Terrorism will forever be Terrorism

The following post is a correspondence I had with a Muslim girl in my American Pluralism class in school. It was a part of our grade to respond to classmates posts on the class's message board. This correspondence is from April 2006, and is still extremely relevant for a couple of months later. My responses to the girl are in the different colored font;


It's so sad to see things like that, I really wish they didn't happen.

It is not just sad, it is outrageous and you and I both wish terror will end.

The world today is a very, very disturbing place. It is so sad that people kill each other and take revenge and kill each other some more and the cycle is ongoing.

Suicide bombers murder innocent people not simply for revenge but for the sole purpose of killing. The purpose is to be ‘shahid’ (martyr), because that’s what their recruiters tell them they’ll be – they tell them that they will get to heaven and get the 72 virgins.

I think America is the only place safe from these types of terrors...

9/11, thousands of dead. Downtown Manhattan. And constant threats by Osama Bin-Laden. I wouldn’t call that safe.

it's hard to believe that most of the world lives in constant terror...

It is hard to believe that people feel it is ok to kill innocent people, but this is the reality. Not just in Israel, but in Madrid, London, NYC, Bali, Dahab (The Sinai desert in Egypt), and many other cities.

what is the solution? Spirituality, fairness, empathy and compromise are the only things that will bring peace... but how do we go about it? How do we make someone have a conscience?

The solution starts with education. No one is born a hater. Hate derives from education, from brain washing. When your family/school/mosque tells you that Jews are pigs and monkeys and that they are infidels (as is anyone who is not Muslim according to Islam) and blames everything that is wrong on someone else instead of their own leadership. That leadership stole billions and billions of funding that was meant to build schools, hospitals, etc and put that money in their own bank accounts, letting their people suffer while their own families are living lives of wealth in Paris, London and other European cities.
I was never taught to hate. I grew up with Lebanese in my house and they were treated the same way the queen of England would have treated if she came to my house.

People are so emotional on both sides that they can't think straight. Wheather it's a suicide bomber who kills people, or tanks and machine guns that kill people, it is still violence and it needs to stop if there is to be any hope of a more peaceful tomorrow.

You cannot compare between a suicide bomber who has the sole intention of murdering innocent people, man, women, children and babies, and a solider doing his job to DEFEND his country! No Israeli solider kills civilians with the intention to do so, but in a state of war, mistakes do happen and that is unfortunate. Israelis don’t go partying in the streets even when terrorist are killed. Palestinians DO. They also did it when 9/11 happened. For some reason they feel the need to celebrate when others die.
Any country in the world has the right to DEFEND itself if attacked, which is what Israel is doing since 1948. If the Arabs would have accepted the UN’s offer back in 1948 instead of attacking the Jews right away, Palestine would have been 58 years old today.