Its all our fault (blaming the war in Iraq part II)
That seems to be the message in Naomi Klein’s latest piece over at the Guardian. Its always impressive that someone who has enjoyed the benefits of Western civilization can loathe it so much.
Anyway – Ms. Klein seems to be twisting herself into knots here to show that at the root of all that nasty anti-western terrorism we face is of course, our racism. To prove this point, she pulls together several different strands and attempts to tie them together to show that terrorists in London are blowing stuff up because of our extreme racism. Hmmm…interesting….
And just how does she tie all this up? Well, to start, she takes a reported statement by one of the failed bombers from July 21 – that he and his buddies prepared for their little outing by watching films on the war in Iraq – of women and children being “exterminated” by Americans and British. Of course she takes this at face value. Me, I am a little skeptical of these types of sentiments – as I’ve posted previously, it’s the Islamist nutters (ne ‘insurgents’) who are killing the bulk of women and children right now (you know, the brave souls who drive a car bomb into a crowd of children, who kidnap diplomats and workers, who blow up schools & mosques). So why would these lads feel the need to strike out at commuters in London? I realize that American and British hands are not clean here, that there are of course still civilians being killed, but the daily horrors, the daily bombings, kidnappings, beheadings, etc – these are acts being carried out by co-religionists in the name of their religion…so to me, all this “we are striking out at the west because of the suffering in Iraq” always sounds like nonsense spouted by people who are looking for the easy justification for their own violent actions (and its also the line that the lefties among us are so keen to hear and applaud).
And not to get off on a tangent, but where was all this righteous anger when Sadaam was filling mass graves all over the country like he was planting flower gardens? Why weren’t assholes like the London bombers strapping dynamite to their chests and blowing Saddam and his supporters up to stop the slaughter of the innocents? And for that matter, why aren’t they right now marching into Syria to stop the torture? Why aren’t they righteously demanding that the insurgent stop targeting ordinary Iraqi’s? Right – because its much easier to blame the West (since we are evil and jam packed with infidels to boot!).
Back to Naomi for a moment – she also brings up Sayyid Qutb – an Egyptian writer who is seen as the intellectual (if you can call it that) “architect of radical political Islam”. Apparently the puritanical Qutb had his delicate sensibilities disturbed while studying in the US in 1948. Apparently Quttb was shocked by both the licentious women and America’s fanatical racial discrimination.
To back this claim, she states:
” By coincidence, Qutb arrived in the United States in 1948, the year of the creation of the state of Israel. He witnessed an America blind to the thousands of Palestinians being made permanent refugees by the Zionist project.”
This bit about Palestinians being made ‘permanent refugees’ disturbs me. Is she suggesting that in 1948 people knew that the Palestinians were going to be held up as cynical pawns in the Arab world’s ongoing war against Israel for the next 60 years? Is she suggesting that the Americans somehow knew that the Palestinians were being made into permanent refuges by their own Arab brethren who will not allow them to settle in any other Arab country and become citizens because it plays much better to world sympathies to be able to hold up the poor Palestinian refugees as evidence of the evil of the state of Israel? No, she couldn’t be suggesting that, could she? Nonsense. The only reason the Palestinians are “permanent refugees” is because the Arab world has wanted them that way.
I always find it annoying that the Palestinians are held up to be the people who have suffered the most in human history. Yes, about 7-800,000 were made refugees when the state of Israel was declared. And lets not forget that the bulk of them were encouraged to leave by their Arab neighbours, with the promise that they would return as soon as Israel was wiped off the map by their invading armies. Oops. Little miscalculation there.
Also lets not forget that at the same time 7-800,000 jews were evicted from the neighbouring Arab states. Don’t here too much about those refugees, do you? Oh right, that’s because they settled in Israel and got on with life rather than focusing their energies on creating a death cult built upon a never ending cycle of grievances and paranoid fantasy.
Do you hear much from the millions (that’s millions of actual refugees, not millions of descendents of the original thousands) of German refugees from WWII? Should the millions of Germans evicted from the east stand up now and claim their right of return – should they march back to Konigsburg (now Kaliningrad) and the other former territories of East Prussia? Should they kindly ask Poland to move a few hundred kilometers to the East? No, because rather than spend 60 years wallowing in the past, the people affected have MOVED ON.
A little bit of a tangent there, but that kind of historical blindness always tends to tick me off.
__
Anyway, Klein’s other main point is that we are racist because we have the belief that American and European lives are worth more than the lives of Arabs and Muslims. Well, perhaps that’s because we value life more – if the arabs and muslims who celebrate suicide bombers as heroes and perpetuate a bizarre death cult mentality don’t value their lives, how are we supposed to?
Anyway – Ms. Klein seems to be twisting herself into knots here to show that at the root of all that nasty anti-western terrorism we face is of course, our racism. To prove this point, she pulls together several different strands and attempts to tie them together to show that terrorists in London are blowing stuff up because of our extreme racism. Hmmm…interesting….
And just how does she tie all this up? Well, to start, she takes a reported statement by one of the failed bombers from July 21 – that he and his buddies prepared for their little outing by watching films on the war in Iraq – of women and children being “exterminated” by Americans and British. Of course she takes this at face value. Me, I am a little skeptical of these types of sentiments – as I’ve posted previously, it’s the Islamist nutters (ne ‘insurgents’) who are killing the bulk of women and children right now (you know, the brave souls who drive a car bomb into a crowd of children, who kidnap diplomats and workers, who blow up schools & mosques). So why would these lads feel the need to strike out at commuters in London? I realize that American and British hands are not clean here, that there are of course still civilians being killed, but the daily horrors, the daily bombings, kidnappings, beheadings, etc – these are acts being carried out by co-religionists in the name of their religion…so to me, all this “we are striking out at the west because of the suffering in Iraq” always sounds like nonsense spouted by people who are looking for the easy justification for their own violent actions (and its also the line that the lefties among us are so keen to hear and applaud).
And not to get off on a tangent, but where was all this righteous anger when Sadaam was filling mass graves all over the country like he was planting flower gardens? Why weren’t assholes like the London bombers strapping dynamite to their chests and blowing Saddam and his supporters up to stop the slaughter of the innocents? And for that matter, why aren’t they right now marching into Syria to stop the torture? Why aren’t they righteously demanding that the insurgent stop targeting ordinary Iraqi’s? Right – because its much easier to blame the West (since we are evil and jam packed with infidels to boot!).
Back to Naomi for a moment – she also brings up Sayyid Qutb – an Egyptian writer who is seen as the intellectual (if you can call it that) “architect of radical political Islam”. Apparently the puritanical Qutb had his delicate sensibilities disturbed while studying in the US in 1948. Apparently Quttb was shocked by both the licentious women and America’s fanatical racial discrimination.
To back this claim, she states:
” By coincidence, Qutb arrived in the United States in 1948, the year of the creation of the state of Israel. He witnessed an America blind to the thousands of Palestinians being made permanent refugees by the Zionist project.”
This bit about Palestinians being made ‘permanent refugees’ disturbs me. Is she suggesting that in 1948 people knew that the Palestinians were going to be held up as cynical pawns in the Arab world’s ongoing war against Israel for the next 60 years? Is she suggesting that the Americans somehow knew that the Palestinians were being made into permanent refuges by their own Arab brethren who will not allow them to settle in any other Arab country and become citizens because it plays much better to world sympathies to be able to hold up the poor Palestinian refugees as evidence of the evil of the state of Israel? No, she couldn’t be suggesting that, could she? Nonsense. The only reason the Palestinians are “permanent refugees” is because the Arab world has wanted them that way.
I always find it annoying that the Palestinians are held up to be the people who have suffered the most in human history. Yes, about 7-800,000 were made refugees when the state of Israel was declared. And lets not forget that the bulk of them were encouraged to leave by their Arab neighbours, with the promise that they would return as soon as Israel was wiped off the map by their invading armies. Oops. Little miscalculation there.
Also lets not forget that at the same time 7-800,000 jews were evicted from the neighbouring Arab states. Don’t here too much about those refugees, do you? Oh right, that’s because they settled in Israel and got on with life rather than focusing their energies on creating a death cult built upon a never ending cycle of grievances and paranoid fantasy.
Do you hear much from the millions (that’s millions of actual refugees, not millions of descendents of the original thousands) of German refugees from WWII? Should the millions of Germans evicted from the east stand up now and claim their right of return – should they march back to Konigsburg (now Kaliningrad) and the other former territories of East Prussia? Should they kindly ask Poland to move a few hundred kilometers to the East? No, because rather than spend 60 years wallowing in the past, the people affected have MOVED ON.
A little bit of a tangent there, but that kind of historical blindness always tends to tick me off.
__
Anyway, Klein’s other main point is that we are racist because we have the belief that American and European lives are worth more than the lives of Arabs and Muslims. Well, perhaps that’s because we value life more – if the arabs and muslims who celebrate suicide bombers as heroes and perpetuate a bizarre death cult mentality don’t value their lives, how are we supposed to?
posted by Steve at
5:31 PM
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