Justice Done? The Dominion Post headline was right on! One little Maori word, two syllables – 'Utu”. This is what Bush's ‘War on Terror' boils down to. Reports on US reaction to the assassination of Osama bin Laden, from the President down, make plain their weakness for bogeyman politics and the childish, self-centred, moral simplicity of their world view.
The embodiment of evil? With his flowing robe, his beard, his sad, soft-eyed Mid Eastern features, bin Laden rather resembles my Sunday School Jesus, only with an AK47 in place of the shepherd's crook.
Justice done? The world is a safer place now the Hollywood-Western sheriff has taken out the bad guy.
Just whose hands are the most drenched with the blood of innocents?
Al Qaeda's few thousand victims have been already avenged, eye-for-eye, blood-for-blood, many scores of times over, by the deaths of many more thousands of innocents killed as a direct or indirect result of US military interference in Iraq and Afghanistan.
What justice for them? Just which fundamentalism is the more violent?
Fires of 'utu” burn with a constant flame. Messrs Bush, Blair, Cheney, Rumsfield, Rice – watch your backs!
Colin Marshall, Te Puke.