[hackmeeting] [muy off-topic] [pero si no lo mando me sale una úlcera]

[Jarri Potter]

Siento usar la lista para esto, pero es que he flipado con este texto y no 
ocurre tan a menudo; perdón, no lo volveré a hacer, lo juro, lo juro O:|
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Dear all,

this has got nothing to do with anything technical, nothing to do with 
linguistics whatsoever. In fact, I never circulate email messages of any 
kind but I just received this and I thought I had to share it with you:

Dear Gary and whoever else is on this email thread: I've been hearing a lot 
of talk about "bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age." Ronn Owens, on 
KGO Talk Radio today, allowed that this would mean killing innocent people, 
people who had nothing to do with this atrocity, but "we're at war, we have 
to accept collateral damage. What else can we do?" Minutes later I heard 
some TV pundit discussing whether we "have the belly to do what must be 
done." And I thought about the issues being raised especially hard because I 
am from Afghanistan, and even though I've lived here for 35 years I've never 
lost track of what's going on there. So I want to tell anyone who will 
listen how it all looks from where I'm standing. I speak as one who hates 
the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. There is no doubt in my mind that these 
people were responsible for the atrocity in New York. I agree that something 
must be done about those monsters. But the Taliban and Ben Laden are not 
Afghanistan. They're not even the government of Afghanistan. The Taliban are 
a cult of ignorant psychotics who took over Afghanistan in 1997. Bin Laden 
is a political criminal with a plan. When you think Taliban, think Nazis. 
When you think Bin Laden, think Hitler. And when you think "the people of 
Afghanistan" think "the Jews in the concentration camps." It's not only that 
the Afghan people had nothing to do with this atrocity. They were the first 
victims of the perpetrators. They would exult if someone would come in 
there, take out the Taliban and clear out the rats nest of international 
thugs holed up in their country. Some say, why don't the Afghans rise up and 
overthrow the Taliban? The answer is, they're starved, exhausted, hurt, 
incapacitated, suffering. A few years ago, the United Nations estimated that 
there are 500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan-a country with no economy, 
no food. There are millions of widows. And the Taliban has been burying 
these widows alive in mass graves. The soil is littered with land mines, the 
farms were all destroyed by the Soviets. These are a few of the reasons why 
the Afghan people have not overthrown the Taliban. We come now to the 
question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age. Trouble is, that's 
been done. The Soviets took care of it already. Make the Afghans suffer? 
They're already suffering. Level their houses? Done. Turn their schools into 
piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their hospitals? Done. Destroy their 
infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine and health care? Too late. 
Someone already did all that.
New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs. Would they at least 
get the Taliban? Not likely. In today's Afghanistan, only the Taliban eat, 
only they have the means to move around. They'd slip away and hide. Maybe 
the bombs would get some of those disabled orphans, they don't move too 
fast, they don't even have wheelchairs. But flying over Kabul and dropping 
bombs wouldn't really be a strike against the criminals who did this 
horrific thing. Actually it would only be making common cause with the 
Taliban-by raping once again the people they've been raping all this time.
So what else is there? What can be done, then? Let me now speak with true 
fear and trembling. The only way to get Bin Laden is to go in there with 
ground troops. When people speak of "having the belly to do what needs to be 
done" they're thinking in terms of having the belly to kill as many as 
needed. Having the belly to overcome any moral qualms about killing innocent 
people. Let's pull our heads out of the sand. What's actually on the table 
is Americans dying. And not just because some Americans would die fighting 
their way through Afghanistan to Bin Laden's hideout. It's much bigger than 
that folks. Because to get any troops to Afghanistan, we'd have to go 
through Pakistan. Would they let us? Not likely. The conquest of Pakistan 
would have to be first. Will other Muslim nations just stand by? You see 
where I'm going. We're flirting with a world war between Islam and the West.
And guess what: that's Bin Laden's program. That's exactly what he wants. 
That's why he did this. Read his speeches and statements. It's all right 
there. He really believes Islam would beat the west. It might seem 
ridiculous, but he figures if he can polarize the world into Islam and the 
West, he's got a billion soldiers. If the west wreaks a holocaust in those 
lands, that's a billion people with nothing left to lose, that's even better 
from Bin Laden's point of view. He's probably wrong, in the end the west 
would win, whatever that would mean, but the war would last for years and 
millions would die, not just theirs but ours. Who has the belly for that? 
Bin Laden does. Anyone else?

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Bueno, y ya aprovecho para saludar a mi papá y a mi mamá y para felicitar a 
la asamblea porque las cosas salen adelante y el hackmeeting está teniendo 
una buena pinta... ÑAM!
¡¡Nos vemos en Leioa!!

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