" What Unions Do."ĭuke University, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences. Now we have learned what this means.The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO). Theology versus technology, the suicide bomber against the nuclear power. They talked about how no one would help them but God. Now I remember some of those Muslims in that film, their families burnt by American-made bombs and weapons. But, of course, the United States will want to strike back against “world terror.” Indeed, who could ever point the finger at Americans now for using that pejorative and sometimes racist word “terrorism”?Įight years ago, I helped make a television series that tried to explain why so many Muslims had come to hate the West. America has bankrolled Israel’s wars for so many years that it believed this would be cost-free. Our broken promises, perhaps even our destruction of the Ottoman Empire, led inevitably to this tragedy. No, Israel was not to blame–though 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. 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–all these must be obscured lest they provide the smallest fractional reason for the mass savagery on September 11. 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. ![]() 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.Īsk an Arab how he responds to the thousands of innocent deaths, and he or she will respond as decent people should, that it is an unspeakable crime. And then how easy was our failure to recognize the new weapon of the Middle East, which neither Americans nor any other Westerners could equal: the despair-driven, desperate suicide bomber.Īnd there will be, inevitably, and quite immorally, an attempt to obscure the historical wrongs and the injustices that lie behind the firestorms. Then there were the attacks on US bases in Saudi Arabia, and last year’s attempt–almost successful, it turned out–to sink the USS Cole in Aden. There were just seven seconds between the Marine bombing and the destruction of the French three miles away. Did not the suicide bombers who killed 239 American servicemen and 58 French paratroopers in Beirut on October 23, 1983, time their attacks with unthinkable precision? How could a backward, conservative, undemocratic and corrupt group of regimes and small, violent organizations fulfill such preposterous promises? Now we know.Īnd in the hours that followed the September 11 annihilation, I began to remember those other extraordinary assaults upon the United States and its allies, miniature now by comparison with yesterday’s casualties. 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. That Palestinians could celebrate the massacre of thousands of 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. No, there is no doubting the utter, indescribable evil of what has happened in the United States. It is also about US 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–paid and uniformed by America’s Israeli ally–hacking and raping and murdering their way through refugee camps. But this is not really the war of democracy versus terror that the world will be asked to believe in the coming days. ![]() Their boundless confidence allowed them to declare war on America. 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. And yes, Osama bin Laden comes to mind–his money, his theology, his frightening dedication to destroying American power.
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