WAMM Activists Respond to September 11

Sanford Berman
It happens every day. The equivalent of 100 jumbo jets carrying 400 kids each crash. No survivors. Forty thousand children die daily just because they are poor. Why isn't this regarded as a global crisis? And why have massive resources and firm resolve never been devoted to an International War on Poverty, which would certainly make the world at once fairer and safer?

Joyce Wallace
I am from New York and write with a heavy heart as we share our shock and grief over the great tragedies of that September day. We must not allow our fear, our anger, our hate to control us. Rather, we must seek out the human decency, which lies within each and every one to lead us. It is easy to strongly condemn the terrorist actions of September 11. However, we must strongly condemn the actions of hate- and war-mongers, especially the powerful in government, who advocate military retaliation as a just response. Military retaliation is morally wrong. It is terrorism. Military retaliation equates to military madness.

Now is a time for Americans to communicate to members of Congress and the administration that there should be no military retaliation in our name. The only way to end terrorism is to work for peace with justice, dignity and respect for all people.

Joseph Schwartzberg
All Americans are deeply moved by the recent tragic and unforgivable acts of terrorism in New York and at the Pentagon. Numerous calls have already been made for swift and decisive retribution against the perpetrators, despite the fact that we have yet to learn who those perpetrators are. In responding to past acts of terrorism, our nation has repeatedly taken punitive military action against those thought to be the guilty parties. Such actions were intended to demonstrate America's might and resolve and to prove that we could and would respond effectively to terrorism wherever it occurred.

But did our strategy work? In the case of the embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, for example, we bombed an alleged chemical weapons plant in Khartoum and a base believed to have been a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan. As it turned out, however, our intelligence in respect to the Khartoum installation was faulty and all that we accomplished was to snuff out the lives of many innocent civilians. From the perspective of many nations this was an act of U.S. state terrorism. The casualties in Afghanistan also appear to have been mainly innocent civilians. Similarly, our bombing of Tripoli, because of the still unproven presumption that Libya was behind the Lockerbie Pan Am 103 disaster, also resulted in the loss of many innocent lives.

Do we have the slightest evidence that these American military responses to terrorism have reduced the frequency and severity of subsequent terroristic acts? The events of September 11 point to a very different conclusion, namely that each such response fans the flames of hatred against America and facilitates the recruitment of new terrorists. Violence begets violence.