An Anti-War Message From an American Muslim

We Must Opposse This War
I am not a hippie, nor am I a pacifist, that does not mean I am a warmonger either.

I do not doubt that Saddam has weaponry, just as I do not doubt the earlier US administarations armed him with the tools to make those weapons. I am saying so what!!!

He had the weapons in the Gulf War, did he use them then? He has had them in the time since and has not used them, so what is the rush now? Saddam has been a long time critic and opponnent of the Islamist movement and the likes of bin Laden, they come from different ends of the political spectrum. Saddam is from the Baath Party, a secular Arab nationalist party founded by a Christian, and bin Laden is a Pan-Islamist. Saddam would give bin Laden about as much help as Jesse Helms would give to Jesse Jackson.

This war is about a couple of things. It is about crushing resistance to the US rule in the Middle East and the New World Order. It is about sending the Muslim world a message; do not mess with America, even though if we look at the situation factually it is the US messing with the Muslim world, not the Muslim world messing with US, save for some isolated incidents.

This war is also being used to take our civil liberies. John Aschcoft and his Justice Department have been given gestapo like powers to tap our phones, read our emails, intrude into our places of worship, listen to our attorneys and incarcerate US citizens without trial or respresentation. We have just seen the beginning of Big Brother, but as we see the machine is mobilizing to crush the political will and civil rights of an entire ethnic and religous group of Americans.

Of course this war is also about oil, and we know that many of the Chicken Hawks in the Bush administartion may not have backgrounds in the military, they where punks and cowards in their youth who have become tough guys in old age, they do have backgrounds in the oil industry.

In the words of former Republican Senator of New Hampshire Bob Smith " why do`nt we just take their oil!"

Furthermore, it is very important for Latinos, African-Americans, American Muslims and the working class to opposse this war, because we will never see the benifits of an eventual war. The benifits will go to the wealthy, and their children; the children of tough talking *bleep* war mongers, will not see any action