In Reply to: What motivated the bombings ? posted by albert on Monday, 10. October 2005 at 23:28 Bali Time:
This is what I believe and I totally respect anyones right to believe differently. A good friend of mine would like to shoot all the families of the bombers to disencourage further bombers. She's still my friend although our oinions are pretty much at opposite ends of the spectum!!
We know pretty much that periodically in human history, truly evil individuals gain power and use that power to influence "the masses".Hitler, Pol Pot (sp?) some in the former Yugoslavia whose names I can't spell, etc etc. They manipulate by means of almost brainwashing their followers.
In any society which has a mass of poor disenfranchised young people (usually young men) there is a pool of people for the evil minded to exploit. Back to Hitler, he after forming the Hitler Youth movement whipped up hatred against the Jews, blaming them for all the economic woes of Germany and then he used them to commit all kinds of horrors, as we know.
Non of that is particularly controversial but this might be. After the initial anger I actually feel sorrow for these young people who after being marinated in hate and warped interpretation of The Koran actually find it in themselves to strap explosives to their body and blow themselvers up to kill people who they have been programmed to believe are the enemy and furthermore that this act will martyr them and take them to heaven.
The way, I believe,to change the balance is not by returning fire with fire. It doesn't seem to be working for us in Iraq or Afghanistan does it? We need to reach out to poverty stricken areas of the world with aid, in times of disaster of course, but also in times of no natural disaster and we need to keep doing it until the message gets through and then some. I know we aided Aceh and that the latest bombing still happenned but Rome was not built in a day. If we can reach the youth living in poverty beyond our imagination and show compassion helping them to be able to have an education which is not provided by zealots maybe bit by bit we can chip away at the number of young men available to be recruited by the radicals who have an agenda of their own and are totally using these youngsters.
I'm not expecting to win "The most popular Forumite of the day award" today but hey, that sincerely is the way I feel. Thank you for reading.