Osama and Bush equally wrong

A recent article in The Jakarta Post about fears that extremist Israeli settlers will try to assassinate Ariel Sharon caught my eye. Alongside it was an article acknowledging deaths of 17 Afghan civilians, including an undisclosed number of children, after a U.S. military raid.

The problem is extremism and fundamentalism. These are the two biggest perpetrators worldwide, the ones seemingly certain they and no one else are right, are Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush. And it is contagious. The Israeli extremists consider their settlements their "biblical birthright".

None of them is right, if you think it through. And meanwhile innocents continue to die as if it were just one of those things... not really real but what happens "out there", say, to prove a point.

The conventional methods of resolving disputes -- violence and shows of force -- just don't produce positive outcomes anymore. This is partly because a growing number of people are seeing beyond the insanity, and partly because the majority who don't yet see have the means now to strike back even more violently. The spin-meisters produce blather to make people think all is well no matter what.

Everyone is right. No one is right. The world explodes or dies in its own pollution. People do always have the opportunity to open their hearts to our common humanity. Politics, especially in the U.S. but really everywhere, is completely out of control, manipulated by greed, selfishness, arrogance. Money talks.

I think it is time for people to look each other in the eye, honestly and not cursorily -- deeply, truly -- to allow us to see we are all the same and have the same rights and hopes. The kind of "freedom" George Bush endorses is, as he says himself as he prepares for the G-8 Meeting, the one that is good for the American economy.

That is no freedom, it is the very trap that keeps the world afire.

RICK ADAMS, Ubud, Bali