Bush should move to settle the Palestinian issue
Stabroek News
September 26, 2001

Dear Editor,

Just as Richard Nixon was making his bid for the White House, North Korea seized an American munitions ship and Nixon said, "When a fourth-rate country can hijack an American ship and get away with it, it is time for new leadership."

Well today we have seen where terrorists operating from the most backward country of the world struck the technological giant - big Uncle Sam right on the nose.

Whether we like it or not as more world leaders pledge their support to the US the more bin Laden is seen as a hero. The Muslim leaders may all pledge their support to the US to fight terrorism but their people will hail bin Laden as their hero.

The bone of contention as we all know is US support to Israel in spite of whatever crimes it is committing against the Palestinians. The George Bush administration should move to make a genuine effort to settle the Palestinian issue.

Yours faithfully,

Wendell P George

Bush has not offered the Taliban evidence of bin Laden's guilt

Dear Editor,

I note, with considerable dis-ease, that it was not so long ago that President Bush insisted upon a hasty disengagement of his nation from the theatre of world politics. It was he who snubbed his very close neighbour, Canada, in an August tribute to Mexican President, Vicente Fox, and did so again, when he excluded Canada in his address to a joint session of Congress, on the evening of September 20. Is this the man who is capable of leading the world in dealing with an issue that requires more than a crusading captain at the helm?

The President has exhorted citizens of "the greatest nation on the face of the earth" to be vigilant against terrorism. This is the very leader whose predecessors battled for seven years against the British Crown over principled matters of fairness and justice. Is the President also not the inheritor of a legacy littered with the spoils of the Monroe Doctrine and the Alliance for Progress? Does he not preside over a nation haunted by what one of its leading intellectuals, Cornel West, describes as a spectre of despair which bears direct relation to one of the chapters in history "marked by a special note of infamy?" That note is, of course, indelibly recorded with the blood of slaves "herded in barracks... regimented, as they had been recruited, by soulless and mercenary violence."

Today, when one of the descendants of such gruesome victimisation, the American Secretary of State, withdraws from an historic conference on racism, but is preparing for war, whose casualties he is in no position to calculate, how can he aid his commander to unravel the paradox of democracy in which the `truth' of terrorism is located? Here, I am reminded of an enduring sociological dictum, if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.

The President has used the media of our great `global village' for which Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch are proudly responsible to inform us that his war is not against Islam. I observe that although his nation has not been at war with Afghanistan, he has chosen not to offer its rulers evidence of bin Laden's guilt. Instead, he has declared to the world community that those who are not with `us' are against `us.' If we are witnessing work of the compassionate conservative, will we see him and his coalition partners appeal to their compatriots and give sanctuary to countless Afghan Muslims who oppose bin Laden and the Taliban, before raging rains of terror overwhelm their war-torn land?

Yours faithfully,

Dr William H Walcott