“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
Edmund Burke
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| late September, 2001 |
“In any society, fanatics who hate don’t hate only me – they hate you, too.
They hate everybody.”
Elie Wiesel
“But there’s one thing we must all be clear about: terrorism is not the pursuit of legitimate goals by some sort of illegitimate means. Whatever the murderers may be trying to achieve, creating a better world certainly isn’t one of their goals. Instead they are out to murder innocent people.”
Salman Rushdie
“Political correctness does not legislate tolerance; it only organizes hatred.”
Jacques Barzun
13 years on, and it’s a very scary world we live in. This is what I think:
when language is twisted in the name of political correctness, it is a form of psychological warfare that we willingly use against ourselves. Thus, if we use terminology coined by terrorists to brand themselves, we unwittingly lend them legitimacy. We should never underestimate the number of people who are not very media-literate and tend to see the world in rather black and white terms and take words at face value.
extremism is not a problem for just any one country: it is as much a European problem that requires all EU countries to agree to a plan to fight it as it is an American problem that can only be solved working together with the EU, Australia, Russia, and the the Middle Eastern countries…; and it is a global problem that requires all nations to abide by the same rules and respect each other as equal partners.
social media sites should stop being such hypocrites and introduce as strict rules concerning hate speech and content that depicts or incites violence as they have for content depicting nudity and whatever they consider obscene
it is time for the ‘good men’, (and women) in communities targeted by terrorist recruiters to step up and say ‘enough’. It is them, after all, who are losing their young people, their future, to violence…
Tiina