Dear Sir,

This is a response to Joe Wakefield’s letter dated November 21, 2015.

Joe, I don’t disagree with much of your observations; it’s just that your arguments were based on what you misunderstood of my comments.

Maybe I didn’t say it clear enough. Yes, we in the West did suffer and we fought on our own soil for the liberties you described.

The difference being, in many cases such as in the United States, the constitution had already guaranteed certain rights and liberties.

Our liberties were denied and the true battles were to cause the country to live up to its meaning.

However, in the Middle East, the repressed were under no such constitutional constructs and had leaders put in place over them as dictators to ensure they didn’t.

Joe, these leaders were put in place under the support and control by the likes of the US, Britain and France with military might and intelligence to assure their effectiveness.

Their battle today is to find that level of constitutionality through self-determination, and they have to find the proper ethical positions to bring that about. It’s going take a while. On your point about lack of intellectual accomplishment, ethics plays a huge role in the intellectual development of a people.

Greed, power and control has affected the Muslim population, from within and also from outside forces. The issue of whether a society’s educational model entertains observation, or whether it follows prescribed belief and rebuts objective inquiry, determines whether it produces thinkers, scientists, mathematicians, etc.

In that regard, the US and Britain played a heavy role in supporting factions with ideology who do not follow principles of observation, which means the educational processes in those countries could not produce thinkers because thought and objective inquiry were more or less repressed.

The Americans and British operated that type of foreign policy to gain control over the Middle East, where the thinkers and reformers in those countries were routinely killed by the puppet dictators, and all the money made in the process went towards that antiquated, educational model that produced the likes of the Taliban.

So, back to my argument, ideology will be the instrument of peace in the long run. Yes, there is the need to contain aggression through military means, but the war is won with peace, not bullets and bombs.

KHALID WASI