Humanizing enemies doesn't necessarily mean forgiving them, though certain schools of religious thought (not just Christian thought) might indeed recommend such forgiveness, and there can be practical as well as moral virtue in that.
I'd say that we ought to humanize enemies on moral, legal, criminological, and political grounds.
Ethically speaking, only those who are more than merely biologically human are fully responsible for what they do. That moral distinction has legal implications. We do not hold animals, children, the senile, the insane, and the mentally retarded responsible for their actions in the same way that we judge legally competent persons. If we are to hold terrorists responsible for their acts of terror, we must first humanize them, i.e. treat them as morally responsible and legally competent persons, rather than as merely biologically humans who have nothing in common with us. We ought to find, for instance, George W. Bush and John Kerry's response -- "I . . . will hunt and kill the terrorists wherever they are" ("Transcript: First Presidential Debate," <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/debatereferee/debate_0930.html>, September 30, 2004) -- ethically unsatisfactory, as it lets terrorists off the moral hook and reduces us as well as terrorists to mere players in a contest for power: if we win, we kill them, and if they win, they kill us. (Besides, consenting to the rhetoric of hunting and killing makes one look dumber than terrorists, which is in itself a good reason to object to it.)
Criminologically, if we are interested in preventing similar crimes, we have to understand human motivations for them, which, too, requires humanizing enemies sociologically and psychologically.
Last but not the least, politically speaking, humanizing "enemies" (e.g., innocent civilians who never even think about taking up arms against anyone but are wrongly labeled "enemies" by Washington) but refusing to humanize enemies (e.g., those who hijacked the airliners and killed nearly three thousand individuals on September 11, 2001, those who took hostages and beheaded them in Iraq) still very much leaves us within the "us/them logic" that you say we should leave behind. We need to hunt and kill "them"; "they," being inhuman, are beyond the reach of political negotiations; "they" are so monstrously dangerous as to justify any means to get "them"; and if the extreme means makes "collateral damage" of many of the "enemies" who happen to live in the same neighborhood as enemies, that is regrettable but inevitable.
>As far as I can tell, Sheikh Rahman is a pretty bad guy who belongs
>in jail. Are there any circs under which you'd think the USG was
>right to prosecute someone for planning to blow up the Lincoln
>Tunnel?
Those who are actually planning to blow up the Lincoln Tunnel ought to be prosecuted and convicted, but those who aren't shouldn't be. I'm convinced that Rahman is a pretty bad guy, but I'm not convinced that the US government presented enough evidence to show -- beyond reasonable doubt -- that he was literally planning to blow up the Lincoln Tunnel, _even tough I don't put it past him_. When the government (on the left or right or center) starts locking up people on rather scant material evidence, mainly based on what they SAID rather than did, I don't think it will stop at simply locking up people whose politics is antithetical and detrimental to ours.
To begin with, I don't believe that the "seditious conspiracy" statute should be on the books. Do you? -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * OSU-GESO: <http://www.osu-geso.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>