Re yeThe Minty Voice November 2,-16 200)~The M' VoiceTITJim Rouse/ Publisher/CEO © "S- M. Adams/ EditorWm. Clark/ General ManagerSend all inquires to 405 Evans: EDITORIALSessons can terror "What |Street Greenville, NC 27835 "teach America, the world?he mind cannot comprehend thedepth of tne terror that Americaexperience! Sept. 11. Whilemany have compared it to theDec. 7, 1941. attack on PearlHarbor-othe date that will live in infamy? -in some ways the horror is even larger thanthat catastrophe.Pearl Harbor was a surgical attack againsta military target. But this coordinated strikeonly tangentially touched on the military, -with the crashing of unc of the hijackedplanes into the Pentazon. This was a strikedesigned primarily to insini, murder andterrorize those who hi oot engaged in anywar at all.- We can count the numbers: more than260 killed in the tour hijacked airplanes;possibly up to 200 at the Pentagon; possiblythousands more in the two towers of theWorld Trade Center, which collapsed intotwisted piles of glass. steel and concrete, Asthe dust begins to clear we will ultimatelybegin, in some way, to calculate the finan-cial losses that have been incurred in an: at-tack designed to devastate AmericaTs-andthe worldTs-financial markets.* But there is truly no way to calculate thebreadth of the horror that has been visitedupon the nation, or to understand the twist-ed evil that chose to perpetrate it.T The mind is awed by the level of preci-Sion that went into the four hijackings-allgccurring within moments of each other, atthree different locations. We are amazedby the expense and planning that it musthave taken to coordinate this activity. Weare overwhelmed by the evil that wouldengage in such precision, planning and ex-eeution without a shred of conscience orcompassion for all those who would beIpst. And we are amazed, and saddened, bythe pictures taken in parts of the Arabworld-rejoicing at the devastation andtragedy that had befallen the oGreat Satan?the United States.But as vile as this event has been, thereare lessons-and warnings-in the holocaust.The lesson is that we are not invulnera-ble. America has truly been a blessed na-tion. There has not been a single shot firedby a foreign power on American soil sinceoBut the blessing that God has extendedupon us is just that-a blessing, not abirthright. We live in a world that is filledwith evil people, people who will stop atnothing to destroy what they cannot build.The terroist attack has made a direct hit onour sense of complacency, comfort and ar-rogance. .And there are warnings, as well. In ouranger, we cannot be too quick to assume weknow who committed this vile act.Much of the discussion has centeredaround Osama bin Laden, the fanaticalMuslem cleric who is apparently in hidingin Afghanistan. Others have said that thiscould have been state-sponsored terrorism,with Iraq as a chief suspect.But, as this is being written, no one hastaken responsibility. Therefore, we do notknow. We cannot forget what happened inthe wake of the Oklahoma City bombing,when-before we learned that the bomberswere right-wing White men-Arabs aroundthe country were being harassed because ofthe mistaken belief that the bombing wasArab terrorism.~ Areligion or a nationality did not committhese acts: evil men did. Their evil was tru-ly indiscriminate: theres were Blacks andWhites, Jews, gentiles and Arabs, men andwomen in the airplanes they hijacked. Allnationalities and cultures were representedin the World Trade Center, and even in thePentagon.We cannot allow our fear to cause us tokill the very liberty that makes us the envy"of the world-and, yet, that makes us morevulnerable to these attacks. And we cannotallow our anger to cause us to lash out atpeople just because they do not look likewe do-or just because they look like theTpeople we believed may have terrorized us.As African-Americans, we understand theshame, horror-and evil-of being singled outfor abusive treatment just because someonein power believes that our skin color or na-tionality in some way links us to other folkslike us who engage in criminal behavior.We all grieve.We have experienced a terror that is un-fathomable. But the nation will recover. Wewill emerge stronger and wiser from this-ifwe do not allow fear and rage to compel usto commit suicide on our own liberties orsocial homicide against those who are dif-ferent from us. If we do that. then we willhave given our enemies the victory theywanted-a victory they could not achieve ontheir own.September 11 attacks leaveplenty questions of faithhe past weeks have been hardfor all peace-loving people allover the world. It is a time thatrevealed the bestial and barbaricextent to which some Muslimextremists can go: killing and inflictingpain on innocent people in a spuriouslyfrivolous belief that it would win favor forthem in the sight of God.It is a cause that makes them believe theuniverse should be purged of every religionthat does not pay homage to the superiorityof Islam, leaving Islam as the bona fide andauthentic religion of the world. In pursuitof that belief, they have since 1993 execut-ed monstrous atrocities all over the globe,but America never took them too seriouslyuatil now.oThey bombed the World Trade Center in1993, killing six people and injuring others;they bombed a Phillipine airplane in 1994ling one person and injuring a dozen.others; and they made an assassination at-tempt on Egyptian President HosniMubarak who was on a visit to Ethiopia in1995. If those sequential, annual killingsdidnTt sound an auditory alarm to Americanintelligence, they hit a home run in 1996when they attacked a military housing unitin Saudi Arabia, killing nearly a score ofUSS. soldiers. Still, the neo-terroristsproved too crafty, too cunning and too elu-Sive to be detected. Fearing detection, how-ever, they had a cooling-off period in 1997.-But they were back in action, big time, in1998. They devastated lives on a massivenote when they bombed U.S. embassies inKenya and Tanzania, killing 235 people inthe process and injuring more than 5,000others. After those killings, President BillClinton reacted via missile attacks onOsama bin LadenTs hideout in Afghanistan.The attack, however, was not carried out ona Sustained level because the president wasat the time accused of using bin Laden as afaAade to shield him from the MonicaLewinsky debacle. Head of cells or groupsthat pervade over 50 countries, includingthe United States, bin Laden, son of a for-mer Saudi Arabian oil magnate, is worth$300 million and bank rolls his wide net-work of terrorists known as The Base (AlQaeda).In nefarious activities last year, theybombed the USS Cole off the coast ofYemen in the Middle East and killed 17U.S. service personnel.Then, on Sept. 11, they executed theirmost sophisticated and devious attack yetin the history of terrorism by hijacking fourcommercial aircrafts and plunging three of_them into the twin towers that used tohouse the World Trade Center in New York |and The Pentagon in Virginia. More than5,000 people are feared to have perished inthose attacks. The fourth plane did not getto its destination because of the heroic featof some of the passengers on board, whoforced the aircraft to crash in Shanksvillenear Pittsburgh.Investigations have found bin LadenTsnetwork responsible for the crashes andPresident Bush has named him a prime sus-pect. In fact, bin LadenTs atrocities havenow made Libyan leader, MuammarGaddafi look like an angel and AyatollahKhomeini a saint. He is indeed, AdolfHitler reincarnated and Americans are hisJews.It is for this reason that the highest sup-port and encouragement must be givenPresident Bush in his noble quest to rid theworld of terrorists. This is not vengeance; itis justice and the right thing to do under theprevailing circurnstances.(Guest editorial by Sam Doku, writer forthe Washington Informer.)The Minority Voice Newspaperassumes no responsibility for thereturn of unsolicited manuscriptsor photo re Photographs onanuscripts become peof The Minority Voice N vopapenAddress your complaints to: MrJim Rouse / Publi 405 EvansStreet Greenville, NC 27834LL:by George E. Curryhough they are reluctant to ad-mit it, George W. Bush andOsama bin Laden have some-thing in common besides beingmillionaires: Each firmly be-lieves the other one is a terrorist. Unfortu-nately, many more innocent lives will belost in the United States and inAfghanistan while each man seeks to anni-hilate the other.Without a doubt, the loss of lives inNew YorkTs World Trade Center and at thePentagon is a tragedy, an act of cowardicethat cannot be condoned or defended onany grounds. And if the United Stateswants to be viewed as anything other thana punching bag for Islamic zealots, it hasno choice but to retaliate.Characterizing the Sept. 11 assaults asobarbarism,? Bush said: oThis administra-tion, along with those friends of ours whoare willing to stand with us all the waythrough, will do what it takes to rock ter-rorism out of the world. The Americanpeople should know that my administra-tion is determined to find, to get them run-ning, and to hunt them down.?Bin Laden, the person being hunted, is-sued a statement denying he had ocarriedout this act. oBut Jamal Ismail, a Palestin-1an journalist, said an aide to bin Ladenhad called him immediately after lastweek's devastating attack to say his bosshad denied orchestrating the recent vio-lence but othanked almighty Allah andbowed before him when he heard thisnews.?To begin to understand how bin Ladencould be thankful for the bloody deaths ofthousands of innocent people in New Yorkand Washington, one needs to trace theroots of his anger.Bin Laden was born in 1957 to a Syrianmother in Saudi Arabia, the 17th of 52children. His father, Mohamed Awad binLaden, had emigrated from South Yemen,eventually owning the Bin Laden Group,the largest construction company in thekingdom, now worth about 5 billion.Instead of continuing to live a life ofprivilege, young bin Laden chose to travelto Afghanistan to help successfully repelthe 10-year Soviet invasion, which endedin 1989.A year before the Soviets withdrew, binLaden established his own organization,Al-Qaeda, an Arabic term meaning othebase.? He became involved in a series ofregional disputes, including IraqTs invasionof Kuwait.Bin laden anger toward the UnitedStates escalated after the commencementof the Persian Gulf War in 1991, accordingto his associates. He was particularly upsetwith the decision to station Americantroops in Saudi Arabia, which he saw asQOsama bin LadenTs terroristbackground is unimaginableolatest and greatest? aggression against theIslamic world.The riches-to -rags leader was indictedafter he was linked to the 1993 WorldTrade Center bombing that took six lives.He was also said to be implicated in the at-tacks on the U.S. embassies in East Africa,leaving 224 dead.But bin Laden contends that heTs not theproblem. mThe American imposes himself oneveryone, obin Laden said in a 1998 inter-view with ABC-TV Reporter John Miller.oAmericans accuse our children in Pales-tine of being terrorists-those-children, whohave no weapons and have not evenreached maturity. At the same time, Ameri-cans defend a country, the state of theJews, and that has a policy to destroy thefuture of these children.?Bin Laden is said to loosely affiliatewith Islamic radical in 50 to 60 countries.Intelligence sources say that in additionto sharing a deep hated for the U.S. and Is-rael, bin Laden has been able to tap intothe religious fervor of the region-by goingto local clerics and having themT give theirblessing to the impending antieAmericanaction. .Larry C. Johnson, deputy director of theU.S. Department Office of Counter terror-ism from 1989 to 1993, said intelligenceOperatives are not prepared to deal withthe likes of bin Laden.oThe fundamental problem the UnitedStates faces in dealing with entities likebin Laden and his supporters is that the ex-isting intelligence apparatus is still orga-nized to defeat a conventional Cold Warenemy, oFrontline,? the PBS documentaryunit.o...How do you penetrate an organiza-tion which is largely ideological andbound by religious fervor? They donTthave membership. You donTt have to fillout an application. ItTs not like joining acountry club. You are brought together bycommonness of belief that is shared inworship. And in the faithful application ofyour religious faith.?But religion plays another role thatmight explain why bin LadenTs followersdonTt mind dying for their cause.oBeing killed for AllahTs cause is a greathonor achieved by only those who are theelite of the nation, obin Laden said in a1997 interview with Peter Arnett of CNN.oWe love this kind of death for AllahTscause as much as you like to live. We havenothing to fear for. It is something wewish for.?As long as the United States has thatkind of unconventional enemy, conven-tional warfare, as well as conventionalwisdom, is useless.(Curry is an opinion writer for theNNPA)Sneak attacksby Bob Browns | watch, over and overagain, the reruns of theT World Trade Center andthe Pentagon on fire, thesymbols of white suprema-cy, of the U.S. military-industrial-po-lice-intelligence complex smolderingin ruins; and a I listen to the growingand racist drumbeat for war, | remem-ber the wisdom of Malcolm X andKwame Ture.The master, and his/her owestern civ-ilization,? is sick, not us slaves, His/herhouse, the racist capitalist system, is onmuch of what is Americarepresentsfire, not our plantation shacks.Hell no, I did not go to Vietnam, orGrenada, or Haiti, or Iraq, or Libya, orPanama, or Somali, or Sudan. Hell no,I will not go, to Afghanistan or Co-lumbia!Victory of the Oppressed Peoples ofthe world is.certain, no matter the timeor sacrifice! Then and only then, willthere be no more mourning, or griev-ing, or tears. In the meantime, thestruggle continues, and the work of the|Metro-Council toldter is the case. When those res;Please include your address ond completeil letters to: The Minority T 2News 405 Evans Street Greenville. NC 27835: Fax: (252). 787-1793 :. E-Mail: woow@skantech net . -to wake up to issuesDear Editor,I am writing this letter out of concern}] for the citizens of Davidson county. Myconcern stems from the inability of some||| |: members of the Metro Council to acceptthe fact that the citizens of Davidson -county has given their views about termlimits, and want the issue behind them.The people have said No, No, No! "Yet there are some council members.who either refuse to.accept the mandate ofthe people, or they think the voting publicis too dumb to know what they were vot-ing for when they so soundly defeated theeffort to repeal in the last Metro Generalelection. T thasoIt was obvious in the last vote. on TermLimits, almost four years ago, that the lat-sible forplacing the language on the ballot, used| the confusing words that was used, anyvoter with an once of voting savvy shouldhave known that this was an attempt fohoodwink the voting public.Now here they come again with theideas, advanced recently by CouncilmanPhil Ponder, on the Editorial page of theTennessean, where he indicates that newadditions to the council arenTt very bright.In his theory that a third term would make "the Council more efficient, he furthersealed the thought that a person has to bein the council almost eight years beforethey know what they are doing. If that isthe case, the public had better examine thequalification of those we vote into office,and not be so worried about extending theterms of those who are too dumb to graspthe cityTs business.I would offer one consideration for thepublic, not the council, to punder. (No punin tended). And that is to start staggeringCouncilmanic terms, by voting on differ-ent districts at different times for a thirdof the council members, until there is nodanger of more than one third of the coun-cil members to be freshman at one time.That way the city would always be as-sured that a healthy number of the mem-bers are seasoned legislators and are fullaware of the needs of the people ofNashville. How the one third would be se-lected could be the responsibility of a pan-el of citizens selected from. the city at-large. Until that time my personal opimionis, STOP TRYING TO REPAEL TERM -:.LIMIT. THE PEOPEE HAVE SPOKEN.THREE TIMES! 8Since some are still worried about beingone-term council members, why not makeeach term one of eight years, and bar any-one who have already served one fouryear term at any time, from running in anyelection until the formula for staggeringthe terms have been solidified. In thoseoriginal eight years any person smartenough to get elected, should at leastknow how to govern their district. Mr.Ponder seems to think the freshman mem-bers are still wetbehind the ears after al-most four years, so give them eight years,since the older and wiser councilmen donot deem it their responsibility to teachthe newly elected members. What selfish-ness on their part!Rev. James T. Morris Sr.NashvilleExpensive hotel roomsavailable to everyoneDear Editor,Those readers who say that race rela-tions are no better than they were 40 yearsago (oPeopleTs Pulse,? Aug.23), were nothere 40 years ago. I just returned fromBiloxi, Miss., where I was welcomed withopen arms at the Beau Rivage Hotel. Mymoney was as good as anyone elseTs. 'In 1965, I couldnTt get even a room inBiloxi, not that | would have wanted to.Arthur Lewis,Los Angelos|THE MINORIY VOICENEWSPAPER18,000 Circulation Bi-WeeklyAnual Subscription $40.00Newspaper Size - 6 Column by 21InchesQuarter Page - $260.00Half Page - $615.00Full Page - $1200.00Local - $8.75 per column inchNational - $10.75 per columninch Inserts - $.09 per insertDiscounts on frequency numberof inches per monthenuine proesexe and revolutionaryorces of the world intensifies,(Brown is an opinion writer for theNNPA.)