Who
is Terrorist?
By M . R . Rajna
So it has come to this. The entire modem history of the
Middle East, the collapse of the Ottoman empire, the Balfour
declaration, Lawrence of Arabia's lies, the Arab revolt,
the foundation of the state of Israel, four Arab-Israeli
wars and the 34 years of Israel's brutal occupation Arab
land, all erased within hours as those who claim to represent
a crushed,humiliated population struck back with the wickedness
and awesome cruelty of a doomed people. Is it fair, is
it moral,to write this so soon, without proof,without
a shred of evidence, when the last act of barbarism in
Oklahoma turned out to be the work of home-grown Americans?
I fear it is.
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is at war and, unless I am grotesquely mistaken, many thousands
more are now scheduled to die in the Middle East, perhaps in
America too. Some of us warned of "the explosion to come.'
But we never dreamed this nightmare. And yes, Osama bin Laden
comes to mind, his money, his theology, is frightening dedication
to destroy American power. I have sat in front of Bin Laden
as he described how his men helped to destroy the Russian army
in Afghanistan and thus the Soviet Union. Their boundless confidence
allowed them to declare war on America. But this is not the
war of democracy vs. terror, that the world will be asked to
believe in the coming hours and days. It is also about American
missiles smashing into Palestinian homes and US helicopters
firing missiles into a Lebanese ambulance in 1996 and American
shellscrashing into a village called Qana a few days later and
about a Lebanese militia, paid and uniformed by America's Israeli
ally, hacking and raping and murdering their way through refugee
camps
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No,
there is no doubting the utter, indescribable evil of what has
happened in the United States That Palestinians could celebrate
the massacre of 20,000 perhaps 35,000, innocent people is not
only a symbol of their despair but of their political immaturity,
of their failure to grasp what they had always been accusing
their Israeli enemies of doing: acting disproportionately but
we were warned. All the years of rhetoric, all the promises
to strike at the heart of America, to cut off the head of the
American snake' we took for empty threats. How could a backward,
conservative, undemocratic and corrupt group of regimes and
small, violent organizations fulfill such preposterous promises?
Now we know. And in the hours that followed last Tuesdays annihilation,
I last Tuesday's annihilation, I began to remember those other
extra ordinary, unbelievable assaults upon the US and its allies,
miniature now by comparison with Tuesday's casualties. Did not
the suicide bombers who killed 241 American servicemen and almost
100 French paratroops in Beirut on October 23. 1983, time their
attacks with unthinkable precision? It was just seven seconds
between the Marine bombing and the destruction of the French
three miles away.
Then there were the attacks on US bases in Saudi Arabia, and
last year's attempt. Almost successful it now turns out, to
sink the USS Cole in Aden. And then how easy was our failure
to recognize the new weapon of the Middle East which neither
American nor any other westerners could equal: the despair driven
,desperate suicide bomber. All America's power wealth, and arrogance,
the |
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an Arab how he responds to 20 or 30 thousands innocent
deaths and he or she will respond as good and decent
people should, that it is an unspeakable crime.
But they will ask why we did not use such words
about the sanctions that have destroyed the lives
of perhaps half a million children in Iraq, why
we did not rage about the 17,500 civilians killed
in Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon. |
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Arabs
will be saying, could not defend the greatest power the
world has ever known from this destruction.For journalists,
even those who have literally walked through the blood
of the Middle East, words dry up here. Awesome, terrible,unspeakable,
unforgivable; in the coming days, these words will an
become water in the desert. And there will be, naturally
and inevitably, and quite immorally, an attempt to obscure
the historical wrongs and the blood and the injustices
that lie behind Tuesday's firestorms. We
will be told about mindless terrorism', the mindless but
being essential if we are riot to realize tow hated America
has become in the land of the birth of three great religions.Ask
an Arab how he responds to 20 or 30 thousands innocent
deaths and he or she will respond as good and decent people
should, that it is an unspeakable crime But they will
ask why we did not use such words about the sanctions
that have destroyed the lives of perhaps half a
million children in Iraq, why we didn't rage about |
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the 17,500 civilians killed in Israel's 1982 invasion
of Lebanon, why we allowed one nation in the Middle East
to ignore UN Security Council resolutions but bombed and
sanctioned all others who did. And those basic reasons
why the Middle East caught fire last September, the Israeli
occupation of Arab land, the dispossession of Palestinians,
the bombardments and state-sponsored executions, the Israeli
tortures... all these must be obscured lest they provide
the smallest fractional reason for Tuesday mass savagery.
No, Israel was not to blame, that
we an be sure that Saddam Hussain and the other grotesque
dictators will claim so, but the malign influence of history
and our share in its burden must surely stand in the dark
with the suicide bombers. Our broken promises, perhaps
even our destruction of the Ottoman Empire, led inevitably
to this tragedy. America has bankrolled Israel's wars
for so many years that it believed this would be cost-free.
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No
longer so. It would be an act of
extraordinary courage and wisdom if the United States
was to pause for a moment and reflect upon its role in
the world, the indifference of its government to the suffering
of Arabs the indolence of its current president.
But, of course, the United States
will want to strike back against world terror , who can
blame them? Indeed, who could ever point a finger at Americans
now for using that pejorative and sometimes racist word
"terrorism" ?
There will be those swift to condemn any suggestion that
we should look for real historical reasons for an act
of violence on this world-war scale. But unless we do
so, then we are facing a conflict the like of which we
have not seen since Hitler's death and the surrender of
Japan. Korea, Vietnam, is beginning to fade away in comparison.
Eight years ago, I helped make a television series that
tried to explain why so many Muslims had come to hate
the West.
Last night, I remember some of those Muslims in that film,
their families burnt by American-made bombs and weapons.
They talked about how no one would help them but God.
Theology vs. technology, the suicide bomber against the
nuclear power. Now we have learnt what this means.
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In
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