To the students and faculty of the University of North Carolina at Wilmington:

The summary murder of thousands of people on the morning September 11^th was a tragedy for the entire human species. It was an irrational act that can only serve the cause of irrationality. As we are members of a university, all irrationality deserves from us unequivocal condemnation. This is the place where, above all else, rationality must be kept alive. We must keep discussion alive. We must untiringly examine causes and effects, and not allow any feelings of anger or depression to permanently cloud our vision. In light of this, we must not for a moment forget the following: (1) the US government has been engaged in a combination of occupation and imperialist warfare in the Middle East, aimed at domination of its oil resources, for nearly two decades; (2) the US government gives its unequivocal support to Israel’s assassination of Palestinians who are ‘suspected’ of being terrorists, falsely claiming that any opposition to murder committed in the name of the Israeli government amounts to Nazism; (3) as the World Socialist Website put it "far from America being ‘the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world,’ the US is seen by tens of millions as the main enemy of their human and democratic rights, and the main source of their oppression. The American ruling elite, in its insolence and cynicism, acts as if it can carry out its violent enterprises around the world without creating the political conditions for violent acts of retribution" and; (4) "both bin Laden and the Taliban mullahs, whom the US accuses of harboring him, were financed and armed by the Reagan-Bush administration to fight pro-Soviet regimes in Afghanistan in the 1980s. If they are involved in Tuesday’s operations, then the American CIA and political establishment are guilty of having nurtured the very forces that carried out the bloodiest attack on American civilians in US history"; (5) innocent Arab and Muslim Americans, including children, are being attacked and threatened in the chauvinist, racist fervor stirred by the war-mongering US media; (6) whatever their true feelings, the Bush administration stands, in several respects, to benefit from the results of the ‘attack on America’: (i) the current situation serves as a distraction from the fact that President Bush was illegally appointed to office by the reactionary majority of the US Supreme Court, through suppression of votes, in stark violation of the US constitution, and (ii) the current crisis serves as justification, to the American people, for the continuation and intensification of US imperialist repression already in progress throughout the world. The future is not about revenge, but about life. A humanity worth fighting for is a humanity undivided by petty nationalistic, imperialist, bourgeois squabbling. When this squabbling takes the form of all out war and the deaths of untold thousands of ‘Americans’ and ‘foreigners,’ the struggle for rationality is transformed into the struggle between life and death. The time for silence is ended; the time for rational discussion is now.

If you support open, unbiased, democratic discussion of all the facts, please forward this e-mail to friends and acquaintances both on an off campus. For more detailed information, see www.wsws.org .

Thank you for your time,

Rosa Fuller