Posted on 12/30/2007 8:35:43 PM PST by ventanax5
When President Bush described the assassination of Benazir Bhutto as cowardly, he chose precisely the wrong word. (He was not the only person to do so, but he was the most important one to do so.) In fact, it was a very courageous act: for it requires great courage to assassinate someone in the middle of a large and volatile crowd favourable to that person, and above all then to blow yourself up just to make sure that you have succeeded. Not many people have that degree of courage: I certainly don’t.
The two Islamic militants whose telephone call was putatively intercepted by the Pakistani security services, and who are claimed by them to have been the organisers of the assassination, were quite right when they called the two men who did it ‘brave boys.’ They were brave all right; I do not see how it can very well be denied. Even if the transcript of the telephone call turns out to be a complete work of fiction, the authors of it got something right that President Bush got wrong
(Excerpt) Read more at newenglishreview.org ...
The Courageous Act of Civil Disobedience
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Ghandi pointed out three possible responses to oppression and injustice. One he described as the coward's way: "To accept the wrong or run away from it. The second option was to stand and fight by force of arms." Gandhi said, "This was better than acceptance or running away." But the third way, he said, "was best of all and required the most courage to stand and fight solely by non-violent means."
When a government violates its own laws - the rights guaranteed to the citizens by its Constitution, when a government violates international law, specifically violating international treaties and covenants it has signed and ratified and thereby agreed to uphold, the people themselves have the right, indeed the responsibility, to uphold the law themselves. The history of civil disobedience, as enshrined in the essays of Henry Thoreau and the leadership of Frederick Douglas, Mahatma Ghandi, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela, instruct that when a nation violates the rule of law and tramples upon the rights of man, it is incumbent upon the people themselves to not accept the wrong and not fight by force of arms but to fight solely by non-violent means.
Sorry, but I just don't have time to entertain any further discussion of this exercise in futility!!!
I wasn’t putting the good doctor down. Au contraire, I was pointing out in a light-hearted way that I didn’t think he had some kind of radical agenda as some posters seemed to suspect.
Sorry.
Happy New Year!
“It was demon possession.”
Probably the most accurate answer...
“Why go off topic?”
By merely asking me this question you are as guilty as I.
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