Madam, - Having returned to Dublin via Heathrow airport in the past few days, and with my sister soon to be flying home from the United States, I can only express my horror, revulsion and disgust at the plot to blow up commercial airliners in mid-air.
What can one say to people willing to commit so gross a crime? What reason can one appeal to? What bargains can be made? We are dealing here with the piercing gleam of lunacy allied to a cold, craven and remorseless lack of scruple. No détente, no rapproachment, no compromise or peace can be made with such an enemy.
Those who would invoke the destruction of Lebanon, the subjugation of the Palestinians, the chaos in Iraq or the invasion of Afghanistan as pretext or motive for such indiscriminate brutality make a most dangerous error. No Iraqi or Palestinian or Lebanese democrat would ever truly consider incinerating hundreds of innocent people above the clouds. To those who count such acts as imperial "blowback", one need only point out that the Timorese, Chileans, South Africans and Salvadoreans, who have suffered much more at the hands of empire, would never direct their rage in such a way. One cannot imagine Mandela or Allende secreting high explosives on commerical aircraft.
Furthermore, anyone who thinks that such attacks would be retaliation for Muslim grievance need only look at Iraq and Afghanistan, where the truly devout put to the sword any co-religionist considered apostate or impious. How many Muslims would have been consumed in flames, high above the earth, if this plot had been "successful"? What we have arrayed against us - and, make no mistake, this does not concern Americans alone - is a band of nihilists and fascists, fundamentalists and murderers, jihadists and criminals, who would sooner see women eviscerated than unveiled, who behead peace-workers and journalists, who seek to murder innocents in the skies, and whose ideology has yet to progress beyond the 7th Century.
One need not be a supporter of Rumsfeld and Cheney to know an enemy when one appears. Society must be defended. In times of great uncertainty, the tendency to fall back on old slogans should perhaps be resisted. But "Death to fascism" - latterly the rallying cry of an independent left - seems, for the moment, more apt than anything our leaders may now announce. - Yours, etc,
SEAN COLEMAN, Brian Avenue, Marino, Dublin 3.