Help, help we're being repressed

Last week marked nine months since the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington and the week went off without a hitch. Well sort of. But there are some who have failed to grasp the obvious: there is a war going on.

On Friday there was no warnings to report, and it is shameful to think that we don't even blink when another 12 people die, this time in a suicide bomber attack in Pakistan. But there was something worse. The Guardian printed a statement entitled "We won't deny our consciences" signed, apparently, by some "prominent" Americans.

"In our name," say these prominent Americans, "the government has brought down a pall of repression over society. The president's spokesperson warns people to 'watch what they say'. Dissident artists, intellectuals, and professors find their views distorted, attacked, and suppressed."

Suppressed? One signer of the statement, Casey Kasem, is a disk jockey who happens to voice the deadbeat sidekick of cartoon canine Scooby Doo. Prominent American? Barely. Suppressed? You must be joking. Take another hit off the bong Shaggy!

Sure the usual suspects (Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, Gloria Steinem, and their buddies) signed the thing. But who are they kidding? Noam Chomsky gets more attention in the media than Mariah Carey after a post buffet-gorging breakdown. Can it really be suppression when you have face time on CNN, get books published, and travel around the world? If this is "being repressed" where do you register?

Maybe these loons are looking out for American citizens like Jose Padilla, sorry ... his close friends call him Abdullah al Muhajir, who is now being held for as long as the U.S. military damn well pleases. Padilla it is claimed has links to al-Qaida and is being held in connection to a plot to explode a "dirty bomb". Here is a man who spent time outside the United States training to be a terrorist, he came back into the country and Chomsky and his minions want to roll out the red carpet for him.

They failed to mention that the justice system has granted Zacarias Moussaoui, the twentieth hijacker, the chance to represent himself in court. He'd probably get stoned to death if he stole a loaf of bread in the Middle East; but here we give him three squares a day, a roof over his head, and the chance to act like James Traficant by defending himself. It makes you want to bring third-rate Russian comedian Yakof Smirnoff back to shriek, "What a country."

So here we have on one hand the U.S. allowing one foreign born man some civil rights, and he is going to squander them by getting rid of his lawyers. On the other hand we have a guy who is an American citizen who has been, at the very least, meeting with al-Qaida and is going to be safely locked up before he gets to violate a great many people's rights.

There is good news. Los Angeles based writer Ken Layne figures that this published statement will benefit the Bush administration: "Anyway, the Bush team has done a great job with this latest nonsense from the 'prominent Americans.' I wouldn't be surprised if Congress drops the Sept. 11 investigations out of bored disgust. If you're nostalgic for October, this will bring you right back, man."

When there are legitimate, and far more serious, complaints to be made on behalf of the civil rights of the prominent Americans favorite vacation spots in the radical Islamic world why are they spreading such ridiculous statements about America's liberty?

The truth is, Chomsky and co. live and die, much like the environmentalist movement, by framing the issues in their most frightening and hysterical form. The reality is Chomsky and co. look increasingly ridiculous doing just that, but we're on to them. They just don't get it and that is just fine.

Jackson Murphy is a commentator from Vancouver, Canada. He is the editor of "Dispatches" a website that serves up political commentary 24-7. You can contact him at jacksonmurphy@telus.net.

NYPOST

A VISION OF HELL IN THE HOLY CITY

By URI DAN

June 19, 2002 -- JERUSALEM - It was a scene of gruesome carnage out of a horror movie:

A long row of black nylon body bags, near the gutted insides of a commuter bus - with blood dripping out its rear door.

The arm of one victim - identified only by the police ID tag No. 10 - sticking out from the covered remains.

The bus driver - still in his seat, his hands frozen in death to the wheel.

The scream of sirens from arriving rescue workers unable to drown out the moans of the wounded lying in pools of blood.

That's what confronted rescue workers at the scene of the latest homicide bombing, which killed 19 Israelis yesterday morning.

The worst terrorist attack in Jerusalem in six years also left 55 people wounded.

Among them was 15-year-old Michael Lasri, who took so long styling his hair with gel that he missed his usual school bus yesterday and ended up on the doomed bus with two friends.

Lasri escaped more serious injury when he took cover behind a seat.

"I felt as if the hand of God was with me, pushing me down," he said from his hospital bed.

Israeli security forces and police had been on high alert after reports that five potential homicide bombers were at large - planning their "martyrdom" to coincide with the timing of a major policy statement by President Bush on the Mideast.

But one bomber succeeded about 8 a.m. yesterday as commuter bus No. 32 stopped at a crowded intersection in the southern Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo.

Lasri said he saw the bomber, slightly overweight and wearing a red shirt, for "only a few seconds - from the moment he got on the bus till the moment he blew himself up."

The tremendous explosion ripped through the bus.

"People were flying in the air. There was blood everywhere," said student Yakir Barashi, 14, who had just stepped off another bus.

"I'm afraid to go on a bus to go to school."

Lasri said, "For the first few minutes, there was a lot of shouting. Then there was silence."

Down the block, at Lasri's school, Ort Spanian, students were assembled in the synagogue for morning prayers - but knew immediately what had happened.

"Bombing, bombing!" they shouted as they rushed to the school gate to try to help the injured.

"Everyone was on . . . [cell] phones at once to call home and assure their parents they were safe," said Shmuel Calfon, 15.

"It's awful. It's impossible to imagine."

Shalom Sabag was driving his car just in front of the bus when the blast occurred.

"Bodies were piled up near the door of the bus," he said.

"I took off the bodies of two girls and a man. There was one girl I cannot forget. She had a long braid down her back."

Survivors, like Lasri, were quickly hospitalized.

His mother, Devorah, phoned her son and reached him in an ambulance on his way to the hospital.

"He kept saying: ‘I'm OK, I'm OK,' " she said.

But for hours after the explosion, Lasri did not know what had happened to his friend, Shai Cohen, who was sitting next to him.

"I ducked, but Shai took the full impact of the blast," he said.

Late yesterday Cohen was reported in serious condition at Jerusalem's Hadassah Hospital.

Lasri's other friend, Yonatan Yagen, 17, who was sitting in front of Lasri, suffered only minor injuries.

But Yagen's sister Liat, 24, who was also on the bus, died on the operating table.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, making his first visit to a massacre scene since taking office, examined the rows of black body bags.

"The scene was so atrocious," Sharon told The Post, "it spoke for itself."

Later, at his office, Sharon learned how the bombing touched the lives of close aides.

One of his secretaries told him how her best friend, a young wife in her 20s, was driving to work with her husband when they realized they had forgotten something at home. The wife volunteered to go home and retrieve the item - so she got on the doomed bus and was killed.

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