Earth's dispossessed are vulnerable targets for extremists: those who teach that global justice is meaningless; that satisfaction can come only in violence, division, and intellectual isolation.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Citizens victimized by genocide or abandoned by the international community do not make good neighbors, as their thirst for vengeance, their irredentism and their acceptance of violence as a means of generating change can turn them into future threats.
Extremism can flourish only in an environment where basic governmental social responsibility for the welfare of the people is neglected. Political dictatorship and social hopelessness create the desperation that fuels religious extremism.
Whoever is content with the world, and who profits from its lack of justice, does not want to change it.
Extremist perspectives win sympathy and recruits because they offer narratives that claim to identify deep injustices and enemies.
It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
I find the earth to be a place of misery in which I am surrounded by the conformity that kills society.
The core political values of our free society are so deeply embedded in our collective consciousness that only a few malcontents, lunatics generally, ever dare to threaten them.
Globalisation has made us more vulnerable. It creates a world without borders, and makes us painfully aware of the limitations of our present instruments, and of politics, to meet its challenges.
For while the threat of nuclear holocaust has been significantly reduced, the world remains a very unsettled and dangerous place.
What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world.