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War

The ‘War of Good Against Evil’

Raimond Gaita on racism, religion and the motives of suicide bombers.

They don’t value the individual the way we do. After September 11 there was a lot of talk like that. Who values individual life in the way ‘they don’t’? We of the civilized nations, it would seem. Who are ‘they’? Presumably the kind of people now routinely targeted for security checks at American airports and sometimes held for months without charge – people with dark complexions who live in poor, overpopulated countries. Protestations, especially those by the British Prime Minister Tony Blair, that Operation Enduring Freedom is not against Islam or more generally against the dark-skinned poor of the world were sincere, I’m sure.

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