some random person forwarded this to me, and for some reason i felt compelled to respond…

his letter:
“”on oct 27, 2004, at 8:13 pm, w________k wrote:

i don’t know who you are voting for and my intention is not toãŠinsult anyone, but i think we have to stop being afraid of offending someone and stop being politically correct at the expense of this nation, the usa.

casting a vote for john kerry is equal to saying, “”iãŠam an uninformed, naive idiot””.㊠this man has aided and abetted the enimies of the united states for years, he is against everything this nation stands for andãŠcertainly does not put america first.㊠if you don’t believe me do your own research.㊠if you want to live in john kerry’s world you dont belong in the usa.㊠move to france or some third world country.㊠our countryãŠwill be in great peril with this man in power.㊠if the mainstream media were not so blatantlyãŠliberalãŠand bias toward getting this man elected, the race would not even be close.㊠take the blindfolds off before it is too late and vote bush.ãŠãŠãŠ””

my response

to whomever you might be,
wow, are you serious?
well, first off, it’s ‘enemies’.
secondly, george bush started a war with iraq.
iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, nor did iraq have any programs for building weapons of mass destruction.
those are facts that have been corroborated by bi partisan committees.
there was no al-qaeda presence in iraq before the war.
that fact that has been corroborated by bi-partisan committees.
so what exactly has george bush done?
started a war that will end up costing $200 billion dollars and thousands of lives when his reasons for starting the war have all been shown to be erroneous?
george bush has underfunded homeland defense.
george bush has cut veterans benefits.
george bush sent our troops into battle without adequate reinforcements and adequate equipment.
so how in the world can you say that george bush has been a good commander in chief?
i’m not a democrat. i’m not a republican. in fact i’d reconsider republicanism if republicans started practicing:

1-fiscal responsibility(george bush has created the largest federal government and the largest federal deficit in the history of our country)

2-informed and effective foreign policy(you might be a xenophobe, but i believe that alienating the majority of our european allies is not a good basis for foreign policy).

3-social liberalism(i find it hard to get too concerned about banning the harry potter books from southern public school libraries when most education programs are sorely underfunded).

this election is not about republicans vs. democrats. it’s about saying no to an inept, arrogant, disastrous administration who have poorly governed our country.

i don’t know how i received your email, and i’m not sure why i’m responding to your ill-informed missive, but my hope is that people like you will take a step back and realize that your vote should not be cast based on the criteria of who you think would be more fun to have over for a barbecue.

because when judged by any objective criteria it is clear that george bush has been a terrible president and his policies have made america poorer, less-safe, and tragically divided against itself.

thanks,
moby

i just received this letter. i thought that you might want to read it, too.
thanks,
moby

dear friends and family,
as an american, a new yorker and an afghan, i have struggled with many feelings. i have wondered what i can do to educate people about the state of affairs in afghanistan now and over the past 20 years. the soviets invaded afghanistan in december of 1979, it is september 2001 and my father’s country has been destroyed day by day for over two decades.
i am disgusted by the taliban and osama bin laden. for my family, these have been household names for years prior to the tragedies we witnessed on tuesday. my father has spent years trying to get people in our government to listen – he has sat around our dinner table talking to his children for hours on end about what was happening to his homeland – so many of our friends have listened as my dad spoke passionately about the hateful crimes the taliban were committing against innocent afghans all in the name of islam, an islam that my family does not know, an islam that cannot be found in the pages of the koran.

i beg you, as friends, to take the anger we all feel and try to learn and spread knowledge. we all want retaliation. we want someone to pay for the innocent people whose lives were taken away. but, please, please, please understand that afghans like me and my family have never supported the taliban. in fact, we have watched helplessly as these cowards took the little bit of dignity the afghans had left after the soviet war.

i went to work the other night and watched groups of friends, bright and educated people, stop their conversations as i approached. i have never experienced anything like this. my dad recently grew a beard, but after seeing images of bearded fundamentalists on tv, we have asked him to shave it off to quell any possibility of attacks out of ignorance. for the first time in my life, i am afraid to tell people my ethnic background. my name is a liability. my coloring makes me feel scared when people look at me on the subway. i find myself thankful that my sisters and mom have lighter coloring.
please do not perpetuate hate. hatred brought down the world trade center. hate is hate — there is no gray area. all we have is hope, unity and the ability to open our eyes. open them.

with much love,

yasmine

this letter was forwarded to me. it’s from an afghanistani man who lives here in the u.s. in my opinion it’s worth reading.
-moby

dear friends, i am from afghanistan, and even though i’ve lived here for 35 years i’ve never lost track of what’s been going on over there. so i want to share a few thoughts with anyone who will listen.

i speak as one who hates the taliban and osama bin laden. there is no doubt in my mind that these people were responsible for the atrocity in new york. i fervently wish to see those monsters punished. but the taliban and bin laden are not afghanistan. they’re not even the government of afghanistan. the taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics who captured afghanistan in 1997 and have been holding the country in bondage ever since. bin laden is a political criminal with a master plan. when you think taliban, think nazis. when you think bin laden, think hitler. and when you think “”the people of afghanistan”” think “”the jews in the concentration camps.”” it’s not only that the afghan people had nothing to do with this atrocity. they were the first victims of the perpetrators. they would love for someone to eliminate the taliban and clear out the rats nest of international thugs holed up in their country. i guarantee it. some say, if that’s the case, why don’t the afghans rise up and overthrow the taliban themselves? the answer is, they’re starved, exhausted, damaged, and incapacitated. a few years ago, the united nations estimated that there are 500,000 disabled orphans in afghanistan-a country with no economy, no food. millions of afghans are widows of the approximately two million men killed during the war with the soviets. and the taliban has been executing these women for being women and has buried some of their opponents alive in mass graves. the soil of afghanistan is littered with land mines and almost all the farms have been destroyed . the afghan people have tried to overthrow the taliban. they haven’t been able to.

we come now to the question of bombing afghanistan back to the stone age. trouble with that scheme is, it’s already been done. the soviets took care of it . make the afghans suffer? they’re already suffering.
level their houses? done. turn their schools into piles of rubble?
done.

eradicate their hospitals? done. destroy their infrastructure? there is no infrastructure. cut them off from medicine and health care? too late. someone already did all that. new bombs would only land in the rubble of earlier bombs. would they at least get the taliban? not likely. in today’s afghanistan, only the taliban eat, only they have the means to move around. they’d slip away and hide. (they have already, i hear.) maybe the bombs would get some of those disabled orphans, they don’t move too fast, they don’t even have wheelchairs. but flying over kabul and dropping bombs wouldn’t really be a strike against the criminals who did this horrific thing. actually it would be making common cause with the taliban-by raping once again the people they’ve been raping all this time. i don’t have a solution. but i do believe that suffering and poverty are the soil in which terrorism grows. bin laden and his cohorts want to bait us into creating more such soil, so they and their kind can flourish. we can’t let him do that. that’s my humble opinion.

tamim ansary