“ In Defence of Civilised Values”?
 

1. What sort of values can be ‘threatened’ by terrorist attacks or biological weapons? You can be sure that Islamic terrorists don’t feel that their values are anything that can be ‘threatened’ by material or military forces.

 2. What sort of  ‘values’ are ‘defended’ by spending 100’s of billions of dollars on military operations to ‘defend’ the ‘civilised world’ against Islamic terrorism instead of using those dollars to fight global poverty and deprivation – not least in Palestine.

 4. What sort of ‘free speech’ is valued in countries where both politicians and the media ‘freely’ report current events and invite ‘free’ discussion of them, but consistently fail to inform the public, or even themselves, of the historic background to those events.

5. What sort of ‘democratic’ values rule in countries in which not a single company or corporation – the major form of social organization affecting people’s real lives – is run on democratic principles, and hundreds of thousands of workers can be fired at will?

6. What sort of ‘cultural values’ prevail in a country such as America in which 50% of the population have never read a book?

7. What sort of ‘human values’ prevail in states in which money is taken from the poor, sick or disabled to pay for wars and protect the rich from taxes?

8. What sort of ‘civil rights’ are valued by governments which collude with corrupt, dictatorial, genocidal and terrorist regimes all over of the world?

10. What sort of ‘Christian’ values reign in a ‘civilisation’ whose real god is Mammon: in which ultimate power rests with global corporations and ultimate  responsibility for global development is handed to the uncontrolled economic forces of the The Market.