Somebody sent this to me and it will piss off most of us.
By JOHN PILGER
The (Glasgow)Herald, 13/09/01
IF the attacks on America have their source in the Islamic world, who can
really be surprised?
Two days earlier, eight people were killed in southern Iraq when British
and American planes bombed civilian areas. To my knowledge, not a word
appeared in the mainstream media in Britain.
An estimated 200,000 Iraqis, according to the Health Education Trust in
London, died during and in the immediate aftermath of the slaughter known
as the Gulf War.
This was never news that touched public consciousness in the west.
At least a million civilians, half of them children, have since died in
Iraq as a result of a medieval embargo imposed by the United States and
Britain. In Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Mujadeen, which gave birth to
the fanatical Taliban, was largely the creation of the CIA.
The terrorist training camps where Osama bin Laden, now
America's most
wanted man
, allegedly planned his attacks, were built with American money
and backing. In Palestine, the enduring illegal occupation by Israel would
have collapsed long ago were it not for US backing.
Far from being the terrorists of the world, the Islamic peoples have been
its victims - principally the victims of US fundamentalism, whose power,
in all its forms, military, strategic and economic, is the greatest source
of terrorism on earth.
This fact is censored from the Western media, whose
coverage
at best
minimises the culpability of imperial powers. Richard Falk, professor of
international relations at Princeton, put it this way:
Western foreign
policy is presented almost exclusively through a self-righteous, one-way
legal/moral screen (with) positive images of Western values and innocence
portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted political
violence.
That Tony Blair, whose government sells lethal weapons to Israel and has
sprayed Iraq and Yugoslavia with cluster bombs and depleted uranium and
was the greatest arms supplier to the genocidists in Indonesia, can be
taken seriously when he now speaks about the
shame
of the
new evil of
mass terrorism
says much about the censorship of our collective sense of
how the world is managed.
One of Blair's favourite words -
fatuous
- comes to mind. Alas, it is no
comfort to the families of thousands of ordinary Americans who have died
so terribly that the perpetrators of their suffering may be the product of
Western policies. Did the American establishment believe that it could
bankroll and manipulate events in the Middle East without cost to itself,
or rather its own innocent people?
The attacks on Tuesday come at the end of a long history of betrayal of
the Islamic and Arab peoples: the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the
foundation of the state of Israel, four Arab-Israeli wars and 34 years of
Israel's brutal occupation of an Arab nation: all, it seems, obliterated
within hours by Tuesday's acts of awesome cruelty by those who say they
represent the victims of the West's intervention in their homelands.
America, which has never known modern war, now has her own terrible
league table: perhaps as many as 20,000 victims.
As Robert Fisk points out, in the Middle East, people will grieve the loss
of innocent life, but they will ask if the newspapers and television
networks of the west ever devoted a fraction of the present coverage to
the half-a-million dead children of Iraq, and the 17,500 civilians killed
in Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon. The answer is no. There are deeper
roots to the atrocities in the US, which made them almost inevitable.
It is not only the rage and grievance in the Middle East and south Asia.
Since the end of the cold war, the US and its sidekicks, principally
Britain, have exercised, flaunted, and abused their wealth and power while
the divisions imposed on human beings by them and their agents have grown
as never before.
An elite group of less than a billion people now take more than 80 per
cent of the world's wealth.
In defence of this power and privilege, known by the euphemisms
free
market
and
free trade
, the injustices are legion: from the illegal
blockade of Cuba, to the murderous arms trade, dominated by the US, to its
trashing of basic environmental decencies, to the assault on fragile
economies by institutions such as the World Trade Organisation that are
little more than agents of the US Treasury and the European central banks,
and the demands of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in
forcing the poorest nations to repay unrepayable debts; to a new US
Vietnam
in Colombia and the sabotage of peace talks between North and
South Korea (in order to shore up North Korea's
rogue nation
status).
Western terror is part of the recent history of imperialism, a word that
journalists dare not speak or write.
The expulsion of the population of Diego Darcia in the 1960s by the Wilson
government received almost no press coverage. Their homeland is now an
American nuclear arms dump and base from which US bombers patrol the
Middle East.
In Indonesia, in 1965/6, a million people were killed with the complicity
of the US and British governments: the Americans supplying General Suharto
with assassination lists, then ticking off names as people were killed.
Getting British companies and the World Bank back in there was part of
the deal
, says Roland Challis, who was the BBC's south east Asia
correspondent.
British behaviour in Malaya was no different from the American record in
Vietnam, for which it proved inspirational: the withholding of food,
villages turned into concentration camps and more than half a million
people forcibly dispossessed.
In Vietnam, the dispossession, maiming and poisoning of an entire nation
was apocalyptic, yet diminished in our memory by Hollywood movies and by
what Edward Said rightly calls cultural imperialism.
In Operation Phoenix, in Vietnam, the CIA arranged the homicide of around
50,000 people. As official documents now reveal, this was the model for
the terror in Chile that climaxed with the murder of the democratically
elected leader Salvador Allende, and within 10 years, the crushing of
Nicaragua.
All of it was lawless. The list is too long for this piece.
Now imperialism is being rehabilitated. American forces currently operate
with impunity from bases in 50 countries.
Full spectrum dominance
is Washington's clearly stated aim.
Read the documents of the US Space Command, which leaves us in no doubt.
In this country, the eager Blair government has embarked on four violent
adventures, in pursuit of
British interests
(dressed up as
peacekeeping
), and which have little or no basis in international law: a
record matched by no other British government for half a century.
What has this to do with this week's atrocities in America? If you travel
among the impoverished majority of humanity, you understand that it has
everything to do with it.
People are neither still, nor stupid. They see their independence
compromised, their resources and land and the lives of their children
taken away, and their accusing fingers increasingly point north: to the
great enclaves of plunder and privilege. Inevitably, terror breeds terror
and more fanaticism.
But how patient the oppressed have been.
It is only a few years ago that the Islamic fundamentalist groups, willing
to blow themselves up in Israel and New York, were formed, and only after
Israel and the US had rejected outright the hope of a Palestinian state,
and justice for a people scarred by imperialism.
Their distant voices of rage are now heard; the daily horrors in faraway
brutalised places have at last come home.
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Oh Dear.
Don't shoot the messanger!