Chickens, home and roost

Date: 14th Sept '01

Name: Malcolm X(tra)

Country: The World

As my good brother, Malcolm X said in connection with another tragedy in the USA, it's the chickens coming home to roost. This isn't to ignore the human consequences of what happened but to understand where this attack came from.

Have a look at this extract from a John Pilger article.

Pilger: Inevitable ring to the unimaginable

JOHN PILGER

The Herald, 13 September 2001

IF the attacks on America have their source in
the Islamic world, who can really be surprised?

Two days earlier, eight people were killed in
southern Iraq when British and American planes
bombed civilian areas. To my knowledge, not a
word appeared in the mainstream media in
Britain.

An estimated 200,000 Iraqis, according to the
Health Education Trust in London, died during
and in the immediate aftermath of the slaughter
known as the Gulf War.

This was never news that touched public
consciousness in the west.

At least a million civilians, half of them children,
have since died in Iraq as a result of a medieval
embargo imposed by the United States and
Britain.

In Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Mujadeen,
which gave birth to the fanatical Taliban, was
largely the creation of the CIA.

The terrorist training camps where Osama bin
Laden, now "America's most wanted man",
allegedly planned his attacks, were built with
American money and backing.

In Palestine, the enduring illegal occupation by
Israel would have collapsed long ago were it not
for US backing.

Far from being the terrorists of the world, the
Islamic peoples have been its victims -
principally the victims of US fundamentalism,
whose power, in all its forms, military, strategic
and economic, is the greatest source of
terrorism on earth.

This fact is censored from the Western media,
whose "coverage" at best minimises the
culpability of imperial powers. Richard Falk,
professor of international relations at Princeton,
put it this way: "Western foreign policy is
presented almost exclusively through a
self-righteous, one-way legal/moral screen (with)
positive images of Western values and
innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a
campaign of unrestricted political violence."

............................................

What has this to do with this week's atrocities in
America? If you travel among the impoverished
majority of humanity, you understand that it has
everything to do with it.

People are neither still, nor stupid. They see
their independence compromised, their
resources and land and the lives of their children
taken away, and their accusing fingers
increasingly point north: to the great enclaves of
plunder and privilege. Inevitably, terror breeds
terror and more fanaticism.

But how patient the oppressed have been.

It is only a few years ago that the Islamic
fundamentalist groups, willing to blow
themselves up in Israel and New York, were
formed, and only after Israel and the US had
rejected outright the hope of a Palestinian state,
and justice for a people scarred by imperialism.

Their distant voices of rage are now heard; the
daily horrors in faraway brutalised places have
at last come home.

* John Pilger is an award-winning, campaigning
journalist.

Full article at:
http://www.theherald.co.uk/news/archive/13-9-19101-0-24-43.html

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