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From billhicks.com message board.
We can't just sit back and watch this happen on the news before we watch Eastenders and go to the pub.
We have the chance to get our voices heard, emails can get round the world in seconds.
Please, please copy and send this to anyone you know.
I know I go on and on about this, but we are approaching one of the worst periods in our history, but we can change this.
"But it's just an email".
But you send it to one person and they send it someone else etc etc, this is how things get changed, worlds get altered for the better.
I'll shut up now and let the man speak:
-------
The following was to me by my friend Tamim Ansary.
Tamim is an Afghani-American writer. He is also one of the most brilliant people I know in this life. When he writes, I read. When he talks, I listen. Here is his take on Afghanistan and the whole mess
we are in.
Gary T.
Dear Gary and whoever else are on this email thread:
I've been hearing a lot of talk about "bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age."
Ronn Owens, on KGO Talk Radio today, allowed that this would mean killing innocent people, people who had nothing to do with this atrocity, but "we're at war, we have to accept collateral damage. What else can we do?"
Minutes later I heard some TV pundit discussing whether we "have the belly to do what must be done."
And I thought about the issues being raised especially hard because I am from Afghanistan, and even though I've lived here for 35 years I've never lost track of what's going on there.
So I want to tell anyone who will listen how it all looks from where I'm standing.
I speak as one who hates the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden.
There is no doubt in my mind that these people were responsible for the atrocity in New York.
I agree that something must be done about those monsters. But the Taliban and Ben Laden are not Afghanistan.
They're not even the government of Afghanistan.
The Taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics who took over Afghanistan in 1997. Bin Laden is a political criminal with a plan.
When you think Taliban, think Nazis. When you think Bin Laden, think Hitler. And when you think "the people of Afghanistan" think "the Jews in the concentration camps."
It's not only that the Afghan people had nothing to do with this atrocity. They were the first victims of the perpetrators. They would exult if someone would come in there, take out the Taliban and clear out the rats nest of international thugs holed up in their country.
Some say, why don't the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban?
The answer is, they're starved, exhausted, hurt, incapacitated, suffering.
A few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there are 500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan--a country with no economy, no food. There are millions of widows.
And the Taliban has been burying these widows alive in mass graves. The soil is littered with land mines; the farms were all destroyed by the Soviets. These are a few of the reasons why the Afghan people have not overthrown the Taliban.
We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age.
Trouble is, that's been done.
The Soviets took care of it already.
Make the Afghans suffer? They're already suffering.
Level their houses? Done.
Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done.
Eradicate their hospitals? Done.
Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine and health care?
Too late. Someone already did all that.
New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs. Would they at least get the Taliban? Not likely.
In today's Afghanistan, only the Taliban eat, only they have the means to move around. They'd slip away and hide. Maybe the bombs would get some of those disabled orphans, they don't move too fast; they don't even have wheelchairs.
But flying over Kabul and dropping bombs wouldn't really be a strike against the criminals who did this horrific thing. Actually it would only be making common cause with the Taliban--by raping once again the people they've been raping all this time
So what else is there? What can be done, then? Let me now speak with true fear and trembling. The only way to get Bin Laden is to go in there with ground troops. When people speak of "having the belly to do what needs to be done" they're thinking in terms of having the belly to
kill as many as needed.
Having the belly to overcome any moral qualms about killing innocent people. Let's pull our heads out of the sand. What's actually on the table is Americans dying. And not just because some Americans would die fighting their way through Afghanistan to Bin Laden's hideout.
It's much bigger than that folks.
Because to get any troops to Afghanistan, we'd have to go through Pakistan. Would they let us? Not likely.
The conquest of Pakistan would have to be first.
Will other Muslim nations just stand by? You see where I'm going.
We're flirting with a world war between Islam and the West.
And guess what: that's Bin Laden's program.
That's exactly what he wants. That's why he did this. Read his speeches and statements. It's all right there. He really believes Islam would beat the west.
It might seem ridiculous, but he figures if he can polarise the world into Islam and the West, he's got a billion soldiers.
If the west wreaks a holocaust in those lands, that's a billion people with nothing left to lose, that's even better from Bin Laden's point of view. He's probably wrong, in the end the west would win, whatever that would mean, but the war would last for years and millions would die, not just theirs but ours.
Who has the belly for that?
Bin Laden does.
Anyone else?
Tamim Ansary
We can't just sit back and watch this happen on the news before we watch Eastenders and go to the pub.
We have the chance to get our voices heard, emails can get round the world in seconds.
Please, please copy and send this to anyone you know.
I know I go on and on about this, but we are approaching one of the worst periods in our history, but we can change this.
"But it's just an email".
But you send it to one person and they send it someone else etc etc, this is how things get changed, worlds get altered for the better.
I'll shut up now and let the man speak:
-------
The following was to me by my friend Tamim Ansary.
Tamim is an Afghani-American writer. He is also one of the most brilliant people I know in this life. When he writes, I read. When he talks, I listen. Here is his take on Afghanistan and the whole mess
we are in.
Gary T.
Dear Gary and whoever else are on this email thread:
I've been hearing a lot of talk about "bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age."
Ronn Owens, on KGO Talk Radio today, allowed that this would mean killing innocent people, people who had nothing to do with this atrocity, but "we're at war, we have to accept collateral damage. What else can we do?"
Minutes later I heard some TV pundit discussing whether we "have the belly to do what must be done."
And I thought about the issues being raised especially hard because I am from Afghanistan, and even though I've lived here for 35 years I've never lost track of what's going on there.
So I want to tell anyone who will listen how it all looks from where I'm standing.
I speak as one who hates the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden.
There is no doubt in my mind that these people were responsible for the atrocity in New York.
I agree that something must be done about those monsters. But the Taliban and Ben Laden are not Afghanistan.
They're not even the government of Afghanistan.
The Taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics who took over Afghanistan in 1997. Bin Laden is a political criminal with a plan.
When you think Taliban, think Nazis. When you think Bin Laden, think Hitler. And when you think "the people of Afghanistan" think "the Jews in the concentration camps."
It's not only that the Afghan people had nothing to do with this atrocity. They were the first victims of the perpetrators. They would exult if someone would come in there, take out the Taliban and clear out the rats nest of international thugs holed up in their country.
Some say, why don't the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban?
The answer is, they're starved, exhausted, hurt, incapacitated, suffering.
A few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there are 500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan--a country with no economy, no food. There are millions of widows.
And the Taliban has been burying these widows alive in mass graves. The soil is littered with land mines; the farms were all destroyed by the Soviets. These are a few of the reasons why the Afghan people have not overthrown the Taliban.
We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age.
Trouble is, that's been done.
The Soviets took care of it already.
Make the Afghans suffer? They're already suffering.
Level their houses? Done.
Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done.
Eradicate their hospitals? Done.
Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine and health care?
Too late. Someone already did all that.
New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs. Would they at least get the Taliban? Not likely.
In today's Afghanistan, only the Taliban eat, only they have the means to move around. They'd slip away and hide. Maybe the bombs would get some of those disabled orphans, they don't move too fast; they don't even have wheelchairs.
But flying over Kabul and dropping bombs wouldn't really be a strike against the criminals who did this horrific thing. Actually it would only be making common cause with the Taliban--by raping once again the people they've been raping all this time
So what else is there? What can be done, then? Let me now speak with true fear and trembling. The only way to get Bin Laden is to go in there with ground troops. When people speak of "having the belly to do what needs to be done" they're thinking in terms of having the belly to
kill as many as needed.
Having the belly to overcome any moral qualms about killing innocent people. Let's pull our heads out of the sand. What's actually on the table is Americans dying. And not just because some Americans would die fighting their way through Afghanistan to Bin Laden's hideout.
It's much bigger than that folks.
Because to get any troops to Afghanistan, we'd have to go through Pakistan. Would they let us? Not likely.
The conquest of Pakistan would have to be first.
Will other Muslim nations just stand by? You see where I'm going.
We're flirting with a world war between Islam and the West.
And guess what: that's Bin Laden's program.
That's exactly what he wants. That's why he did this. Read his speeches and statements. It's all right there. He really believes Islam would beat the west.
It might seem ridiculous, but he figures if he can polarise the world into Islam and the West, he's got a billion soldiers.
If the west wreaks a holocaust in those lands, that's a billion people with nothing left to lose, that's even better from Bin Laden's point of view. He's probably wrong, in the end the west would win, whatever that would mean, but the war would last for years and millions would die, not just theirs but ours.
Who has the belly for that?
Bin Laden does.
Anyone else?
Tamim Ansary
Yes it does.
And it appears that "legit" news sources are starting to say "Hang on a minute, there must have been a reason this happened", which is NOT the same as saying it was deserved.
But it will get worse with that warmonger Bush leading the country into an apocolyptic confrontation.
Arrogant redneck cracker doesn't even realise what's coming.
But what's the point of wasting your breath?
Nobody cares, I get written off as a loudmouth, always banging on about the same things.
makes you despair sometimes that most other people dont care or stop to think about this stuff.
But this is my mission, to inform and elucidate on these situations. I can't do anything else, so I will continue to shout about corrupt and lying governments, massacres of foreign nationals in the name of "trade" and the brutalisation of children for profit.
And it appears that "legit" news sources are starting to say "Hang on a minute, there must have been a reason this happened", which is NOT the same as saying it was deserved.
But it will get worse with that warmonger Bush leading the country into an apocolyptic confrontation.
Arrogant redneck cracker doesn't even realise what's coming.
But what's the point of wasting your breath?
Nobody cares, I get written off as a loudmouth, always banging on about the same things.
makes you despair sometimes that most other people dont care or stop to think about this stuff.
But this is my mission, to inform and elucidate on these situations. I can't do anything else, so I will continue to shout about corrupt and lying governments, massacres of foreign nationals in the name of "trade" and the brutalisation of children for profit.
Just read the article Wookiee, very interesting.
MAkes you think a bit, doesn't it?
MAkes you think a bit, doesn't it?
Interesting section on the BBC website...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world /middle_east/newsid_1552000/1552900.stm
(Remove the space...)
I'm not usually a politics person, but this has explained a lot to me.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world /middle_east/newsid_1552000/1552900.stm
(Remove the space...)
I'm not usually a politics person, but this has explained a lot to me.
From billhicks.com message board.
We can't just sit back and watch this happen on the news before we watch Eastenders and go to the pub.
We have the chance to get our voices heard, emails can get round the world in seconds.
Please, please copy and send this to anyone you know.
I know I go on and on about this, but we are approaching one of the worst periods in our history, but we can change this.
"But it's just an email".
But you send it to one person and they send it someone else etc etc, this is how things get changed, worlds get altered for the better.
I'll shut up now and let the man speak:
-------
The following was to me by my friend Tamim Ansary.
Tamim is an Afghani-American writer. He is also one of the most brilliant people I know in this life. When he writes, I read. When he talks, I listen. Here is his take on Afghanistan and the whole mess
we are in.
Gary T.
Dear Gary and whoever else are on this email thread:
I've been hearing a lot of talk about "bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age."
Ronn Owens, on KGO Talk Radio today, allowed that this would mean killing innocent people, people who had nothing to do with this atrocity, but "we're at war, we have to accept collateral damage. What else can we do?"
Minutes later I heard some TV pundit discussing whether we "have the belly to do what must be done."
And I thought about the issues being raised especially hard because I am from Afghanistan, and even though I've lived here for 35 years I've never lost track of what's going on there.
So I want to tell anyone who will listen how it all looks from where I'm standing.
I speak as one who hates the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden.
There is no doubt in my mind that these people were responsible for the atrocity in New York.
I agree that something must be done about those monsters. But the Taliban and Ben Laden are not Afghanistan.
They're not even the government of Afghanistan.
The Taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics who took over Afghanistan in 1997. Bin Laden is a political criminal with a plan.
When you think Taliban, think Nazis. When you think Bin Laden, think Hitler. And when you think "the people of Afghanistan" think "the Jews in the concentration camps."
It's not only that the Afghan people had nothing to do with this atrocity. They were the first victims of the perpetrators. They would exult if someone would come in there, take out the Taliban and clear out the rats nest of international thugs holed up in their country.
Some say, why don't the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban?
The answer is, they're starved, exhausted, hurt, incapacitated, suffering.
A few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there are 500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan--a country with no economy, no food. There are millions of widows.
And the Taliban has been burying these widows alive in mass graves. The soil is littered with land mines; the farms were all destroyed by the Soviets. These are a few of the reasons why the Afghan people have not overthrown the Taliban.
We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age.
Trouble is, that's been done.
The Soviets took care of it already.
Make the Afghans suffer? They're already suffering.
Level their houses? Done.
Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done.
Eradicate their hospitals? Done.
Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine and health care?
Too late. Someone already did all that.
New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs. Would they at least get the Taliban? Not likely.
In today's Afghanistan, only the Taliban eat, only they have the means to move around. They'd slip away and hide. Maybe the bombs would get some of those disabled orphans, they don't move too fast; they don't even have wheelchairs.
But flying over Kabul and dropping bombs wouldn't really be a strike against the criminals who did this horrific thing. Actually it would only be making common cause with the Taliban--by raping once again the people they've been raping all this time
So what else is there? What can be done, then? Let me now speak with true fear and trembling. The only way to get Bin Laden is to go in there with ground troops. When people speak of "having the belly to do what needs to be done" they're thinking in terms of having the belly to
kill as many as needed.
Having the belly to overcome any moral qualms about killing innocent people. Let's pull our heads out of the sand. What's actually on the table is Americans dying. And not just because some Americans would die fighting their way through Afghanistan to Bin Laden's hideout.
It's much bigger than that folks.
Because to get any troops to Afghanistan, we'd have to go through Pakistan. Would they let us? Not likely.
The conquest of Pakistan would have to be first.
Will other Muslim nations just stand by? You see where I'm going.
We're flirting with a world war between Islam and the West.
And guess what: that's Bin Laden's program.
That's exactly what he wants. That's why he did this. Read his speeches and statements. It's all right there. He really believes Islam would beat the west.
It might seem ridiculous, but he figures if he can polarise the world into Islam and the West, he's got a billion soldiers.
If the west wreaks a holocaust in those lands, that's a billion people with nothing left to lose, that's even better from Bin Laden's point of view. He's probably wrong, in the end the west would win, whatever that would mean, but the war would last for years and millions would die, not just theirs but ours.
Who has the belly for that?
Bin Laden does.
Anyone else?
Tamim Ansary
We can't just sit back and watch this happen on the news before we watch Eastenders and go to the pub.
We have the chance to get our voices heard, emails can get round the world in seconds.
Please, please copy and send this to anyone you know.
I know I go on and on about this, but we are approaching one of the worst periods in our history, but we can change this.
"But it's just an email".
But you send it to one person and they send it someone else etc etc, this is how things get changed, worlds get altered for the better.
I'll shut up now and let the man speak:
-------
The following was to me by my friend Tamim Ansary.
Tamim is an Afghani-American writer. He is also one of the most brilliant people I know in this life. When he writes, I read. When he talks, I listen. Here is his take on Afghanistan and the whole mess
we are in.
Gary T.
Dear Gary and whoever else are on this email thread:
I've been hearing a lot of talk about "bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age."
Ronn Owens, on KGO Talk Radio today, allowed that this would mean killing innocent people, people who had nothing to do with this atrocity, but "we're at war, we have to accept collateral damage. What else can we do?"
Minutes later I heard some TV pundit discussing whether we "have the belly to do what must be done."
And I thought about the issues being raised especially hard because I am from Afghanistan, and even though I've lived here for 35 years I've never lost track of what's going on there.
So I want to tell anyone who will listen how it all looks from where I'm standing.
I speak as one who hates the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden.
There is no doubt in my mind that these people were responsible for the atrocity in New York.
I agree that something must be done about those monsters. But the Taliban and Ben Laden are not Afghanistan.
They're not even the government of Afghanistan.
The Taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics who took over Afghanistan in 1997. Bin Laden is a political criminal with a plan.
When you think Taliban, think Nazis. When you think Bin Laden, think Hitler. And when you think "the people of Afghanistan" think "the Jews in the concentration camps."
It's not only that the Afghan people had nothing to do with this atrocity. They were the first victims of the perpetrators. They would exult if someone would come in there, take out the Taliban and clear out the rats nest of international thugs holed up in their country.
Some say, why don't the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban?
The answer is, they're starved, exhausted, hurt, incapacitated, suffering.
A few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there are 500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan--a country with no economy, no food. There are millions of widows.
And the Taliban has been burying these widows alive in mass graves. The soil is littered with land mines; the farms were all destroyed by the Soviets. These are a few of the reasons why the Afghan people have not overthrown the Taliban.
We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age.
Trouble is, that's been done.
The Soviets took care of it already.
Make the Afghans suffer? They're already suffering.
Level their houses? Done.
Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done.
Eradicate their hospitals? Done.
Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine and health care?
Too late. Someone already did all that.
New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs. Would they at least get the Taliban? Not likely.
In today's Afghanistan, only the Taliban eat, only they have the means to move around. They'd slip away and hide. Maybe the bombs would get some of those disabled orphans, they don't move too fast; they don't even have wheelchairs.
But flying over Kabul and dropping bombs wouldn't really be a strike against the criminals who did this horrific thing. Actually it would only be making common cause with the Taliban--by raping once again the people they've been raping all this time
So what else is there? What can be done, then? Let me now speak with true fear and trembling. The only way to get Bin Laden is to go in there with ground troops. When people speak of "having the belly to do what needs to be done" they're thinking in terms of having the belly to
kill as many as needed.
Having the belly to overcome any moral qualms about killing innocent people. Let's pull our heads out of the sand. What's actually on the table is Americans dying. And not just because some Americans would die fighting their way through Afghanistan to Bin Laden's hideout.
It's much bigger than that folks.
Because to get any troops to Afghanistan, we'd have to go through Pakistan. Would they let us? Not likely.
The conquest of Pakistan would have to be first.
Will other Muslim nations just stand by? You see where I'm going.
We're flirting with a world war between Islam and the West.
And guess what: that's Bin Laden's program.
That's exactly what he wants. That's why he did this. Read his speeches and statements. It's all right there. He really believes Islam would beat the west.
It might seem ridiculous, but he figures if he can polarise the world into Islam and the West, he's got a billion soldiers.
If the west wreaks a holocaust in those lands, that's a billion people with nothing left to lose, that's even better from Bin Laden's point of view. He's probably wrong, in the end the west would win, whatever that would mean, but the war would last for years and millions would die, not just theirs but ours.
Who has the belly for that?
Bin Laden does.
Anyone else?
Tamim Ansary