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Will you stand for this?
Personal crusades

By Craig Moreschini
September 27, 2001
The Iranian

Their is no one person or group in this world who can claim to know infinite justice. Each is fallible, incomplete, temporary, transitory. Only the children of tomorrow will know the greater consequences of today. Some have explained that the root of Satan's great evil came from his great love of God. Everyone, no matter their system of belief of level of acknowledgement in the divine, has witnessed personally the tragic irony of this situation firsthand.

One can not choose where and to whom their born. Being born in the Western world, I have an incomplete knowledge of Islam. Although, having been born in the United States and into its relative wealth, I have been exposed and benefited from the many fruits of the tradition and can recognize the divine wisdom of its teachings.

I live in an imperfect country, I am participating in an imperfect political system, as most of my fellow citizens will agree, and many are working for positive change, a realistically brighter future, a future where the Modernist ideals that state everyone should be the same, where the world exchanges its great diversity of culture for one set of ideas, one limited palette of tools to salve all problems, will cease to exist, and everyone will have the opportunity for their own self-determination and liberty to seek a fuller palette of God's own wisdom.

Some in my country worship at the idol of money, not realizing that it really should represent human labor. Some have sought to remake people in developing countries to their own image, both economically, politically, and even religiously. Throughout our short history countless atrocities have been committed under our star spangled banner of red, white and blue. But it too is only a symbol which we have been constantly remaking into something new. We are imperfect, and anyone holding us up as anything other, or to a higher standard, is deceiving themselves.

But no one, no matter how righteous and just they believe their cause, has the right to target and pre-meditatively murder innocent people to make their point heard. Those who try to argue a point, self-righteously teach a lesson, at the blackboard of another's evil, only corrupt and darken their own wisdom.

Human justice, our rules of law, all are equally imperfect and transitory, but these are the conditions of living together, forming congresses and societies, agreeing not to kill our neighbors or steal, having enough stability to raise our children and pursue some limited form of wisdom and happiness. When governments or individuals corrupt and pervert our trust, terrorize us, turn us into symbols, idols of their oppression, speak through the voice of mass murder; then there must be retribution, law and order, stability, must be reestablished.

These people refuse to submit themselves to the rule of human law, to argue their case with words, to submit themselves before their peers, maybe they realize that arguments made through acts of murder are unjustifiable, they hide, and now unfortunately they will have to be apprehended. Because no one can raise their children, pursue work, stability, with a group of murders hiding about, waiting to argue another bloody point, to make some profound statement about their own inadequacy and personal lack of faith. I, like most of the rest of America, awoke to this evil.

America is a big place, filled with all sorts of people, a place you can be born and choose to live for a great many years and still not fully understand, watching our television or movies, eating our food, wearing our products, working or going to school here, it is impossible to understand or form a complete understanding of this countries dualities, ourselves we are always seeking to define it, but it is incomplete; like a great giant slowly rising from a long slumber it is now awakened.

I hope it doesn't perpetuate this tit for tat, this evil for an evil. But the United States, and hopefully the whole international community with it, yourself and your great wisdom included, has decided that we all can't allow people to conspire to make their political and philosophical points with murder. Everyone should be fearful of the instability and precedence this will set for future generations of terrorists. Will you stand for this?

This is not a crusade against the wisdom of Islam as some would like you to believe as they manipulate language, this is a quest to apprehend people who tragically mask themselves in piety and practice unspeakable acts of antisocial behavior. This isn't about the Palestinian struggle, although individuals on both sides of that issue have done a great disservice to humanity by propitiating similar acts of unjustifiable, ever escalating, violence toward their own neighbors and families. This is about hypocrisy, the evil of murder, being so fanatical that one can not differentiate symbols and false idols from the substance.

I am reminded of Cervantes's Don Quixote, a story about a Spanish knight so caught up in self delusion and romantic notions he chases down and fights windmills thinking they are dragons. It is far more tragic to think there are people so deluded and caught up in their own romantic symbols to not be able to recognize the human tragedy in destroying an office building, or an airplane full of people, or even the divine wisdom of a single individual life.

No one is safe when people like this are free to have their own personal crusades, to declare their own personal Jihad against the world, our silence and ambiguity is their shelter, their evil coven.

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