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TERRORISTS
"If
you bomb our cities, we will bomb yours."
Osama bin Laden, 2004
"I
don't know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really
don't care. It's not that important. It's not our priority."
George W. Bush, 2002
On
Wednesday London won it's 2012 Olympic bid and Blair scored
a major victory by securing $50 billion of debt relief
for Africa at the G8 summit.
On Thursday al Qaeda murdered more than fifty people and I spent the morning
calling friends who live there to check they were still alive. Billionaire
champion of the downtrodden bin Laden demonstrated his ongoing commitment
to the Qur'an and class war by killing innocent people on their way to work
for a living. People who didn't give a fuck about anything much beyond paying
their rent were killed to remind Blair that his suck-up-to-Bush geopolitical
strategy is not as popular with the fundamentalist psychopaths in al Qaeda
as it is with the fundamentalist psychopaths in Washington. These were people
who had nothing to do with the cozy game between the rich and powerful parasites.
Except that they had to die for it.
And so the game goes on: How can bin Laden wrest control of the middle east
from western self-interest and turn the region into his own personal empire
of oppression that will make Taliban Afghanistan seem like Vermont? How much
more moolah can Bush, Cheney, et al stuff into their bloated bank accounts
before the American people finally catch on to the scam and send them packing?
For this sick and bloody global game of 'Risk,' ordinary people are losing
their lives. How many more will have to die as a by-product of these rich
and powerful fucks getting even more rich and powerful before we start thinking?
Unfortunately, given the dumb expressions of outrage that I read that day,
it will be a long time. In the paranoid climate of hate we now live in, just
to suggest that bin Laden does not represent Islam and that the Qur'an is
not the contemporary equivalent of The
Protocols of The Elders of Zion, is enough to have you labeled a 'sand
nigger' on the Yahoo! op ed boards.
I found out that one friend in London had missed the train that was bombed
because he'd woken up late with a hangover. Another had had to take his daughter
home from the kindergarten across from the bombed station after it was evacuated
in case of further explosions. While I pondered this, I was asked to 'strap
a bomb on my back and kill some more American children' by a Yahoo! board
fuckwit after I expressed the opinion that the war on terror was a dangerous
and pointless sham. For me, this massacre was not about geopolitical polemics
and an excuse to parade my bigotries, it was a sad and bitter lesson on how
the biggest, most abstract and titanic political notions can seriously fuck
up the lives of ordinary people. And, in this instance, ordinary people that
I know and care about. But for others, it just provided a great opportunity
to recycle the lies and hate that had been fed to them during the past five
years of the Neocon revolution by those in power. Ten years ago, the racists,
Christian Nazis and anti-everything head bangers were marginalized in survivalist
camps and left-field churches. Now they have a government that speaks for
them.
So, sadly, it will be a long time before the mind-poisoned heartland starts
to wise up. It seems that the more shit Bush gets us into, the more viciously
and perversely they will defend his honor. As long as the horror does not
touch them personally, even tangentially, they will see nothing wrong in
a neo-fascist foreign policy that has turned so many against us and has made
the world a far more dangerous place for Americans. But out of all the sadly
predictable rage, bluster and conformity that followed the carnage came one
small voice of reason from London:
"The
danger now is that the west's current response to the
terrorist threat compounds that original error. So long
as the struggle against terrorism is conceived as a war
that can be won by military means, it is doomed to fail.
The more the west emphasises confrontation, the more
it silences moderate voices in the Muslim world who want
to speak up for cooperation.
Success will only come from isolating the terrorists and denying them support,
funds and recruits, which means focusing more on our common ground with the
Muslim world than on what divides us... After all, it is written in the Qur'an
that we were made into different peoples not that we might despise each other,
but that we might understand each other. President Bush is given to justifying
the invasion of Iraq on the grounds that by fighting terrorism abroad, it
protects the west from having to fight terrorists at home.
Whatever else can be said in defence of the war in Iraq today, it cannot
be claimed that it has protected us from terrorism on our soil."
Robin
Cook, Former British Foreign Secretary
(Resigned from the Blair cabinet during the build up to the invasion of Iraq)
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GREAT
PIONEERS OF NEOCON THOUGHT #11
"I
am not a crook."
Richard
M. Nixon
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