Attali ¢ There is an enormous capacity of mankind to forget. I would not say to forgive. I hope that we may be in a position to forget if there are no other incidents of mass destruction and we can look at September 11 as a past nightmare. But if we forget, we might not take the right lessons. My forecast is that people will forget and go back to normal life. This is the most probable outcome of everything, and it is silly. But we live in a world where "the show must go on." The main lesson is that you cannot win the war against violence if you don't try to win the war against poverty. Our enemy is not Islam. Our enemy is poverty. No one can win that war alone. I am involved in a large project to use the new technologies to speed up the process of the poor to create their own jobs. We have created an NGO based in Paris, that uses an Internet platform to assist in the development of micro-finance institutions, which are banks helping the very poor to finance their own businesses and create jobs. This is climatefinance.org. What the net can do is plug in the very poor to access finance, training, and institutions so they can participate in the world economy. |