Another missed opportunity

The terrorist who takes hostages or plants a roadside bomb near Baghdad is serving the same ideology of murder that kills innocent people on trains in Madrid and murders children on buses in Jerusalem and blows up a nightclub in Bali and cuts the throat of a young reporter for being a Jew. We've seen the same ideology of murder in the killing of 241 marines in Beirut, the first attack on the World Trade Center, in the destruction of two embassies in Africa, in the attack on the U.S.S. Cole and in the merciless horror inflicted upon thousands of innocent men and women and children on Sept. 11, 2001. None of these acts is the work of a religion. All are the work of a fanatical political ideology. The servants of this ideology seek tyranny in the Middle East and beyond. They seek to oppress and persecute women. They seek the death of Jews and Christians and every Muslim who desires peace over theocratic terror.

Leaving aside Bush the Younger's erroneous conflation of the Sunni fundamentalism of al-Qaida (assuming it has a hand in the current unrest), the Shia fundamentalism of Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army and the secular Baathism of Saddam loyalists, if he was going to mention Madrid and Bali, he could have mentioned the attack on the Indian Parliament, the imposition of sharia on non-Muslims in northern Nigeria, slavery and ongoing ethnic cleansing in Sudan or the hacking to death of three Buddhist monks in southern Thailand, one of whom was only thirteen. To counter opposition to the war on terror by developing countries and the Left and maybe even win a little of their support, there must at least be acknowledgement of, if not emphasis on, the poor, brown-skinned victims of Islamic aggression, as well as reminders that Islamic persecution of them has been going on since long before September 11th (or before Western colonialism, for that matter).