|
The
Attack against the World
Trade Center
in New York and the Pentagon
in Washington,
What is it, that really threatens Civilization and - what
kind of a Civilization is this?, by Wolfgang Fischer -
The
awesome cruelty of a doomed
people
by Robert Fisk - On
the Bombings
by Noam Chomsky - Inevitable
ring to the unimaginable
by John Pilger - Folks
out there have a "Distaste of Western Civilization and
Cultural Values"
by Edward
S. Herman - Respond
to Violence: Teach Peace, Not
War,
by Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman -
TwinTowers,
by Uri Avnery, Acts
of Terrorism - Acts of War,
Venomous Butterfly - Emperor's Clothes comments:
'Washington's
Backing of Afghan Terrorists: Deliberate Policy' Article
from "Washington Post' -
'Taliban
Camps U.S. bombed in Afghanistan Were Built by
NATO'
Documentation from the 'N.Y. Times'. Combined U.S. and
Saudi aid to Afghan-based terrorism totaled $6 billion or
more - 'CIA
worked with Pakistan to create
Taliban'
- 'Osama
bin Laden: Made In USA'
(Excerpt from article on U.S. bombing of a pill factory
in Sudan in August, 1998. Argues that bin Laden was and
still may be a CIA asset)- 'Excerpts
from News Reports - Bin Laden in the
Balkans'
evidence that bin Laden aided or is aiding the
U.S.-sponsored forces in Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia-
'Into
the Abyss'
by Rick Rozoff - 'Washington
Created Osama bin Laden'
by Jared Israel - 'Russian
Navy Chief Says Official 9-11 Story
Impossible'
-
September
11 And Its Aftermath
by
Michael Albert and Stephen R. Shalom -
The
Need for Dissent - Radicalism is retreating, but it's more
necessary than ever before
by George Monbiot - Welcome
to the Warnacular
by
Laura Flanders
- What
Kind of War?
by Michael T. Klare- America
Under Attack?
by
Dan Berger - White
House lied about threat to Air Force
One
by Jerry White - Tony
Blair's bin Laden dossier: a pretext instead of
proof
by Chris Marsden and Barry Grey - A
Brief (and partial) History of US Sponsored Terrorism
Abroad,
Mark Zapezauer - If
CIA and the government weren't involved in the September 11
attacks what were they
doing?
by Michael C. Ruppert - US
planned war in Afghanistan long before September
11
by Patrick Martin - Gaping
Holes in the 'CIA vs. bin Laden'
Story
by Jared Israel, Was
the US government alerted to September 11
attack?
-"What
really happend on
9-11?"
Jared Israel interviewed by Mark Haim (April
2002) (pdf.version)
see
also: Who
Is Osama
Bin Laden?
by Michel Chossudovsky
and: The
GW Bush - Osama Bin Ladin
Connection
Where
is the Bush administration taking the American
people?
By the WSWS Editorial Board (Sept.22.01)
Emergency,
Terrorism
and War
on ZNet
and: a
kind of different
statistics
WAR
- looking behind the smoke: War
of Lies
by Rahul Mahajan and Robert Jensen
The
Top Five Lies About This
War
Kill,
Kill,
Kill
by Russell Mokhiber
EMPEROR'S
CLOTHES ARTICLES ON 9-11
* A GUIDE
/ site
mirror here
The
Complete 9/11 Timeline
by Paul Thompson
9/11
WIDOW'S BUSH
TREASON SUIT
DISAPPEARS FROM MEDIA,by
W. David Kubiak (Dec. 03)
911
BOOK (full text)
New Pearl Harbor,Theology
professor David Ray Griffin has written a book about the
possible complicity of the Bush administration in the events
of 9-11.
Why
Did the WTC Buildings
Collapse?
(02.06)
Pentagon
Strike - What hit the Pentagon on 911 ???
http://www.physics911.net
(04.06)
IRAQ
-
Occupation and Resistance
Report,
Psychoanalysts
for Peace and Justice
Senior
Military, Intelligence, and Government Officials
Question
9/11 Commission Report
Loose
Change (10. 06):
loosechange911.com
A
CALL TO ACTION FOR PEACE
The
Attack against the World
Trade Center
in New York and the Pentagon
in Washington and the Consequences
What
is it, that really threatens Civilization and - what kind of
a Civilization is this?
By
Wolfgang Fischer
(
german
version
) (spanish
version)
The
attack against the WTC and the Pentagon.
The
sorrow and suffering of the innocent victims of this attack
and of their relatives and friends is added to the pain of
all people, who have had to suffer since ages from the fact,
that 'Justice', as meted out by those in power - is robbing
the powerless majority of a viable future.
What
is really threatening civilization, the attack itself or the
historically developed causes and backgrounds, which drive
people into humiliation to such an extent, that it is
motivating them to deadly and suicidal attacks?
Have
we really been confronted with a new dimension of violence
on Sept. 11. 2001 or is a well known dimension only showing
up at quite an unexpected location?
Are
not, for example, the Iraqi people suffering from daily
bombardements and what else have been those two bombs on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki than acts of terror?
We
must allow such questions if we do not totally want to
forfeit any hope for a peaceful future.
So
why all this violence?
On
the one hand we have politically motivated violent expansion
of power against the vital interests of human beings and
whole peoples, who are being deprived of their living space
and material as well as spiritual nourishment. And what is
no less reprehensible: - people of questionable moral
motivation are being financed and strategically used by
secret services to satisfy the criminal interests of the
investors.
And
on the other hand we find the resistance against all the
insanity of the world, acts of despair committed by people,
who want to draw attention to the hopelessness and
desperation of their existence. Permanent humiliation gives
birth to the courage of despair and hatred, the spirit of
ultimate destruction.
Violence
must come to an end.
Only
a politics considering the basic interests of Life, treating
peoples of all different religions, races and nations as
equal - a politics which respects Life and takes care of
Nature as our basic source of existence will instantly lead
to a termination of violence. If, however, we fail to move
in this direction of an 'Infinite Justice' by means of
actions such as used by Gandhi, further losses of freedom
and quality of Life around the globe are
inevitable.
The
US-built anti-terror alliance named their answer to the
attacks of Sept.11.: "Enduring Freedom"
According
to the goals of capitalism the motto seems correct as this
war is only trying to reinforce the freedom of exploitation
and suppression by the industrialized countries. Pretending
to be guided by humanistic motivations in waging this kind
of war is pure lie and hypocrisy.
Privatised
Violence in the Service of State
Terrorism
is Threatening World Peace.
(w.f.,
21.12. 2001)
For
decades, and ever more aggressively, the US through their
secret service agencies have been supporting sources of
conflict all over the world with a view to destabilising
certain situations to suit their own interests. This is a
clear-cut strategy, thought out by clever heads like former
Security Adviser Brzezinski ("The Grand Chessboard: American
Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives") and supported by
scenarios like those designed by US historian Huntington
("The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World
Order") See also: http://www.newamericancentury.org
If
such views are familiar to our former State Secretary of
Defence and Federal Research Minister Andreas von
Bülow, who publicised them in book form ("In the Name
of the Government - CIA, BND and the Criminal Intrigues of
the Secret Services"), and if he claims without any official
denial, that even in 1993 when the first bombing of the WTC
took place, the primer had been supplied by the FBI, then a
man like Schily, our Minister of the Interior, cannot be
ignorant of them. Speaking of a "war beyond nations", Otto
Schily is showing his true face as a collaborator with
terror, and the same goes for all other politicians who
support this manipulative interpretation.
On
the one hand, they cover up for all those who, with profits
from the trade with heroin and cocaine, are financing the
terror at the cost of an army of millions of addicts,
thereby in contravention of international law globally
preventing peaceful coexistence. And on the other hand, they
have a terrorising effect upon citizens at home, whose basic
human rights continue to be abrogated through so-called
anti-terror" legislation.
more
(source: http://www.zmag.org/Commentaries/donorform.htm)
The
awesome cruelty of a doomed people
By
Robert Fisk
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,
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. America 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,
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
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
shells crashing 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.
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 fulfil such preposterous promises? Now we
know.
And
in the hours that followed yesterday's annihilation, I began
to remember those other extraordinary, unbelievable assaults
upon the US and its allies, miniature now by comparison with
yesterdays' casualties. Did not the suicide bombers who
killed 241 American servicemen and almost 100 french
paratroops in Beirut on 23 October 1983, time their attacks
with unthinkable precision?
It
was just 7 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 Aiden. And then how easy was our failure to
recognize the new weapon of the Middle East which neither
Americans or any other Westerners could equal: the
despair-driven, desperate suicide bomber.
All
America's power, wealth - and arrogance, the 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 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 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 or 30 thousand 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, 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 yesterday's mass savagery.
No,
Israel was not to blame - that 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. 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 the 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 to make a television series that tried
to explain why so many Muslims had come to hate the West.
Last night, I remembered 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.
On
the Bombings
By
Noam Chomsky
The
terrorist attacks were major atrocities. In scale they may
not reach the level of many others, for example, Clinton's
bombing of the Sudan with no credible pretext, destroying
half its pharmaceutical supplies and killing unknown numbers
of people (no one knows, because the US blocked an inquiry
at the UN and no one cares to pursue it). Not to speak of
much worse cases, which easily come to mind. But that this
was a horrendous crime is not in doubt. The primary victims,
as usual, were working people: janitors, secretaries,
firemen, etc. It is likely to prove to be a crushing blow to
Palestinians and other poor and oppressed people. It is also
likely to lead to harsh security controls, with many
possible ramifications for undermining civil liberties and
internal freedom.
The
events reveal, dramatically, the foolishness of the project
of "missile defense." As has been obvious all along, and
pointed out repeatedly by strategic analysts, if anyone
wants to cause immense damage in the US, including weapons
of mass destruction, they are highly unlikely to launch a
missile attack, thus guaranteeing their immediate
destruction. There are innumerable easier ways that are
basically unstoppable. But today's events will, very likely,
be exploited to increase the pressure to develop these
systems and put them into place. "Defense" is a thin cover
for plans for militarization of space, and with good PR,
even the flimsiest arguments will carry some weight among a
frightened public.
In
short, the crime is a gift to the hard jingoist right, those
who hope to use force to control their domains. That is even
putting aside the likely US actions, and what they will
trigger - possibly more attacks like this one, or worse. The
prospects ahead are even more ominous than they appeared to
be before the latest atrocities.
As
to how to react, we have a choice. We can express justified
horror; we can seek to understand what may have led to the
crimes, which means making an effort to enter the minds of
the likely perpetrators. If we choose the latter course, we
can do no better, I think, than to listen to the words of
Robert Fisk, whose direct knowledge and insight into affairs
of the region is unmatched after many years of distinguished
reporting. Describing "The wickedness and awesome cruelty of
a crushed and humiliated people," he writes that "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 &endash; paid and uniformed by
America's Israeli ally &endash; hacking and raping and
murdering their way through refugee camps." And much more.
Again, we have a choice: we may try to understand, or refuse
to do so, contributing to the likelihood that much worse
lies ahead.
Inevitable
ring to the
unimaginable
By
John Pilger
If
the attacks on America have their source in the Islamic
world, who can really be surprised?
Two
days earlier, eight people were killed in southern Iraq when
British and American planes bombed civilian areas. To my
knowledge, not a word appeared in the mainstream media in
Britain.
An
estimated 200,000 Iraqis, according to the Health Education
Trust in London, died during and in the immediate aftermath
of the slaughter known as the Gulf War.
This
was never news that touched public consciousness in the
west.
At
least a million civilians, half of them children, have since
died in Iraq as a result of a medieval embargo imposed by
the United States and Britain.
In
Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Mujadeen, which gave birth to
the fanatical Taliban, was largely the creation of the CIA.
The
terrorist training camps where Osama bin Laden, now
"America's most wanted man", allegedly planned his attacks,
were built with American money and backing.
In
Palestine, the enduring illegal occupation by Israel would
have collapsed long ago were it not for US backing.
Far
from being the terrorists of the world, the Islamic peoples
have been its victims - principally the victims of US
fundamentalism, whose power, in all its forms, military,
strategic and economic, is the greatest source of terrorism
on earth.
This
fact is censored from the Western media, whose "coverage" at
best minimises the culpability of imperial powers. Richard
Falk, professor of international relations at Princeton, put
it this way: "Western foreign policy is presented almost
exclusively through a self-righteous, one-way legal/moral
screen (with) positive images of Western values and
innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of
unrestricted political violence."
That
Tony Blair, whose government sells lethal weapons to Israel
and has sprayed Iraq and Yugoslavia with cluster bombs and
depleted uranium and was the greatest arms supplier to the
genocidists in Indonesia, can be taken seriously when he now
speaks about the "shame" of the "new evil of mass terrorism"
says much about the censorship of our collective sense of
how the world is managed.
One
of Blair's favourite words - "fatuous" - comes to mind.
Alas, it is no comfort to the families of thousands of
ordinary Americans who have died so terribly that the
perpetrators of their suffering may be the product of
Western policies. Did the American establishment believe
that it could bankroll and manipulate events in the Middle
East without cost to itself, or rather its own innocent
people?
The
attacks on Tuesday come at the end of a long history of
betrayal of the Islamic and Arab peoples: the collapse of
the Ottoman Empire, the foundation of the state of Israel,
four Arab-Israeli wars and 34 years of Israel's brutal
occupation of an Arab nation: all, it seems, obliterated
within hours by Tuesday's acts of awesome cruelty by those
who say they represent the victims of the West's
intervention in their homelands.
"America,
which has never known modern war, now has her own terrible
league table: perhaps as many as 20,000 victims."
As
Robert Fisk points out, in the Middle East, people will
grieve the loss of innocent life, but they will ask if the
newspapers and television networks of the west ever devoted
a fraction of the present coverage to the half-a-million
dead children of Iraq, and the 17,500 civilians killed in
Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon. The answer is no. There
are deeper roots to the atrocities in the US, which made
them almost inevitable.
It
is not only the rage and grievance in the Middle East and
south Asia. Since the end of the cold war, the US and its
sidekicks, principally Britain, have exercised, flaunted,
and abused their wealth and power while the divisions
imposed on human beings by them and their agents have grown
as never before.
An
elite group of less than a billion people now take more than
80 per cent of the world's wealth.
In
defence of this power and privilege, known by the euphemisms
"free market" and "free trade", the injustices are legion:
from the illegal blockade of Cuba, to the murderous arms
trade, dominated by the US, to its trashing of basic
environmental decencies, to the assault on fragile economies
by institutions such as the World Trade Organisation that
are little more than agents of the US Treasury and the
European central banks, and the demands of the World Bank
and the International Monetary Fund in forcing the poorest
nations to repay unrepayable debts; to a new US "Vietnam" in
Colombia and the sabotage of peace talks between North and
South Korea (in order to shore up North Korea's "rogue
nation" status).
Western
terror is part of the recent history of imperialism, a word
that journalists dare not speak or write.
The
expulsion of the population of Diego Darcia in the 1960s by
the Wilson government received almost no press coverage.
Their homeland is now an American nuclear arms dump and base
from which US bombers patrol the Middle East.
In
Indonesia, in 1965/6, a million people were killed with the
complicity of the US and British governments: the Americans
supplying General Suharto with assassination lists, then
ticking off names as people were killed.
"Getting
British companies and the World Bank back in there was part
of the deal", says Roland Challis, who was the BBC's south
east Asia correspondent.
British
behaviour in Malaya was no different from the American
record in Vietnam, for which it proved inspirational: the
withholding of food, villages turned into concentration
camps and more than half a million people forcibly
dispossessed.
In
Vietnam, the dispossession, maiming and poisoning of an
entire nation was apocalyptic, yet diminished in our memory
by Hollywood movies and by what Edward Said rightly calls
cultural imperialism.
In
Operation Phoenix, in Vietnam, the CIA arranged the homicide
of around 50,000 people. As official documents now reveal,
this was the model for the terror in Chile that climaxed
with the murder of the democratically elected leader
Salvador Allende, and within 10 years, the crushing of
Nicaragua.
All
of it was lawless. The list is too long for this
piece.
Now
imperialism is being rehabilitated. American forces
currently operate with impunity from bases in 50 countries.
"Full
spectrum dominance" is Washington's clearly stated aim.
Read
the documents of the US Space Command, which leaves us in no
doubt.
In
this country, the eager Blair government has embarked on
four violent adventures, in pursuit of "British interests"
(dressed up as "peacekeeping"), and which have little or no
basis in international law: a record matched by no other
British government for half a century.
What
has this to do with this week's atrocities in America? If
you travel among the impoverished majority of humanity, you
understand that it has everything to do with it.
People
are neither still, nor stupid. They see their independence
compromised, their resources and land and the lives of their
children taken away, and their accusing fingers increasingly
point north: to the great enclaves of plunder and privilege.
Inevitably, terror breeds terror and more fanaticism.
But
how patient the oppressed have been.
It
is only a few years ago that the Islamic fundamentalist
groups, willing to blow themselves up in Israel and New
York, were formed, and only after Israel and the US had
rejected outright the hope of a Palestinian state, and
justice for a people scarred by imperialism.
Their
distant voices of rage are now heard; the daily horrors in
faraway brutalised places have at last come home.
September
13, 2001
Folks
out there have a "Distaste of Western Civilization and
Cultural Values"
By
Edward S. Herman
One
of the most durable features of the U.S. culture is the
inability or refusal to recognize U.S. crimes. The media
have long been calling for the Japanese and Germans to admit
guilt, apologize, and pay reparations. But the idea that
this country has committed huge crimes, and that current
events such as the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks
may be rooted in responses to those crimes, is close to
inadmissible. Editorializing on the recent attacks ("The
National Defense," Sept. 12), the New York Times does give a
bit of weight to the end of the Cold War and consequent
"resurgent of ethnic hatreds," but that the United States
and other NATO powers contributed to that resurgence by
their own actions (e.g., helping dismantle the Soviet Union
and pressing Russian "reform"; positively encouraging
Slovenian and Croatian exit from Yugoslavia and the breakup
of that state, and without dealing with the problem of
stranded minorities, etc.) is completely unrecognized.
The
Times then goes on to blame terrorism on "religious
fanaticism...the anger among those left behind by
globalization," and the "distaste of Western civilization
and cultural values" among the global dispossessed. The
blinders and self-deception in such a statement are truly
mind-boggling. As if corporate globalization, pushed by the
U.S. government and its closest allies, with the help of the
World Trade Organization, World Bank and IMF, had not
unleashed a tremendous immiseration process on the Third
World, with budget cuts and import devastation of artisans
and small farmers. Many of these hundreds of millions of
losers are quite aware of the role of the United States in
this process. It is the U.S. public who by and large have
been kept in the dark.
Vast
numbers have also suffered from U.S. policies of supporting
rightwing rule and state terrorism, in the interest of
combating "nationalistic regimes maintained in large part by
appeals to the masses" and threatening to respond to "an
increasing popular demand for immediate improvement in the
low living standards of the masses," as fearfully expressed
in a 1954 National Security Council report, whose contents
were never found to be "news fit to print." In connection
with such policies, in the U.S. sphere of influence a dozen
National Security States came into existence in the 1960s
and 1970s, and as Noam Chomsky and I reported back in 1979,
of 35 countries using torture on an administrative basis in
the late 1970s, 26 were clients of the United States. The
idea that many of those torture victims and their families,
and the families of the thousands of "disappeared" in Latin
America in the 1960s through the 1980s, may have harbored
some ill-feelings toward the United States remains
unthinkable to U.S. commentators.
During
the Vietnam war the United States used its enormous military
power to try to install in South Vietnam a minority
government of U.S. choice, with its military operations
based on the knowledge that the people there were the enemy.
This country killed millions and left Vietnam (and the rest
of Indochina) devastated. A Wall Street Journal report in
1997 estimated that perhaps 500,000 children in Vietnam
suffer from serious birth defects resulting from the U.S.
use of chemical weapons there. Here again there could be a
great many people with well-grounded hostile feelings toward
the United States.
The
same is true of millions in southern Africa, where the
United States supported Savimbi in Angola and carried out a
policy of "constructive engagement" with apartheid South
Africa as it carried out a huge cross-border terroristic
operation against the frontline states in the 1970s and
1980s, with enormous casualties. U.S. support of "our kind
of guy" Suharto as he killed and stole at home and in East
Timor, and its long warm relation with Philippine dictator
Ferdinand Marcos, also may have generated a great deal of
hostility toward this country among the numerous victims.
Iranians
may remember that the United States installed the Shah as an
amenable dictator in 1953, trained his secret services in
"methods of interrogation," and lauded him as he ran his
regime of torture; and they surely remember that the United
States supported Saddam Hussein all through the 1980s as he
carried out his war with them, and turned a blind eye to his
use of chemical weapons against the enemy state. Their
civilian airliner 655 that was destroyed in 1988, killing
290 people, was downed by a U.S. warship engaged in helping
Saddam Hussein fight his war with Iran. Many Iranians may
know that the commander of that ship was given a Legion of
Merit award in 1990 for his "outstanding service" (but
readers of the New York Times would not know this as the
paper has never mentioned this high level commendation).
The
unbending U.S. backing for Israel as that country has
carried out a long-term policy of expropriating Palestinian
land in a major ethnic cleansing process, has produced two
intifadas- uprisings reflecting the desperation of an
oppressed people. But these uprisings and this fight for
elementary rights have had no constructive consequences
because the United States gives the ethnic cleanser arms,
diplomatic protection, and carte blanche as regards policy.
All
of these victims may well have a distaste for "Western
civilization and cultural values," but that is because they
recognize that these include the ruthless imposition of a
neoliberal regime that serves Western transnational
corporate interests, along with a willingness to use
unlimited force to achieve Western ends. This is genuine
imperialism, sometimes using economic coercion alone,
sometimes supplementing it with violence, but with many
millions-perhaps even billions-of people "unworthy victims."
The Times editors do not recognize this, or at least do not
admit it, because they are spokespersons for an imperialism
that is riding high and whose principals are unprepared to
change its policies. This bodes ill for the future. But it
is of great importance right now to stress the fact that
imperial terrorism inevitably produces retail terrorist
responses; that the urgent need is the curbing of the causal
force, which is the rampaging empire.
Respond
to Violence: Teach Peace, Not
War
By
Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
Open
the Washington Post to it's editorial pages, and war talk
dominates.
Henry
Kissinger: Destroy the Network.
Robert
Kagan: We Must Fight This War.
Charles
Krauthammer: To War, Not to Court.
William
S. Cohen: American Holy War.
There
is no column by Colman McCarthy talking peace. From 1969 to
1997, McCarthy wrote a column for the Washington Post. He
was let go because the column, he was told, wasn't making
enough money for the company. "The market has spoken," was
the way Robert Kaiser, the managing editor at the Post, put
it at the time.
McCarthy
is a pacifist. "I'm opposed to any kind of violence -
economic, political, military, domestic."
But
McCarthy is not surprised by the war talk coming from the
Post. He has just completed an analysis of 430 opinion
pieces that ran in the Washington Post in June, July and
August 2001.
Of
the 430 opinion pieces, 420 were written by right-wingers or
centrists. Only ten were written by columnists one might
consider left.
Nor
is he surprised by the initial response of the American
people to Tuesday's horrific attacks on innocent civilians.
According to a Washington Post/ABC News poll, nine of ten
people supported taking military action against the groups
or nations responsible for the attacks "even if it led to
war."
"In
the flush of emotions, that is the common reaction,"
McCarthy says. "But is it a rational and sane reaction?" So,
how should we respond? "We forgive you. Please forgive us."
Forgive us for what? "Please forgive us for being the most
violent government on earth," McCarthy says. "Martin Luther
King said this on April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church in New
York. He said 'my government is the world's leading purveyor
of violence.'"
What
should Bush do? "He should say that the United States will
no longer be the world's largest seller of weapons, that we
will begin to decrease our extravagantly wasteful military
budget, which runs now at about $9,000 a second." What will
Bush do? "Within the week, we will be bombing somebody
somewhere," McCarthy says. "This is what his father did,
this is what Clinton did."
"In
the past 20 years, we have bombed Libya, Grenada, Panama,
Somalia, Haiti, Afghanistan, Sudan, Iraq, and Yugoslavia.
There are two things about those countries - all are poor
countries, and the majority are people of dark colored
skin."
Are
you saying that we should just turn the other cheek? "No,
that's passivity," McCarthy says. "Pacifism is not
passivity. Pacifism is direct action, direct resistance,
refusing to cooperate with violence. That takes a lot of
bravery. It takes much more courage than to use a gun or
drop a bomb."
Since
leaving the Post, McCarthy has dedicated his life to
teaching peace. He has created the Center for Teaching
Peace, which he runs out of his home in Northwest
Washington. He teaches peace and non-violence at six area
universities and at a number of public secondary and high
schools.
But
he's up against a system that systematically teaches
violence -from that all pervasive teacher of children -
television - to the President of the United States.
"In
1999, the day after the Columbine shootings, Bill Clinton
went to a high school in Alexandria, Virginia and gave a
speech to the school's Peer Mediation Club," McCarthy says.
"Clinton said 'we must teach our children to express their
anger and resolve their conflicts with words not weapons.'"
"It
was a great speech, but he went back that same night and
ordered up the most intense bombing of Belgrade since that
war began four weeks before." Message to children: kid's
violence is bad, but America's violence is good.
McCarthy
says we should teach our children forgiveness, not to
demonize people who have a grievance. "When you hit your
child, or beat up the person you are living with, you are
saying - 'I want you to change the way you think or behave
and I'm going to use physical force to make you change your
way or your mind,'" he says. "In fact, violence is rarely
effective. If violence was effective, we would have had a
peaceful planet eons ago."
How
to break the cycle of violence? "The same way you break the
cycle of ignorance - educate people," McCarthy responds.
"Kids walk in the school with no idea that two plus two
equals four. They are ignorant. We repeat over and over -
Billy, two plus two equals four. And Billy leaves school
knowing two plus two equals four. But he doesn't leave
school knowing that an eye for an eye means we all go
blind."
"We
have about 50 million students in this country," McCarthy
says. "Nearly all of those are going to graduate absolutely
unaware of the philosophy of Gandhi, King, Dorothy Day,
Howard Zinn, or A.J. Muste." When he speaks before college
audiences, McCarthy holds up a $100 dollar bill and says
"I'll give this to anybody in the audience who can identify
these next six people - Who was Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S.
Grant, and Paul Revere? All hands go up on all three."
"Then
I ask - Who was Jeanette Rankin (first women member of
Congress, voted against World War I and World War II, said
'you can no more win a war than win an earthquake,' Dorothy
Day (co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement), Ginetta
Sagan (founder of Amnesty USA)."
"The
last three are women peacemakers. The first three are all
male peacebreakers. The kids know the militarists. They
don't know the peacemakers." He hasn't lost his $100 bill
yet to a student. Of the 3,100 colleges and universities in
the country, only about 70 have degree programs in peace
studies and most are underfunded.
Instead
of bombing, we should start teaching peace. "We are
graduating students as peace illiterates who have only heard
of the side of violence," McCarthy laments. "If we don't
teach our children peace, somebody else will teach them
violence."
[The
Center for Teaching Peace has produced two text books,
Solutions to Violence and Strength Through Peace, both
edited by Colman McCarthy. Each book contains 90 essays by
the world's great theorists and practitioners of
non-violence. ($25 each). To contact Colman McCarthy, write
to: Center for Teaching Peace, 4501 Van Ness Street, N.W.,
Washington, D.C. 20016 Phone: (202) 537-1372]
Russell
Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate
Crime Reporter. Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington,
D.C.-based Multinational Monitor. They are co-authors of
Corporate Predators: The Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack
on Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1999).
TwinTowers
By
Uri Avnery
After
the smoke has cleared, the dust has settled down and the
initial fury blown over, humankind will wake up and realize
a new fact: there is no safe place on earth.
A
handful of suicide-bombers has brought the United States to
a standstill, caused the President to hide in a bunker under
a far-away mountain, dealt a terrible blow to the economy,
grounded all aircraft, and emptied government offices
throughout the country. This can happen in every country.
The Twin Towers are everywhere.
Not
only Israel, but the whole world is now full of gibberish
about "fighting terrorism". Politicians, "experts on
terrorism" and their likes propose to hit, destroy,
annihilate etc., as well as to allocate more billions to the
"intelligence community". They make brilliant suggestions.
But nothing of this kind will help the threatened nations,
much as nothing of this kind has helped Israel.
There
is no patent remedy for terrorism. The only remedy is to
remove its causes. One can kill a million mosquitoes, and
millions more will take their place. In order to get rid of
them, one has to dry the swamp that breeds them. And the
swamp is always political.
A
person does not wake up one morning and tell himself: Today
I shall hijack a plane and kill myself. Nor does a person
wake up one morning and tell himself: Today I shall blow
myself up in a Tel-Aviv discotheque. Such a decision grows
in a person's mind through a slow process, taking years. The
background to the decision is either national or religious,
social and spiritual.
No
fighting underground can operate without popular roots and a
supportive environment that is ready to supply new recruits,
assistance, hiding places, money and means of propaganda. An
underground organization wants to gain popularity, not lose
it. Therefore it commits attacks when it thinks that this is
what the surrounding public wants. Terror attacks always
testify to the public mood.
That
is true in this case, too. The initiators of the attacks
decided to implement their plan after America has provoked
immense hatred throughout the world. Not because of its
might, but because of the way it uses its might. It is hated
by the enemies of globalization, who blame it for the
terrible gap between rich and poor in the world. It is hated
by millions of Arabs, because of its support for the Israeli
occupation and the suffering of the Palestinian people. It
is hated by multitudes of Muslims, because of what looks
like its support for the Jewish domination of the Islamic
holy shrines in Jerusalem. And there are many more angry
peoples who believe that America supports their tormentors.
Until
September 11, 2001 - a date to remember - Americans could
entertain the illusion that all this concerns only others,
in far-away places beyond the seas, that it does not touch
their sheltered lives at home. No more.
That
is the other side of globalization: all the world's problems
concern everyone in the world. Every case of injustice,
every case of oppression. Terrorism, the weapon of the weak,
can easily reach every spot on earth. Every society can
easily be targeted, and the more developed a society is, the
more it is in danger. Fewer and fewer people are needed to
inflict pain on more and more people. Soon one single person
will be enough to carry a suitcase with a tiny atomic bomb
and destroy a megalopolis of tens of millions.
This
is the reality of the 21st century that started this week in
earnest. It must lead to the globalization of all problems
and the globalization of their solutions. Not in the
abstract, by fatuous declarations in the UN, but by a global
endeavor to resolve conflicts and establish peace, with the
participation of all nations, with the US playing a central
role.
Since
the US has become a world power, it has deviated from the
path outlined by its founders. It was Thomas Jefferson who
said: No nation can behave without a decent respect for the
opinion of mankind. (I quote from memory). When the US
delegation left the world conference in Durban, in order to
abort the debate about the evils of slavery and in order to
court the Israeli right, Jefferson must have turned over in
his grave.
If
it is confirmed that the attack on New York and Washington
was perpetrated by Arabs - and even if not! - the world must
at long last treat the festering wound of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is poisoning the whole
body of humanity. One of the wise guys in the Bush
administration said only a few weeks ago: "Let them bleed!"
- meaning the Palestinians and the Israelis. Now America is
bleeding. He who runs away from the conflict is followed by
it, even into his home. Americans, and Europeans too, should
learn this lesson.
The
distance from Jerusalem to New York is small, and so is the
distance from New York to Paris, London and Berlin. Not only
multi-national corporations embrace the globe, but terror
organizations do so, too. In the same way, the instruments
for the solution of conflicts must be global.
Instead
of the destroyed New York edifices, the twin towers of Peace
and Justice must be built.
For
information about Gush Shalom visit the website:
http://www.gush-shalom.org/
- email:
info@gush-shalom.org
On
the 11 Sept 2001, 36615 children also died through hunger.
Here's the statistics...
Victims:
35615 (according to FAO)
Location: the poorest countries in the world
Special TV reports on the tragedy: NONE
Newspaper articles: NONE
Messages from heads of states: NONE
Appeals by organisations against the crisis: NONE
Solidarity messages: NONE
Minutes of silence: NONE
Homages to the victims: NONE
Special s organised: NONE
Messages from the Pope: NONE
Stock exchanges: situation normal
Alarm level: NONE
Mobilisation of armed forces: NONE
Media speculation over the identity of the perpetrators of
this crime: NONE
Those probably responsible for the crime: the global
capitalist class.
Emanzipation
Humanum,
version 9.2001, Criticism, suggestions as to form and
content, dialogue, translation into other languages are all
desired
http://emanzipationhumanum.de/english/WTC.html
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