years has gotten us SO many enemies, that words cannot describe the misery that has come out of it.

Terrorism is the last resort of people who have been shut out of normal political processes. Its interesting that those on the right who are responsible for these mass marginalizations, both abroad and here often think of the possibility of responses long before those who are marginalized do. I have no doubt that the Pentagon and whoever is responsible for domestic 'stability' have done simulations in which, say, the prices of oil, housing, food and healthcare continue to rise as they have been and millions are evicted or forced out of the cities into the soon-to-be-abandoned fringe areas (where gas is too expensive to allow most people to live there) - in other words, extreme civil unrest scenarios. Thats probably why Bush has done a lot of the things he has done (like force the telephone companies to massively rebuild their phone networks to support something like 1% or 10% of the phones in America being monitored AT ONE TIME.)

Obviously, they are thinking ahead!

So, what it comes down to is a choice.. do we take the path of war, which is the path of ever increasing marginalizations of large groups which is the path of division, with each group being told, until its own judgement day that it is 'inside' the big group until its too late.. Or do we accept the fact that we are ALL in this together and try to work towards a world WITHOUT POVERTY AND HATRED.

Not pay lip service to that ideal, I mean REALLY DO IT.

(The future WILL be a time of incredible ABUNDANCE and each human life will be PRECIOUS, demographics and the rate of scientific change show us so.)

One path leads towards the stars.. the other leads towards hell.

The reason Yousef has a point is ecause he is tailoring his oped for the american political discourse. read between the lines.

If we on the left fall for it by saying hey he sounds reasonable, we are just as gullible as those on the right who say hey Obama terror endorsee etc.

If hamas really believed in democracy, it would do two things. 1, expunge the reference to israels destrction from its charter, and 2. stop firing rockets at civilians.

foreign and domestic policy.

And we need a fair way of measuring what is right and what is wrong for america instead of 'right good left bad' which is basically the corporatist view of the world. Our present foreign (and domestic!) policy is very much a continuation of the 'imperialism' or expansionism of the 19th and 20th centuries..

Using that yadstick, we might have avoided blindly supporting the corrupt Nationalists in China after SunYat Sen died and thereby avoided the bloodshed and scorched earth policies that sent millions of Chinese into the arms of the increasingly radicalized and Communists. We would have avoided our overthrowing nascent democracies in Iran, Korea and Latin America and probably at least tens more in favor of 'our friendly strongmen'...

The world would be vastly different and we would not have the level of alienation we do now.