By Brad Friedman on 3/23/2004, 4:24pm PT  

Never one to shy away from tooting my own horn, regretfully or otherwise, I came across this item this morning about a crop of babies born in Gaza today, named after the Hamas Leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who was assassinated yesterday by Israel.

On September 14th, 2001, I wrote a "Speech to the Nation�were I President" to no one in particular that I shared only with my family and a friend or two at the time (the family, by the way, was quite critical of it).

Reading the news item above, I recalled the following paragraph from that "speech":

We must avoid the easy, and well-justified, temptation to avenge. To create more hostility, and, as Nobel Peace Laureate Nelson Mandela so wisely said, �to avoid any course of action that will be as unpopular as the terrorists� in the eyes of the world. For if we fail to do so, certain death and destruction will inevitably be borne from it. Borne by rash and imprudent action. Both by us, and by those that wish to destroy us. For every Usama bin Laden that we destroy, a thousand will be born in his place.

I've heard Bush and Israeli Officials over the last 24 hours describe Yassin as "Israel's Bin Laden". And today, we seem to - quite literally - have quite a few more "Yassins" born in his place.

Something to ponder as we continue down the short-sighted, narrow-minded, fear-based, vengeful, seek-and-destroy strategy currently employed as our own "War on Terror". I have no reason to believe that this strategy will work any better for us than it has for Israel.

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