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Survivors of chemical attack bear the scars and the memories
Star Tribune ^ | March 2, 2003 | Paul McEnroe pmcenroe@startribune.com

Posted on 03/02/2003 1:55:06 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife

Edited on 04/13/2004 3:38:33 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]

It was time again, and Payman Azziz looked inside herself to find the courage. The frail girl of 14 slipped the red gown off her right shoulder, stretched out on the floor and stared at the ceiling to gather the strength for what she was about to endure.


(Excerpt) Read more at startribune.com ...


TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Culture/Society; Foreign Affairs; Front Page News; Government; News/Current Events; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: iraq; liberation; murder; saddamhussein; terrorism; warlist

1 posted on 03/02/2003 1:55:06 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
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Habasa Grailb was blinded in her right eye by the attack (Photo caption)
2 posted on 03/02/2003 1:56:45 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
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To: Pan_Yans Wife
for later reading
3 posted on 03/02/2003 1:57:00 AM PST by Pan_Yans Wife (Lurking since 2000.)
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To: All
The little shop of NBC Horrors-- Yellow Rain-

The Poor-Boy Nuke-- Bioterrorism***

Nuclear, Biological, & Chemical Warfare- Survival Skills, Pt. II

-Terror Tips--

4 posted on 03/02/2003 2:10:31 AM PST by backhoe (Has that Clinton "legacy" made you feel safer- yet?)
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To: backhoe
Hesperophobia On blaming the Jews - John Derbyshire - Sept. 12, 2001 [Full Text] Back in 1982 there were some horrible massacres at two Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. Christian Lebanese Arabs actually did the killing; but the Israeli army was in the neighborhood, and was responsible, at some theoretical level, for keeping the peace in the zone that included the camps. Because of this, the Israelis took much of the brunt of the world's outrage at the killings. Commenting on these events, the Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, remarked in disgust: "Goyim kill goyim, and they blame the Jews!"

I've been getting the same feeling from some of my e-mail. The fundamental reason America is under attack by Arab terrorists, several dozen people want me to know, is that the U.S. supports Israel. And the only reason we do that, several of them have said, or hinted, is because of the political power of the Jewish lobby here in the U.S.A. A few of my correspondents have expressed themselves more ... bluntly than that. Put it this way: While I have not yet encountered the word "bloodsuckers" (perhaps my readership isn't "diverse" enough), some of this stuff comes pretty close - though I should say in fairness, most is argued on cold national-interest grounds. At any rate, a lot of people feel that the mass killing of Americans by Arab terrorists is all the fault of Israel and those American politicians who, for low and disreputable motives, or from sheer blindness to America's true ideals and interests, support her. Goyim kill goyim, and they blame the Jews.

Setting aside the statistical certainty that some of the dead Americans are Jewish (as, in high statistical probability, some were of Arab origins), and at the risk of yet more ill-tempered or abusive e-mails, I am going to declare that I don't think these recent outrages can be blamed on the Jews, nor even on pro-Israel American politicians. The root phenomenon is not American involvement in Middle Eastern affairs: The root phenomenon is hesperophobia.

This word was coined by the political scientist Robert Conquest. Its roots are the Greek words hesperos, which means "the west" and phobos, which means "fear," but which when used as an English suffix can also carry the meaning "hate." Hesperophobia is fear or hatred of the West. [While I'm in the classical stuff, by the way, I committed a breach of good manners in my last posting by inserting a Latin tag without translation. I am sorry. Oderint dum metuant means "Let them hate us, so long as they fear us." Seneca rebuked Cicero for saying it, though it seems to have been current among educated late-republican Romans.]

Here is the news: A lot of people out there hate us. The name "Durban" mean anything? In China, in India, in Pakistan, in Indonesia and Malaysia, in Africa, and in the Arab countries, European civilization - the West - is widely hated. Matter of fact, quite a lot of Europeans and Americans hate it, too, as you will know if you spend much time on college campuses.

I can't see any strong reason for believing that if the state of Israel were to disappear from the face of the earth tomorrow, hesperophobia would disappear with it. Not even just Arab hesperophobia would decline. A common word for Europeans in the Arabic language is feringji, from "Frank," i.e. crusader. Arabs don't hate us because we support Israel. They hate us because we humiliated them, showed up the gross inferiority of their culture. To them, and similarly humiliated peoples, we are the other, detested and feared in a way we can barely understand. Things got really bad in the 19th century. When European society achieved industrial lift-off, Europeans were suddenly buzzing all over the world like a swarm of bees. They encountered these other cultures, that had been vegetating in a quiet conviction of their own superiority for centuries (or in the case of the Chinese, millennia). When these encounters occurred, the encountered culture collapsed in a cloud of dust. Some of them, like the Turks, managed to reconstitute themselves as more or less modern nations; others, like the Arabs and the Chinese, are still struggling with the trauma of that encounter. Neither the Arabs nor the Chinese, for example, have yet been able to attain rational, constitutional government. For a devastating look at the paleolithic condition of politics and society in the Arab world, I strongly recommend my colleague David Pryce-Jones's book, The Closed Circle.

The 1991 Gulf War showed how little has changed since those first encounters. Here were the armies of the West: swift, deadly, efficient, equipped and organized, under the command of elected civilians at the head of a robust and elaborate constitutional structure. And here were the Arabs: a shambling, ill-nourished, shoeless rabble, led by a mad gangster-despot. (That was their Arabs. There were also, of course, our Arabs - the Kuwaitis and Saudis, cowering in their plush-lined air-conditioned bunkers being waited on by their Filipino servants while we did their fighting for them.) Final body counts: the West, 134 dead, the Arabs, 20,000 or more. The superiority of one culture over another has not been so starkly demonstrated since a handful of British wooden ships, at the end of ten-thousand-mile lines of communications, brought the Celestial Empire to its knees 150 years earlier. The Chinese are still mad about that: They are still making angry, bitter movies about the Opium Wars. A hundred and 50 years from now, the Arabs will not have forgotten the Gulf War.

If you haven't spent some time in its company, the depth, and bitterness of hesperophobia in these cultures is hard to imagine. As Thomas Friedman points out in today's New York Times, Palestinian suicide bombers do not target yeshivas, synagogues, or religious settlements. They go for shopping malls or Sbarro's outlets. Sure, they hate the Jews, but they hate the West as much, or more.

Israel is not a cause of any of this, except to the degree that Israeli culture is essentially Western. If the present state of Israel were inhabited by Christian Lithuanians or Frenchmen, the hatred would be nearly as intense. Nearly, not completely: Hatred of the Jews has been built into Arab-Moslem culture since the time of Mohammed. There is a tale you will hear from Arab apologists that the Jews were contented and well treated in the old Arab-Moslem empires. This is nonsense: More often than not, they were treated like swine. For a true account, read Joan Peters's From Time Immemorial, or Gil Carl Alroy Behind the Middle East Crisis. From the Arab point of view, Israel, or any Western state on "Arab land," is an outrage, an illegitimate creation, a crusader state. The fact that the Jews had a wealthy and powerful nation on that land three thousand years ago counts for nothing. Israel is, from the point of view of most Arabs, an alien graft that must not be allowed to "take." It is a reminder of what can barely be thought of without acute psychic pain: the squalid, hopeless, irredeemable inferiority of one's own culture by comparison with another.

So, so, so, is this any of America's business? What are we doing, meddling in the Middle East? Where is our interest? Well, U.S. politicians must speak for themselves, but if I had any position of authority in any Western nation, I would be urging full support for Israel, and I am not Jewish. (Following my Passover column, in fact, a lot of NRO readers, along with at least one ex-editor of The New Republic, believe I am an anti-Semite.) It's a matter of cultural solidarity. We of the West must hang together, or else we shall hang separately. American isolationists simply do not understand how much we are hated in other places.

What, after all, does the Buchananite program offer us, if carried through? We have no troops in Israel to be withdrawn. If we withdraw our aid, the Israelis will be less able to defend themselves against the Arabs. Should we just let the free market take over, U.S. arms manufacturers selling weapons to them cash on the nail? Apparently not: Several of my correspondents have explained to me that what so enrages the Arabs is the sight of their people being killed "by American weapons." Oh. No weapons, then (and presumably we should try to repatriate the ones they already have - lots of luck with that, guys). But if we don't arm the Israelis, who will? While other hesperophobic countries - China, for example - are gleefully arming the Arabs and other Israel-haters like Iran, and pocketing the profits?

And the end of it all will be ... what? Inevitably, without our support, it will be the destruction of Israel. They are so few, and the Arabs so many. The Arabs will overwhelm that tiny state, and there will be such an orgy of massacre as has not been seen since the Rape of Nanking. And we shall be doing ... what? Watching it on our TVs, with a six-pack and a bucket of Nacho chips in hand? That's the Buchananite vision? If so, it is a vision of cowards and fools, and I want no part of it.

Israel's culture is ours. She is part of the West. If she goes down, we have suffered a defeat, and the howling, jeering forces of barbarism have won a victory. You don't have to be Zionist, nor even Jewish, to support Israel. You don't have to be in the pocket of the Israeli congressional lobbies, or a suck-up to "powerful pro-Zionist interests." You don't have to pretend not to notice the occasional follies and cruelties of Israeli policy. You don't have to forget about the U.S.S. Liberty or Jonathan Pollard. You just have to think straight. You just have to understand that the war between civilization and barbarism is being fought today just as it was fought at Chalons and Tours, at the gates of Kiev and Vienna, by the hoplites at Marathon and the legions on the Rhine. It is, as you have heard a thousand times, this past few days, a war; and the thing about war is, you have to take sides, and close your eyes to your allies' imperfections for the duration. There isn't any choice. What happened this week was not, or not only, an act of anti-Americanism, anti-Israelism, or anti-Semitism. It was in part all those things: but more than anything else, it was an act of hesperophobia. [End]

5 posted on 03/02/2003 2:36:36 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
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To: Cincinatus' Wife
"We demand for America to finally help us."

She's right, we have a moral obligation to the Kurds, after backing Saddam Hussein.

6 posted on 03/02/2003 2:38:47 AM PST by xm177e2 (smile) :-)
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To: Cincinatus' Wife
Arabs don't hate us because we support Israel. They hate us because we humiliated them...

Exactly.

If Israel had never existed, the problem would still remain.

We are locked in a death-struggle with militant Islam, and no amount of happy-talk, negotiating, or UN resolutions alters that simple ( but unvoiced ) fact.

7 posted on 03/02/2003 2:42:12 AM PST by backhoe (Has that Clinton "legacy" made you feel safer- yet?)
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To: Cincinatus' Wife
Too bad the "human shields" didn't get to visit this area!


MARK A SITY
http://www.logic101.net/
8 posted on 03/02/2003 2:47:34 AM PST by logic101.net (OO)
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To: xm177e2; backhoe; logic101.net
Bumps!
9 posted on 03/02/2003 3:27:48 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
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To: *war_list
http://www.freerepublic.com/perl/bump-list
10 posted on 03/02/2003 7:38:00 AM PST by Free the USA (Stooge for the Rich)
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To: Cincinatus' Wife
It's for these people that we must fight.

Thanks for the postings, both give much to think about.

11 posted on 03/02/2003 7:52:34 AM PST by happygrl
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To: happygrl
bump
12 posted on 03/02/2003 7:58:38 AM PST by sandlady
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To: Cincinatus' Wife
Heartbreaking. Is this what is condoned by the anti-war protesters? They should be forced to read these stories, but then I wonder if even then, they wouldn't agree with Sonja, who blames, understandably, the western nations for selling Saddam the weapons.
13 posted on 03/02/2003 8:38:04 AM PST by sweetliberty ("To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.")
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To: sweetliberty
The "peace protesters" don't care about that. They only care about Bush bashing. They have no solutions, only hatred for the right. If Dems were in office now, there would be no protest. We would be reading the Koran.
14 posted on 03/02/2003 10:22:22 AM PST by 2rightsleftcoast
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To: Cincinatus' Wife
Somewhere this weekend (I think from a British publication) I saw the Halabja massacre blamed on Iran, rather than Iraq/Saddam. It seems the villagers themselves blame Saddam. But note the young doctor who survived was up in the mountains with Iranian soldiers, and they told him what was going on. So, could Saddam escape the blame for this?

Also, what about those (like the woman quoted in the story) who say that America sold Saddam those weapons? I had read somewhere else (sorry for no links) that when we took his side agains Iran, we gave only intelligence-gathering stuff, the weapons are Russian and French, not American.

I bring these points up because they will surely be brought up by 'the other side,' and I want to get the answers ready for them!
15 posted on 03/02/2003 12:46:09 PM PST by Jerez2
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To: Jerez2
I did a search on the weapons before I posted the article and I ran across much about France and Russia sending weapons to Saddam. Sure we were using Saddam to fight our enemies in Iran, that was the right thing to do then and now is the right time to take him out. Saddam finances terrorism and he ordered these atrocities against Iraqis. He would have found some way to satisfy his blood lust.
16 posted on 03/03/2003 2:20:11 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
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