London Bombing

Originally Posted by Happy Monkey

Indeed. But Cohen's entire argument is that rich idealistic Westerners are deluded by thinking that if only we could convince the terrorists that we're nice people, everything would be hunky dory.

You may indeed have a point about delusional Western thinking. One need only look to Timothy McVeigh, the Atlanta Olympic bombing and numerous abortion clinic bombings to realize that Christian fundamentalists are as prone to acts of terrorism as their Muslim Mid Eastern counterparts.

Up until 9/11 Timothy Mc Veigh, who had ties to a Christian fundamentalist extremist group called Christian Identity, was responsible for the worst terrorist attack on US soil, the Oklahoma City bombing which killed 168 people, many of them children. The person responsible for the 1996 Atlanta Olympic bombing has yet to be captured and is known to be associated with domestic Christian fundamentalist groups. For quite sometime now, there have been countless bombings of abortion clinics, family planning centers and terrorist threats from domestic Christian extremists. In 1987, a number of white supremacists influenced by "Christian Idenity" teaching were indicted for plotting to poison the municipal water supplies of two major American cities.

(http://sandiego.indymedia.org/en/2002/07/1671.shtml)

We may really have a very hard time convincing Islamic fundamentalists, or anyone else for that matter, that we are "nice people" and we believe that God is love.