Terrorism - confrontation or dialogue: what do we want?

As part of the run up to tomorrow's commemoration of 9/11, Mister Blair was interviewed on this morning's Today programme by John Humphries, who wasn't quite as bullying as I usually find him to be, though Mr Blair was dogmatic as ever about the part he and Britain had played in the past decade of violence around the world. He still insists that combating so-called religious extremism is the key to neutralising the global terrorist threat and still doesn't see the costliness and unproductiveness of the use of force. 

Yet paradoxically it was on his watch that secret negotiations between the 'terrorist' leaders on both sides that led to the end of decades of conflict in Northern Ireland bore fruit, as Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller pointed out in her Reith Lecture this week. Although the warring parties in Ulster were for ever assigned religious labels, the conflict was not about religious belief as such. It was about the inability of those with power and access to resources to share it fairly between different communities and their needs. As it happened those communities had social and cultural identities with roots in the religious history and politics of another era. In the doctrines of opposing sides, fair shares in employment, education and housing were what mattered, and required a reconciling response. That's what the dialogue revealed and led the way to achieving.

I was disappointed that Humphries omitted to remind Mister Blair that only about ten per cent of all reported suicide bombers in the past couple of decades could reasonably be described as 'religious extremists'. The other ninety percent were ordinary people, some communist, some atheist other with religious beliefs maybe but not as a driving force. Helplessness rage at the plight of a nation, a community, an ethnic group, subjected to foreign domination, exploited, deprived of dignity as well as resources, generates a despair that induces a feeling that since all is lost, why not give the oppressors as taste of their own medicine? It's a most perverse and evil way to make one's existence meaningful, but it's the response of poor vulnerable people whose lives have been thoroughly devalued by their experience of suffering oppression.

Emphasis is rightly given to the tragic victims and heroes of 9/11, nearly three thousand of them, maybe more when the final account is made of eventual victims of toxic dust fall-out in the aftermath. The world would have a lot more mourning to do if a similar day were to be set aside for a hundred times as many victims of a decade of  'war on terror' in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and other parts of the globe soon forgotten. Why do all these lost lives seem to matter less in the estimation of attention given to their demise? It's a mighty challenge to secure any kind of peacemaking dialogue with people enraged to the point of insane despair. Violence must be stopped by reasonable force if needs be. But beyond that?

I've got to preach twice tomorrow. What can I say? But first,  there's Mass to celebrate this morning at St Germans, then a drive to Worcester for lunch and a walk along the banks of the river Severn with our friends Mike and Gail, to lift the spirits and clear the mind. And then finish the sermon.