h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

What makes me mad is the idea that once they're released, they can just dust themselves off and go about their business as usual. The reality is that families and livelihoods are broken, productive immigrants are forced back to their countries of origin to start over again, but now stigmatized and impoverished. It happened in my own town (Moscow, ID). I'm not sure the status of the case now..it's been so very long, but his family was forced to leave. To keep a man in jail without just cause..unconsionable. To punish a whole group for the imagined sins of one person...these things happen, we know they happen - that's what our sacred indy media is for - and we can just watch in shock. I wonder if the common man has ever been so emasculated

Please see my ealier post "throwing the baby out with the bathwater". It is a given that the indiscriminate murder of civilians is indefensible . However if we discard everything that makes us civilised in an attempt to contain the threat , then evil has triumphed .We also seem to have a Government in the UK now that is worryingly keen to turn us into a police state , with all the added tyranny a computer and DNA analyser can add to classicla Stalinism.

Not posted as an argument, more a sort of comment. But a man mutch cleverer than I once said "there is no such thing as justice ,only the law " I am not clever enough to answer the next question. How do you apply the law to some one who murders indiscriminately and hides behind a name?

"How do you apply the law to some one who murders indiscriminately and hides behind a name?"

Who is that?

Come on, your not that coy. Organisation, religion ,I am sure you can think of a few yourself.


Have a great day

Oh, I am that coy Most of the really big murder sprees of the last hundred years have been organised by western governments after all. Whereas, with the current war on terror, they're perfectly happy to link it all to a single named individual, whom, despite invading entire countries to get him, they're quite unable to catch.

>>may I draw your attension away from the seemingly deprived detainese for a short period and take a look at there victims [...] Give a thought to the people sitting in there favorite bar ,or just out shopping who have been killed or mutalated for apparantly no logical reason<<

Supergrandad, I live in Jerusalem. I have a mini-row with my mom every time I intend to go down-town, or even take a bus. But despite that, I don't think that terrorism can be used as an excuse to deprive people of their most basic human rights.
It's a complicated situation we're living in, and there is no black and white; but there must be boundaries to what a government can do, otherwise we are no better than your average third-world dictatorship.

Sad! but very true.Now that can't be bad, we seem to be in agreement.

Tea time I think, have or pehaps you prefer?

Hi Lady Pennywhistle,
You quite obviously live a lot closer to the situation than I do, so I must in all conscience defer to your opinion.


Be safe and be happy

You are entitled to your own opinion, you know... you don't have to agree with me just because I happen to live where I do.

Hi Lady Pennywhistle,
My Dad always taught me to be polite to ladys.
But of course you are right, my opinion while my own, I hope is open enough to listen and learn. That after all is what I hope h2g2 is all about?

This is one of those difficult ones. Every bone in my body cries out against injustice. To those who say better one or two (hundred) innocents jailed unfairly than thousands killed in terrorists attacks - fine - until one of the innocents is you or yours...... (Same goes for the death penalty)


But, thank god, none of mine have ever been directly affected by terrorism, so do I have the right to comment??

Elenitsa - when you say that, it seems fair enough. But when politicians use that argument, it's always with the assumption that, if you are directly affected by terrorism, you're always going to be swayed towards the hardline extremist position. Because that's the way it is? No, because that's what suits them.

And this just doesn't stand up, it seems to me: there are plenty of civil liberties campaigners, right round the world, who do what they do not because they haven't been affected by terrorism but precisely because they have been. Because they can see that the idea that you best combat terrorism by constantly moving towards the extreme, by restricting civil liberties and throwing the laws away whenever it suits, just doesn't work.

Nor does the 'you're either with us or against us' line, as though to oppose anything proclaimed as supposedly combatting terror is therefore to align yourself with terror. This is not and never will be a matter of 'good' vs. 'evil', no matter how much the language gets knocked around.

You certainly do have the right to comment - so do I, so does everybody. You could even call it a responsibility to comment, as loudly as possible - because the people ranged behind the current move towards taking away bits and pieces of the free society are not in fact 'those who have been directly affected by terrorism', they are those in office who presume to speak on their behalf, uninvited and unendorsed, who even, far more shamefully, presume to speak for the dead. What none of us has the right to do is to identify our political programme as the only one possible and to identify all who take issue with it as somehow 'sympathetic' to terrorism, what none us has the right to do is to sanctify our philosophy as somehow in tune with the wishes of the dead, to declare that the dead would want vengeance or that the dead would want us somehow 'less free' if that meant 'more safe'.

So, we're only talking about locking a handful of people up?

"Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression. If you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining" (Saul Bellow)

terrorists are all spinless cowards killing inocent women & children then skulking back to their own familys cowards that if they feel so much about their cause why don,t they face the worlds armys head on and sort it!!
cowards cos they have not got the guts its much easier to get on a bus full of inocents and blow them to bits
suicide is forbidan in muslim religion!!!!!
and why are these animals in the uk who support these scum here f..k of back home if u dont like the west

As far as I know, suicide is not forbidden in Islam, though as in any religion you can probably find support for whichever view you want, depends where you look.
And the suicide bombers are considered Shahids, martyrs - something like the Japanese Kamikaze pilots.

the kamikazis fought man to man not that i agree with suicide why kill women & children explain wot that does for the scums so called honour

"The 'solution' from our control freak government is not to root out the incompetant deadwood in the Police and the CPP .."

This is because such an approach would be impossible to complete successfully. It makes much more sense to put in a legal safeguard against it.

How are they supposed to skulk back to their own families if they just blew themselves up?

NICEGUY 4

the kamikaze pilots did only target the military in a time of war unlike terrorists but its not exactly fighting man to man

Let me raise a provocative question here: What is the difference between a suicide bomber blowing up a bus in Jerusalem and a fighter pilot dropping a bomb on a house in Gaza, apart from the fact that the latter can't see the people he's killing?