Thursday, September 25, 2008

Wikileaks - Bin Laden and a Texas court

Wikileaks is indeed great: checked out two stories, one about a corrupt court in Texas, another containing a selection of interviews and declarations from Osama Bin Laden from 1994 to 2004. Very interesting.

The first is a clear-cut case of good versus bad: innocent people are convicted by criminals who occupy chief positions in the court and the police . Example: a person convicted of drug traffic has in fact never trafficked drugs while the policemen that indicted her on false evidence are in fact drug dealers. Well this is what is described in this apparently accurate book! Is it true? I'm not entirely sure, but, if it is, it is a clear case of good guys vs bad guys.

Now, what makes this so clear to us is a set of shared beliefs about what constitutes good and evil. Inflicting a punishment on someone for an action that he or her did not commit is, we all believe, something evil. And when someone gets away with something (such a dealing drugs) that is correctly prohibited, we also generally believe this to be wrong.

Now in the case of the jihad that Bin Laden and others proposed in 1996, we are looking at very different sets of assumptions which are not shared by the different cultures that have to share this region (Muslims, Jews, Christians, Scientists / Atheists). Not only about what to dress, but how to behave, values, who to obey, what to obey, and why to obey. When I read Bin Laden's words I can't stop feeling a great compassion towards him, I do understand his pain and the ways he has available to deal with it. Basically he is saying that the bads that have occurred to Muslims all over the world are due to the fact that they had been to permissive regarding their involvement with the sinfulness of rest of the world. "Infidels" should not have influence in "holy" lands. Well... you can't really reason with someone like that.

When I knew that Bin Laden's texts were on the net I thought, great, now I will see the other side, but seeing it made it very clear that there is really no way of communicating (communion) with someone like that. If I am an infidel and he is a saint, well, what can an infidel say to a saint? What can he possibly bring except disgrace, sin, shame, etc. Bin Laden's position is like an Iron Wall made of feelings of what is proper and useful and what should be neglected and dispised. All that are on the outside of the Muslim faith must be despised, all that are inside must try to remain pure.


Only in this context of "remaining pure" does it make sense to talk about the military, economic and political issues also at stake. Ironically, the recent military interventions by the US on the Middle East will indeed provide an excellent background where the ideas of these crazy radicals can flourish. I am not saying that the military, political and economical issues are not real. Governments in the Middle East are indeed corrupt, and there are many issues between the arabs and israelis, including the lands taken in the aftermath of the 1948 war. But this kind of problems also exists in Europe and many other parts of the world. What makes the situation almost impossible to solve here is the disregard for the other side. The hard line of both Jew and Muslim orthodoxy (along with most Western religions) consider themselves superior and, the Jews at least, entitled to reign over the other tribes of Israel. As long as this craziness from religious fanatics continue there will be no other choice but to let them all kill one another until only reasonable people are left. These, I think are the people that don't alienate themselves with images or notions of God that they themselves have created as a group. The God that we were able to create is, by far, very different from the God who would be able to create us.

Let me just reinforce the idea: I've read Chomsky and I understand that colonialism just changes it's appearance. But the question here is how we deal with the influences of other countries and cultures. If there is no communication, and instead just despise and disgust and the attempt to "remain pure"... well, what can you expect?

There are here two different problems, the first is that this region has resources that have high economical value to western societies. This leads to heavy interference in the region based not on a human interest (in the art or human qualities of a people for instance), but on exploitation of resources, which leaves indigenous people rightly mad. The second problem is that some of these Muslim guys do not want contact with the outside world. Even if there was no exploitation, it wouldn't matter. It's our own way of life, we are disbelievers and non-obedient. We praise difference, diversity, authenticity. We are certainly infidels.

Conversely guys like Bin Laden are quite happy in their frame of mind of "obedience to God and the scriptures". They are happy if they can spend most of their day praying to God and trying to clean themselves. They don't care about pornography, expensive clothes and lipstick; they don't want to know about science and galaxies and dinosaurs, they just want to live by the words of the prophet. We should just let them be... just let them be... Let them stay with their lives, they wont search for weapons of mass destruction, they'll just... well, persecute the infidels among them and the infidel inside them... they'll be quite happy that way.

But of course... we can't, because of oil... We are joining a 21st century society, which fuels its high technology with something that can be found in a civilization similar to ours more than four centuries ago. It just wont work... There are just two options, either an increase in military operations until one of the sides decisively wins, or some other form of energy is found that completely replaces oil turning it into something with no value at all.

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