Writing to cc last week and talking to a businessman on Monday, I started to wonder if most of the confusion and rhetoric wasn't on the American side. I don't see any reason why we should expect a calmer, more reasoned reaction from Jerry Falwell than Osama Bin Laden, both are leaders with the level of intelligence that their followers demand. However, it seems to me that the American media is running way ahead of 'the enemy' in noise and disconcertion. Someone pointed out that the hijackers didn't even leave suicide notes. CNN is more than making up for their silence.

In a review of a novel by an American Jewish author, Gore Vidal noted that the sex scenes failed because American Jewish writers have had trouble getting under the American gentiles' skins, let alone their foreskins. Understanding people who attack us may be an even more difficult problem.

We have been horrified by scenes from New York but it is quite possible that 'the enemy' does not see their actions of last week as terrorism at all. They may not see World trade Center workers as innocent civilians. It quite possible that they see the World Trade Center as a strategic military target and the workers as soldiers in a financial system that oppresses them and kills them. If they believe the claims that over a million people have died in Iraq alone as a result of an American led and American enforced embargo, then the attacks may seem modest to them. They may see the attack as a wildly successful and relatively surgical strategic military hit rather than an act of terrorism. To misunderstand their thinking in what looks like modernized guerilla warfare could be a costly mistake.

The businessman, a Harvard MBA, drove home my earlier thoughts when he told me that whenever he was in New York and when he visited the World Trade Center he had always been nervous because New York was such a visible and vulnerable target for surprise nuclear attack by any nut in the world. Any nuclear attack would have been many times worse. America developed the nuclear technology that is becoming more available around the world and even America has its fair share of Falwells. Truely frightening if we care to think about it. Perhaps dangerous if we don't (although I'm not sure what we can do about it.)

The Halifax Herald ran two interesting news wire stories yesterday that shine different lights into the darkness. Mudcatters have raised similar issues but the reporters' pencil marks draw interesting pictures. Note how low key the rhetoric is in Afghanistan. Perhaps the western world could give 'the enemy' CNN as an aid package and drive them completely crazy.

www.herald.ns.ca/cgi-bin/home/loadmain?2001/09/18+151.raw

www.herald.ns.ca/cgi-bin/home/loadmain?2001/09/18+150.raw