In Talking Point this week, lots of h2g2 Researchers have been sharing their memories of 11 September, 2001. I've held back from joining in, partly because the memories are so painful, but also because I was afraid of being misunderstood.

You see, if asked what I felt after I found out exactly why it was so hard to log on to h2g2 that afternoon, I'd have to say 'nothing'. I went emotionally numb for a few days. I was, I'm sure now, in shock.

I couldn't write a thing for most of that week, because words seemed so useless and inadequate. Finally, several days late, some inner barrier broke and I cried. After that, I was finally able to come up with a few words for the h2g2 Book of Condolence.

Subsequently, I wrote the only 'Notes From a Small Planet' column ever to be deemed unacceptable by a Moderator, and thus hidden for a few hours before furious protests on my part got it restored to view. That 'Crisis Special' column was a clumsy but heartfelt attempt to make sense of the overwhelming horror, and to apply some sort of sense of perspective to the world-changing events of the previous week. It was hidden because, in those fraught times, criticising America in any way was seen by some as tactless, even if you made it clear that you weren't attempting to defend the indefensible, obscenely callous actions of the hijackers and mass murderers who carried out the attacks.

In the weeks that followed, the 'war on terrorism' was declared. President Bush repeatedly announced: 'You're with us, or you're with the terrorists'. The effect was to make it hard to get heard if you were trying to have a rational debate on the question of where the world could go from here, particularly (from what I've read and been told) in America itself. It was so much easier to denounce the 'evildoers' and rally to the Stars and Stripes, even if it was being held aloft by a President whose legitimacy and competence you'd strongly doubted before September 11.

Now, a year later, that same President is about to address the United Nations and tell the world what it should do about a possible war with Iraq. The timing of the speech, a day after the world's media has been full of those hideous images from September 2001, is surely no coincidence. Bush's speech writers are bound to have created a script for him designed to reflect and direct the intense anger that many people felt and still feel towards the hijackers. He'll have an attentive and largely sympathetic audience both at the United Nations and around the world.

Sadly, judging by all his pronouncements in recent weeks, it seems virtually certain that Bush will use the opportunity to push the world further along the road to war with Iraq. So, whatever the President has to say, I hope that one simple fact will be remembered: Saddam Hussein is not Osama bin Laden, and no convincing evidence has yet been produced to link Saddam to what happened this time last year.

That may, just possibly, change when the famous dossier of evidence against Saddam is finally published; but nothing we've been allowed to see so far has come close to justifying war. So to oppose an attack on Iraq is not to betray the memory of those who died in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, because the enemy that perpetrated those atrocities is not the one that Bush and Tony Blair now wish to attack. You do not become a collaborator with evil killers because you oppose further needless killing.

That should be obvious, but it's a truth that's sometimes been obscured by the emotive 'with us or against us' rhetoric. The whole concept of the 'war on terrorism' seems based on the notion that 'terrorism' is one unified entity, as though European neo-fascist racist murderers and Middle Eastern Islamist suicide bombers had a common cause. Opposing paramilitary organisations that hold a homicidal hatred for each other are lumped together in the talk of a 'war on terrorism', when all that truly unites them is a willingness to use dreadful violence in pursuit of their political aims.

In any case, the 'war on terrorism' is surely as unwinnable as the 'war on drugs', and for similar reasons: that if you remove one group of perpetrators, another is almost certain to take its place. If anyone should know about combating terrorism, it's Dame Stella Rimington, who was until fairly recently the head of the British intelligence service MI5; and recently, she sadly observed:
'A "war on terrorism" cannot be won unless the causes of terrorism are eradicated by making the world a place free of grievances, something that will not happen. Terrorism will always be there because terrorism is ultimately successful in its way. It achieves publicity for the cause terrorists are supporting.'

Dame Stella went on to say that, when denouncing terrorists,
'...politicians should use words of scorn, rather than the rhetoric of revenge. All rhetoric plays into the hands of terrorists, but talk of revenge breeds yet more hatred in a never-ending cycle.'

Surely no-one who's paid even the most cursory attention to news reports from the Middle East or Northern Ireland over the last 30-odd years can doubt the truth of that last observation. And if Iraq is attacked, just about the only certainties are that lots more innocent people will lose their lives, and that a lot more hatred towards the West will be generated.

The United Nations should demand that its weapons inspectors are allowed back into Iraq to prove the truth of Baghdad's claims to have no weapons of mass destruction. If that happens, then perhaps the threat of war will have done a great deal of good, by making the dreadful reality of war unnecessary.

Over the past 12 months, far too many innocent people have been caught up in the fallout from the attacks on America. Among them have been millions of Muslims appalled by last September's atrocities, yet still blamed for them by the ignorant. This week, the Muslim Council - Britain's leading Muslim organisation - issued a statement which repeated the Council's previous-expressed condemnation of last year's attacks.

The statement said:
'Those who planned and perpetrated those atrocities, regardless of their religious, ideological or political beliefs, stand outside the pale of civilised values.'

The Council's secretary general, Iqbal Sacranie, added:
'Islam commands us to be just and wrong no-one. Terrorism is an evil and destructive phenomenon that inflicts pain and suffering on defenceless people. To eradicate terrorism, it is imperative that we address the conditions that can give rise to it.

'Sadly, the world is instead being pushed towards more violence and division. Instead of vengeance we need justice, and instead of rhetoric we need reason.'

I couldn't agree more.

One Muslim family who've suffered more than most recently are the Ahmadis, until recently residents of Britain. Farid and Feriba Ahmadi fled to Germany from Afghanistan in 2000 with their two young children. They say that they did so after being tortured by the Taleban, having been targeted because Mr Ahmadi's father was a prominent member of the regime in power in Afghanistan before the Taleban took over.

They didn't enjoy life in German refugee camps, and claim that they often suffered racist abuse and religious bigotry whilst in Germany. So they came to Britain, where they settled much more happily and made plenty of friends, who rallied to their defence as the UK government threatened to deport them.

In February, campaigners petitioned the Prime Minister to allow the Ahmadis to remain in Britain, but to no avail. A legal appeal meant that the family were able to stay, but the appeal was rejected in May. At the end of June, after being threatened with imminent deportation, they sought sanctuary in a mosque in Lye, the Midlands town where they'd made their home.

On 25 July, police staged a dawn raid on the mosque. They battered down the door and seized Mr and Mrs Ahmadi. Their children weren't there; they'd earlier been moved to a secret address by friends of the family. Mr and Mrs Ahmadi were held in a detention centre near Heathrow Airport, outside London. On 9 August, the children visited their parents at the detention centre. The children were not allowed to leave the centre. Finally, on 14 August, the family was forcibly put on a plane to Munich.

Nobody, apart from Home Office officials, seems to have wanted to see the Ahmadis ejected from Britain, but there were plenty of people who wanted them to stay. One of the leading campaigners on their behalf is Soraya Walton, who said after the deportation:
'I saw them for 15 minutes last night and the kids were asking why they couldn't go home. What can you say to that?'

What indeed.

But now, there's fresh hope for the Ahmadis. High Court judge Mr Justice Scott Baker has ruled that Home Secretary David Blunkett acted illegally in choosing to ignore medical evidence suggesting that the mental health of Mrs Ahmadi and her children would suffer if they were sent back to Germany.

In fact, the judge appeared to suggest that the Home Secretary had either lied or made a clumsy mistake in his eagerness to get the Ahmadis' final appeal turned down, by claiming that the family had been granted residency in Germany. In fact, they'd only been granted 'tolerated status', giving them temporary protection from being returned to Afghanistan but obliging them to live in a residential centre. Mr Justice Scott Baker said that the mistake over the medical evidence '...emphasises the care that is required in this type of case to ensure that the secretary of state makes any decision on a sound basis of fact'.

However, this damning criticism of its methods has not dissuaded the Home Office from launching an appeal against the judge's ruling. Blunkett and his team seem grimly determined to ensure that the Ahmanis are made to live in a country where they're 'tolerated', rather than in one where they're popular and happy.

It'd be nice if Mr Blunkett did the decent thing and backed down in this case. It'd be better still if he then took the long holiday he appears to need rather badly, given that just about every public statement we've heard from him recently seems to have consisted of bad-tempered right-wing ranting. If he isn't lambasting asylum seekers, he's raging against the 'bleeding-heart liberals' who sometimes dare to question the wisdom of his decisions.

Is Blunkett trying to prove that he can be more illiberal than any Conservative Home Secretary, or does it just look that way?

Finally this week, a tale of life imitating JK Rowling's art. Would-be Harry Potters and Hermione Grangers can now enrol at a real-life school for witches and wizards. The school has opened in Klagenfurt, in the mountains of southern Austria.

The students there will be taught astrology, magic, history of magic, meditation and divination. Later on, there's to be practical lessons in preparing potions, making talismans and performing rituals. If their mystical skills stand up to examination and their dissertation is good enough, the students will then be awarded a 'veneficus certificate' to prove their qualification.

A spokesman for the school has explained:
'In the past, witches and wizards were people recognised by society, who used their divining powers and learned to mediate between the visible and invisible worlds. Etymologically, "witch" means someone who is on the border between our world and the beyond'.

The aim of the courses, he said, was '...to restore contact with nature, which has been lost by our society'.

For that reason, Celtic and druidic learning and nature studies play a large part in the school's curriculum, along with the more exotic classes.

Strangely, sport doesn't seem to feature at all - but then, the school has only just opened. Perhaps the Quidditch pitch is still being built?

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