Strife

This is a topic i have to approach cautiously; i'll begin with a condemnation. I believe that harming civilians is an unacceptable method of advancing your political agenda.

A few years back i saw this chalk writing on the side of a building on campus. It said "Students Against Cancer" -- nothing else. This got me to wondering: are there students FOR cancer? Are they running around campus exposing us to deadly radiation, or spreading carcinogens in the ventilation systems of campus buildings? These people need to be stopped!

But i don't think Students Against Cancer are taking a wide enough view. Why stop there? We need to take in the whole picture. Cancer kills, right? That must be why they oppose it. After all, i don't see any groups like "Students Against the Common Cold" or "Students Against Halitosis". I guess what they're trying to say is that they oppose suffering and death, of which one notable cause is cancer. I can get behind that.

But...what would that accomplish?
Maybe it's not necessary to be vocal about some topics. I'm talking about terrorism, if you didn't click on the link above.

There's a candlelight vigil being held downtown tonight to "honor and remember the victims of the terrorist attacks on Mumbai, and to stand in solidarity with those who mourn their loved ones, irrespective of nation and religion." I find myself awkwardly impartial to this gathering. I'm not against it, but at the same time it strikes me as profoundly unnecessary. It serves as a reminder that other people care about similar issues as yourself, i suppose (if you go), but i would be very surprised if you told someone you were afraid for friends/family/people in a terrorist-threatened area and that confidant turned out to be SUPPORTING THE TERRORISTS.

Anti-terrorist sentiment, i think, doesn't need to be organized the way a school bond proposal might be hyped, or even the way Students Against Cancer might try to raise money for research. That's the crux of my argument.

And after reading this, i'm inclined to take that argument half a step further. Maybe -- just maybe -- our anti-terrorist fervor is inciting more terrorism, this time by the guys wearing uniforms.

Does this man Azam deserve to die? Maybe. Death penalties are another matter entirely, and it's not my place to make that kind of judgment anyway.

BUT! Does this man deserve to be tortured?
Does this man deserve to be terrorized?
I contend that no one deserves that.

You might say, and i considered this at length as well, that torture and terror caused this desperate man to reveal information that saved innocent lives. It might have. But from his perspective, he found it acceptable to use terror to "save" the lives of innocent, oppressed members of his particular group who were being just as terrorized by a regime which disenfranchised his voice.

I honestly don't see the difference, so i can't support the use of scare tactics, even to save lives.

Let me close with a statement i think we can all agree upon, by Professor Martin Rudner, director of the Canadian Centre of Intelligence and Security Studies at Ottawa's Carleton University.
"There is the famous statement: 'One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.' But that is grossly leading. It assesses the validity of the cause when terrorism is an act. One can have a perfectly beautiful cause and yet if one commits terrorist acts, it is terrorism regardless."
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When drafting this post, i had high hopes of keeping it on an architectural topic. That...didn't happen.

The connection i wanted to make was what i perceive to be a connection between media coverage and visible destruction (i.e., demolished architecture). I don't follow worldwide terrorism very closely, but of that hundreds-of-pages-long list linked, the ones i recognize are all closely associated with a structure. The attacks on the World Trade Center Towers (Sep. 11, 2001), the Madrid train bombings (Mar. 11, 2004), the London Underground bombings (Jul. 7, 2005), and now these attacks in Mumbai at the Taj Mahal hotel and the Chabad House. I wonder if the media chooses to show these more often than other terrorist stories because of the symbolic aspect of striking at the heart of "civilized" urban centers, or because it makes for better television? Some of both, perhaps. I'm not trying to make a point here, i just wanted to share what was on my mind regarding the topics at hand.