Among the limitless bad news around here lately, one of the most recent and interesting might be the White Paper that the Singapore government published and released to the public on Thursday, on the state of terrorism in the S.E. Asian region and its links to Afghanistan. Had this been published before October 12 last year, it would probably have been met with pooh-poohs, indignance, and denial from the media of neighboring countries (who do so love to look in and criticize events of cultural or religious import in Chinese-majority Singapore). But as far as I can tell, no such attack on the White Paper is being made now. That Jemaah Islamiyah is a militant group with members in Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia and very probably elsewhere is a fact that no one with a brain can deny now. (And once upon a time, it was denied, and by the country that most probably has the most members on its soil. I'll always remain bitter on this point.)

The White Paper investigation turned up this letter, just one of the most angering and disappointing things I've ever read in my life. Yes, it keeps being reported here that members of the local JI group were of average or above average intelligence, with well-paying jobs. But I find it hard to believe that a person of "intelligence" and who possessed any wisdom could be so brainwashed by a strain of religion that he persisted in blindly and brainlessly submitting to a questionable hierarchy of questionable people claiming to be carrying out "God's will." I hate brainless submission, and I will never be able to see how a person who does this can be considered intelligent. They are not thinking. They are too happy to let someone else think for them. And they care not to question whether what they're doing is really God's will, or more obviously just the will of the human higher-up they're blindly submitting to.

And after writing the above rant, I just realized I now know how to revise and finish my "Grandfather's War" story. That's one good thing.

The other thing is, it's somewhat ironic that non-militant Muslim scholars assert that Islam is a religion of peace because even the word means "to submit." That argument truly means NOTHING because all I'm seeing is that terrorists are submitting—happily deferring to the madmen commanding them, who in turn like to argue that they too are submitting to the will of God.