The world is dividing into two hostile camps:
Islam and "us." That is the unerring message from Western governments,
press, radio and television. For Islam, read terrorists. It is reminiscent of
the cold war, when the world was divided between "Reds" and us, and
even a strategy of annihilation was permissible in our defense. We now know,
or we ought to know, that so much of that was a charade; released official files
make clear the Soviet threat was for public consumption only.
Every day now, as during the cold war, a one-way moral mirror is held up to
us as a true reflection of events. The new threat is given impetus with every
terrorist outrage, be it at Beslan or Jakarta. Seen in the one-way mirror, our
leaders make grievous mistakes, but their good intentions are not in question.
Tony Blair's "idealism" and "decency" are promoted by his
accredited mainstream detractors, as the concocted Greek tragedy of his political
demise opens on the media stage. Having taken part in the killing of as many
as 37,000 Iraqi civilians, Blair's distractions, not his victims, are news:
from his arcane rivalry with treasurer Gordon Brown, his Tweedledee, to his
conversion to the perils of global warming. On the atrocity at Beslan, Blair
is allowed to say, without irony or challenge, that "this international
terrorism will not prevail." These are the same words spoken by Mussolini
soon after he had bombed civilians in Abyssinia.
Heretics who look behind the one-way mirror and see the utter
dishonesty of all this, who identify Blair and his collaborators as war
criminals in the literal and legal sense and present evidence of his
cynicism and immorality, are few; but they have wide support among the
public, whose awareness has never been higher, in my experience. It is
the British public's passionate indifference, if not contempt for the
political games of Blair/Brown and their courts and its accelerating
interest in the way the world really is, that unnerves those with
Let's look at a few examples of the way the world is presented and the way
it really is. The occupation of Iraq is presented as "a mess": a blundering,
incompetent American military up against Islamic fanatics. In truth, the occupation
is a systematic, murderous assault on a civilian population by a corrupt American
officer class, given license by its superiors in Washington. Last May, the US
Marines used battle tanks and helicopter gunships to attack the slums of Fallujah.
They admitted killing 600 people, a figure far greater than the total number
of civilians killed by the "insurgents" during the past year. The
generals were candid; this futile slaughter was an act of revenge for the killing
of three American mercenaries. Sixty years earlier, the SS Das Reich division
killed 600 French civilians at Oradour-sur-Glane
as revenge for the kidnapping of a German officer by the resistance. Is there
These days, the Americans routinely fire missiles into Fallujah and other dense
urban areas; they murder whole families. If the word terrorism has any modern
application, it is this industrial state terrorism. The British have a different
style. There are more than 40 known cases of Iraqis having died at the hands
of British soldiers; just one soldier has been charged. In the current issue
of the magazine The Journalist, Lee Gordon, a freelance reporter, wrote,
"Working as a Brit in Iraq is hazardous, particularly in the south where
our troops have a reputation (unreported at home) for brutality." Neither
is the growing disaffection among British troops reported at home. This is so
worrying the Ministry of Defense that it has moved to placate the family of
17-year-old soldier David
McBride by taking him off the AWOL list after he refused to fight in Iraq.
Almost all the families of soldiers killed in Iraq have denounced the occupation
and Blair, all of which is unprecedented.
Only by recognizing the terrorism of states is it possible to understand, and
deal with, acts of terrorism by groups and individuals which, however horrific,
are tiny by comparison. Moreover, their source is inevitably the official terrorism
for which there is no media language. Thus, the State of Israel has been able
to convince many outsiders that it is merely a victim of terrorism when, in
fact, its own unrelenting, planned terrorism is the cause of the infamous retaliation
by Palestinian suicide bombers. For all of Israel's perverse rage against the
BBC a successful form of intimidation BBC reporters never report Israelis
as terrorists: that term belongs exclusively to Palestinians imprisoned in their
own land. It is not surprising, as the recent Glasgow University study concluded,
that many television viewers in Britain believe that the Palestinians are the
invaders and occupiers.
On September 7, a Palestinian suicide bomber killed 16 Israelis in the town
of Beersheba. Every television news report allowed the Israeli government spokesman
to use this tragedy to justify the building of an apartheid wall when
the wall is pivotal to the causes of Palestinian violence. Almost every news
report marked the end of a five-month period of "relative peace and calm"
and "a lull in the violence." During those five months of relative
peace and calm, almost 400 Palestinians were killed, 71 of them in assassinations.
During the lull in the violence, more than 73 Palestinian children were killed.
A 13-year-old was murdered with a bullet through the heart, a 5-year-old was
shot in her face as she walked arm in arm with her 2-year-old sister. The body
of Mazen Majid, aged 14, was riddled with 18 Israeli bullets as he and his family
fled their bulldozed home.
None of this was reported in Britain as terrorism. Most of it was not reported
at all. After all, this was a period of peace and calm, a lull in the violence.
On May 19, Israeli tanks and helicopters fired on peaceful demonstrators, killing
eight of them. This atrocity had a certain significance; the demonstration was
part of a growing nonviolent Palestinian movement, which has seen peaceful protest
gatherings, often with prayers, along the apartheid wall. The rise of this Gandhian
movement is barely noted in the outside world.
The truth about Chechnya is similarly suppressed. On February 4, 2000, Russian
aircraft attacked the Chechen village of Katyr
Yurt. They used "vacuum bombs," which release petrol vapor and
suck people's lungs out, and are banned under the Geneva Convention. The Russians
bombed a convoy of survivors under a white flag. They murdered 363 men, women
and children. It was one of countless, little-known acts of terrorism in Chechnya
perpetrated by the Russian state, whose leader, Vladimir Putin, has the "complete
solidarity" of Tony Blair.
"Few of us", wrote the playwright Arthur Miller, "can easily
our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the
state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is
intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied."
It is time we stopped denying it.