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>Date: Fri, 05 Oct 2001 15:33:07 +1000
> extropians@extropy.org Miriam English <miriam@werple.net.au> Re: Chomsky (was: Christopher Hitchens' Column)Reply-To: extropians@extropy.org
>
>At 01:12 PM 05/10/2001, Joe Dees wrote:
>>How mwny were killed in East Timor? Thousands; tens of thousands at
>>worst. And how mwny were killed in cambodia, hmmmm? TWO MILLION. Is it
>>possible that this magnitudinous disparity in human carnage was reflected
>>in the disparity of media coverage? Amd why would a purported genius like
>>Noam C. never even consider this?
>
>Oh come on Joe! As if the *number* of human lives destroyed is the issue!
>
>If that was the case then the murder of all those people in East Timor
>would have been trumpeted much louder than the deaths of the poor souls in
>the World Trade Center.
>
>*All* acts of systematic slaughter of innocent civilians are intolerable
>affronts to humanity. That is how Chomsky feels. He says it again and
>again. I don't get why you would seek to denigrate someone like him for
>saying such things.
>
There was a young woman killed by a drunken driver on her wedding day nine months ago near here; today, her killer received 14 years in a woman's prison. I never did read Noam Chomsky's article about the injustice and irresponsibility of this death, nor about the tens of thousands like her who die each year, even though deadly public irresponsibility is indeed a legal issue (just ask MADD). Now, why would that be? Maybe because it's not geopolitically juicy, and thus his focus devalues these deaths?
Also could it not be that the New York location did play a part in the attention, and the availability of the sensational pictures to the visual media, and the fact that these were OUR citizens, murdered on OUR soil? On television today, many Afghanis who were questioned by reporters, since they are not allowed to have televisions or radios themselves, did not even know that thousands had dies in New York, only that the great satan US wes planning to kill them and that the taliban were calling oon them to join a jihad against us. They weren't their citizens, or on their soil. And the fact that, unlike East Timor, and even Cambodia, six thousand people died in one place within the space of an hour? That kind of compression does tend to intensify things.
But I agree that fanatical and hate-filled Muslims should not be murdering East Timorese infidels any more than they should be murdering World trade center infidels.
BTW; doncha love the story that the extremist Muslim media is feeding a lot of fundie Muslims? It goes like this: The Jew-supported Al Gore was pissed that the Christian-backed George W. Bush, with the help of the business community and the military-indistrial complex, got his friends in the Mossad to stage the attack, and to arrange for hapless, clueless Muslims to be aboard the missile planes.
We cannot look to indigent foreigners to be some modern sagacious equivalent of noble savages, magically and mystically plugged into founts of insight and truth while we remain alone in being deluded and confused, and reduced to supplicating their wisdom; such a view is itself a delusion, and the facilitator of many more.
>
> - Miriam
>
>
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>To the pessimist, the glass is half empty.
>To the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
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>http://members.optushome.com.au/miriame
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