10/8/05:J.PILGER:IRAQ INVASION BROUGHT LONDON BOMBING(GLW/FWD)
- From: uneoo@xxxxxxxxxx
- Date: 25 Aug 2005 01:57:34 +1000
fwd-22-Aug-2005
[AddedNote: Regarding with the causes that lead to London bombing,
the governments (UK/AU in particular) unsuccessfully try to twist
the facts. The governments shifting blames to muslim clerics who
spoke strongly against US-led invasion in Iraq. Those political
opportunist and racist rats vilify the muslim community; put
arbitrary division of so-called "moderate" and "radical" muslims.
Attempts were made to silence those who spoke out against the
invasion.
Notwithstanding such government tactics, let it be known that the
majority of Australian people are strongly opposed against the
illegal occupation of Iraq. -- U Ne Oo.]
--------
GREENLEFT WEEKLY AUSTRALIA, 10-AUG-2005
LONDON TERROR BRING HOME IRAQ INTERVENTION
John Pilger, London
pilger.carlton.com
The latest bombings in London have produced a strange political
atmosphere here; I cannot recall anything like it. A truth is
struggling to be heard. It is being said guardedly,
apologetically. Occasionally, a member of the public breaks the
silence, as an East Londoner did when he walked in front of a CNN
camera crew and reporter in mid-platitude. "Iraq!" he said. "We
invaded Iraq and what did we expect? Go on say it."
The Scottish MP Alex Salmond tried to say it on BBC radio. He was told
he was speaking "in poor taste ... before the bodies are even
buried". The Respect MP George Galloway was lectured by BBC televison
presenter that he was being "crass". The Mayor of London, Ken
Livingstone, said the diametric opposite of what he had previously
said, which was that the invasion of Iraq would come home to our
streets. With the exception of Galloway, not one so-called anti-war MP
spoke out in clear, unequivocal English. The warmongers were allowed
to fix the boundaries of public debate; one of the more idiotic, in
the Guardian, called PM Tony Blair "the world's leading statesman".
And yet, like the man who interrupted CNN, people understand and know
why, just as the majority of Britons oppose the war and believe Blair
is a liar. This frightens the British political elite. At a large
media party I attended, many of the important guests uttered "Iraq"
and "Blair" as a kind of catharsis for that which they dared not say
professionally and publicly.
The bombs of July 7 were Blair's bombs. Blair brought home to this
country his and Bush's illegal, unprovoked and blood-soaked adventure
in the Middle East. Were it not for his epic irresponsibility, the
Londoners who died in the Tube and on the No. 30 bus almost certainly
would be alive today. This is what Livingstone ought to have said. To
paraphrase perhaps the only challenging question put to Blair on the
eve of the invasion, it is now surely beyond all doubt that the man is
unfit to be prime minister.
How much more evidence is needed? Before the invasion, Blair was
warned by the Joint Intelligence Committee that "by far the greatest
terrorist threat" to this country would be "heightened by military
action against Iraq". He was warned by 79% of Londoners who, according
to a YouGov survey in February 2003, believed that a British attack on
Iraq "would make a terrorist attack on London more likely". A month
ago, a leaked, classified CIA report revealed that the invasion had
turned Iraq into a focal point of terrorism. Before the invasion, said
the CIA, Iraq "exported no terrorist threat to its neighbours",
because Saddam Hussein was "implacably hostile to al Qaeda".
Now, a July 18 report by the Chatham House organisation, a "think
tank" deep within the British establishment, may well beckon Blair's
coup de grace. It says there is "no doubt" the invasion of Iraq has
"given a boost to the al-Qaeda network" in "propaganda, recruitment
and fundraising", while providing an ideal targeting and training area
for terrorists. "Riding pillion with a powerful ally has cost Iraqi,
US and British lives. Right-wing academic Paul Wilkinson, a voice of
Western power, was the principal author. Read between the lines and it
says the prime minister is now a serious liability. Those who run this
country know he has committed a great crime; the "link" has been made.
Blair's bunker-mantra is that there was terrorism long before the
invasion, notably 9/11. Anyone with an understanding of the painful
history of the Middle East would not have been surprised by September
11 nor by the bombing of Madrid and London, only that they had not
happened earlier. I have reported the region for 35 years, and if I
could describe in a word how millions of Arab and Muslim people felt,
I would say "humiliated". When Egypt looked like winning back its
captured territory in the 1973 war with Israel, I walked through
jubilant crowds in Cairo; it felt as if the weight of history's
humiliation had lifted. In a very Egyptian flourish, one man said to
me, "We once chased cricket balls at the British club. Now we are
free."
They were not free, of course. The US re-supplied the Israeli army and
they almost lost everything again. In Palestine, the humiliation of a
captive people is Israeli policy. How many Palestinian babies have
died at Israeli checkpoints after their mothers, bleeding and
screaming in premature labour, have been forced to give birth beside
the road at a military checkpoint with the lights of a hospital in the
distance? How many old men have been forced to show obeisance to young
Israeli conscripts? How many families have been blown to bits by
US-supplied F-16s with British-supplied parts?
The gravity of the bombing of London, said a BBC commentator, "can be
measured by the fact that it marks Britain's first suicide
bombing". What about Iraq? There were no suicide bombers in Iraq until
Blair and US President George Bush invaded. What about Palestine?
In the 1991 Gulf "war", US and British forces left more than 200,000
Iraqis dead and injured, and the infrastructure of their country in
"Ban apocalyptic state", according to the United Nations. The
subsequent embargo, designed and promoted by zealots in Washington and
Whitehall, was not unlike a medieval siege. Denis Halliday, the United
Nations official assigned to administer the near-starvation food
allowance, called it "genocidal".
I witnessed its consequences: tracts of southern Iraq contaminated
with depleted uranium and cluster bomblets waiting to explode. I
watched dying children, some of the half-a-million infants whose
deaths UNICEF attributed to the embargo deaths that then-US Secretary
of State Madeline Albright said were "worth it". In the West, this was
hardly reported. Throughout the Muslim world, the bitterness was like
a presence, its contagion reaching many young British-born Muslims.
In 2001, in revenge for the killing of 3000 people in the Twin Towers,
more than 20,000 Muslims died in the Anglo-American invasion of
Afghanistan. This was revealed by Jonathan Steele in the London
Guardian and was never news, to my knowledge. The attack on Iraq was
the Rubicon, making the reprisal against Madrid and the bombing of
London entirely predictable: the latter "in response to the massacres
carried out by Britain in Iraq and Afghanistan ...", claimed a group
called the Organisation for El Qaeda in Europe. Whether or not the
claim was genuine, the reason was. Bush and Blair wanted a "war on
terror" and they got it.
Omitted from public discussion is that their state terror makes al
Qaeda's appear minuscule by comparison. More than 100,000 Iraqi men,
women and children have been killed, not by suicide bombers, but by
the Anglo-American "coalition", says a peer-reviewed study published
in the Lancet, and largely ignored.
In his poem From Iraq, Michael Rosen wrote: "We are the unfound/We are
uncounted/You don't see the homes we made/We're not even the small
print or the bit in brackets ... because we lived far from you/because
you have cameras that point the other way ...
Imagine, for a moment, you are in the Iraqi city of Fallujah. It is a
US police state, like a vast penned ghetto. Since April last year, the
hospitals there have been subjected to a US policy of collective
punishment. Staff have been attacked by US marines, doctors have been
shot, emergency medicines blocked. Children have been murdered in
front of their families.
Now imagine the same state of affairs imposed on the London hospitals
that received the victims of the bombing. When will someone draw this
parallel at one of Blair's staged press conferences, at which he is
allowed to emote for the cameras about our values outlast[ing] theirs?
Silence is not journalism. In Fallujah, they know "our values" only
too well. And when will someone invite the obsequious Bob Geldoff to
explain why his hero, Blair's smoke-and-mirrors debt cancellation
amounts to less than the money the Blair government spends in a week,
brutalising Iraq?
The hand-wringing over "whither Islam's soul is another
distraction. Christianity leaves Islam for dead as an industrial
killer. The cause of the current terrorism is neither religion nor
hatred for "our way of life". It is political, requiring a political
solution. It is injustice and double standards, which plant the
deepest grievances. That, and the culpability of our leaders, and the
"cameras that point the other way", are the core of it.
On July 19, while the BBC governors were holding their annual general
meeting at Television Centre, an inspired group of British documentary
filmmakers met outside the main gates and conducted a series of news
reports of the kind you do not see on television. Actors played famous
reporters doing their "camera pieces". The "stories" they reported
included the targeting of the civilian population of Iraq, the
application of the Nuremberg Principles to Iraq, the US's illegal
rewriting of the laws of Iraq and theft of its resources through
privatisation, the everyday torture and humiliation of ordinary
people, and the failure to protect Iraqis archaeological and cultural
heritage.
Blair is using the London bombing to further deplete our rights and
those of others, as Bush has done in the US. Their goal is not
security, but greater control. The memory of their victims in Iraq,
Afghanistan, Palestine and elsewhere demands the renewal of our
anger. The troops must come home. Nothing less is owed to those who
died and suffered in London on July 7, unnecessarily, and nothing less
is owed to those whose lives are marked if this travesty endures.
>From Green Left Weekly, August 10, 2005.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.
--
http://netipr.org/~uneoo/ (Burma HR Activity)
http://netipr.org/saorg/ (Refugee Rights Activity)
emails: uneoo@xxxxxxxxxx druneoo@xxxxxxxxxxx
POST: Dr U Ne Oo, 18 Shannon Place,Adelaide SA5000,AUSTRALIA
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