From: Shaifuddin Abdullah [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Wednesday, September 12, 2001 11:43 PM
Subject: [hizbulan] The wickedness and awesome cruelty of a crushed and
humiliated people.
The wickedness and awesome cruelty of a crushed and humiliated people.
By Robert Fisk
12 September 2001
The Independent
So it has come to this. The entire modern 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 of 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,
when the last act of barbarism, in Oklahoma, turned out to be the work of
home-grown Americans? I fear it is. America is at war and, unless I am
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 dreamt this nightmare.
And yes, Osama bin Laden comes to mind, his mon! ey, his theology, his
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 versus
terror that the world will be asked to believe in the coming days. It is
also about American missiles smashing into Palestinian homes and US
helicopters firing missiles into a Lebanese ambulance in 1996 and American
shells crashing into a village called Qana and about a Lebanese militia
paid and uniformed by America's Israeli ally hacking and raping
and murdering their way through refugee camps.
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 im! maturity, of their failure to grasp what
they had always been accusing their Israeli enemies of doing: acting
disproportionately. 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 organisations fulfil such
preposterous promises? Now we know.
And in the hours that followed yesterday's annihilation, I began to
remember those other extraordinary assaults upon the US and its allies,
miniature now by comparison with yesterday's casualties. Did not the
suicide bombers who killed 241 American servicemen and
100 French paratroops in Beirut on 23 October 1983, time their attacks with
unthinkable precision?
There were 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 recognise the new weapon of the Middle East which neither Americans nor
any other Westerners could equal: the despair-driven, desperate suicide
bomber.
And there will be, inevitably, and quite immorally, an attempt to obscure
the historical wrongs and the injustices that lie behind yesterday's
firestorms. We will be told about mindless
terrorism'', the mindless bit being essential if we are not to realise
how hated America has become in the land of the birth of three great
religions.
Ask an Arab how he responds to 20,000 or 30,000 innocent deaths and he or
she will respond as 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. 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 ... all these must be obscured lest the! y
provide the smallest fractional reason for yesterday's mass savagery.
No, Israel was not to blame though we can be sure that Saddam Hussein 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.
No longer so. But,
of course, the US will want to strike back against world terror'',
