Boston Marathon explosion, 04/15/13. (photo: Boston Globe/Getty Images)
The Recurring Motive for Anti-US 'Terrorism'
By Glenn Greenwald, Guardian UK
25 April 13
Ignoring the role played by US actions is dangerously self-flattering and
self-delusional.
ews reports purporting to describe what Dzhokhar Tsarnaev told US
interrogators should, for several reasons, be taken with a huge grain of salt.
The sources for this information are anonymous, they work for the US
government, the statements were obtained with no lawyer present and
no Miranda warnings given, and Tsarnaev is "grievously wounded", presumably
quite medicated, and barely able to speak. That the motives
for these attacks are still unclear has been acknowledged even by Alan
Dershowitz last week ("It's not even clear under the federal terrorism statute
that this qualifies as an act of terrorism") and Jeffrey Goldberg on Friday
("it is not yet clear, despite preliminary indications, that these men were, in
fact, motivated by radical Islam").
Those caveats to the side, the reports about what motivated the Boston suspects
are entirely unsurprising and, by now, quite familiar:
"The two suspects in the Boston bombing that killed
three and injured more than 260 were motivated by the US wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan, officials told the Washington Post.
>"Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 'the 19-year-old suspect in the Boston Marathon
bombings, has told interrogators that the American wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan motivated him and his brother to carry out the attack,' the
Post writes, citing 'US officials familiar with the interviews.'"
In the last several years, there have been four other
serious attempted or successful attacks on US soil by Muslims, and in
every case, they emphatically all say the same thing: that they were
motivated by the continuous, horrific violence brought by the US and its allies
to the Muslim world - violence which routinely kills and
oppresses innocent men, women and children:
Attempted "underwear bomber" Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab upon pleading guilty:
"I had an agreement with at least one person to
attack the United States in retaliation for US support of Israel and in
retaliation of the killing of innocent and civilian Muslim populations
in Palestine, especially in the blockade of Gaza, and in retaliation for the
killing of innocent and civilian Muslim populations in Yemen, Iraq, Somalia,
Afghanistan and beyond, most of them women, children, and
noncombatants."
Attempted Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad, the first Pakistani-American
involved in such a plot, upon pleading guilty:
"If the United States does not get out of Iraq,
Afghanistan and other countries controlled by Muslims, he said, 'we will be
attacking US', adding that Americans 'only care about their people,
but they don't care about the people elsewhere in the world when they
die' . . .
>"As soon as he was taken into custody May 3 at John F. Kennedy
International Airport, onboard a flight to Dubai, the Pakistani-born
Shahzad told agents that he was motivated by opposition to US policy in
the Muslim world, officials said."
When he was asked by the federal judge presiding over his case how he could
possibly have been willing to detonate bombs that would kill innocent children,
he replied:
"Well, the drone hits in Afghanistan and Iraq, they
don't see children, they don't see anybody. They kill women, children,
they kill everybody. It's a war, and in war, they kill people. They're
killing all Muslims . . .
>"I am part of the answer to the US terrorizing the Muslim nations and the
>Muslim people. And, on behalf of that, I'm avenging the attack.
Living in the United States, Americans only care about their own people, but
they don't care about the people elsewhere in the world when they
die."
Emails and other communications obtained by the US document how Shahzad
transformed from law-abiding,
middle-class naturalized American into someone who felt compelled to
engage in violence as a result of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,
drone attacks, Israeli violence against Palestinians and Muslims
generally, Guantanamo and torture, at one point asking a friend: "Can
you tell me a way to save the oppressed? And a way to fight back when
rockets are fired at us and Muslim blood flows?"
Attempted NYC subway bomber Najibullah Zazi, the first Afghan-American involved
in such a plot, upon pleading guilty:
"Your Honor, during the spring and summer of 2008, I conspired with others to
travel to Afghanistan to join the Taliban and
fight against the U.S. military and its allies . . . During the
training, Al Qaeda leaders asked us to return to the United States and
conduct martyrdom operation. We agreed to this plan. I did so because of my
feelings about what the United States was doing in Afghanistan."
Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan:
"Part of his disenchantment was his deep and public
opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a stance shared by some
medical colleagues but shaped for him by a growing religious fervor. The
strands of religion and antiwar sentiment seemed to weave together in a
PowerPoint presentation he made at Walter Reed in June 2007 . . . For a
master's program in public health, Major Hasan gave another
presentation to his environmental health class titled 'Why The War on
Terror is a War on Islam.'"
Meanwhile, the American-Yemeni preacher accused (with
no due process) of inspiring both Abdulmutallab and Hasan - Anwar
al-Awalaki - was once considered such a moderate American Muslim imam that the
Pentagon included him in post-9/11 events and the Washington
Post invited him to write a column on Islam. But, by all accounts, he
became increasingly radicalized in anti-American sentiment by the attack on
Iraq and continuous killing of innocent Muslims by the US, including in Yemen.
And, of course, Osama bin Laden, when justifying violence against Americans,
cited US military bases in Saudi Arabia, US support for Israeli
aggression against its neighbors, and the 1990s US sanctions regime that killed
hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, while Iranians who took over the US
embassy in 1979 cited decades of brutal tyranny from the
US-implanted-and-enabled Shah.
It should go without saying that the issue here is
causation, not justification or even fault. It is inherently
unjustifiable to target innocent civilians with violence, no matter the
cause (just as it is unjustifiable to recklessly kill civilians with
violence). But it is nonetheless vital to understand why there are so
many people who want to attack the US as opposed to, say, Peru, or South
Africa, or Brazil, or Mexico, or Japan, or Portugal. It's vital for two
separate reasons.
First, some leading American opinion-makers love to
delude themselves and mislead others into believing that the US is
attacked despite the fact that it is peaceful, peace-loving,
freedom-giving and innocent. As these myth-makers would have it, we
don't bother anyone; we just mind our own business (except when we're
helping and liberating everyone), so why would anyone possibly want to
attack us?
With that deceitful premise in place, so many
Americans, westerners, Christians and Jews love to run around insisting
that the only real cause for Muslim attacks on the US is that the
attackers have this primitive, brutal, savage, uncivilized religion
(Islam) that makes them do it. Yesterday, Andrew Sullivan favorably cited Sam
Harris as saying that "Islamic doctrines ... still present huge
problems for the emergence of a global civil society" and then himself
added: "All religions contain elements of this kind of fanaticism. But
Islam's fanatical side - from the Taliban to the Tsarnaevs - is more
murderous than most."
These same people often love to accuse Muslims of
being tribal without realizing the irony that what they are saying - Our Side
is Superior and They are Inferior - is the ultimate expression of
rank tribalism. They also don't seem ever to acknowledge the irony of
Americans and westerners of all people accusing others of being uniquely prone
to violence, militarism and aggression (Juan Cole yesterday,
using indisputable statistics, utterly destroyed the claim that Muslims are
uniquely violent, including by noting the
massive body count piled up by predominantly Christian nations and the
fact that "murder rates in most of the Muslim world are very low
compared to the United States").
As the attackers themselves make as clear as they can, it's not religious
fanaticism but rather political grievance that
motivates these attacks. Religious conviction may make them more willing to
fight (as it does for many in the west), but the motive is anger over what is
being done by the US and its
allies to Muslims. Those who claim otherwise are essentially saying:
gosh, these Muslims sure do have this strange, primitive, inscrutable
religion whereby they seem to get angry when they're invaded, occupied,
bombed, killed, and have dictators externally imposed on them. It's
vital to understand this causal relationship simply in order to prevent
patent, tribalistic, self-glorifying falsehoods from taking hold.
Second, it's crucial to understand this causation
because it's often asked "what can we do to stop Terrorism?" The answer
is right in front of our faces: we could stop embracing the polices in
that part of the world which fuel anti-American hatred and trigger the
desire for vengeance and return violence. Yesterday at a Senate hearing
on drones, a young Yemeni citizen whose village was bombed by US drones
last week (despite the fact that the targets could easily have been
arrested), Farea Al-Muslimi, testified. Al-Muslimi has always been pro-American
in the extreme, having spent a
year in the US due to a State Department award, but he was brilliant in
explaining these key points:
"Just six days ago, my village was struck by a drone, in an attack that
terrified thousands of simple, poor farmers. The
drone strike and its impact tore my heart, much as the tragic bombings
in Boston last week tore your hearts and also mine.
>"What radicals had previously failed to achieve in my village one
drone strike accomplished in an instant: there is now an intense anger
and growing hatred of America."
He added that anti-American hatred is now so high as a result of this drone
strike that "I personally don't even know if it is safe for me to go back to
Wessab because I am someone who people in my
village associate with America and its values." And he said that whereas he
never knew any Yemenis who were sympathetic to al-Qaida before the
drone attacks, now:
"AQAP's power and influence has never been based on
the number of members in its ranks. AQAP recruits and retains power
through its ideology, which relies in large part on the Yemeni people
believing that America is at war with them" . . .
>"I have to say that the drone strikes and the targeted killing
program have made my passion and mission in support of America almost
impossible in Yemen. In some areas of Yemen, the anger against America
that results from the strikes makes it dangerous for me to even
acknowledge having visited America, much less testify how much my life
changed thanks to the State Department scholarships. It's sometimes too
dangerous to even admit that I have American friends."
He added that drone strikes in Yemen "make people fear the US more than
al-Qaida".
There seems imagine how Americans would reactto be
this pervasive belief in the US that we can invade, bomb, drone, kill,
occupy, and tyrannize whomever we want, and that they will never
respond. That isn't how human affairs function and it never has been. If you
believe all that militarism and aggression are justified, then
fine: make that argument. But don't walk around acting surprised and
bewildered and confounded (why do they hate us??) when violence is
brought to US soil as well. It's the inevitable outcome of these
choices, and that's not because Islam is some sort of bizarre or
intrinsically violent and uncivilized religion. It's because no group in the
world is willing to sit by and be targeted with violence and
aggression of that sort without also engaging in it (just look at the
massive and ongoing violence unleashed by the US in response to a single
one-day attack on its soil 12 years ago: to a series of relentless attacks on
US soil over the course of more
than a decade, to say nothing of having their children put in prison
indefinitely with no charges, tortured, kidnapped, and otherwise
brutalized by a foreign power).
Being targeted with violence is a major cost of war
and aggression. It's a reason not do it. If one consciously decides to
incur that cost, then that's one thing. But pretending that this is all
due to some primitive and irrational religious response and not our own
actions is dangerously self-flattering and self-delusional. Just listen
to what the people who are doing these attacks are saying about why they are
doing them. Or listen to the people who live in the places
devastated by US violence about the results. None of it is unclear, and
it's long past time that we stop pretending that all this evidence does
not exist.
Dirty Wars
Several weeks ago, I wrote about the soon-to-be-released film, "Dirty Wars",
that chronicles journalist
Jeremy Scahill's investigation of US violence under President Obama in
Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia and elsewhere. That film makes many of the
same points here (including the fact that many Yemenis never knew of any fellow
citizens who were sympathetic to al-Qaida until the US began
drone-bombing them with regularity). Scahill's book by the same title was just
released yesterday and it is truly stunning and vital: easily
the best account of covert US militarism under Obama. I highly recommend it.
See Scahill here on Democracy Now yesterday discussing it, with a focus on
Obama's killing of both Anwar
Awlaki and, separately, his 16-year-son Abdulrahman in Yemen. He also
discussed his book this week with MSNBC's Chris Hayes and Morning Joe (where he
argued that Obama has made assassinations standard US policy).
UPDATE
The incorrect day was originally cited for Goldberg's column. It has now been
edited to reflect that it was published on Friday.
UPDATE II
I was interviewed at length this week by the legendary Bill Moyers about
Boston, US foreign policy, government secrecy and a
variety of related matters. The program will air repeatedly on PBS,
beginning this Friday night (see here for local listings). You can see a
preview for the show they released today - here - as well as one short excerpt
from the interview on the recorder below:
UPDATE III
Here's one more excerpt released today by the Moyers
show, this one pertaining to exactly the questions raised in today's
column:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/24/boston-terrorism-motives-us-violence?INTCMP=SRCH
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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