Posted on 09/13/2001 6:33:57 AM PDT by getoffmylawn
Nearly two days after the horrific suicide attacks on civilian workers in New York and Washington, it has become painfully clear that most Americans simply don't get it. From the president to passersby on the streets, the message seems to be the same: this is an inexplicable assault on freedom and democracy, which must be answered with overwhelming force - just as soon as someone can construct a credible account of who was actually responsible.
Shock, rage and grief there has been aplenty. But any glimmer of recognition of why people might have been driven to carry out such atrocities, sacrificing their own lives in the process - or why the United States is hated with such bitterness, not only in Arab and Muslim countries, but across the developing world - seems almost entirely absent. Perhaps it is too much to hope that, as rescue workers struggle to pull firefighters from the rubble, any but a small minority might make the connection between what has been visited upon them and what their government has visited upon large parts of the world.
But make that connection they must, if such tragedies are not to be repeated, potentially with even more devastating consequences. US political leaders are doing their people no favours by reinforcing popular ignorance with self-referential rhetoric. And the echoing chorus of Tony Blair, whose determination to bind Britain ever closer to US foreign policy ratchets up the threat to our own cities, will only fuel anti-western sentiment. So will calls for the defence of "civilisation", with its overtones of Samuel Huntington's poisonous theories of post-cold war confrontation between the west and Islam, heightening perceptions of racism and hypocrisy.
As Mahatma Gandhi famously remarked when asked his opinion of western civilisation, it would be a good idea. Since George Bush's father inaugurated his new world order a decade ago, the US, supported by its British ally, bestrides the world like a colossus. Unconstrained by any superpower rival or system of global governance, the US giant has rewritten the global financial and trading system in its own interest; ripped up a string of treaties it finds inconvenient; sent troops to every corner of the globe; bombed Afghanistan, Sudan, Yugoslavia and Iraq without troubling the United Nations; maintained a string of murderous embargos against recalcitrant regimes; and recklessly thrown its weight behind Israel's 34-year illegal military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as the Palestinian intifada rages.
If, as yesterday's Wall Street Journal insisted, the east coast carnage was the fruit of the Clinton administration's Munich-like appeasement of the Palestinians, the mind boggles as to what US Republicans imagine to be a Churchillian response.
It is this record of unabashed national egotism and arrogance that drives anti-Americanism among swaths of the world's population, for whom there is little democracy in the current distribution of global wealth and power. If it turns out that Tuesday's attacks were the work of Osama bin Laden's supporters, the sense that the Americans are once again reaping a dragons' teeth harvest they themselves sowed will be overwhelming.
It was the Americans, after all, who poured resources into the 1980s war against the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul, at a time when girls could go to school and women to work. Bin Laden and his mojahedin were armed and trained by the CIA and MI6, as Afghanistan was turned into a wasteland and its communist leader Najibullah left hanging from a Kabul lamp post with his genitals stuffed in his mouth.
But by then Bin Laden had turned against his American sponsors, while US-sponsored Pakistani intelligence had spawned the grotesque Taliban now protecting him. To punish its wayward Afghan offspring, the US subsequently forced through a sanctions regime which has helped push 4m to the brink of starvation, according to the latest UN figures, while Afghan refugees fan out across the world.
All this must doubtless seem remote to Americans desperately searching the debris of what is expected to be the largest-ever massacre on US soil - as must the killings of yet more Palestinians in the West Bank yesterday, or even the 2m estimated to have died in Congo's wars since the overthrow of the US-backed Mobutu regime. "What could some political thing have to do with blowing up office buildings during working hours?" one bewildered New Yorker asked yesterday.
Already, the Bush administration is assembling an international coalition for an Israeli-style war against terrorism, as if such counter-productive acts of outrage had an existence separate from the social conditions out of which they arise. But for every "terror network" that is rooted out, another will emerge - until the injustices and inequalities that produce them are addressed.
How "compassionate" of you. How "level headed" and "reasonable."
Let's alter your convenient little simile to something more appropriate to this week.
The guy goes out and blows up the elementary school because the mayor performed a dedication on it last fall.
750 children are incinerated.
How's your "compassion" compute the "root of anger" on that one?
Just the kind of DRIVEL I expected to see from whatever you are.
Are you watching mikey ? I'd like to take you OUT. You could even call it dinner cause I could chew you plumm up.
I think they just got new names. It looks like the same writings ,of the origional 5 resident commies.
You know ,I think there are at least 5 of these freaks around here that need to be watched. I know I'd like to see a couple or three of them "jacked-up".I've seen it before and it is "great fun".Especially when it is someone in such need!!
Yes, communisim was a historical scourge of civilization of enormous proportions. It killed more people than any other regime or group of regimes in history. We necessarily made 'allies' of pagan regimes to defeat the greater evil. And it did.
Were we wise to take the side of the KLA (direct links to bin Laden) first in Kosovo, and now in Macedonia?
No, but Clinton and the UN did. In a burst of historical foolishness, we sided with Mohammedans against a Christian nation. As soon as we defeated the Christian nation, the Mohammedans immediately began killing the Christians (and continue to do so). Clinton, of course, could care less, but we should.
Were we wise to condemn Russian retaliation against the Chechen terrorists (also with direct links to bin Laden) who bombed apartment buildings in Moscow and St. Petersburg?
Once the communist regime had fallen, No. [Clinton again.] Again, we now have at least a nominally Christian country trying to end another of the endless Mohammedan uprisings and concommitant slaughters. The Russians were right and Clinton wrong.
Were we wise to aid and abet our own enemy?
Of course not, except in pursuit of the defeat of the greater evil, communism. It is easy now (and entirely fallacious) to assume that because communism fell, it was bound to. It was not. But for President Reagan and his insights (and in part the loss of the Afghan war), it might not have fallen for another 30 years. In the interim, millions and millions more would have died at its atheist altar.
We made a deal with a much smaller devil to defeat the larger one and it worked. Now, we must defeat the smaller devil of Mohammedanism.
I've had to prove to them that I don't lie. But it doesn't matter to them,because they just make up garbage as they go along.
I believe that quote comes from Americans who were in the business of exterminating Native Americans.
First, there are no 'muslim babies' only babies of 'muslim' parents. In OKC, that had nothing to do with the tragedy. But in the WTC attacks, it is everything.
Only those who are so blind that they will not see can argue that the bloodthirsty Mohammedanism of the attackers had nothing to do with the attack. Will Afghan babies die because their primitive, pagan and immensely foolish Mohammedan parents refuse to turn over the terrorists? Yes, sadly yes.
But the fact the Mohammedans can make babies cannot keep us from stamping out this evil from the face of the earth (while trying to hold the number of innocents lost to an absolute minimum).
I might have misunderstood but:That baby died because it's muslim mother was stoned,by a mob ,after the bombing.In the United States.
I think it says alot,about rushing to vengance.
I think we need time to do this quietly !
Now just watch me get flamed as the author of this thing - it'll be all your fault! ;-)
Do what 'quietly'? If we have to bomb quietly, how do we do that? If that isn't what you meant, were the Mohammedans who hijacked the planes 'quiet' by your definition?
If you comment pertained to a 'quiet' debate over the reasons for, appropriate scope of and goals for our response, I think that is what we are having here.
In my opinion, it was the primitive, bloodthirsty nature of the Mohammedan religion which brought on this tragedy and nothing else. It was not the hijackers' Arab ancestry. It was not any allegiance to the Afghan flag or nationality. [Most of them had probably never been to Afghanistan.] It was not the Arab-Israeli dispute (except tangentially). It was the well-known and understood tenets of the Mohammedan religion and nothing else. These poor misguided souls expected 70 virgins apiece for killing Christians and bought a ticket to Hell instead. In my view, this won't stop until we stop those people who believe in the central tenets of Mohammedanism.
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