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New Nobel laureate Doris Lessing speaks a little-said truth. Terrorism is a fact in the world. 9/11 was spectacular, but it was not unique:
September 11 was terrible, but if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible,” she told Spanish newspaper El Pais."Some Americans will think I'm crazy. Many people died, two prominent buildings fell, but it was neither as terrible nor as extraordinary as they think. They're a very naive people, or they pretend to be," she said of the Americans."Do you know what people forget? That the IRA attacked with bombs against our Government.”Nearly 3,000 people were killed in the Sept 11 attacks of 2001. More than 3,500 died and thousands more were injured in more than 30 years of violence in Northern Ireland.Indeed. She could have added that for the money we've spent on Iraq we could have save 3,000 lives many times over, even in the US. Or that the real threat to our lives is nuclear terrorism, which we've done little to prevent. This kind of argument pops up periodically on blogs, and then is ignored because it's impossible to talk about without being made to seem, at best, callous, and at worst, sympathetic to evil. --Sam Boyd
