Bu-lat-lat (boo-lat-lat) verb: to search, probe, investigate, inquire; to unearth facts Issue No. 31 September 16-22, 2001 Quezon City, Philippines |
The
Awesome Cruelty of a Doomed People BY
ROBERT FISK Back to Bulatlat.com Alternative Reader Index 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 versus 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 theyhad 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 fulfill 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 Americansnor 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 thatlie behind yesterday's
firestorms. We will be told about "mindless terrorism'', the
"mindless" bit being essential if we are not to realize 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 tocondemn 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 versus technology, the suicide bomber against the nuclear power. Now we have learnt what this means. Back to Bulatlat.com Alternative Reader Index We want to know what you think of this article.
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