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Date: Wed, 19 Sep 2001 15:15:00 -0500 (CDT)
From: MSANEWS
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To: msanews@lists.acs.ohio-state.edu
Subject: The Star (Canada): "It's the U.S. foreign policy, stupid" ..
Suicide Bombers were NOT "pious avengers"
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Source: Direct Submission
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To: msanews@msanews.mynet.net
Date: Wed, 19 Sep 2001 16:23:32 -0400 (EDT)
Title: [The Star Article]: It's the U.S. foreign policy, stupid
TEXT:
Wed Sep 19 16:23:31 2001
It's the U.S. foreign policy, stupid
Haroon Siddiqui
STAR COLUMNIST
AMERICA IS not the target of terrorism because Islamic
fundamentalists hate American democratic ideals of freedom,
liberty and "all that we stand for," as George Bush has
claimed.
Only if it were so. The problem may be much bigger.
This is what needs to be grasped, quickly, even in this period of
bereavement. There is a danger in this television-driven drama's
misplaced focus on the ``how'' of last week's horror, that Americans
will not pay sufficient attention to the ``why'' of it.
The worst possible interpretation of the evil deed is to assume that
it was carried out by spiritually inspired suicide bombers seeking
"martyrdom" as a reward for trying to topple American hedonism.
The mad bombers did not fit the mould of pious avengers. On the eve
of their evil act, two were consuming vodka and ogling strippers at
a bar. Another who had come via Germany liked to drink and dance
with his live-in girlfriend whom he had ditched before crossing the
Atlantic.
They were trying to "meld in," to avoid suspicion, say the experts
who know not that no true believer would ever behave so, even as a
ruse.
Nor did the bombers come from impoverished hellholes, the breeding
grounds of zealots and ready recruits for extremist causes.
They were educated products of privilege, sons of affluent families
from Arab nations that are among America's strongest allies. This is
scarier than we think.
What we think is based on what we are told. What we are being told
in the wake of the biggest terrorist act is what we have already
been told, ad nauseam, in the years before. None of it inspires much
confidence.
Osama bin Laden is the prime suspect, yet we can't seem to get even
the most basic facts on him right.
He is said to have inherited $20 million. Or $200 million. Or $500
million. All stashed in a Sudanese bank. Or invested broadly.
His accounts have remained frozen since 1998. Or maybe not.
He has only a few dozen followers. Or a few hundred. Or "3,000 Arab
radicals from 12 countries." Or an army of "35,000 warriors"
assigned to secret cells around the globe.
He lives in a cave with three rooms and four wives, satellite TV,
faxes and phones. Or he does not spend more than one night in any
place.
Either out of ignorance or calculation, the theories on the motives
for last week's attacks avoid the most obvious: America has many
enemies.
Not just because of globalization and a McWorld in which Coke brings
harmony to all. Or because of American cultural domination. Or
because America is arrogant and isolationist.
Rather, it is due to American complicity in injustice, lethal and
measurable, on several fronts:
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in which America stands by
decades-long Israeli defiance of United Nations resolutions,
international law and the most basic standards of human rights,
keeping millions penned in military-patrolled enclaves.
The decade-long American-led economic sanctions on Iraq that have
killed 500,000 children under 5, strangled a whole nation and
destroyed the birthplace of civilization.
The mess in Afghanistan where the CIA recruited and trained the
likes of bin Laden to overturn the Soviet occupation but dumped them
once that mission impossible was accomplished. Since then, the
American-led economic sanctions - imposed to help ferret out bin
Laden - have inflicted a new wave of misery, leaving thousands of
children dead and about 1 million people starving.
American strategic alliances with the military and monarchical
dictatorships of Algeria, Turkey and Egypt, as well as the oil-rich
Arab states, all of whom crush even the smallest steps towards
democratization.
Add the American sanctions on Iran, Sudan and Libya, "the rogue
states," plus the miseries of Bosnia, Chechnya and Kashmir, and you
begin to grasp the utter dismay, and sense of helplessness, gripping
the peoples of all these lands.
Not all the conflicts can be blamed on America but many can be and
have been, especially in the last decade, only to draw indifference
or, more scandalously, a barrage of propaganda blaming the victims
themselves: that Muslim genes must account for all the savagery and
suffering surrounding them.
It suits America to avoid the real issues, and the double standard
and hypocrisy enveloping them.
It suits Israel to keep up the fundamentalist, terrorist mantra,
especially now, as it moves to create even more elbow room to crush
the intifadah.
It suits Russia, which has cloaked its brutality in Chechnya as a
war against terrorism.
It suits India on Kashmir.
It suits China, in battling Uighur separatists in Xingiang region,
and in keeping America on side for joining the World Trade
Organization.
With so many agendas at work, it is difficult to keep it all in
context.
It goes without saying, but bears repeating, that no grievance can
ever justify what happened last week. But the apologists for America
and its allies are disingenuous in advancing the racist notion, with
nauseating regularity, that the victims burst out in anger because
their religion rewards them for it. Some no doubt believe so. But to
present them as the sole face of all the oppressed is to distort
reality.
The public, more than the media, senses this. Some put it crudely:
America had it coming. The surprise is how a broad spectrum of the
Canadian middle class, including academics, professionals and
business people, is coming to the view that America needs, beyond
any tactical strikes or smart bombs it might deploy, a more humane
and even-handed approach to the world.
_________________________________________________________________
Haroon Siddiqui is The Star's editorial page editor emeritus.
His e-mail address is hsiddiq@thestar.ca
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1000850489976&call_page=TS_News_Columnists&call_pageid=970599109774&call_pagepath=News/Columnists
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<> the Children of Israel that if anyone <>
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<> in the land - it would be as if <>
<> he slew the whole people: and if <>
<> any one saved a life, it would <>
<> be as if he saved the life of <>
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<> Holy Qur'an, Surah al-Maidah 5:32. <>
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"And the mind - may God preserve you - is more prone to
deep sleep than the eye. Neediest of sharpening
than a sword. Poorest to treatment. Fastest to change.
Its illness, the deadliest. Its doctors, the rarest.
And its cure, the hardest. Whoever got a hold of it, before
the spread of the disease, found his sake. Whoever tried to
wrestle it after the spread would not find his
sake. The greatest purpose of knowledge is the abundance
of inspiring thoughts. Then, the ways to go about one's
needs are met." -- Al-Jahiz ("Puffy"), 9th Century Baghdad,
Kitab at-Tarbi` wat-Tadweer ("Squaring the Circle"), p. 101,
Edited by Prof. Charles Pellat, Institut Francais de
Damas, 1955.
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