A few hours ago, two aircraft flown by a terrorist group, LTTE, recognized as such by the US, were foiled in their attempt to attack the Sri Lankan capitol of Colombo. Thought both planes were shot down, two civilians were killed and forty-six others injured.
[ad#200×200]In an article in the New Yorker, (Jane Mayer, ‘The Hard Cases,’ New Yorker, 2/23/09), argues that the Obama administration faces the tough choice of closing Guantanamo Bay and other detention centers holding so-called enemy combatants who have never been charged with a crime, and being accused of going easy on future terrorists. There is the old argument that it is entirely possible to take an ordinary civilian and transform them into a terrorist simply by treating them as such, for what else but revenge might occupy the mind of an innocent human in solitary confinement for five years. But that is hindsight. The task now is to proceed with cautious speed toward justice and that requires the reassessment of definitions of “enemy combatants” and the multiple layers of incarceration, torture and prosecution that defined the Bush era.
But as Neal Katyal, the new Principal Deputy Solicitor General in the Justice Department (i.e. the person authorized to represent the government before the Supreme Court), and the President find their way toward the surprisingly broad line that separates the terrorist from the person or group with a justifiable grievance, there is another issue that Americans as a whole, particularly American liberals, need to confront: their relationship to minorities, particularly as it pertains to the classification of terrorists.
America’s checkered past viz-a-viz its own minorities has made it both capable of massive collective goodness (i.e. two and a half years of working toward the election of a man with solid foreign-resident credentials and a name that echoes America’s chosen anti-Christ, bin Laden), and equally all-encompassing myopia. Liberal Americans have, for decades, made the usually, but regrettably not reliably, flawless argument that minority status confers upon that minority the right to unquestioned support and a corner on the market on truth. President Obama, himself fairly and squarely a minority, owes his success not merely to the fact that he has done what most minorities have to do in order to achieve the kind of respect he enjoys, i.e. be above reproach in terms of his integrity and intellect, but also to the fact that he has had the courage to disassociate and even condemn those aspects or arguments of a minority group which he finds to be untruthful.
But the rest of America is still catching up, and none slower than its mainstream media, which has been awash with a new found enthusiasm for throwing the word “genocide” at the Sri Lankan government. Sri Lanka, an island off the coast of India, comprises of a Sinhalese majority, and Tamil, Moslem and mixed-race (of European descent), minorities. Sri Lankan schools are required, by law, to teach each child his/her own religion no matter the denomination of the school, and Sri Lankans live, study, work and exist in harmony in the entire island (about the size of Maine), except in a small area controlled by the Tamil Tigers, a separatist terrorist organization. To be absolutely clear, the Tigers (LTTE), are a group of Tamils, but all Tamils are not members nor supporters of the LTTE and 95% of all Tamils live among Sinhalese and Moslems away from the LTTE.
Slump dog won many Academy awards. It would have been better if MIA had not brought terrorist issues. So unfair they worked so hard to come to fame.People are fed up of terrorism.