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Assalamu'alakum,
The truths they never tell us
Behind the jargon about failed states and
humanitarian interventions lie thousands of dead
John Pilger
http://www.zmag.org/pilgertruthes.htm
Polite society's bombers may not have to wait long for round two. The US
vice-president, Dick Cheney, warned last week that America could take
action against '40 to 50 countries'. Somalia, allegedly a 'haven' for
al-Qaeda, joins Iraq at the top of a list of potential targets. Cheered by
having replaced Afghanistan's bad terrorists with America's good
terrorists, the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has asked the
Pentagon to 'think the unthinkable', having rejected its 'post-Afghanistan
options' as 'not radical enough'.
An American attack on Somalia, wrote the Guardian's man at the Foreign
Office, 'would offer an opportunity to settle an old score: 18 US soldiers
were brutally killed there in 1993 . . .' He neglected to mention that the
US Marines left between 7,000 and 10,000 Somali dead, according to the
CIA. Eighteen American lives are worthy of score-settling; thousands of
Somali lives are not.
Somalia will provide an ideal practice run for the final destruction of
Iraq. However, as the Wall Street Journal reports, Iraq presents a
'dilemma', because 'few targets remain'. 'We're down to the last
outhouse,' said a US official, referring to the almost daily bombing of
Iraq that is not news. Having survived the 1991 Gulf war, Saddam Hussein's
grip on Iraq has since been reinforced by one of the most ruthless
blockades in modern times, policed by his former amours and arms suppliers
in Washington and London. Safe in his British-built bunkers, Saddam will
survive a renewed blitz - unlike the Iraqi people, held hostage to the
compliance of their dictator to America's ever-shifting demands.
In this country, veiled propaganda will play its usual leading role. As so
much of the Anglo-American media is in the hands of various guardians of
approved truths, the fate of both the Iraqi and Somali peoples will be
reported and debated on the strict premise that the US and British
governments are against terrorism. Like the attack on Afghanistan, the
issue will be how 'we' can best deal with the problem of 'uncivilised'
societies.
The most salient truth will remain taboo. This is that the longevity of
America as both a terrorist state and a haven for terrorists surpasses
all. That the US is the only state on record to have been condemned by the
World Court for international terrorism and has vetoed a UN Security
Council resolution calling on governments to observe international law is
unmentionable. Recently, Denis Halliday, the former assistant secretary
general of the UN who resigned rather than administer what he described as
a 'genocidal sanctions policy' on Iraq, incurred the indignation of the
BBC's Michael Buerk. 'You can't possibly draw a moral equivalence between
Saddam Hussein and George Bush Senior , can you?' said Buerk. Halliday was
taking part in one of the moral choice programmes that Buerk comperes, and
had referred to the needless slaughter of tens of thousands of Iraqis,
mostly civilians, by the Americans during the Gulf war. He pointed out
that many were buried alive, and that depleted uranium was used widely,
almost certainly the cause of an epidemic of cancer in southern Iraq.
That the recent history of the west's true crimes makes Saddam Hussein 'an
amateur', as Halliday put it, is the unmentionable; and because there is
no rational rebuttal of such a truth, those who mention it are abused as
'anti-American'. Richard Falk, professor of international politics at
Princeton, has explained this. Western foreign policy, he says, is
propagated in the media 'through a self-righteous, one-way moral/legal
screen with positive images of western values and innocence portrayed as
threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted political violence'.
The ascendancy of Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, and associates
Richard Perle and Elliot Abrams means that much of the world is now
threatened openly by a geopolitical fascism, which has been developing
since 1945 and has accelerated since 11 September.
The present Washington gang are authentic American fundamentalists. They
are the heirs of John Foster Dulles and Alan Dulles, the Baptist fanatics
who, in the 1950s, ran the State Department and the CIA respectively,
smashing reforming governments in country after country - Iran, Iraq,
Guatemala - tearing up international agreements, such as the 1954 Geneva
accords on Indochina, whose sabotage by John Foster Dulles led directly to
the Vietnam war and five million dead. Declassified files now tell us the
United States twice came within an ace of using nuclear weapons.
The parallels are there in Cheney's threat to '40 to 50' countries, and of
war 'that may not end in our lifetimes'. The vocabulary of justification
for this militarism has long been provided on both sides of the Atlantic
by those factory 'scholars' who have taken the humanity out of the study
of nations and congealed it with a jargon that serves the dominant power.
Poor countries are 'failed states'; those that oppose America are 'rogue
states'; an attack by the west is a 'humanitarian intervention'. (One of
the most enthusiastic bombers, Michael Ignatieff, is now 'professor of
human rights' at Harvard). And as in Dulles's time, the United Nations is
reduced to a role of clearing up the debris of bombing and providing
colonial 'protectorates'.
The twin towers attacks provided Bush's Washington with both a trigger and
a remarkable coincidence. Pakistan's former foreign minister Niaz Naik has
revealed that he was told by senior American officials in mid-July that
military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of
October. The US secretary of state, Colin Powell, was then travelling in
central Asia, already gathering support for an anti-Afghanistan war
'coalition'. For Washington, the real problem with the Taliban was not
human rights; these were irrelevant. The Taliban regime simply did not
have total control of
Afghanistan: a fact that deterred investors from financing oil and gas
pipelines from the Caspian Sea, whose strategic position in relation to
Russia and China and whose largely untapped fossil fuels are of crucial
interest to the Americans. In 1998, Dick Cheney told oil industry
executives: 'I cannot think of a time when we have had a region emerge as
suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian.'
Indeed, when the Taliban came to power in 1996, not only were they
welcomed by Washington, their leaders were flown to Texas, then governed
by George W Bush, and entertained by executives of the Unocal oil company.
They were offered a cut of the profits from the pipelines; 15 per cent was
mentioned. A US official observed that, with the Caspian's oil and gas
flowing, Afghanistan would become 'like Saudi Arabia', an oil colony with
no democracy and the legal persecution of women. 'We can live with that,'
he said. The deal fell through when two American embassies in east Africa
were bombed and al-Qaeda was blamed.
The Taliban duly moved to the top of the media's league table of demons,
where the normal exemptions apply. For example, Vladimir Putin's regime in
Moscow, the killers of at least 20,000 people in Chechnya, is exempt. Last
week, Putin was entertained by his new 'close friend', George W Bush, at
Bush's Texas ranch.
Bush and Blair are permanently exempt - even though more Iraqi children
die every month, mostly as a result of the Anglo-American embargo, than
the total number of dead in the twin towers, a truth that is not allowed
to enter public consciousness. The killing of Iraqi infants, like the
killing of Chechens, like the killing of Afghan civilians, is rated less
morally abhorrent than the killing of Americans.
As one who has seen a great deal of bombing, I have been struck by the
capacity of those calling themselves 'liberals' and 'progressives'
wilfully to tolerate the suffering of innocents in Afghanistan. What do
these self-regarding commentators, who witness virtually nothing of the
struggles of the outside world, have to say to the families of refugees
bombed to death in the dusty town of Gardez the other day, long after it
fell to anti-Taliban forces? What do they say to the parents of dead
children whose bodies lay in the streets of Kunduz last Sunday? 'Forty
people were killed,' said Zumeray, a refugee. 'Some of them were burned by
the bombs, others were crushed by the walls and roofs of their houses when
they collapsed from the blast.' What does the Guardian's Polly Toynbee say
to him: 'Can't you see that bombing works?' Will she call him
anti-American? What do 'humanitarian interventionists' say to people who
will die or be maimed by the 70,000 American cluster bomblets left
unexploded?
For several weeks, the Observer, a liberal newspaper, has published
unsubstantiated reports that have sought to link Iraq with 11 September
and the anthrax scare. 'Whitehall sources' and 'intelligence sources' are
the main tellers of this story. 'The evidence is mounting . . .' said one
of the pieces. The sum of the 'evidence' is zero, merely grist for the
likes of Wolfowitz and Perle and probably Blair, who can be expected to go
along with the attack. In his essay 'The Banality of Evil', the great
American dissident Edward Herman described the division of labour among
those who design and produce weapons like cluster bombs and daisy cutters
and those who take the political decisions to use them and those who
create the illusions that justify their use. 'It is the function of the
experts, and the mainstream media,' he wrote, 'to normalise the
unthinkable for the general public.' It is time journalists reflected upon
this, and took the risk of telling the truth about an unconscionable
threat to much of humanity that comes not from faraway places, but close
to home.
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WE AFFIRM THAT INJUSTICE ANYWHERE IS A THREAT TO JUSTICE EVERYWHERE!!!!
"O you who believe, fasting is made obligatory on you as it was made for
those before you, so that you may achieve Taqwa (God Consciousness).
(Fasting) for a fixed number of days; but if any of you is ill, or on a
journey, the prescribed number (Should be made up) from days later. For
those who can do it (With hardship), is a ransom, the feeding of one that
is indigent. But he that w ill give more, of his own free will,- it is
better for him. And it is better for you that ye fast, if ye only knew.
Ramadhan is the (month) in which was sent down the Qur'an, as a guide to
mankind, also clear (Signs) for guidance and judgment (Between right and
wrong). So every one of you who is present (at his home) during that month
should spend it in fas ting, but if any one is ill, or on a journey, the
prescribed period (Should be made up) by days later. God intends every
facility for you; He does not want to put to difficulties. (He wants you)
to complete the prescribed period, and to glorify Him in that He has
guided you; and perchance ye shall be grateful." (Holy Qur'an 2:183-185)
Information on Fasting In Islam: http://www.inin.net/fasting.htm
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