[Peace-discuss] Forget ISIS: Humanity is at Stake

[David Johnson]

 <http://weknowwhatsup.blogspot.com/> Facts For Working People

Friday, November 27, 2015

Forget ISIS: Humanity is at Stake 

We reprint this article from
<http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/11/27/forget-isis-humanity-is-at-stake/>
Counterpunch 

This is a profound and accurate description of the savagery and slaughter
western capitalist nations have inflicted on the former colonial countries
of the old empires before the rise of US imperialism. The world's most
efficient war criminals are here in the US.

 
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Forget ISIS: Humanity is at Stake 
by Ramzy Baroud 

November 27, 2015

I still remember that smug look on his face, followed by the matter-of-fact
remarks that had western journalists laugh out loud.

"I'm now going to show you a picture of the luckiest man in Iraq," General
Norman Schwarzkopf, known as 'Stormin' Norman, said at a press conference
sometime in 1991, as he showed a video of US bombs blasting an Iraqi bridge,
seconds after the Iraqi driver managed to cross it. But then, a far more
unjust invasion and war followed in 2003, following a decade-long siege that
cost Iraq a million of its children and its entire economy.

It marked the end of sanity and the dissipation of any past illusions that
the United States was a friend of the Arabs. Not only did the Americans
destroy the central piece of our civilizational and collective experience
that spanned millennia, it took pleasure in degrading us in the process.
Their soldiers raped our women with obvious delight. They tortured our men,
and posed with the dead, mutilated bodies in photographs - mementos to
prolong the humiliation for eternity; they butchered our people, explained
in articulate terms as necessary and unavoidable collateral damage; they
blew up our mosques and churches and refused to accept that what was done to
Iraq over the course of twenty years might possibly constitute war crimes.

Then, they expanded their war taking it as far as US bombers could reach;
they tortured and floated their prisoners aboard large ships, cunningly
arguing that torture in international waters does not constitute a crime;
they suspended their victims on crosses and photographed them for future
entertainment.

Their entertainers, media experts, intellectuals and philosophers made
careers from dissecting us, dehumanizing us, belittling everything we hold
dear; they did not spare a symbol, a prophet, a tradition, values or set of
morals. When we reacted and protested out of despair, they further censured
us for being intolerant to view the humor in our demise; they used our angry
shouts to further highlight their sense of superiority and our imposed
lowliness.

They claimed that we initiated it all. But they lied. It was their
unqualified, inflated sense of importance that made them assign September
11, 2001 as the inauguration of history. All that they did to us, all the
colonial experiences and the open-ended butchery of the brown man, the black
man, any man or woman who did not look like them or uphold their values, was
inconsequential.

All the millions who died in Iraq were not considered a viable context to
any historical understanding of terrorism; in fact, terrorism became us; the
whole concept of terror, which is violence inflicted on innocent civilians
for political ends, abruptly became an entirely Arab and Muslim trait. In
retrospect, the US-Western-Israeli slaughter of the Vietnamese, Koreans,
Cambodians, Palestinians, Lebanese, Egyptians, South Americans, Africans,
was spared any censure. Yet, when Arabs attempted to resist, they were
deemed the originators of violence, the harbingers of terror.

Furthermore, they carried out massive social and demographic experiments in
Iraq which have been unleashed throughout the Middle East, since. They
pitted their victims against one another: the Shia against the Sunni, the
Sunni against the Sunni, the Arabs against the Kurds, and the Kurds against
the Turks. They called it a strategy, and congratulated themselves on a job
well done as they purportedly withdrew from Iraq. They disregarded the
consequences of tampering with civilizations that have evolved over the
course of millennia.

When their experiments went awry, they blamed their victims. Their
entertainers, media experts, intellectuals and philosophers flooded every
public platform to inform the world that the vital mistake of the Bush
administration was the assumption that Arabs were ready for democracy and
that, unlike the Japanese and the Germans, Arabs were made of different
blood, flesh and tears. Meanwhile, the finest of Arab men were raped in
their jails, kidnapped in broad daylight, tortured aboard large ships in
international waters, where the Law did not apply.

When the Americans and their allies claimed that they had left the region,
they left behind bleeding, impoverished nations, licking their wounds and
searching for bodies under rubble in diverse and macabre landscapes. Yet,
the Americans, the British, the French and the Israelis, continue to stage
their democratic elections around the debate of who will hit us the hardest,
humiliate us the most, teach the most unforgettable lesson and, in their
late night comedies, they mock our pain.

We, then, sprang up like wild grass in a desert, multiplied, and roamed the
streets of Rabat, Baghdad, Damascus and Cairo, calling for a revolution. We
wanted democracy for our sake, not Bush's democracy tinged with blood; we
wanted equality, change and reforms and a world in which Gaza is not
habitually destroyed by Israel and children of Derra could protest without
being shot; where leaders do not pose as divinities and relish the endless
arsenals of their western benefactors. We sought a life in which freedom is
not a rickety dingy crossing the sea to some uncertain horizon where we are
treated as human rubbish on the streets of western lands.

However, we were crushed; pulverized; imprisoned, burnt, beaten and raped
and, once more, told that we are not yet ready for democracy; not ready to
be free, to breathe, to exist with even a speck of dignity.

Many of us are still honorably fighting for our communities; others
despaired: they carried arms and went to war, fighting whoever they perceive
to be an enemy, who were many. Others went mad, lost every sense of
humanity; exacted revenge, tragically believing that justice can be achieved
by doing unto others what they have done unto you. They were joined by
others who headed to the West, some of whom had escaped the miseries of
their homelands, but found that their utopia was marred with alienation,
racism and neglect, saturated with a smug sense of superiority afflicted
upon them by their old masters.

It became a vicious cycle, and few seem interested now in revisiting General
Schwarzkopf's conquests in Iraq and Vietnam - with his smug attitude and the
amusement of western journalists - to know what actually went wrong. They
still refuse to acknowledge history, the bleeding Palestinian wound, the
heartbroken Egyptian revolutionaries and the destroyed sense of Iraqi
nationhood, the hemorrhaging streets of Libya and the horrifying outcomes of
all the western terrorist wars, with blind, oil-hungry dominating foreign
policies that have shattered the Cradle of Civilization, like never before.

However, this violence no longer affects Arabs alone, although Arabs and
Muslims remain the larger recipients of its horror. When the militants,
spawned by the US and their allies, felt cornered, they fanned out to every
corner of the globe, killing innocent people and shouting the name of God in
their final moment. Recently, they came for the French, a day after they
blew up the Lebanese, and few days after the Russians; and, before that, the
Turks and the Kurds, and, simultaneously, the Syrians and the Iraqis.

Who is next? No one really knows. We keep telling ourselves that 'it's just
a transition' and 'all will be well once the dust has settled'. But the
Russians, the Americans and everyone else continue bombing, each insisting
that they are bombing the right people for the right reason while, on the
ground, everyone is shooting at whoever they deem the enemy, the terrorist,
a designation that is often redefined. Yet, few speak out to recognize our
shared humanity and victimhood.

No - do not always expect the initials ISIS to offer an explanation for all
that goes wrong. Those who orchestrated the war on Iraq and those feeding
the war in Syria and arming Israel cannot be vindicated.

The crux of the matter: we either live in dignity together or continue to
perish alone, warring tribes and grief-stricken nations. This is not just
about indiscriminate bombing - our humanity, in fact, the future of the
human race is at stake.


Dr. Ramzy Baroud has been writing about the Middle East for over 20 years.
He is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author
of several books and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book
is My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story (Pluto Press,
London). His website is:  <http://ramzybaroud.net/> ramzybaroud.net 

 

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