Benjamin Barber, author of Jihad vs McWorld, spoke to a packed Hamilton chapel Thursday evening. His lecture, titled "Globalization a year after 9/11: Terrorism or Democracy?," addressed America's response to terrorism after the attacks of September 11 and suggested alternative means to combat the threat of terrorism in the future. Barber hit a variety of topics, including religious fundamentalism, sovereignty and capitalism.
Barber commented, "We don't have to cause the world's evils to have the power to remedy them," and suggested that the U.S. spend more time and resources setting up unbiased educational systems in the nations that have traditionally raised terrorists than forever killing a generation of ready suicide bombers.
He continued, "The al-Qaida terrorist network has a better grasp of how the world is organized than the Bush Administration." Barber lamented, "Terrorism is using brilliantly the interdependence of the new world," and warned that the U.S. needs to step into the new age it has been so essential in creating and begin to think of terrorism less in a national arena than in a world-wide context.
