From Jim Glassman, a Professor of Geography at Syracuse University a comment on teaching and political strategy ñ and on what appropriate US policy should be:

 

ìOne comment on general strategy that I think it would be useful for us to think about.Ý I'm trying to emphasize to people I talk with that though this week's acts were despicable and illegitimate, they were not incomprehensible.Ý To say that they can't be understood is to invoke a racist conception of Arabs and Islam that suggests their thinking, emotions, and "culture," are so different from ours as to be beyond rational explanation.Ý At this point, then, the need for terrorism "experts" is invoked to enable us to "understand" the irrational society of this other so that we can control it--though not, of course, empathize with it.Ý (This was the sort of line emanating from Warren Christopher this week, at the liberal end of the spectrum of acceptable opinion.)Ý Against this, I think we need to insist that these acts of terrorism can--and desperately need to be--understood and explained, and that the kinds of voices and information that we are providing through the People's Geography Project hold a crucial key to that explanation.Ý Indeed, many of those voices have been warning for decades that if the US government continued supporting oppressive policies towards the majority of people in the Middle East that tragedies like the present one would be inevitable--not because Arabs and Muslims "don't value human life the way we do" but precisely because they do value it just as much as we do and, like us, will not tolerate their own repression and humiliation forever.Ý In such a context, extremists and terrorists will inevitably find a home, even if most people around them would not engage in or even endorse terrorist acts themselves.Ý In short, I think we have a right to say that whereas the US government has falsely assured us that continuing its policies of aggression would make "us" Americans safe (and I think here of how many non-Americans were killed in the WTC, including some 30 Thais), critical voices have been correctly warning us that such policies merely endanger "us" more--and increasingly so as history (and geography) marches on.Ý This increased danger also applies fully to Israel, where a misguided sense that security can only (and should only) be secured through military strength and rejection of Palestinian claims, has led to an arrogance and brutality that has inevitably rebounded on Israel itself and will threaten to do so even more in the future--as many critical Israeli scholars and activists have themselves argued.î