Middle Eastern country and killed civilians, we created more terrorists, willing to give their lives to avenge their dead loved ones.

As long as this circle of violence continues, terrorism will thrive. And every time the terrorists hit us back for something we do in the Middle East, their attacks on us will get more and more vicious. We have to kill terrorism, not the terrorists. Killing the terrorists means we'll accidentally kill civilians aswell, which in turn will create far more terrorists than we just killed.

We can't even win the war on crime, so how could we ever hope to win the war on terrorism? Terrorism is a hundred times worse than crime, because crime is motivated by primitive greed, while terrorism is motivated by convictions and beliefs that these people are willing to die for. How many criminals do you know that are willing to die just to mug you?

And if we can't even win the war against a handful of terrorists here in the States who practically paralyse the entire country with a bio-attack, how could we ever hope to win a war against 1 billion angry moslems?

Trigger-happy hawks in the US government have already announced that they want to attack Iraq and a few other islamic countries next. If we do that, the coalition will fall apart instantly. No islamic country will be on our side, and even our European allies have already made it clear that they will not support an unprovoked attack on Iraq.

What most Americans don't understand, is that not all Middle Easterners are the same. And there are not just"good" moslems (who leave us alone) and"bad" moslems (extremists like Osama.) It's a little more complicated than that.

There are royalists (like the rich rulers of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait), there are secular modernists (like Saddam) and then there are religious fundamentalists (like Osama).

All throughout history, kings have abused their royal powers and abused their people. And all over the world those kings have eventually been overthrown by their own people (see French revolution or the Russian revolution) unless they agreed to empower their own people. If the British royal family hadn't given the power to the democratic parties, they probably would have been killed, just like the French royals.

But in the Middle East, kings still rule Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Why? Because the US wants it that way. It's easier for us to buy oil from some royals, rather than have to deal with political turmoil after a king has been overthrown. Not all people in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are rich. The royal families live in unimaginable wealth while large parts of their population live in poverty. Their own people have practically no rights. They can't vote, the have no freedom of speech, etc. The Saudi and Kuwaiti royals are really not much better than the Taliban in that regard.

But you never hear about that stuff in our media, because our government prefers to keep the status quo, to keep the price of oil low. But the Saudi and Kuwaiti people would prefer to see their kings go. When we defended Kuwait from Saddam, we were actually just defending the Kuwaiti Royal family. Saddam really wouldn't have treated the Kuwaiti people any worse than they are treated right now - but for the Kuwaiti Royals it would have meant exile or death.

Right now the Saudi Royal family wants to be on our good side, because we make them rich by buyin their oil, and by guaranteeing their safety against their own people.

But if their own people get too pissed at their Royals, they might very well overthrow their Royals and either follow a secular modernist like Saddam (he's not a Royal - he's one of the guys from the street) or follow Osama, a religious fundamentalist.

Saddam wants change. He wants a modern state. That's the opposite of what religious fundamentalists like Osama want. (They want the same thing the Taliban wants - some crazy mediveal backwards country without any modern western influences.) That's why Saddam has locked up thousands of religious fundamentalists in his jails. Saddam and Osama can't stand each other.

It's our own fault they're working together against us. If we didn't give them that one reason they all have in common to hate us (Palestine) then Osama and Saddam probably would have killed each other already.

Quelle

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