if terrorism is your answer, you have no rational basis to complain about being repressed.

You can say it's a reaction, but one you lose the moral high ground, you're dirt.

Yes, I think the whole issue is that it's a reaction. And the terrorists are being irrational and immoral. The question is, what awesome and terrible forces are acting on these human beings that can turn them immoral enough to kill 2,800 of some other country's citizens, or irrational enough to give their lives doing so?

Have you seen news footage of Garvaghy Road in Belfast? It's an utterly ordinary-looking street of houses on a utterly ordinary-looking housing estate that could be anywhere in Britain. But when the Orange Order is marching down it, both verges are lined with Army landrovers nose-to-tail, filled with armed soldiers, and people on opposite sides of the landrovers are throwing pipebombs at each other. You don't need to have a high opinion of the morals or rationality of the pipebomb-throwers to realise that the big picture is that something has gone terribly, terribly wrong with this ordinary street of houses on an ordinary housing estate, and that even if you could arrest the entire community it wouldn't help.

Peter