An excellent interview; posted excerpts below. The man suffered personally at the hands of Hezbollah, but he has obvious respect for Islam and was anti war.
Terry Waite CBE served as a special envoy for the Archbishop of Canterbury for seven years, five of them chained to a wall in Beirut as a prisoner of Hezbollah. For its Cultural Breakthrough photo exhibition, he has presented Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) with an image of himself with Nelson Mandela and photographs of Mandela’s release
http://metro.co.uk/metro/interviews/interview.html?in_page_id=8&in_interview_id=590
How can Islam’s image be improved?
We’ve almost been driven mad by the demonisation of Islam because of the activities of a few people. But we’re in much more danger on one of our motorways than we ever are from terrorism. The minority do cause great problems for us all but we should n’t be intimidated by it. The vast majority of Muslims do not support the activities of the extremists. We have to build bridges. We will never defeat terrorism with warfare.
If you had 15 minutes with President Bush, what would you say to him?
Not very much, because I don’t think he’d take a blind bit of notice. The older I get the more cynical I get. The fundamental motivating factor is the economic factor. What’s good for the economy drives most things. But war consolidates the terrorist’s base of support. I’m not a pacifist but I don’t think we should let terrorism push us into actions that border on the illegal or isolate us from the United Nations. Many of the problems of the world have to be dealt with by the United Nations.
Was Iraq a just war?
It’s questionable. But I’m also talking about the tendency to undermine the rule of international law. For instance, Guantanamo Bay, where people are locked up. We don’t know who they are, we don’t know how long they are going to be there. They’re not given access to lawyers, charges are not brought. Just reverse that. If that was happening to substantial numbers of American or European citizens in China, for example, everybody would be jumping up and down.
It’s more or less what happened to you.
Exactly! There should be universal respect for the rule of law. There have been some very dangerous moves in recent months which could have very dangerous long term consequences. But, on terrorism, what you must not do is deal with symptoms, but with the root causes. There is so little public and government questioning about root causes and I’d like to see our political leaders address that.