[Media-watch] Time to Recognize State Terror; John Pilger; 2/10/04)

Cem Ertur ertur at usa.net
Mon Oct 4 11:08:34 BST 2004


http://www.globalecho.org/view_article.php?aid=1710




Time to Recognize State Terror


The world is dividing into two hostile camps: Islam and "us." That is the
unerring message from Western governments, press, radio and television. For
Islam, read terrorists. It is reminiscent of the cold war, when the world was
divided between "Reds" and us, and even a strategy of annihilation was
permissible in our defense. We now know, or we ought to know, that so much of
that was a charade; released official files make clear the Soviet threat was
for public consumption only.


John Pilger; Global Echo; 2nd Oct, 04


Every day now, as during the cold war, a one-way moral mirror is held up to us
as a true reflection of events. The new threat is given impetus with every
terrorist outrage, be it at Beslan or Jakarta. Seen in the one-way mirror, our
leaders make grievous mistakes, but their good intentions are not in question.
Tony Blair's "idealism" and "decency" are promoted by his accredited
mainstream detractors, as the concocted Greek tragedy of his political demise
opens on the media stage. Having taken part in the killing of as many as
37,000 Iraqi civilians, Blair's distractions, not his victims, are news: from
his arcane rivalry with treasurer Gordon Brown, his Tweedledee, to his
damascene conversion to the perils of global warming. On the atrocity at
Beslan, Blair is allowed to say, without irony or challenge, that "this
international terrorism will not prevail." These are the same words spoken by
Mussolini soon after he had bombed civilians in Abyssinia. 

Heretics who look behind the one-way mirror and see the utter dishonesty of
all this, who identify Blair and his collaborators as war criminals in the
literal and legal sense and present evidence of his cynicism and immorality,
are few; but they have wide support among the public, whose awareness has
never been higher, in my experience. It is the British public's passionate
indifference, if not contempt for the political games of Blair/Brown and their
courts and its accelerating interest in the way the world really is, that
unnerves those with power. 

Let's look at a few examples of the way the world is presented and the way it
really is. The occupation of Iraq is presented as "a mess": a blundering,
incompetent American military up against Islamic fanatics. In truth, the
occupation is a systematic, murderous assault on a civilian population by a
corrupt American officer class, given license by its superiors in Washington.
Last May, the US Marines used battle tanks and helicopter gunships to attack
the slums of Fallujah. They admitted killing 600 people, a figure far greater
than the total number of civilians killed by the "insurgents" during the past
year. The generals were candid; this futile slaughter was an act of revenge
for the killing of three American mercenaries. Sixty years earlier, the SS Das
Reich division killed 600 French civilians at Oradour-sur-Glane as revenge for
the kidnapping of a German officer by the resistance. Is there a difference? 

These days, the Americans routinely fire missiles into Fallujah and other
dense urban areas; they murder whole families. If the word terrorism has any
modern application, it is this industrial state terrorism. The British have a
different style. There are more than 40 known cases of Iraqis having died at
the hands of British soldiers; just one soldier has been charged. In the
current issue of the magazine The Journalist, Lee Gordon, a freelance
reporter, wrote, "Working as a Brit in Iraq is hazardous, particularly in the
south where our troops have a reputation (unreported at home) for brutality."
Neither is the growing disaffection among British troops reported at home.
This is so worrying the Ministry of Defense that it has moved to placate the
family of 17-year-old soldier David McBride by taking him off the AWOL list
after he refused to fight in Iraq. Almost all the families of soldiers killed
in Iraq have denounced the occupation and Blair, all of which is
unprecedented. 

Only by recognizing the terrorism of states is it possible to understand, and
deal with, acts of terrorism by groups and individuals which, however
horrific, are tiny by comparison. Moreover, their source is inevitably the
official terrorism for which there is no media language. Thus, the State of
Israel has been able to convince many outsiders that it is merely a victim of
terrorism when, in fact, its own unrelenting, planned terrorism is the cause
of the infamous retaliation by Palestinian suicide bombers. For all of
Israel's perverse rage against the BBC ­ a successful form of intimidation ­
BBC reporters never report Israelis as terrorists: that term belongs
exclusively to Palestinians imprisoned in their own land. It is not
surprising, as the recent Glasgow University study concluded, that many
television viewers in Britain believe that the Palestinians are the invaders
and occupiers. 

On September 7, a Palestinian suicide bomber killed 16 Israelis in the town of
Beersheba. Every television news report allowed the Israeli government
spokesman to use this tragedy to justify the building of an apartheid wall ­
when the wall is pivotal to the causes of Palestinian violence. Almost every
news report marked the end of a five-month period of "relative peace and calm"
and "a lull in the violence." During those five months of relative peace and
calm, almost 400 Palestinians were killed, 71 of them in assassinations.
During the lull in the violence, more than 73 Palestinian children were
killed. A 13-year-old was murdered with a bullet through the heart, a
5-year-old was shot in her face as she walked arm in arm with her 2-year-old
sister. The body of Mazen Majid, aged 14, was riddled with 18 Israeli bullets
as he and his family fled their bulldozed home. 

None of this was reported in Britain as terrorism. Most of it was not reported
at all. After all, this was a period of peace and calm, a lull in the
violence. On May 19, Israeli tanks and helicopters fired on peaceful
demonstrators, killing eight of them. This atrocity had a certain
significance; the demonstration was part of a growing nonviolent Palestinian
movement, which has seen peaceful protest gatherings, often with prayers,
along the apartheid wall. The rise of this Gandhian movement is barely noted
in the outside world. 

The truth about Chechnya is similarly suppressed. On February 4, 2000, Russian
aircraft attacked the Chechen village of Katyr Yurt. They used "vacuum bombs,"
which release petrol vapor and suck people's lungs out, and are banned under
the Geneva Convention. The Russians bombed a convoy of survivors under a white
flag. They murdered 363 men, women and children. It was one of countless,
little-known acts of terrorism in Chechnya perpetrated by the Russian state,
whose leader, Vladimir Putin, has the "complete solidarity" of Tony Blair. 

"Few of us", wrote the playwright Arthur Miller, "can easily surrender our
belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has
lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so
the evidence has to be internally denied." 

It is time we stopped denying it. 






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