Eradicating Terrorists?

<body topmargin=0 leftmargin=0 marginheight=0 marginwidth=0> <table cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 border=0><tr> <td valign="top" colspan=2 height=90 BGCOLOR="#CC9966" TEXT="#080000" bgproperties="fixed" background="04600640dkesoe.jpg"> <div> <FONT SIZE="5" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" ><B>Medical Missionary Press</B></FONT><FONT SIZE="1" COLOR="#006633" FACE="Arial" > </FONT><FONT SIZE="1" COLOR="#FF3300" FACE="Arial" > </FONT><FONT SIZE="1" COLOR="#CC0033" FACE="Arial" > </FONT><B> |     </B><A HREF="index.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Medical Missionary Press"><B>home</B></A></div> <div>                                                   </div> <div> </div> </td> </tr><tr> <td valign="top" width=190 BGCOLOR="#CC9966" TEXT="#080000"> <div> Perhaps we need to consider a little more fully what is really involved in declaring a war on terrorism and terrorists</div> </td> <td valign="top" height=390 width="100%" BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" TEXT="#080000"> <div> Eradicating Terrorists?</div> <DIV ALIGN="LEFT"></DIV> <div> <B>ERADICATING TERRORISTS?</B></div> <bR> <div>      September 11, 2001 is a day that will most likely not be forgotten by this generation. The events of that fateful day have caused many people to wonder what goes on in the mind of a terrorist. The United States government has declared war on terrorism and terrorists. It might be easier to declare war on terrorism, than on terrorists.</div> <div>      To identify terrorism we only need to identify actions and results. To terrorize is defined as the use of acts of terror or violence to coerce people. We often use the term in a broader sense to refer to acts of violence or crime that have no logical rationale behind them. Some people engage in terrorist acts simply because they enjoy doing something violent. It is appropriate to put forth efforts to apprehend and bring to justice those who are responsible for acts of terrorism. But it is much more difficult to identify a person who might be a terrorist but has not yet committed an act of terrorism. It is even more difficult to ascertain how a person might think and whether they indeed would become a terrorist who would commit acts of terrorism such as we saw September 11.</div> <div>      In our haste to stamp out terrorists we should not forget that big scale terrorists often grow from little scale terrorists. Acts of terrorism are daily occurring in a wide variety of ways that we often overlook, and have perhaps ceased to see as actually terrorism. Throwing a brick through a window is an act of terrorism. Writing obscene graffiti (or maybe most any graffiti) is a small-scale act of terrorism. Phone threats are acts of terrorism. Injury purposely done to people, or damage deliberately done to property, these are all acts of terrorism. Of course, Tuesday's events were a glaringly outstanding act of terrorism. Yes, we are anxious to prevent terrorism, but there are several points that in our haste we may easily overlook.</div> <bR> <div> <B>1.</B>  <B>While there may be a great concern in the hearts of many of us in America for the possible acts of terrorism that can take place, there is also a deep concern in the hearts of many of us that in a time of great trauma and emotional reaction we can be in danger of over reacting.</B> To declare that we are going to wage war on terrorists until we have stamped them out is to run a great risk of embarking on a modern day "witch hunt" which will inevitably result in the destruction of innocent lives. In our pain we can easily develop a hasty outlook of "shoot first and ask questions later." To carry out the stated intention of eliminating terrorists requires assessing motives and possibilities of individual's characters and lives. This can be an endless and eventually ruthless process. We are in exceedingly grave danger of criminalizing race, religion, or ethnic background as the breeding place of terrorists and then persecuting or purging those with such background. Terrorists come from all walks of life, all denominations, all races. The great danger is that some group of people with sufficient power will identify other minority groups, or segments of society with less power or influence, as a threat to society, because some members or renegades from that group conducted or committed terrorist activities.</div> <div>      Because some terrorists have come from Jordan, we might be liable to hastily conclude that all Jordanians are potential terrorists. Or because some militant Islamics have committed acts of terrorism, we might be in danger of concluding that all Islamics are dangerous and could be potential terrorists. From Tuesday, September 11, through Thursday, September 13, in the U.S., firebombs damaged Islamic mosques, Hindu and Sikh temples. A man attempted to run down a Pakistani woman with his car, claiming that he was "doing this for my country." Another man awaits trial on the charge of murdering Balbir Singh Sodhi, a 49-year-old gas station owner and father of three who was shot to death while doing some landscaping work outside his business. But these incidents were not the only indication of unreasonable reactions spurred by heated emotions. The danger of overreacting was illustrated by the poll conducted recently by Sierra College Research Institute. The researchers found that <I>a third of New Yorkers favored internment camps for Arabs</I>. </div> <div>      Some of the greatest terrorists of all time have arisen within the Catholic religion (for example read the history of the St. Bartholomew massacre when the presiding pontiff struck a special medal to commemorate the cold murder of thousands of Protestants). Should we then conclude that all Catholics are potential terrorists to be confined and strictly guarded or eliminated? No doubt some people with backgrounds such as Methodists, Baptists, Mormons, Presbyterians, Seventh-day Adventists, or Jehovah's Witnesses have also committed acts of terrorism. Does this make any of those religions the spawning ground of anti-society terrorism? If we allow ourselves to over react, if we are willing to sell out too many of our freedoms in the effort to reach the elusive goal of "security," we could eventually become the most despotic and oppressive nation of all time. Every principle of freedom provided by our Constitution could eventually be traded for "security" and yet in reality our "security" would be an illusion because we would not know when we might be the next suspects of surveillance as potential terrorists because of our religion, race, or background. The effort to eradicate terrorists by this approach could be a serious mistake.</div> <bR> <div> <B>2.</B> <B> Preventing terrorism by figuring out how terrorists think and then catching and confining or eliminating all potential terrorists is a vastly more monumental task than any of us can possibly comprehend</B>. Identifying a potential terrorist might be more difficult than we think. Can we identify with certainty who has seeds of terrorism lying in their hearts? For example, to <I>really</I> accomplish this goal it is necessary to perceive the development of children and their potential habits of thinking, and guard or eliminate such individuals. Otherwise they would eventually be terrorists who could wreak devastation. Terrorists could most likely develop from certain types of people, certain races, or certain religions or ideologies. People exhibiting some of the prescribed suspicious characteristics would need to be carefully monitored and watched, or possibly eliminated, for the sense of security of the majority. This could conceivably become a second Inquisition in which everyone is urged to be an informer of his brother and neighbor, and no one knows who will mysteriously disappear next.</div> <div>      This approach fails to recognize that terrorist seeds of thought may lie dormant in the hearts of even the best of us. The thought of jealousy, envy, anger, hatred, revenge, malice, -these are all seeds of terrorist thoughts and motives. Our mental and emotional programming develops from early moments of life, even during our prenatal period, and is affected by education, religion, diet, entertainment, exposure to news, and many other factors. All of these can have their degree of influence in the making of a terrorist.</div> <div>      Some terrorists are not recognized as such because they carry on their activities in a more politically acceptable way. Others are more visible because their acts of terrorism are so very obvious or bizarre. When an obscure and little known individual hijacks a plane it is an act of terrorism. We have no problem recognizing it. But if a public agency hijacks a home and takes away the children because their education is more conservative or religious than public school, or their lifestyle is not considered "normal" by the soda pop, hamburger, and TV generation, it is not perceived to be terrorism. Such terrorist activities may even be publicized as "rescuing" the victims from "abusive" parents.</div> <bR> <div>      We could even note that quite a number of well known individuals down through history have engaged in terrorism. In fact some have led whole nations into terrorist activities. We are all doubtless familiar with the terrorist activities of Hitler, Alexander, and many others. Even in our own United States, citizens have sometimes experienced terrorist experiences at the hands of agencies apparently endeavoring to prevent the practice of health treatment by practitioners whom they have decided to label as "unorthodox." Remember, there do not have to be violent deaths in order to constitute terrorist activities.</div> <bR> <div> Perhaps we are appalled at the terrorist events of Tuesday because there were many deaths and injuries. But if we consider that a vast number of innocent victims are killed every day by abortion, we must ask which acts of terrorism are worse? The ones that happen unexpectedly, or the ones that are publicly condoned and sponsored? Maybe it is easy for us to overlook the fact that the systematic slaughter of American lives through abortion vastly outnumbers all deaths due to wars and other terrorist activities in America's history.</div> <div>      Maybe we have become accustomed to the fact that 25,000 deaths a year are due to drunk driving. That's 25,000 deaths of mostly innocent men, women, and children. The terrorist attacks on September 11 killed some 5,000 people. Which terrorists should we be most afraid of? The ones we are developing at home, or the ones that come from abroad?</div> <bR> <div> <B>3.  To really deal with the making of a terrorist we must carefully evaluate the process of entertainment and education.</B> Let's take a look at entertainment first. In reality all entertainment has educating influence. It is a well-known fact that certain types of music and entertainment teach and breed violence and acts of what I believe we can call terrorism. At a rock concert a man was deliberately harassed, then stabbed, and carefully "protected" from any assistance until he died. I would classify this as terrorism. The music and its accompanying environment spawned this activity. Many similar incidents could be cited.</div> <div>      In 1989 an attractive and caring young Yale graduate was brutally attacked and gang raped in New York City's Central Park by over 30 youngsters (most of them under 16). They attacked her with a pipe, hacking her skull and thighs with a knife, and pounded her face with a brick. Mary McGrory, writing in the <I>Washington Post</I>, Apr. 30, 1989, said, "Obviously, their parents, their schools, did not tell them about the golden rule. Television, with its verbal and physical violence, its depiction of sex as an instantly available right, its boorish hosts and witless guests, certainly didn't teach them." Why did this kind of terrorism take place? And this is not an unusual, one-time occurrence of this kind of terrorism.</div> <div>      George Will wrote in 1991 that "For more than a generation, the fundamental act of American fun-watching television-has involved, for the average viewer, seeing 150 acts of violence and 15 murders a week." The numbers today are significantly higher. Is it possible that we can overlook the connection between viewing so much violence, and the rapid increase of violent crime? Many children and youth arraigned for violent crimes of murder and aggression have stated that they got their ideas from TV. Between 1989 and 1990 alone the number of youth arrested for murder, manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault increased 16 per cent!</div> <div>      An extensive, long term study conducted by Dr. Centerwall, of the University of Washington, showed that TV is directly responsible for 10, 000 homicides, 70, 000 rapes, and 700, 000 injurious assaults each year!</div> <div>      All the way back in 1972 a government report on television and violence suggested the connection between childhood TV viewing with its routine violence, and future aggression and criminal acts. More recently, numerous studies and books have shown some of the devastating effects of viewing violence on TV, video shows, and arcade games. Almost all video machine games operate on the principle of "destroy, or be destroyed." Most TV programming, even that for little children, contains numerous incidents of violence. In one incident a little boy around 6 years old watching a cartoon show saw "stars" circling the head of a cartoon character who was hit on the head in an act of violence. A little later he found a baseball bat and with it hit his 4-year-old sister on the head (killing her), but was puzzled because he didn't see any "stars" flying around her head. <I>The Buffalo News </I>in 1988 reported that at that time <I>TV programming had 55 times more violence than real life experience</I>! In the past ten years since the book was written we have not seen a decrease in the violence. In one typical example of movie entertainment a young girl was raped with the end of a broom handle. A mother with her small daughter had been watching the TV show, but she turned it off at that point. A few days later a group of boys who also saw the show raped the small daughter with a beer bottle. We must ask the question: Who are the real criminals in such terrorism? Is it <I>the boys</I> who were educated by the Hollywood producers and actors? Or is it <I>the ones who taught the boys</I> what to do and how to do it, planting seeds in their minds? A long-term study by researchers at the University of Illinois showed that regularly watching TV violence at age eight consistently produced people more prone to acts of violence ("terrorist" activities) by the time they were 30 years old.</div> <div>      In one TV show the plot involved a bomb threat on an airplane, with passengers held as hostages. Despite vigorous protest from the Air Line Pilots' Association it was shown on national television. Before the show was over airlines started receiving bomb threats. Within one week eight airlines had received such bomb threats. Five years later the same film was shown in Australia with similar results. One airline eventually ended up paying half a million dollars ransom to protect the 116 passengers on a flight to Hong Kong. We rightly condemn the terrorists who conduct these bomb threats, but do we do anything about the <I>terrorists</I> who educated and inspired them to do it via the TV?</div> <bR> <div>      A chilling fact that should galvanize us into action is described in the <I>Plug-in Drug</I> by Marie Winn. Only in more recent years has a new breed of criminals surfaced-twelve year old muggers who prey on the elderly, casually torturing and murdering their helpless victims, often for very small gains; youths assailing a bicyclist in a park and beating him to death with a chain before making off with his bicycle; children breaking into an apartment and stomping an elderly man or drowning a woman in her bathtub.</div> <div>      The common factor characterizing the present wave of child criminals who kill, torture, and rape seems to be a form of emotional detachment that <I>allows them to commit unspeakable acts of brutal and violent crime with a complete absence of normal feelings such as guilt or remorse</I>. And television, VCR, and media entertainment has been largely, if not almost solely, responsible for training them this way. Here truly is the education of a terrorist. Now the question is: <I>Will we focus our attention on attacking the terrorists overseas, while ignoring the promotion and education of terrorists here at home?</I></div> <div>      Friends, if we are <I>really serious</I> about diminishing terrorist activities, we must start by eliminating the entertainment shows that contain violence. Even the great publicity given to acts of violence on the news spawns a certain interest in some minds to commit acts more infamous and gain greater publicity. <B>We will show a terrible blindness if we spend billions on looking overseas for terrorists while we continue to spend billions on entertainment that breeds terrorists.</B> </div> <bR> <div>      It is a fact that the majority of "terrorist" acts have been carried out by religious fanatics (consider the crusades, the persecutions of the Waldenses, etc.). It is an axiom of moral law that to the extent that something can serve a good and upright purpose, to the same extent, when it is abused, misused, and perverted, it can serve an evil and destructive purpose.</div> <div>      A true and upright use of religion produces citizens with upright moral standards. There is a restraining power in their convictions of right that regulates their behavior and actions. The more knowledge they gain the more useful they are because they use that knowledge within the framework of their principles of proper conduct. Correct principles of conduct keep a person acting civil toward his neighbor and society at all times.</div> <div>      The government has the responsibility to maintain outward civil conduct in society. There are those who do not have the controlling inward conviction of moral principle to regulate their civil conduct. All such are potential terrorists. Any person having the controlling power of moral convictions who loses that inward principle of control is a potential terrorist. To the extent that any of us are liable to lose that controlling power of moral conviction, we are potential terrorists.</div> <div>      Some people lack the strength of conviction to keep them from drinking alcohol, and under its influence have committed atrocious acts of "terrorism" and yet little is being done to stop this breeding ground of terrorism. The civil government must use the "sword" to punish incivility and place a restraint through fear upon those who lack inward moral restraint. As long as people behave in a civil manner toward their fellow man, no one has a right to punish or restrain them because of what it is supposed they might think, or might become or do in the future. The government's role in preventing "terrorism" consists to a large degree in placing penalties upon "terrorism" that are severe enough to place a healthy fear in the hearts of those who lack moral principle. I recognize that different means of defense are also a preventive measure. We prevent damage from rain by making a watertight roof. We don't analyze every cloud and blow up the ones that might drop rain. Otherwise we will end up chasing every cloud. Some of our methods of prevention <I>may</I> involve tighter security in transportation, etc. But the method of prevention that might endeavor to detect all who are likely to engage in potential acts of terrorism could easily end up going too far. The civil government cannot safely assume the role of identifying those religions or groups that are likely to be dangerous, or of trying to regulate them beyond the boundaries which govern all civil relations. As soon as the government takes sides for or against any religion, intolerance and religious persecution are sure to result.</div> <bR> <div>      It is upon the churches that a great weight of responsibility rests for the education of correct principles of moral rectitude. Many years ago a president of the United States said:</div> <div>      "It was not education that founded religion, but it was religion that founded education. It was beside the place of worship that there grew up the school.</div> <div>      "This important fact cannot be ignored in our development of education. Without its spirit either civilization will fall of its own weight, and that deep, abiding wisdom which supports society will cease to exist, or we shall have a type of mind keen in intelligence, but greedy and cruel, which armed with the power of modern science to destroy, will in the end accomplish its own destruction. Without the presence of a great directing moral force, intelligence will either not be developed, or if it be developed, will prove self-destructive.</div> <div>      "In education the whole being must be taken into consideration. It is not enough to train the hand, the eye, to quicken the perception of sense, develop the quickness of the intellect, and leave out of consideration the building of the character, the aspiration of the soul.</div> <div>      "We do not need more material development, we need more spiritual development. We do not need more knowledge, we need more character. We do not need more government, we need more culture. We do not need more law, we need more religion. We do not need more of the things that are seen, we need more of the things that are unseen. It is on that side of life that it is desirable to put the emphasis at the present time. If that side is strengthened, the other side will take care of itself. It is that side which is the foundation of all else. If the foundation be firm the superstructure will stand." </div> <bR> <div>     The churches bear a responsibility to do for society what the civil government cannot do, namely to educate in principles of morality in such a way that there is the inward restraint of noble and upright principles of thought and action.</div> <bR> <div> <B>4.</B> <B>Perhaps the disaster of September 11, 2001, should be a wake-up call to Americans, and to the rest of the world, that congregating together in cities is not the best plan. Cities are prime targets for terrorism</B>. Around the end of the 19th century 80% of the population lived in the country and 20% in the cities. By the late 20th century 80% of the population lived in the cities and 20% in the country. Some statistics now indicate that as little as 2% of the population are growing the food and agricultural fiber produced in the United States. This makes the majority of the population very dependent for food, fiber, and sustenance upon others. The sustaining of most of the population has become an extremely fragile and vulnerable process. We can diminish the likelihood of terrorism by diminishing the large population centers that are attractive targets for terrorist activities. Encouraging people to move out of the cities into places where they have enough land to grow food if necessary would greatly increase the true strength and ability of our people to avoid many liabilities of city living, and weather the ups and downs of economic foibles.</div> <div>      About one hundred years ago an author with deep insight wrote:</div> <div> "Keep out of the cities. . . . Educate our people to get out of the cities into the country, where they can obtain a small piece of land, and make a home for themselves and their children. . . . Erelong there will be such strife and confusion in the cities, that those who wish to leave them will not be able." -Ellen G. White, <I>Country Living</I>, pages 10-11.</div> <bR> <bR> <bR> <div>      <B>In summary</B>, let us be exceedingly careful that we do not think that because a person who committed acts of terrorism may have had Islamic background, therefore we must be suspicious of all Islamics; let us not think that because some terrorists are of Arab descent, all people of Arab lineage are likely terrorists. Our government should appropriately punish <I>acts</I> of terrorism, but we must carefully consider the far-reaching implications of trying to identify and eradicate "<I>terrorists</I>." Especially must we guard against the gross irresponsibility of thinking that in punishing innocent people we would be getting back at those who have committed terrorist crimes, for in doing so we are committing one of the most heinous of terrorist crimes, -that of wrongfully depriving others of their inalienable rights of "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness" simply in the name of wanting to feel a greater "security" for ourselves. One of the features of America's strength and nobility has been its haven of freedom, and liberty of conscience regardless of race, creed, or ethnic background. Our Constitution has sustained the great principle of freedom displayed in the outlook of "innocent until <I>proven</I> guilty." What a tragedy it would be if we discard these important principles of liberty in the pursuit of those who we might classify as "terrorist" because of race, religion, or background. It might be that the greatest terrorist threat begins much closer to home than we think.</div> <bR> <div> October 1, 2001</div> <bR> <div> Bob Jorgensen</div> <div> P.O. Box 602</div> <div> Marshall, NC  28753</div> <bR> <bR> <bR> </td> </tr></table></body>