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I began the morning keeping up with the news and I watched Liza Minnelli on TV as she expressed her love for New York and its citizens by singing 'NEW YORK, NEW YORK' at the Shea stadium; I also learnt of further deployment of military resources in the Middle East.

We are at war against terrorism, and we are preparing a retaliatory action to revenge the atrocities committed at the World Trade Center and at the Pentagon. President Bush has found his presidential mission and has been working relentlessly to build an international coalition of the form of a crusade to smoke out Osama Bin Laden, dead or alive, from his hideout in Afghanistan.

I have the fear that this war against terrorism and against Osama Bin Laden is construed more on our thirst for revenge rather than on our efforts to seek justice and to learn "the whys, the whos, the whens, the wheres, the whats" of these terrorist atrocities. The fact that children as young as four learn to hate people and grow with the mission to become suicide bombers, and the fact that Osama Bin Laden is portrayed as a religious hero by a multitude of Muslims, mean that we are not understanding the sociological predicament of the people in the Middle East, and we are not understanding the religion of Islam. Therefore, a military retaliatory reaction against Afghanistan along with the collateral damage of civil casualties and along with the eventual smoking out of Osama Bin Laden, dead or alive, will not end up our war against terrorism.

We need justice and we don't need revenge, and as a consequence, as we as citizens try to find justice against crimes within our national laws, so we as nations must try to find justice against international crimes within our international community. And as a consequence, we must build an international legal community to pursue justice for international crimes, and The International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague is an example on how justice can be pursued for international crimes. Presently, this international tribunal is prosecuting Slobodian Milosovic for the killing of thousands of people in Kosovo.

Humanity cannot afford the risk of a war between our Christian Crusades and the Islamic 'Jihad' against the western world.

References

WHEN I GROW UP I WANT TO BE A SUICIDE BOMBER, Voice of the Mirror, article accessed on September 19, 2001 http://www.mirror.co.uk/news.htm

Coming to Grips With Jihad, Sage Stossel and Katie Bacon are editors of The Atlantic Online, September 12, 2001 http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/jihad.htm

The Roots of Muslims Rage, by Bernard Lewis, The Atlantic Online, September 1990 http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/90sep/rage.htm