I signed because I wished to register my support for an initiative coming, in part, from Iraqis and Muslims outraged and sickened by violence against innocent people being committed by people who call themselves followers of Islam. Because the statement many times refers to solidarity, that indispensable revolutionary idea without which liberty and equality are at least incomplete, and may not even be possible. Because like almost everyone else I'm afraid, and there is strength and comfort in numbers, in being part of something that tries to do something, even if that something is no more than to cry STOP. Because I believe that the war on terror is no "metaphor," no ploy on the part of Western plutocrats to disguise their rapacity but as real as the deaths in London, in Iraq, in Spain, all over the world. I signed because doing so is a public way to repudiate those whose response to the calamitous threat posed by Islamofascism is to turn away, to say "not in our name." I signed because the sorrowful, controlled indignation of the statement is a civilized tone. It is a tone, and a message, to which I am glad to lend my name.
Oliver Connant (USA)
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