[mujahedeen], By The Way, Don't Represent Islam

The Central Fact For Me Is, I Think, That The [role Of The] Intellectual... Cannot Be Played Without A Sense Of Being Someone Whose Place It Is Publicly To Raise Embarrassing Questions, To Confront Orthodoxy And Dogma (rather Than To Produce Them), To Be Someone Who Cannot Easily Be Co-opted By Governments Or Corporations, And Whose Raison D'etre Is To Represent All Those People And Issues That Are Routinely Forgotten Or Swept Under The Rug.

It Was Thought That To Rally Islam Against Godless Communism Would Be Doing The Soviet Union A Very Bad Turn Indeed, And That, In Fact, Transpired.

It's Very Hard, For Example, To Justify The Thirty-four-year Occupation Of The West Bank And Gaza. It's Very Hard To Justify 140 Israeli Settlements And Roughly 400,000 Settlers.

Exile Is Strangely Compelling To Think About But Terrible To Experience. It Is The Unhealable Rift Forced Between A Human Being And A Native Place, Between The Self And Its True Home: Its Essential Sadness Can Never Be Surmounted. And While It Is True That Literature And History Contain Heroic, Romantic, Glorious, Even Triumphant Episodes In An Exile’s Life, These Are No More Than Efforts Meant To Overcome The Crippling Sorrow Of Estrangement.

Osama Bin Laden's Organization Has Spun Out From Him And Is Now Probably Independent Of Him. There Will Be Others Who Will Appear And Reappear. This Is Why We Need A Much More Precise, A Much More Defined, A Much More Patiently Constructed Campaign, As Well As One That Surveys Not Just The Terrorists' Presence But The Root Causes Of Terrorism, Which Are Ascertainable.