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Reidar
It's perturbing to witness this kind of masochism being taken by most of my friends who are politically in-tune in the face of countless examples demonstrating that religious fascism makes impossible and, more importantly, completely undesirable (which makes whether it's feasible or not irrelevant - we wouldn't work with them even if we could) demands.

One valid crime of the American government (under the Ford administration) was the training and arming of Indonesian forces to invade and annex East Timor, which resulted in a genocide about on the scale of the killing fields in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge (which in turn were propped up by the stupidity and ignorance of Jimmy Carter, of course). After decades of this illegality the U.S. finally rectified past wrongs in the '90s and helped East Timor regain its independence. Al-Qaeda cites this last part as near the top (I've heard it's #3, but I haven't found that document for myself) of the most gravest in American injustices. In other words, how dare the American crusaders help East Timor be partitioned from Indonesia, a Muslim country (East Timor is primarily Christian).

Some more of Bin Laden's designated offenses, in his own words from his infamous letter:

> "You separate religion from your policies, contradicting the pure nature which affirms Absolute Authority to the Lord and your Creator."

> "Who can forget your President Clinton's immoral acts committed in the official Oval office? Is there a worse kind of event for which your name will go down in history and remembered by nations?"*
* Particularly telling if this is rhetorically suggested to be the worse event in U.S. history. If I was a Muslim I would find this marginalizing and insulting.

> "You use women to serve passengers, visitors, and strangers to increase your profit margins."

> "You are a nation that practices the trade of sex in all its forms, directly and indirectly."

> "And because of all this, you have been described in history as a nation that spreads diseases that were unknown to man in the past. Go ahead and boast to the nations of man, that you brought them AIDS as a Satanic American Invention.

> "We call you to be a people of manners, principles, honour, and purity; to reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling's, and trading with interest."

> "The freedom and democracy that you call to is for yourselves and for white race only." Obviously made before Obama got elected. Ouch.

These are not demands reflective of legitimately-voiced injustices done to the oppressed in Palestine (Israel definitely needs to give up the territory it captured in 1967) or Iranian civilians bitter about historical meddling with their internal affairs. People of real suffering don't give a shit about Bill Clinton's penis, they care about food and housing and respite from violence. To equivocate those with the fascists is to hamper the efficiency of progress and recognition applied to actual problems.

In summation, if we wanted to appease the most dangerous (and therefore the most relevant when people talk about whose fault is whose) of disgruntled demands that are supposedly the result of blowback and American hegemony, we would 1.) have to let Indonesia commit genocide in East Timor; 2.) renounce the separation of church and state; 3.) disallow women to choose their careers; 4.) ban and criminalize homosexuality; 4.) reinstate prohibition on alcohol and legal drugs.

No, I don't think so lowly of you that I'm expecting or wanting you to take a position defending Osama or anything like that - the debate is on blowback, thesis-ized pretty directly with the pithy topic title.
kryogenix
Oklahoma City.
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