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 minimizes 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 this delusion.
One of
Blair's favorite 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 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
these betrayals, it seems, were 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 U.S., 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
U.S. 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 U.S., to its trashing of
basic environmental decencies, to the assault on
fragile economies by institutions such as the World
Trade Organization that are little more than agents
of the U.S. 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 U.S.
"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 1965-66, one-million people were killed
with the complicity of the U.S. 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 southeast Asia correspondent.
British
behavior in Malaya was no different from the American
record in Vietnam: 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 an attitude of cultural
imperialism.
In
Operation Phoenix, in Vietnam, the CIA arranged the
homicide of some 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 U.S. Space Command, which leaves us in no
doubt.
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
U.S. 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 brutalized places have at last
come home.
John Pilger
is an award-winning, campaigning journalist. His
film, Paying The Price: Killing the Children of Iraq,
is available at Insomniac Videos (805-545-8866).
