Murphy's letter from Edinburgh

 

Lasting peace in the Middle East

I'm quite sure some will mourn the loss of Yasser Arafat who died this week in France, but there are those who will see him as a terrorist and one of the people who was holding the peace process back.

I will state quite clearly, I saw him as the later, and as long as he was in the position that he was in, the peace process was going nowhere.

Now that Yasser Arafat has gone, Palestine has a chance to move forward from its past, and with the right leadership this country can move forward into the future.  But that will be up to the people of Palestine.  One thing is for sure, they cannot keep fighting for the rest of their lives.

Just now the coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan have my full support to get rid of the dictators and insurgents that are ruining these countries.  We call them insurgents, when in fact they are terrorists who want to fight no matter what the cause is.  They need to be captured or got rid of - so that the peace processes can begin for real.

I sometimes wonder what goes on in the head of someone like Osama Bin Laden and his followers who want to cause as much mayhem in the world that they possibly can.

They say they are fighting a Jihad, which by their meaning is a holy war.  Some clerics state that the meaning of  Jihad means something totally different, and that it doesn't mean a holy war.  In other words the word has been hijacked according to these clerics.  If that is the case they need to turn against the people who using it wrongly, because just now Jihad means holy war in most peoples minds.

I have some news for these people, we are not fighting these wars on religious grounds, nor should we. We are fighting on the grounds of bringing democracy to countries that have been dominated and decimated by dictators who have ruled the roost for far to long with no mandate.

What have these people achieved in all the time they have held on to their positions apart from ruining their countries and declaring war on all and sundry?  I can't think of anything that they have done for the Middle East apart from destroying it and killing the people who don't agree with them.

Osama Bin Laden and cohorts have done nothing for the Middle East, nor are they likely too. They have brainwashed the children of these countries into believing that if they blow themselves up they will be heroes.  But will the likes of Osama Bin Laden do this himself?  Not a chance.  His attitude is to get other people to do his dirty work for him, and that seems to be the pattern with these people who just don't seem to want peace.

Peace will only come when the people of the Middle East see what these people really are and start telling them that they are fed up fighting a war that they just can't win. They won't win and the rest of the world can't let them win because we have become used to a lasting stability that we now take for granted.

It will take a long time for the Middle East to become stable, but I believe it can be done with the cooperation of the people who are fed up with fighting and living in squalor.

It's now time for the problem countries in Middle East to move forward and into the future.  When they do that, they will start to enjoy the benefits that the rest of the world takes for granted.  These are the same benefits that these insurgents and rouge leaders are strongly opposed to.  Why?  Because they would lose what little power that they do have.

Westerners are not the enemy of the Middle East, they want to see stability, they want to travel to these countries as tourists.  But most of all, they want to see a lasting peace in the Middle East.

But that up to the people living there.

Written by Andrew Murphy 13 November 2004

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