Titanic Post

When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.
–J. Krishnamurti, Freedom from the Known, pp.51-52

What happened on 9/11 was not war in its traditional sense. This was clearly a crime against humanity. War crimes are crimes which happen in war time. There is some confusion here. This was a crime against humanity because it was deliberate and intentional killing of large numbers of civilians for political or other purposes. That in itself is not tolerable under any international systems, and it should be prosecuted pursuant to the existing laws.

To call them “terrorists” is also a misleading term. There is no agreement on the definition of terrorism. One man’s terrorism is another man’s heroism, depending on which side you are on. We should try them for mass murder. Mass murder is a crime under any jurisdiction. As citizens, we must be careful about our words. We should not allow our politicians to define things and events in ways that are not true. If we had done that after 9/11, we would not have let our country go to war against Iraq for crimes committed against humanity with which Iraq had nothing to do.