Just a former schoolmarm and unrepentant maverick. Though I'm 77, I'm too bolshie to metamorphose into a sweet little old lady.
Thursday, 11 December 2008
Who Will You Weep For?
Am glad I'm not back in Leicester when the Mumbai "massacre" occurred. The agony and the handwringing and may I say the whingeing(?) that you get on the electronic and print media at another 'terrorist' attack on innocents leave me to say, "Oh no, not again". I'm not thinking of the incident but of the way the media circus replays the same self-righteous and hypocritical diatribe against terrorists aka jihadists aka muslims aka Islam.
What follows next is the same scenario. Muslims and Muslim organisations in USA, Europe and in other Western countries have to repeat the same mantra of condemnation and extension of sympathies, in other words apologising for the actions taken by 'jihadists' who number about 50,000 and make up less than one-thousandth of 1% of 1.4 billion Muslims in the world! In fact , it is reckoned that there are as many as 3 times more gang members in Los Angeles alone than there are jihadists and the Muslim population is 350 times larger than that of Los Angeles.
For my fellow Muslims who are facing the indignant wrath of the civilized West, let me quote this by William Blum, a very respectable freelance journalist and writer of numerous books , in the same league as John Pilger and Robert Fisk and Noam Chomsky.
The next time you encounter a defender of American foreign policy, someone insisting that Mumbai justifies Washington's rhetorical and military attacks against Islam, you might want to point out that the United States does the same thing on a regular basis. For seven years in Afghanistan, almost six in Iraq, to give only the two most obvious examples ...breaking down doors and machine-gunning strangers, infidels, traumatizing children for life, firing missiles into occupied houses, exploding bombs all over the place, pausing to torture ... every few days dropping bombs in Pakistan or Afghanistan, and still Iraq, claiming they've killed members of al-Qaeda, just as bad as Zionists, bombing wedding parties, one after another, 20 or 30 or 70 killed, all terrorists of course, often including top al-Qaeda leaders, the number one or number two man, so we're told; so not completely mindless, not totally random; the survivors say it was a wedding party, their brother or their nephew or their friend, mostly women and children dead; ....... Does any of that depress you like Mumbai? Sometimes they bomb Syria instead, or kill people in Iran or Somalia, all bad guys.
So at Mumbai, at least 172 were killed and about 300 were wounded on November 26 2008. What about these numbers?
Muslims are by far the most numerous victims. Since 1991 the total civilian death in Iraq from the Anglo-American invasion numbers 3 million . Post 2003 at least another million paid the price with their lives. The sanctions against Iraq in 1990 killed half a million infants.
In Afghanistan, the Americans make use of a thermobaric bomb designed to suck the air out of human beings (Pilger). The dead remain as just statistics.
Terrorists/jihadists/insurgents have killed about 5,000 western civilians over the last 20 years, mostly on 9/11.
So, who are the rogue states, the evil-doers, the bad guys?
Who shall you weep for?
exactly, ms hamid!
ReplyDeleteand let me reproduce here another good write-up regarding this by dr paul craig robert, former treasury secretary in the reagan administration, a strident critic of american foreign policy:
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December 5, 2008
Washington Arrogance Has Fomented a Muslim Revolution
by Paul Craig Roberts
"In a government of law, the existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy."
Justice Louis Brandeis
Is Pakistan responsible for the Mumbai attack in India? No.
Is India’s repression of its Muslim minority responsible? No.
Is the United States government responsible? Yes.
The attack on Mumbai required radicalized Muslims. Radicalized Muslims resulted from the US overthrowing the elected government in Iran and imposing the Shah; from the US stationing troops in Saudi Arabia; from the US invading and attempting to occupy Afghanistan and Iraq, bombing weddings, funerals, and children’s soccer games; from the US violating international and US law by torturing its Muslim victims; from the US enlisting Pakistan in its war against the Taliban; from the US violating Pakistan’s sovereignty by conducting military operations on Pakistani territory, killing Pakistani civilians; from the US government supporting a half century of Israeli ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their lands, towns and villages; from the assault of American culture on Muslim values; from the US purchasing the government of Egypt to act as its puppet; from US arrogance that America is the supreme arbiter of morality.
As Justice Brandeis said, crime is contagious. Government teaches by example, and America’s example is lawlessness. America’s brutal crimes against the Muslim world have invited every Muslim to become a law unto himself – a revolutionary. It is not terror that Washington confronts but revolution.
By illegal, uncivilized and undiplomatic behavior, the US has stirred Muslim peoples from their long slumber as serfs of Western colonial powers. Some Muslims have had all that they can take, and their fury drives them to rouse a billion of their fellows to throw off the yoke of foreign hegemony.
The arrogant incompetence of American governments brought this conflict to the American people and inflicted it upon the world. By destabilizing Pakistan, the US lost a puppet and created an opportunity for Muslim revolutionaries to exploit. By enraging India against Pakistan, the Mumbai attack has created new problems for Pakistan that will focus that government’s attention away from combating Taliban sanctuaries on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan. If the US picks up the slack, it will have invaded yet another country and become trapped in a larger quagmire.
Having fomented terrorism, the American government now pretends to be the innocent victim, just as Israelis, having brought about terrorism by driving Palestinians from their homes and villages, pretend to be innocent victims.
Today European members of NATO, an outdated organization formed to defend Western Europe against Soviet invasion, are sacrificing the lives of their soldiers fighting the American Empire’s war in Afghanistan. If America continues to have its way, Europeans will soon be dying in Ukraine, Georgia, and Iran.
The American government, which preaches "freedom and democracy" has in the 21st century gone to great extremes to stamp out the US Constitution and the civil liberties that it guarantees. The US government has repudiated the Geneva Conventions and the prohibitions in US statutory law against torture. The US government has set aside habeas corpus, the ancient legal principle guaranteed by the US Constitution that prohibits governments from holding people in prisons without presenting charges. The US government has broken the laws of other nations by kidnapping foreign citizens and transporting them to other lands to be tortured.
These massive crimes have been justified in the name of the "war on terror." In truth, America’s crimes foment revolution.
It was the US government that created the "war on terror," which has been used to murder and dispossess millions of Iraqis and Afghans, to imprison US citizens as if they were medieval serfs, and to squander three trillion dollars for the sole purpose of enriching Halliburton and the military-security complex.
Investigative journalist John Pilger has shown that the so-called "moral superiority of the West" is a hoax designed to shield from view the self-seeking West’s crimes against humanity.
Obama promised change from this destructive behavior, but how does change arise when the most arrogant woman on earth is appointed Secretary of State and the rest of the new government is staffed with tried-and-true Likudniks and servants of the military-security complex?
The change over which Obama will preside will have no American victories. The change will come from America as a failed state, from the dollar dethroned as reserve currency, from America repudiated by its allies and paid puppets, from massive unemployment for which there is no solution, from hyperinflation that produces anarchy.
The day might arrive when Washington is faced with revolution at home as well as abroad.
http://antiwar.com/roberts/?articleid=13855
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Thank you Mekyam. That was a very punchy article. I have read some of Craig Roberts's writings. He's a brave and honest American. Wish we could find a couple of brave and honest Malays!!!
ReplyDeleteThere is however one point I would pick on. The American Government or rather the vested lobbies and corporate interests behind the Govt is not incompetent. They know what they are doing.