> Besides, a good number of us have reasons to fear that we, too, may
> be objects of hatred or collateral damages of it, because of where we
> come from, what we look like, what we believe, what we say, etc. If
> some of us don't feel like jumping onto a hating and cheering
> bandwagon, that may be because we don't feel safe.
Obviously hating people based on race, ethnicity or political beliefs is
totally monstrous. I'm only suggesting we permit ourselves to hate mass
murderers of all stripes - Al Quaeda as well as Bush, etc.
>
> Also, the sorts of punishments meted out to those who were said to
> belong to the Taliban or Al Qaeda (torture and execution by the
> Northern Alliance soldiers, indefinite detention with no legal rights
> in the penal colony in Guantanamo, etc.), I don't even wish on my
> personal enemies.
All the more reason the left should continue to involve itself in the discussion of bringing the guilty to *justice.* I'm suggesting a critical hatred: we hate the criminals, not the people who have been accused without being convicted. We hate the human rights violations, and the US failure to participate in the International Criminal Court. But we cheer the investigations and hope Al Quaeda's ass is grass.
>
>> There was a great reluctance among some anti-war activists to "condemn the
>> 911 attacks." Some local groups were very divided about the issue, strange
>> as that may sound. Some just didn't do it, rejecting it as pandering or
>> boilerplate, or objecting on ideological grounds. But the many other groups
>> who shared the majority's hatred of the terrorists - and anger at the attack
>> - (and said so) sounded a lot less marginal at that moment.
>
> Not my experience. You might name the local groups in question.
> --
Somewhat reluctant to do this out of the sense that the refusal was stupid rather than callous, and my point in bringing this up is not to moralize but to point out the sometimes absurd tendencies toward self-marginalization on the left, and to point out that sometimes it wouldn't kill us to find more common ground with the average person. There was a large NYC coalition that met shortly after September 11, and at its founding meeting - which I attended - people fought *bitterly* about this question. That coalition then splintered into a couple of other groups, a few of which also continued to fight about the same issue. Those who wanted to condemn the attacks were sometimes called racists and imperialists. There was also a group in Detroit I know of that agreed not to condemn the attacks - a close friend of mine, who agreed with that decision, is a member of the group. I heard anecdotally - from peace activists around the country - about other examples. Of course, as I said, many peace groups did condemn the attacks.
Liza