So the question I ask is “when is a human NOT a human”?
Consider the “humans” who bomb busses carrying children and women, or who hijack airplanes and fly them into buildings, all intending to kill as many innocent people as possible. These acts are not only inhumane, but they are animalistic. If we are expected to treat people as they “act” and “feel,” then why should we treat these savages as humans?
So now we hear the cries of Amnesty International claiming that the human rights of the Aa-Qaeda captured in the small African country of Malawi and turned over to America have been violated. AI (Amnesty International) (also perhaps = Artificial Intelligence) is also concerned about the antipathy they see of Americans towards muslims – or more specifically of the growing American view as to what is acceptable in our various responses to muslims and the savage acts they advocate. Of course, we dismiss the human rights we would ordinarily confer to members of the human race when thinking of muslim terrorists. Well, perhaps Americans don’t consider muslims worthy of being considered “human.” Thoughts?
What do Terrorists and people who think they were born the "wrong gender" have in common?
They are more human then you might think. Here's an excerpt from an article I read a few months back...
Article can be found at:
http://george.loper.org/~george/trends/2003/Apr/958.html "'These are rational people[suicide bombers], not necessarily uneducated or impoverished,' says retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Todd Stewart, director of the Program for International and Homeland Security at Ohio State University in Columbus. After all, terrorist cells need reliable killers who blend in, not mentally unstable misfits who behave unpredictably.
What, then, leads a sane individual to suicide terrorism? Scott Atran, an anthropologist and psychologist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and at France's National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, believes at least part of the answer lies in the famous 'Milgram Experiment.' In 1961 and 1962, psychologist Stanley Milgram recruited ordinary adults to, supposedly, help other volunteers learn better. When the 'learner,' hidden by a screen, failed to memorize word pairs quickly enough, the 'teacher' was told to administer an electric shock, and to keep upping the voltage.
Prof. Milgram found that up to 65% of the adults complied with instructions to give potentially lethal shocks (labeled as 450 volts, but in fact 0). This, despite the victim's (actually, an actor's) screams and pleas. Ordinary people, it seems, can commit atrocities out of a sense of obligation to authority."
I tend to believe in the results of this experiment, and the author's conclusion that the terrorists are in fact, completely rational people.
It's their ideals that make them do what they do, not their lack of "humanism".