for example:

Salaam ala man itabi’a al Huda

A must see and listen

Please forward.

The Real Truth of Wars Dr Dahlia Wasfi

Born in 1971 in New York of a Jewish-American mother and Muslim Iraqi father.

http://www.safeshare.tv/w/qjnEABgxUS

And more complete here

http://wn.com/Dr_Dahlia_Wasfi__The_Truth_About_US_Occupation

some highlights …

… WOT cover to our military aggression to gain control of resources of western Asia …

Poor of this country to kill poor of those Muslim countries

… Blood for oil …

For most of world we are the terrorists…

….Remaining silent … is criminal …

… Legitimate resistance to illegal occupation …

… struggling against oppressive hand of empire ….

… Terrorist cells in Washington DC …

… No justice no peace

http://www.safeshare.tv/w/qjnEABgxUS

Transcript:

NOTE:

We have been saying many of these things for years, every since the illegal unjust occupation of Afghanistan that was planned before Pearl Harbor like event of 911 that the neo con Project for a New American Century wished for and got just as they had hoped in order to reenergize the military upgrade and strategic occupations in the Middle east (interesting coincidence) , but her way is very powerful , very moving, straight to the point …

How many innocent Muslims have been killed unjustly and suffered by these crimes against humanity she destrcibes, by the same people who are the huge corporations, the too big to fail and jail banksters in collusion with the Military Industrial Government Financial complex.

This is the cartel that the Occupy Wall Street movement is protesting about since their destructive immoral greed is destroying the earth and all people that they deem counterproductive to their agenda of control.

I actually cried with tears for the power and truth of it, and its implications, and how it is exactly is as what I have been saying, is what many people are now saying, and times, places and people are a-moving quickly to the appointed End Time Events prophesized about in the Quran and Sunnah, and may Allah be praised the Most Almighty and Glorious, and may the salutations of peace and blessings be upon His Prophet Muhammad and his family and faithful followers.

See

http://terrorismbreedsterrorism.wordpress.com

https://occupationbreedsterrorism.wordpress.com

<><><>

Partial Transcript

For more search about it please

We have an obligation to every last victim of this illegal aggression, because all of this carnage has been done in our name.

Since World War II, 90 percent of the casualties of war are unarmed civilians, a third of them children. Our victims have done nothing to us. From Palestine to Afghanistan to Iraq to Somalia to wherever our next target may be, their murders are not collateral damage. They are the nature of modern warfare.

They don’t hate us because of our freedoms. They hate us because every day, we are funding and committing crimes against humanity.

The so-called war on terror is a cover for our military aggression to gain control of the resources of Western nations. This is sending the poor of this country to kill the poor of those Muslim countries. This is trading blood for oil. This is genocide, and to most of the world, we are the terrorists.

In these times, remaining silent about our responsibility to the world and its future is criminal, and in light of our complicity in the supreme crimes against humanity in Iraq and Afghanistan and ongoing violations of the UN charter and international law, how dare any American criticize the actions of legitimate resistance to illegal occupation? How dare we condemn anyone else’s violence?

Our so-called enemies in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine and our other colonies around the world, and our inner cities here at home are struggling against the oppressive hand of empire, demanding respect for their humanity. They are labeled insurgents or terrorists for resisting rape and pillage by the white establishment, but they are our brothers and sisters in the struggle for justice.

The civilians at the other end of our weapons don’t have a choice. But American soldiers have choices, and while there may have been some doubt five years ago, today, we know the truth. Our soldiers don’t sacrifice for duty, honor and country. They sacrifice for Kellogg, Brown and Root. They don’t fight for America–they fight for their lives and their buddies beside them because we put them in a war zone.

They’re not defending our freedoms–they are laying the foundations for 14 permanent military bases to defend the freedoms of ExxonMobil and British Petroleum. They’re not establishing democracy, they’re establishing the basis for an economic occupation to continue after the military occupation has ended.

Iraqi society today, thanks to American help, is defined by house raids, death squads, checkpoints, detentions, curfews, blood in the streets and constant violence. We must dare to speak out in support of the Iraqi people, who resist and endure the horrific existence we brought upon them through our bloodthirsty imperial crusade.

We must dare to speak out in support of the American war resisters–the real military heroes, who uphold their oath to defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, including those terrorist cells in Washington, D.C., more commonly known as the legislative, executive and judicial branches.

I close with a quote from Frederick Douglass, but if you want more information, please visit my Web site at liberatethis.com.

Frederick Douglass said: “Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its mighty waters.

“The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will.”

Every one of us must keep demanding, keep fighting, keep thundering, keep plowing, keep speaking and keep struggling until justice is served. No justice, no peace.

BOOK:

Cutting the Fuse: The Explosion of Global Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It,

by Robert A. Pape and James K. Feldman

Their work fundamentally changes how we understand the root causes of the most important terrorist campaigns today. Through a close analysis of suicide campaigns by Al Qaeda and in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon, Israel, Chechnya, and Sri Lanka, the authors provide powerful new evidence that religion alone motivates only a tiny majority of these attacks. Instead, the root cause is foreign military occupation, which triggers secular and religious people to carry out suicide attacks.

Cutting the Fuse proves that the increase in suicide terrorism attacks is not due to radical Islam or jihadism but the main cause for over 90% of the suicide campaigns is due to military occupation of regions that terrorists prize or have concern for.

Suicide Bombers: Religious fanatics, or simply resisting foregin military occupation?
April 1, 2010 9:02 AM RSS feed for this thread Subscribe
Suicide bombers from Lebanon, the West Bank, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Chechnya have two things in common: they are Muslim and they live under occupation. University of Chicago Professor Dr. Robert A. Pape, who has assembled a comprehensive database of every (or nearly every) suicide bombing since 1980, has been the most prominent proponent of the view that it is occupation, not religion, that is the single most important motivating factor for suicide bombers… more than 95% of suicide bombers come from countries under occupation… Pape and his colleagues at the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism, ask What Makes Chechen Women So Dangerous? -Via The Washington Note

Anti-US demonstration in Baghdad, 2003

Anti-invasion protests in Baghdad in 2003. Photograph: EPA

Demonstrators protest US troop increase for Afghanistan in Los Angeles

UPI/Jim Ruymen

NEW YORK Organizers say 300-thousand people marched against the Iraq war today in New York. The protesters demanded that President Bush withdraw U-S troops immediately. Reverend Al Sharpton, who was among the marchers, called the war “illegal, immoral and unethical.”

anti-war rally sponsored by ANSWER in San Francisco on Sunday, March 18, 2007.

9-11 Truth is the greatest Anti-War message.

says it all

Comments (2)

US soldiers kill 16 Afghan civilians in revenge [Peace and war, Human rights, Media] — Administrator @ 9:47 am

Afghan refugees demonstrate against being sent back to unsafe Afghanistan

By Bill Van Auken:

Highway massacre sparks anti-US protests in Afghanistan5 March 2007

The slaughter of some 16 civilians and the wounding of at least two dozen more by US troops in Afghanistan Sunday sparked angry protests demanding a withdrawal of the occupation forces and the ouster of Washington’s puppet, President Hamid Karzai.

The killings took place on a main highway between the Afghan town of Jalalabad and the Pakistani border after a suicide bomber detonated a car loaded with explosives near a convoy of US Marines.

Both eyewitnesses to the incident and some Afghan officials described the US troops firing indiscriminately at civilians in their vehicles and on foot in angry retaliation for the suicide attack.

Jewish protests against Israel not reported by press.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFpfy1SBCgo

Terrorists or FREEDOM FIGHTERS, ours or theirs?

protest Cardiff Protest posters in Cardiff Photograph: Hannah Waldram/guardian.co.uk

THOUSANDS IN MANCHESTER PROTEST FOR GAZA

Filed under: Manchester, Palestine — Andy Newman @ 3:25 pm

PICTURES BY RICHARD SEARLE

Foreign Occupation main reason for ‘blowback’ Terrorism

BOOK:

An engaging book for investigation:

Cutting the Fuse: The Explosion of Global Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It

by Robert A. Pape and James K. Feldman

Instead, the root cause is foreign military occupation, which triggers secular and religious people to carry out suicide attacks.

Suicide Bombers: Religious fanatics, or simply resisting foregin military occupation?

April 1, 2010 9:02 AM RSS feed for this thread Subscribe
Suicide bombers from Lebanon, the West Bank, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Chechnya have two things in common: they are Muslim and they live under occupation. University of Chicago Professor Dr. Robert A. Pape, who has assembled a comprehensive database of every (or nearly every) suicide bombing since 1980, has been the most prominent proponent of the view that it is occupation, not religion, that is the single most important motivating factor for suicide bombers… more than 95% of suicide bombers come from countries under occupation… Pape and his colleagues at the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism, ask What Makes Chechen Women So Dangerous? -Via The Washington Note

ARGUMENT PRINT | TEXT SIZE

| EMAIL | SINGLE PAGE

It’s the Occupation, Stupid

Extensive research into the causes of suicide terrorism proves Islam isn’t to blame — the root of the problem is foreign military occupations.

BY ROBERT A. PAPE | OCTOBER 18, 2010

Although no one wants to talk about it, 9/11 is still hurting America. That terrible day inflicted a wound of public fear that easily reopens with the smallest provocation, and it continues to bleed the United States of money, lives, and goodwill around the world. Indeed, America’s response to its fear has, in turn, made Americans less safe and has inspired more threats and attacks.

In the decade since 9/11, the United States has conquered and occupied two large Muslim countries (Afghanistan and Iraq), compelled a huge Muslim army to root out a terrorist sanctuary (Pakistan), deployed thousands of Special Forces troops to numerous Muslim countries (Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, etc.), imprisoned hundreds of Muslims without recourse, and waged a massive war of ideas involving Muslim clerics to denounce violence and new institutions to bring Western norms to Muslim countries. Yet Americans still seem strangely mystified as to why some Muslims might be angry about this situation.

In a narrow sense, America is safer today than on 9/11. There has not been another attack on the same scale. U.S. defenses regarding immigration controls, airport security, and the disruption of potentially devastating domestic plots have all improved.

But in a broader sense, America has become perilously unsafe. Each month, there are more suicide terrorists trying to kill Americans and their allies in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other Muslim countries than in all the years before 2001 combined. From 1980 to 2003, there were 343 suicide attacks around the world, and at most 10 percent were anti-American inspired. Since 2004, there have been more than 2,000, over 91 percent against U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other countries.

Yes, these attacks are overseas and mostly focused on military and diplomatic targets. So too, however, were the anti-American suicide attacks before 2001. It is important to remember that the 1995 and 1996 bombings of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen were the crucial dots that showed the threat was rising prior to 9/11. Today, such dots are occurring by the dozens every month. So why is nobody connecting them?

U.S. military policies have not stopped the rising wave of extremism in the Muslim world. The reason has not been lack of effort, or lack of bipartisan support for aggressive military policies, or lack of funding, or lack of genuine patriotism.

No. Something else is creating the mismatch between America’s effort and the results.

For nearly a decade, Americans have been waging a long war against terrorism without much serious public debate about what is truly motivating terrorists to kill them. In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, this was perfectly explicable — the need to destroy al Qaeda’s camps in Afghanistan was too urgent to await sober analyses of root causes.

But, the absence of public debate did not stop the great need to know or, perhaps better to say, to “understand” the events of that terrible day. In the years before 9/11, few Americans gave much thought to what drives terrorism — a subject long relegated to the fringes of the media, government, and universities. And few were willing to wait for new studies, the collection of facts, and the dispassionate assessment of alternative causes. Terrorism produces fear and anger, and these emotions are not patient.

A simple narrative was readily available, and a powerful conventional wisdom began to exert its grip. Because the 9/11 hijackers were all Muslims, it was easy to presume that Islamic fundamentalism was the central motivating force driving the 19 hijackers to kill themselves in order to kill Americans. Within weeks after the 9/11 attacks, surveys of American attitudes show that this presumption was fast congealing into a hard reality in the public mind. Americans immediately wondered, “Why do they hate us?” and almost as immediately came to the conclusion that it was because of “who we are, not what we do.” As President George W. Bush said in his first address to Congress after the 9/11 attacks: “They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.”

Thus was unleashed the “war on terror.”

The narrative of Islamic fundamentalism did more than explain why America was attacked and encourage war against Iraq. It also pointed toward a simple, grand solution. If Islamic fundamentalism was driving the threat and if its roots grew from the culture of the Arab world, then America had a clear mission: To transform Arab societies — with Western political institutions and social norms as the ultimate antidote to the virus of Islamic extremism.

This narrative had a powerful effect on support for the invasion of Iraq. Opinion polls show that for years before the invasion, more than 90 percent of the U.S. public believed that Saddam Hussein was harboring weapons of mass destruction (WMD). But this belief alone was not enough to push significant numbers to support war.

What really changed after 9/11 was the fear that anti-American Muslims desperately wanted to kill Americans and so any risk that such extremists would get weapons of mass destruction suddenly seemed too great. Although few Americans feared Islam before 9/11, by the spring of 2003, a near majority — 49 percent — strongly perceived that half or more of the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims were deeply anti-American, and a similar fraction also believed that Islam itself promoted violence. No wonder there was little demand by congressional committees or the public at large for a detailed review of intelligence on Iraq’s WMD prior to the invasion.

The goal of transforming Arab societies into true Western democracies had powerful effects on U.S. commitments to Afghanistan and Iraq. Constitutions had to be written; elections held; national armies built; entire economies restructured. Traditional barriers against women had to be torn down. Most important, all these changes also required domestic security, which meant maintaining approximately 150,000 U.S. and coalition ground troops in Iraq for many years and increasing the number of U.S. and Western troops in Afghanistan each year from 2003 on.

Put differently, adopting the goal of transforming Muslim countries is what created the long-term military occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Yes, the United States would almost surely have sought to create a stable order after toppling the regimes in these countries in any case. However, in both, America’s plans quickly went far beyond merely changing leaders or ruling parties; only by creating Western-style democracies in the Muslim world could Americans defeat terrorism once and for all.

There’s just one problem: We now know that this narrative is not true.

New research provides strong evidence that suicide terrorism such as that of 9/11 is particularly sensitive to foreign military occupation, and not Islamic fundamentalism or any ideology independent of this crucial circumstance. Although this pattern began to emerge in the 1980s and 1990s, a wealth of new data presents a powerful picture.

More than 95 percent of all suicide attacks are in response to foreign occupation, according to extensive research that we conducted at the University of Chicago’s Project on Security and Terrorism, where we examined every one of the over 2,200 suicide attacks across the world from 1980 to the present day. As the United States has occupied Afghanistan and Iraq, which have a combined population of about 60 million, total suicide attacks worldwide have risen dramatically — from about 300 from 1980 to 2003, to 1,800 from 2004 to 2009. Further, over 90 percent of suicide attacks worldwide are now anti-American. The vast majority of suicide terrorists hail from the local region threatened by foreign troops, which is why 90 percent of suicide attackers in Afghanistan are Afghans.

Israelis have their own narrative about terrorism, which holds that Arab fanatics seek to destroy the Jewish state because of what it is, not what it does. But since Israel withdrew its army from Lebanon in May 2000, there has not been a single Lebanese suicide attack. Similarly, since Israel withdrew from Gaza and large parts of the West Bank, Palestinian suicide attacks are down over 90 percent.

Some have disputed the causal link between foreign occupation and suicide terrorism, pointing out that some occupations by foreign powers have not resulted in suicide bombings — for example, critics often cite post-World War II Japan and Germany. Our research provides sufficient evidence to address these criticisms by outlining the two factors that determine the likelihood of suicide terrorism being employed against an occupying force.

The first factor is social distance between the occupier and occupied. The wider the social distance, the more the occupied community may fear losing its way of life. Although other differences may matter, research shows that resistance to occupations is especially likely to escalate to suicide terrorism when there is a difference between the predominant religion of the occupier and the predominant religion of the occupied.

Religious difference matters not because some religions are predisposed to suicide attacks. Indeed, there are religious differences even in purely secular suicide attack campaigns, such as the LTTE (Hindu) against the Sinhalese (Buddhists).

Rather, religious difference matters because it enables terrorist leaders to claim that the occupier is motivated by a religious agenda that can scare both secular and religious members of a local community — this is why Osama bin Laden never misses an opportunity to describe U.S. occupiers as “crusaders” motivated by a Christian agenda to convert Muslims, steal their resources, and change the local population’s way of life.

The second factor is prior rebellion. Suicide terrorism is typically a strategy of last resort, often used by weak actors when other, non-suicidal methods of resistance to occupation fail. This is why we see suicide attack campaigns so often evolve from ordinary terrorist or guerrilla campaigns, as in the cases of Israel and Palestine, the Kurdish rebellion in Turkey, or the LTTE in Sri Lanka.

One of the most important findings from our research is that empowering local groups can reduce suicide terrorism. In Iraq, the surge’s success was not the result of increased U.S. military control of Anbar province, but the empowerment of Sunni tribes, commonly called the Anbar Awakening, which enabled Iraqis to provide for their own security. On the other hand, taking power away from local groups can escalate suicide terrorism. In Afghanistan, U.S. and Western forces began to exert more control over the country’s Pashtun regions starting in early 2006, and suicide attacks dramatically escalated from this point on.

The research suggests that U.S. interests would be better served through a policy of offshore balancing. Some scholars have taken issue with this approach, arguing that keeping boots on the ground in South Asia is essential for U.S. national security. Proponents of this strategy fail to realize how U.S. ground forces often inadvertently produce more anti-American terrorists than they kill. In 2000, before the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, there were 20 suicide attacks around the world, and only one (against the USS Cole) was directed against Americans. In the last 12 months, by comparison, 300 suicide attacks have occurred, and over 270 were anti-American. We simply must face the reality that, no matter how well-intentioned, the current war on terror is not serving U.S. interests.

The United States has been great in large part because it respects understanding and discussion of important ideas and concepts, and because it is free to change course. Intelligent decisions require putting all the facts before us and considering new approaches. The first step is recognizing that occupations in the Muslim world don’t make Americans any safer — in fact, they are at the heart of the problem.

Save big when you subscribe to FP.

Eric J. Tilford/U.S. Navy/Getty Images

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/10/18/it_s_the_occupation_stupid?print=yes&hidecomments=yes&page=full

Robert A. Pape teaches at the University of Chicago and is co-author, with James K. Feldman, of Cutting the Fuse: The Explosion of Global Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It.

CATO ORG BOOK

Does U.S. Intervention Overseas
Breed Terrorism?
The Historical Record

by Ivan Eland

Ivan Eland is director of defense policy studies at the Cato Institute.

Executive Summary

According to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, terrorism is the most important threat the United States and the world face as the 21st century begins. High-level U.S. officials have acknowledged that terrorists are now more likely to be able to obtain and use nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons than ever before.

Yet most attention has been focused on combating terrorism by deterring and disrupting it beforehand and retaliating against it after the fact. Less attention has been paid to what motivates terrorists to launch attacks. According to the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board, a strong correlation exists between U.S. involvement in international situations and an increase in terrorist attacks against the United States. President Clinton has also acknowledged that link. The board, however, has provided no empirical data to support its conclusion. This paper fills that gap by citing many examples of terrorist attacks on the United States in retaliation for U.S. intervention overseas. The numerous incidents cataloged suggest that the United States could reduce the chances of such devastating–and potentially catastrophic–terrorist attacks by adopting a policy of military restraint overseas.

Full Text of Foreign Policy Brief No. 50 (PDF, 24 pgs, 93 Kb)

http://www.cato.org/pubs/fpbriefs/fpb-050es.html

Letter leaflet from Israelis againt occupation of Palestine

EXCERPTS FROM THE LEAFLET

SOLDIER:

We all want to defend our country. We’re all sick and tired of terrorism. We all want peace. But do our actions permit of an end to the cycle of bloodshed?

Since 1967, Israel has ruled over 3.5 million Palestinians, running their lives by means of a forcible occupation, with continual violations of human rights.

Ask yourself whether your actions in the course of your military service enhance national security? Or do those actions merely fuel the enmity and the acts of violence between us and our Palestinian neighbors?

SOLDIER: THE OCCUPATION BREEDS TERRORISM!

When you take part in extrajudicial killings (“liquidation,” in the army’s terms), when you take part in demolishing residential homes, when you open fire at unarmed civilian population or residential homes, when you uproot orchards, when you interdict food supplies or medical treatment, you are taking part in actions defined in international conventions (such as the 4th Geneva Convention) and in Israeli law as war crimes.

Soldier, is there a people anywhere in the world that will not resist an occupation regime? If you were in the Palestinians’ shoes, would you be willing to bow your head to a foreign ruler?….

http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2002/Israeli-Antiwar-Movement25feb02.htm

The War Nobody Won
Part 2: The new Agincourt

By Henry C K Liu

Part 1: Chaos, crime and incredulity

…. As the NSSUSA puts it: “No people on Earth yearn to be oppressed, aspire to servitude, or eagerly await the midnight knock of the secret police.” It’s this association of power with universal principles, Bush argues, that will cause other great powers to go along with whatever the United States has to do to preempt terrorists and tyrants, even if it does so alone. For, as was the case through most of the Cold War, there’s something worse out there than US hegemony.

The invasion of Iraq punctured the myth behind this theory. It showed the world that US hegemony spells arbitrary misapplication of moral values and selective US occupation in the name of liberation. The inescapable conclusion is that superpower hegemony breeds terrorism rather than suppresses it…..

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3104.htm

US Foreign Policy Makes America Less Safe in the War on Terrorism

Posted by

Guest Writer – February 13, 2010 –

8 Comments

“And we fight today because terrorists want to attack our country and kill our citizens, and Iraq is where they are making their stand. So we’ll fight them there, we’ll fight them across the world, and we will stay in the fight until the fight is won.” (Applause.) — President George W. Bush

Despite plenty of muscular rhetoric, President Bush’s strategy in the War on Terrorism demonstrates a dangerous ignorance of the unique military, tactical, and political aspects of the terrorist threat, and breeds a dangerous and chaotic foreign policy which has only served to put our nation in greater danger.

Back in the 6th century BC, in his classic, The Art of War, Sun Tsu observed, “Know your enemy, and in a thousand battles you will not be defeated.” Sadly, our current Commander-in-Chief ignores the Chinese grand master’s lesson, and actively eschews the acquisition of useful knowledge about our terrorist enemy. After the 9/11 Commission found that the CIA and FBI could have prevented the attacks of September 11th, had they only more effectively shared and communicated their intelligence to the White House, the Bush Administration could have ensured a dynamic and efficient system of American intelligence simply by reforming and/or streamlining the two agencies. Instead, the Administration did nothing to improve either agency, instead creating an entirely new government agency, the Department of Homeland Security, whose most obvious contribution to homeland security to date is a puerile, and now universally-ignored, color-coded Alert Level system.

Not surprisingly, the enhanced state of perpetual ignorance within America’s intelligence community quickly took its toll, proceeding to deliver terribly flawed pre-war intelligence to the White House, which then spawned an utterly disastrous occupation of Iraq. All of this, of course, was in addition to our continued inability to capture, or even locate, America’s Public Enemy 1, Osama bin Laden. Sun Tsu is rolling in his grave.

The atrocious ignorance continues with the Administration’s inability to grasp the fundamental distinction between fighting terrorists and fighting enemy nation-states. In the wars of yesteryear, an enemy nation had a standing army, a native population, static boundaries, and permanent institutions, all of which helped to create an enemy who could be effectively destroyed with a sustained military campaign. But the problem with terrorists, unlike nationals of a belligerent foreign nation, is that they are not a permanent, distinct class. Terrorists are recruited, shaped, molded and trained by underground organizations, usually working without state sanction, and thus there is no fixed stock of “enemy combatants” capable of comprehensive military liquidation. As William F. Buckley, Jr. brilliantly observed, “Individual terrorists were, only yesterday, engaged in ordinary occupations, shocking friends and family when they struck as terrorists.” Victory, then, will be achieved not with a specific death toll or geographic occupation, but by ensuring that Islamofascism remains a detested minority in every country in which it hopes to gain support. Victory is depriving the Islamofascists the ideological fuel with which they recruit the ordinary citizens to join the ranks of the jihad.

Terrorism itself is only a tactic of violence; it finds its roots in an ideology and thus cannot be defeated by military might alone. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelan, founded in 1975 in Sri Lanka as the first terrorist organization to make widespread use of suicide bombing, are amazingly still blowing themselves up as part of their independence movement there (talk about dedication!), simply because they are still not independent from Sri Lanka, and thus can still recruit their martyrs with an effective narrative of foreign oppression and victimization. The near-infinite willingness of a people to willingly slaughter themselves in an ideological protest against foreign occupation has been confirmed over and over, from the Algerian resistance to French occupation, to America’s own experience in Vietnam.

Unfortunately, most of the fuel for the global jihad is supplied by current American foreign policy in the Middle East. It is true, as some allege, that Islamists hate nearly every feature of Western society, from our politics to our culture, and as a result, it is easy to say that Islamic terrorism against America is a fait accompli stemming from a fanatical worldview that hates everything we stand for. But while Islamists indeed harbor grand visions of world empire under Allah, their delusions of global theocracy have been swirling around the Middle East ever since Muhammad began claiming his divinity; only recently did Islamic terrorism emerge as a dangerous threat to America. As late as the 1950s, Arab nations still sought out American mediation in their international disputes, respecting our independence and fairness, despite presumably still harboring atavistic religious hatred toward Our American Freedoms. Seven decades later, Uncle Sam is reviled like no one else in the world.

Libertarians, like Ron Paul, rightly point out that the difference between the good ol’ days of respect for America and the current days of Death to America is a U.S. foreign policy of interference in the Middle East. Rudy Giuliani and his supporters would like to believe otherwise. But nothing is more devastating in the obliteration of Rudy G’s arguments than the facts.

Back in 1998, Cato Institute scholar Ivan Eland had already been looking at the facts, and as a result, he had already begun to note the growing trend of America’s terrorist threat, corresponding directly and invariably with American intervention into the Middle East. Unlike both Bush and Clinton, Eland was already keenly aware of al-Qaida, Hezbollah, and their growing threat to American interests. (If only Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney read the Cato Institute.) Here are some partial excerpts of his prescient work, from his 1998 paper Does U.S. Intervention Overseas Breed Terrorism? The Historical Record:

July 2, 1915: The Senate reception room in the U.S. Capitol was damaged by a homemade bomb built by Erich Muenter, a former Harvard professor who was upset by sales of U.S. munitions to the Allies in World War I.

June 5, 1968: Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, former attorney general and senior policy adviser to President John F. Kennedy, was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan, who had grown up on the West Bank and regarded Kennedy as a collaborator with Israel.

March 1971: A bomb exploded in a U.S. Senate restroom, causing extensive damage. The bombing came at a time of rising opposition to U.S. policies in Vietnam.

November 4, 1979: Supporters of the Ayatollah Khomeini seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran, Iran, capturing hostages that were not freed until January 1981. The embassy was captured as a protest against long-time U.S. support for the unpopular shah of Iran.

July 22, 1980: Ali Akbar Tabatabai, a former press counselor at the Iranian embassy in the United States during the shah’s reign, was assassinated by the Islamic Guerrillas of America (IGA) after he had supplied U.S. officials with a manifesto of the IGA that advocated strategically planned terrorism on U.S. soil and assassinations of U.S. officials, stating, Any American can be targeted… no American is innocent… as long as U.S. foreign policies are to the detriment of the Islamic community.

April 8 and October 23, 1983: Islamic militants, funded by Iran and supported by Syria, suicide bombed the U.S. embassy and U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, killing 290 people and wounding 200 more. The attack remains the deadliest post-World War II attack on Americans overseas. The Americans were supporting the Christian government in Lebanon against the Muslim militias by training and arming the Lebanese National Army. The U.S. Marines were later withdrawn from Beirut, prompting a Hezbollah spokesman to brag that the $martyrs! had finally forced the Marines out of Lebanon.

April 5, 1986: Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi sponsored the bombing of the La Belle nightclub in West Berlin, which was frequented by U.S. servicemen. The United States retaliated for the La Belle bombing with air strikes against Tripoli and Benghazi, Libya. In retaliation for the U.S. air strikes on Libya, an American hostage in Lebanon was sold to Libya and executed; Libyans attempted to blow up the U.S. embassy in Lomé, Togo; a Libyan agent, Abu Nidal, hijacked Pan Am Flight 73 in Karachi, Pakistan, killing several Americans; The Japanese Red Army, under contract from Abu Nidal, planted a bomb at the USO military club in Naples, Italy, on the two-year anniversary of the air strikes, killing five; and two Libyan agents bombed Pan Am Flight 103, killing 270 people, 200 of whom were Americans.

March 10, 1989: A pipe bomb exploded beneath a van owned by the commander of the U.S.S. Vincennes, who had shot down an Iranian airliner over the Persian Gulf (killing 290 civilians) during U.S. participation in the $tanker war! against Iran. March 12, 1991: During the Gulf War, a U.S. Air Force sergeant was blown up by a remotecontrolled bomb placed at the entrance of his residence in Athens, Greece. $November 17!, the deadliest terrorist group in Greece, November 17, which attacks U.S. targets because of American imperialism-nationalism!, claimed responsibility for the attack.

February 26, 1993: A group of Islamic terrorists detonated a massive van bomb in the garage of the World Trade Center in New York City. The Egyptian perpetrators were trying to kill 250,000 people by collapsing the towers. Ramzi Yousef, the leader of the terrorists, said the intent was to inflict Hiroshima-like casualties to punish the United States for its foreign policy toward the Middle East. The perpetrators considered augmenting the explosion with radiological or chemical agents that would have increased the casualties.

April 15, 1993: Seventeen Iraqis were arrested as part of government plot to assassinate former president George Bush on a visit to Kuwait, in retaliation for the Gulf War against Iraq.

June 1993: Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman–a militant Egyptian cleric–and other radical Muslims conspired to destroy several New York landmarks on the same day. Funding for the operation apparently came from Iran and was funneled through Sudan, attempting to punish the United States for its policies toward the Middle East.

October 3, 1993: Osama bin Laden’s operatives trained Somali tribesmen who conducted ambushes of U.S. peacekeeping forces in Somalia in support of clan leader Mohamed Farah Aideed, causing the death of 18 American Army Rangers, and the dragging of dead American soldiers through the streets of Mogadishu. An indictment of his followers alleged the United States–an $infidel nation!–had a nefarious plot to occupy Islamic countries, as demonstrated by its involvement in the peacekeeping operation in Somalia and the Persian Gulf War. The incident led to the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Somalia, which bin Laden called his group’s greatest triumph.

November 13, 1995: A car bombing of a military complex in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia–which housed a U.S. military advisory group–killed 7 people (including 5 Americans) and wounded 42 others. Muslim militants seeking to topple the Saudi monarchy and push the infidel United States out of Saudi Arabia carried out the bombings. Three groups, including the Islamic Movement for Change, claimed responsibility. U.S. officials suspect that Osama bin Laden was involved….

We can fill in the rest. Years later, 9/11 ushered in the modern War on Terrorism, and Mr. Bush, with characteristic ignorance of the documented connection between American aggression in the Middle East and Islamic terrorism against America, only further augmented interventionist U.S. foreign policy. That the Bush Doctrine’s geopolitical social engineering, especially in Iraq, has been such an unqualified failure is not a surprise to anyone who has read this article thus far.

Another obvious problem with the Bush Doctrine and its exportation of Democracy is that nearly every Arab Muslim lives in a Non- Democracy, and thus America’s grand experiment looks, from the perspective of the common man, to simply be imperialist meddling with his local government. The Bush Doctrine, even if it somehow succeeded (i.e. when the “fight is won,” perhaps), would only guarantee a Pyrrhic victory at best. With every terrorist mastermind captured in Iraq, dozens of martyrs sign up to avenge his death and battle the American Empire. Iraq itself wasn’t even a haven for al-Qaida operatives until after America invaded it. While bin Laden, confirmed murderer of American civilians, roams the globe free, Mr. Bush is pleased that we’ve killed terrorist al- Zarqawi, whose horrific and disgusting attacks were all against America’s presence in Iraq, never threatening continental America itself. The Bush Administration, it seems, is really only successful at capturing terrorists of its own creation. Sadly, U.S. interventionism Iraq itself wasn’t even a haven for al-Qaida operatives until after America invaded it. The Bush Administration, it seems, is really only successful at capturing terrorists of its own creation.

Sadly, U.S. interventionism (Operation Terrorist Creation) is not limited to the occupation of Iraq. The CIA and NSA continue to interfere in the political affairs of various nations the world over, funding, training and assisting various anti-Islamic movements and governments, from the Caspian Sea to the Horn of Africa.

While such action may excite the intellectual tribalists in the neoconservative movement, the problem with such meddling is that the CIA-backed alternatives to Islamism, just like the CIAbacked alternatives to Communism, tend to usually be brutal nationalist dictators or military juntas, and are just as bad, or worse, than Islamism for the people we are supposedly “liberating.” As a result, our intervention only enhances political oppression, civil unrest and poverty, which, studies show, then only serves as a breeding ground for Islamic extremism. The whole nasty process only further convinces the Islamic diaspora that America is waging a war on Islam. This is not how to win the hearts and minds of the world’s people.

Our current policy, in its blind aggression and geopolitical ignorance, purports to fight terrorists “where they are making their stand,” but it only serves to make them more effective and numerous. Thanks to the Bush Doctrine, radical clerics, government bankrollers, and their potential recruits can now all observe a visible military and political occupation to justify their ongoing resistance against the Great Satan. In these backward societies deprived of freedom of information and thought, radical Islamofascist rhetoric, combined with clear evidence of American global occupation, is sadly enough for terrorists to gain alarming popular traction, financial support, and willing martyrs. This mobilization of terrorists, potentially creating hundreds of thousands of jihadists, if America’s belligerent foreign policy continues apace, is becoming the greatest threat the United States of America faces.

In intelligent recognition of this reality, America should immediately repudiate the Bush Doctrine and pursue a policy of intelligent disengagement. First, those terrorists and organizations which have committed or planned acts of aggression against the United States, such as al-Qaida, should be pursued with vigor; this is our most important mission and should be treated as such. Second, America must cease all nation-building, internal interference, and general military interventionism in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, in order to deprive terrorists of their fuel for jihad. Regimes, organizations and groups who do not threaten direct harm to the United States should not be the target of any U.S. military campaign. As we’ve repeatedly argued, the occupation of Iraq should immediately end.

As Americans, we all desire to win the war and to enjoy permanent security. But like Vietnam, Quebec, and Somalia, not all battles our government chooses to fight are winning ones; and like My Lai, Manzanar, and the Bay of Pigs, not all tactics our military prefers are desirable. An extension of that nugget of common sense dictates that as long as U.S. foreign policy glorifies the imperialist fallacies of neoconservatism, we libertarians will continue to rightly inveigh against it.

The Bush Administration’s blind allegiance to aggression over knowledge perverts not only the lessons of Sun Tsu, but also the American Founders’ original vision of a nation seeking only peaceful trading ties, the avoidance of entangling political alliances, and a national defense to respond powerfully only when directly provoked. The authentic patriot believes in these true American principles of intelligent self-defense, and knows that they alone can safely guide our nation through these troubled and dangerous times.

The author of The American Evolution, Matt Harrison is the founder and executive director of The Prometheus Institute, Los Angeles, CA, a nonprofit public policy institute. He has authored more than 200 articles and has been a guest on several talk radio shows and a guest blogger for CNN.

Related articles:

http://collegetimes.us/us-foreign-policy-makes-america-less-safe-in-the-war-on-terrorism/

Karen Armstrong, The Label of Catholic Terror Was Never Used About the IRA

Precise intelligence is essential in any conflict. It is important to know who our enemies are, but equally crucial to know who they are not. It is even more vital to avoid turning potential friends into foes. By making the disciplined effort to name our enemies correctly, we will learn more about them, and come one step nearer, perhaps, to solving the seemingly intractable and increasingly perilous problems of our divided world.

exists.–Foreign Affairs, September/October 2006 John Mueller, Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them

Hypervigilance is threatening civil liberties, the economy, and lives. Terrorist threats are overblown; we can learn from the lessons of previous international threats that they are often exaggerated; and by applying these lessons, we can create policy that reduces fear and the cost of overreaction.

Death Toll From Road Accidents 390 Times That From Terrorism

The body count from road accidents in developed economies is 390 times higher than the death toll in these countries from international terrorism, says a study appearing in a specialist journal, Injury Prevention. In 2001, as many people died every 26 days on American roads as died in the terrorist attacks of 9/11, it says.

Peter Dale Scott and Robert Parry, A Long History of America’s Dark Side

This military tradition has explicitly defended the selective use of terror, whether in suppressing Native American resistance on the frontiers in the 19th Century or in protecting U.S. interests abroad in the 20th Century or fighting the “war on terror” over the last decade.

Noam Chomsky, Necessary Illusions

If the agenda can be restricted to the ambiguities of Arafat, the abuses and failures of the Sandinistas, the terrorism of Iran and Libya, and other properly framed issues, then the game [fooling the American public] is basically over; excluded from the discussion is the unambiguous rejectionism of the United States and Israel, and the terrorism and other crimes of the United States and its clients, not only far greater in scale but also incomparably more significant on any moral dimension for American citizens, who are in a position to mitigate or terminate these crimes. — p. 49

Noam Chomsky, What Uncle Sam Really Wants

The use of terror is deeply ingrained in our [US] character. . . The first step is to use the police. They’re critical because they can detect discontent early and eliminate it before “major surgery” is necessary. If major surgery becomes necessary, we rely on the army. When we can no longer control the army . . . it’s time to overthrow the government.

The second step is to use the military. The US has always tried to establish relations with the military in foreign countries, because that’s one of the ways to overthrow a government that has gotten out of hand.

Peter Dale Scott, U.S. Responsibility For The Slaughters

American media are quick to cast light on the personal atrocities of others, who happen (not by coincidence) to be our enemies. We have been told much about the outrages committed by Nazi Germany and Japan during World War II, and then in the post-war era by Stalin and by China down through the Cultural Revolution and Tien-An-Men. The massacres in Cambodia, with their pyramids of skulls, have been succeeded in our media by the killing fields of East Africa, Bosnia, and Algeria. The massacres we do not hear about, at least at the time, are those for which the United States itself is responsible. This on-going, systematic suppression, from the Philippines in the 1950s to El Salvador in the 1980s, falsifies our understanding, not just of our own history, but of all managed atrocities throughout the world.

Head US Special Forces, 60 Minutes

[The special forces are used] to put down rebellions or to start one. — April 30, 1995 [On October 1, 1997, Gen. Henry H. Shelton became Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.]

Major General Smedley D. Butler, Excerpt from 1933 speech

War is just a racket. . . . It has its ‘finger men’ to point out enemies, its ‘muscle men’ to destroy enemies, its ‘brain men’ to plan war preparations, and a ‘Big Boss’ Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism. . . . I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

[General Butler was one of the few Americans to be twice awarded the U.S. Congressional Medal of Honor.]

Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, Letter to United Nations Ambassadors

Two months have passed since the Security Council last reviewed the murderous sanctions against Iraq and more than 20,000 human beings have died as a direct result of its failure to end the sanctions that time. More than 10,000 of those who died in March and April are infants and children. The entire population of Iraq has suffered. Millions will not overcome the effects of the sanctions in their lifetimes which have been shortened by years. The history of this violent century does not reveal a more deadly, cruel, inhumane and degrading torture of the whole population of an entire nation inflicted by foreign power for so long a period of time. — May 1, 1996

http://www.twf.org/Library/Terrorism.html

The “Green Peril”:
Creating the Islamic Fundamentalist Threat

by Leon T. Hadar

Leon T. Hadar, a former bureau chief for the Jerusalem Post, is an adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute.

Executive SummaryNow that the Cold War is becoming a memory, America’s foreign policy establishment has begun searching for new enemies. Possible new villains include “instability” in Europe –ranging from German resurgence to new Russian imperialism– the “vanishing” ozone layer, nuclear proliferation, and narcoterrorism. Topping the list of potential new global bogeymen, however, are the Yellow Peril, the alleged threat to American economic security emanating from East Asia, and the so-called Green Peril (green is the color of Islam). That peril is symbolized by the Middle Eastern Moslem fundamentalist–the “Fundie,” to use a term coined by The Economist(1)–a Khomeini-like creature, armed with a radical ideology, equipped with nuclear weapons, and intent on launching a violent jihad against Western civilization.

George Will even suggested that the 1,000-year battle between Christendom and Islam might be breaking out once more when he asked, “Could it be that 20 years from now we will be saying, not that they’re at the gates of Vienna again, but that, in fact, the birth of Mohammed is at least as important as the birth of Christ, that Islamic vitality could be one of the big stories of the next generations?”(2)

Full Text of Policy Analysis No. 177 (HTML)

Released November 14, 2001
The Wisdom Fund, P. O. Box 2723, Arlington, VA 22202
Website: http://www.twf.org — Press Contact: Enver Masud

Terrorism: Theirs and Ours

by Eqbal Ahmad A Presentation at the University of Colorado, Boulder, October 12, 1998

In the 1930s and 1940s, the Jewish underground in Palestine was described as “TERRORIST.” Then new things happened.

By 1942, the Holocaust was occurring, and a certain liberal sympathy with the Jewish people had built up in the Western world. At that point, the terrorists of Palestine, who were Zionists, suddenly started to be described, by 1944-45, as “freedom fighters.” At least two Israeli Prime Ministers, including Menachem Begin, have actually, you can find in the books and posters with their pictures, saying “Terrorists, Reward This Much.” The highest reward I have noted so far was 100,000 British pounds on the head of Menachem Begin, the terrorist.

Then from 1969 to 1990 the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization, occupied the center stage as the terrorist organization. Yasir Arafat has been described repeatedly by the great sage of American journalism, William Safire of the New York Times, as the “Chief of Terrorism.” That’s Yasir Arafat.

Now, on September 29, 1998, I was rather amused to notice a picture of Yasir Arafat to the right of President Bill Clinton. To his left is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netan-yahu. Clinton is looking towards Arafat and Arafat is looking literally like a meek mouse. Just a few years earlier he used to appear with this very menacing look around him, with a gun appearing menacing from his belt. You remember those pictures, and you remember the next one.

In 1985, President Ronald Reagan received a group of bearded men. These bearded men I was writing about in those days in The New Yorker, actually did. They were very ferocious-looking bearded men with turbans looking like they came from another century. President Reagan received them in the White House. After receiving them he spoke to the press. He pointed towards them, I’m sure some of you will recall that moment, and said, “These are the moral equivalent of America’s founding fathers”. These were the Afghan Mujahiddin. They were at the time, guns in hand, battling the Evil Empire. They were the moral equivalent of our founding fathers!

In August 1998, another American President ordered missile strikes from the American navy based in the Indian Ocean to kill Osama Bin Laden and his men in the camps in Afghanistan. I do not wish to embarrass you with the reminder that Mr. Bin Laden, whom fifteen American missiles were fired to hit in Afghanistan, was only a few years ago the moral equivalent of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson! He got angry over the fact that he has been demoted from ‘Moral Equivalent’ of your ‘Founding Fathers’. So he is taking out his anger in different ways. I’ll come back to that subject more seriously in a moment.

You see, why I have recalled all these stories is to point out to you that the matter of terrorism is rather complicated. Terrorists change. The terrorist of yesterday is the hero of today, and the hero of yesterday becomes the terrorist of today. This is a serious matter of the constantly changing world of images in which we have to keep our heads straight to know what is terrorism and what is not. But more importantly, to know what causes it, and how to stop it.

The next point about our terrorism is that posture of inconsistency necessarily evades definition. If you are not going to be consistent, you’re not going to define. I have examined at least twenty official documents on terrorism. Not one defines the word. All of them explain it, express it emotively, polemically, to arouse our emotions rather than exercise our intelligence. I give you only one example, which is representative. October 25, 1984. George Shultz, then Secretary of State of the U.S., is speaking at the New York Park Avenue Synagogue. It’s a long speech on terrorism. In the State Department Bulletin of seven single-spaced pages, there is not a single definition of terrorism. What we get is the following:

Definition number one: “Terrorism is a modern barbarism that we call terrorism.”Ê

Definition number two is even more brilliant: “Terrorism is a form of political violence.” Aren’t you surprised? It is a form of political violence, says George Shultz, Secretary of State of the U.S.

Number three: “Terrorism is a threat to Western civilization.”

Number four: “Terrorism is a menace to Western moral values.”

Did you notice, does it tell you anything other than arouse your emotions? This is typical. They don’t define terrorism because definitions involve a commitment to analysis, comprehension and adherence to some norms of consistency. That’s the second characteristic of the official literature on terrorism.

The third characteristic is that the absence of definition does not prevent officials from being globalistic. We may not define terrorism, but it is a menace to the moral values of Western civilization. It is a menace also to mankind. It’s a menace to good order. Therefore, you must stamp it out worldwide. Our reach has to be global. You need a global reach to kill it. Anti-terrorist policies therefore have to be global. Same speech of George Shultz: “There is no question about our ability to use force where and when it is needed to counter terrorism.” There is no geographical limit. On a single day the missiles hit Afghanistan and Sudan. Those two countries are 2,300 miles apart, and they were hit by missiles belonging to a country roughly 8,000 miles away. Reach is global.

A fourth characteristic: claims of power are not only globalist they are also omniscient. We know where they are; therefore we know where to hit. We have the means to know. We have the instruments of knowledge. We are omniscient. Shultz: “We know the difference between terrorists and freedom fighters, and as we look around, we have no trouble telling one from the other.”

Only Osama Bin Laden doesn’t know that he was an ally one day and an enemy another. That’s very confusing for Osama Bin Laden. I’ll come back to his story towards the end. It’s a real story.

Five. The official approach eschews causation. You don’t look at causes of anybody becoming terrorist. Cause? What cause? They ask us to be looking, to be sympathetic to these people.

Another example. The New York Times, December 18, 1985, reported that the foreign minister of Yugoslavia, you remember the days when there was a Yugoslavia, requested the Secretary of State of the U.S. to consider the causes of Palestinian terrorism. The Secretary of State, George Shultz, and I am quoting from the New York Times, “went a bit red in the face. He pounded the table and told the visiting foreign minister, there is no connection with any cause. Period.” Why look for causes?

Number six. The moral revulsion that we must feel against terrorism is selective. We are to feel the terror of those groups, which are officially disapproved. We are to applaud the terror of those groups of whom officials do approve. Hence, President Reagan, “I am a contra.” He actually said that. We know the contras of Nicaragua were anything, by any definition, but terrorists. The media, to move away from the officials, heed the dominant view of terrorism.

The dominant approach also excludes from consideration, more importantly to me, the terror of friendly governments. To that question I will return because it excused among others the terror of Pinochet (who killed one of my closest friends) and Orlando Letelier; and it excused the terror of Zia ul-Haq, who killed many of my friends in Pakistan. All I want to tell you is that according to my ignorant calculations, the ratio of people killed by the state terror of Zia ul-Haq, Pino-chet, Argentinian, Brazilian, Indonesian type, versus the killing of the PLO and other terrorist types is literally, conservatively, one to one hundred thousand. That’s the ratio.

History unfortunately recognizes and accords visibility to power and not to weakness. Therefore, visibility has been accorded historically to dominant groups. In our time, the time that began with this day, Columbus Day

The time that begins with Columbus Day is a time of extraordinary unrecorded holocausts. Great civilizations have been wiped out. The Mayas, the Incas, the Aztecs, the American Indians, the Canadian Indians were all wiped out. Their voices have not been heard, even to this day fully. Now they are beginning to be heard, but not fully. They are heard, yes, but only when the dominant power suffers, only when resistance has a semblance of costing, of exacting a price. When a Custer is killed or when a Gordon is besieged. That’s when you know that they were Indians fighting, Arabs fighting and dying.

My last point of this section Ð U.S. policy in the Cold War period has sponsored terrorist regimes one after another. Somoza, Batista, all kinds of tyrants have been America’s friends. You know that. There was a reason for that. I or you are not guilty. Nicaragua, contra. Afghanistan, mujahiddin. El Salvador, etc.

Now the second side. You’ve suffered enough. So suffer more.

There ain’t much good on the other side either. You shouldn’t imagine that I have come to praise the other side. But keep the balance in mind. Keep the imbalance in mind and first ask ourselves, What is terrorism?

Our first job should be to define the damn thing, name it, give it a description of some kind, other than “moral equivalent of founding fathers” or “a moral outrage to Western civilization”. I will stay with you with Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary: “Terror is an intense, overpowering fear.” He uses terrorizing, terrorism, “the use of terrorizing methods of governing or resisting a government.” This simple definition has one great virtue, that of fairness. It’s fair. It focuses on the use of coercive violence, violence that is used illegally, extra-constitutionally, to coerce. And this definition is correct because it treats terror for what it is, whether the government or private people commit it.

Have you noticed something? Motivation is left out of it. We’re not talking about whether the cause is just or unjust. We’re talking about consensus, consent, absence of consent, legality, absence of legality, constitutionality, absence of constitutionality. Why do we keep motives out? Because motives differ. Motives differ and make no difference.

I have identified in my work five types of terrorism

First, state terrorism. Second, religious terrorism; terrorism inspired by religion, Catholics killing Protestants, Sunnis killing Shiites, Shiites killing Sunnis, God, religion, sacred terror, you can call it if you wish. State, church. Crime. Mafia. All kinds of crimes commit terror. There is pathology. You’re pathological. You’re sick. You want the attention of the whole world. You’ve got to kill a president. You will. You terrorize. You hold up a bus. Fifth, there is political terror of the private group; be they Indian, Vietnamese, Algerian, Palestinian, Baader-Meinhof, the Red Brigade. Political terror of the private group. Oppositional terror

Keep these five in mind. Keep in mind one more thing. Sometimes these five can converge on each other. You start with protest terror. You go crazy. You become pathological. You continue. They converge. State terror can take the form of private terror. For example, we’re all familiar with the death squads in Latin America or in Pakistan. Government has employed private people to kill its opponents. It’s not quite official. It’s privatized. Convergence. Or the political terrorist who goes crazy and becomes pathological. Or the criminal who joins politics. In Afghanistan, in Central America, the CIA employed in its covert operations drug pushers. Drugs and guns often go together. Smuggling of all things often go together.

Of the five types of terror, the focus is on only one, the least important in terms of cost to human lives and human property [Political Terror of those who want to be heard]. The highest cost is state terror. The second highest cost is religious terror, although in the twentieth century religious terror has, relatively speaking, declined. If you are looking historically, massive costs. The next highest cost is crime. Next highest, pathology. A Rand Corporation study by Brian Jenkins, for a ten-year period up to 1988, showed 50% of terror was committed without any political cause at all. No politics. Simply crime and pathology

So the focus is on only one, the political terrorist, the PLO, the Bin Laden, whoever you want to take. Why do they do it? What makes the terrorist tick?

I would like to knock them out quickly to you. First, the need to be heard. Imagine, we are dealing with a minority group, the political, private terrorist. First, the need to be heard. Normally, and there are exceptions, there is an effort to be heard, to get your grievances heard by people. They’re not hearing it. A minority acts. The majority applauds.

The Palestinians, for example, the superterrorists of our time, were dispossessed in 1948. From 1948 to 1968 they went to every court in the world. They knocked at every door in the world. They were told that they became dispossessed because some radio told them to go away – an Arab radio, which was a lie. Nobody was listening to the truth. Finally, they invented a new form of terror, literally their invention: the airplane hijacking. Between 1968 and 1975 they pulled the world up by its ears. They dragged us out and said, Listen, Listen. We listened. We still haven’t done them justice, but at least we all know. Even the Israelis acknowledge. Remember Golda Meir, Prime Minister of Israel, saying in 1970, ‘There are no Palestinians.’ They do not exist. They damn well exist now. We are cheating them at Oslo. At least there are some people to cheat now. We can’t just push them out. The need to be heard is essential. One motivation there.

Mix of anger and helplessness produces an urge to strike out. You are angry. You are feeling helpless. You want retribution. You want to wreak retributive justice. The experience of violence by a stronger party has historically turned victims into terrorists. Battered children are known to become abusive parents and violent adults. You know that. That’s what happens to peoples and nations. When they are battered, they hit back. State terror very often breeds collective terror.

Do you recall the fact that the Jews were never terrorists? By and large Jews were not known to commit terror except during and after the Holocaust. Most studies show that the majority of members of the worst terrorist groups in Israel or in Palestine, the Stern and the Irgun gangs, were people who were immigrants from the most anti-Semitic countries of Eastern Europe and Germany. Similarly, the young Shiites of Lebanon or the Palestinians from the refugee camps are battered people. They become very violent. The ghettos are violent internally. They become violent externally when there is a clear, identifiable external target, an enemy where you can say, ‘Yes, this one did it to me’. Then they can strike back.

Example is a bad thing. Example spreads. There was a highly publicized Beirut hijacking of the TWA plane. After that hijacking, there were hijacking attempts at nine different American airports. Pathological groups or individuals modeling on the others. Even more serious are examples set by governments. When governments engage in terror, they set very large examples. When they engage in supporting terror, they engage in other sets of examples.

Absence of revolutionary ideology is central to victim terrorism. Revolutionaries do not commit unthinking terror. Those of you who are familiar with revolutionary theory know the debates, the disputes, the quarrels, the fights within revolutionary groups of Europe, the fight between anarchists and Marxists, for example. But the Marxists have always argued that revolutionary terror, if ever engaged in, must be sociologically and psychologically selective. Don’t hijack a plane. Don’t hold hostages. Don’t kill children, for God’s sake. Have you recalled also that the great revolutions, the Chinese, the Vietnamese, the Algerian, the Cuban, never engaged in hijacking type of terrorism? They did engage in terrorism, but it was highly selective, highly sociological, still deplorable, but there was an organized, highly limited, selective character to it. So absence of revolutionary ideology that begins more or less in the post-World War II period has been central to this phenomenon.

My final question is – These conditions have existed for a long time. But why then this flurry of private political terrorism? Why now so much of it and so visible? The answer is modern technology. You have a cause. You can communicate it through radio and television. They will all come swarming if you have taken an aircraft and are holding 150 Americans hostage. They will all hear your cause. You have a modern weapon through which you can shoot a mile away. They can’t reach you. And you have the modern means of communicating. When you put together the cause, the instrument of coercion and the instrument of communication, politics is made. A new kind of politics becomes possible.

To this challenge rulers from one country after another have been responding with traditional methods. The traditional method of shooting it out, whether it’s missiles or some other means. The Israelis are very proud of it. The Americans are very proud of it. The French became very proud of it. Now the Pakistanis are very proud of it. The Pakistanis say, ‘Our commandos are the best.’ Frankly, it won’t work. A central problem of our time, political minds, rooted in the past, and modern times, producing new realities. Therefore in conclusion, what is my recommendation to America?

Quickly. First, avoid extremes of double standards. If you’re going to practice double standards, you will be paid with double standards. Don’t use it. Don’t condone Israeli terror, Pakistani terror, Nicaraguan terror, El Salvadoran terror, on the one hand, and then complain about Afghan terror or Palestinian terror. It doesn’t work. Try to be even-handed. A superpower cannot promote terror in one place and reasonably expect to discourage terrorism in another place. It won’t work in this shrunken world.

Do not condone the terror of your allies. Condemn them. Fight them. Punish them. Please eschew, avoid covert operations and low-intensity warfare. These are breeding grounds of terror and drugs. Violence and drugs are bred there. The structure of covert operations, I’ve made a film about it, which has been very popular in Europe, called Dealing with the Demon. I have shown that wherever covert operations have been, there has been the central drug problem. That has been also the center of the drug trade. Because the structure of covert operations, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Central America, is very hospitable to drug trade. Avoid it. Give it up. It doesn’t help.

Please focus on causes and help ameliorate causes. Try to look at causes and solve problems. Do not concentrate on military solutions. Do not seek military solutions. Terrorism is a political problem. Seek political solutions. Diplomacy works.

Take the example of the last attack on Bin Laden. You don’t know what you’re attacking. They say they know, but they don’t know. They were trying to kill Qadaffi. They killed his four-year-old daughter. The poor baby hadn’t done anything. Qadaffi is still alive. They tried to kill Saddam Hussein. They killed Laila Bin Attar, a prominent artist, an innocent woman. They tried to kill Bin Laden and his men. Not one but twenty-five other people died. They tried to destroy a chemical factory in Sudan. Now they are admitting that they destroyed an innocent factory, one-half of the production of medicine in Sudan has been destroyed, not a chemical factory. You don’t know. You think you know.

Four of your missiles fell in Pakistan. One was slightly damaged. Two were totally damaged. One was totally intact. For ten years the American government has kept an embargo on Pakistan because Pakistan is trying, stupidly, to build nuclear weapons and missiles. So we have a technology embargo on my country. One of the missiles was intact. What do you think a Pakistani official told the Washington Post? He said it was a gift from Allah. We wanted U.S. technology. Now we have got the technology, and our scientists are examining this missile very carefully. It fell into the wrong hands. So don’t do that. Look for political solutions. Do not look for military solutions. They cause more problems than they solve.

Please help reinforce, strengthen the framework of international law. There was a criminal court in Rome. Why didn’t they go to it first to get their warrant against Bin Laden, if they have some evidence? Get a warrant, then go after him. Internationally. Enforce the U.N. Enforce the International Court of Justice, this unilateralism makes us look very stupid and them relatively smaller.

Q&A

The question here is that I mentioned that I would go somewhat into the story of Bin Laden, the Saudi in Afghanistan and didn’t do so, could I go into some detail? The point about Bin Laden would be roughly the same as the point between Sheikh Abdul Rahman, who was accused and convicted of encouraging the blowing up of the World Trade Center in New York City. The New Yorker did a long story on him. It’s the same as that of Aimal Kansi, the Pakistani Baluch who was also convicted of the murder of two CIA agents. Let me see if I can be very short on this. Jihad, which has been translated a thousand times as “holy war,” is not quite just that. Jihad is an Arabic word that means, “to struggle.” It could be struggle by violence or struggle by non-violent means. There are two forms, the small jihad and the big jihad. The small jihad involves violence. The big jihad involves the struggles with self. Those are the concepts. The reason I mention it is that in Islamic history, jihad as an international violent phenomenon had disappeared in the last four hundred years, for all practical purposes. It was revived suddenly with American help in the 1980s. When the Soviet Union intervened in Afghanistan, Zia ul-Haq, the military dictator of Pakistan, which borders on Afghanistan, saw an opportunity and launched a jihad there against godless communism The U.S. saw a God-sent opportunity to mobilize one billion Muslims against what Reagan called the Evil Empire. Money started pouring in. CIA agents starting going all over the Muslim world recruiting people to fight in the great jihad. Bin Laden was one of the early prize recruits. He was not only an Arab. He was also a Saudi. He was not only a Saudi. He was also a multimillionaire, willing to put his own money into the matter. Bin Laden went around recruiting people for the jihad against communism.

I first met him in 1986. He was recommended to me by an American official of whom I do not know whether he was or was not an agent. I was talking to him and said, ‘Who are the Arabs here who would be very interesting?’ By here I meant in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He said, ‘You must meet Osama.’ I went to see Osama. There he was, rich, bringing in recruits from Algeria, from Sudan, from Egypt, just like Sheikh Abdul Rahman. This fellow was an ally. He remained an ally. He turns at a particular moment. In 1990 the U.S. goes into Saudi Arabia with forces. Saudi Arabia is the holy place of Muslims, Mecca and Medina. There had never been foreign troops there. In 1990, during the Gulf War, they went in, in the name of helping Saudi Arabia defeat Saddam Hussein. Osama Bin Laden remained quiet. Saddam was defeated, but the American troops stayed on in the land of the kaba (the sacred site of Islam in Mecca), foreign troops. He wrote letter after letter saying, Why are you here? Get out! You came to help but you have stayed on. Finally he started a jihad against the other occupiers. His mission is to get American troops out of Saudi Arabia. His earlier mission was to get Russian troops out of Afghanistan. See what I was saying earlier about covert operations?

A second point to be made about him is these are tribal people, people who are really tribal. Being a millionaire doesn’t matter. Their code of ethics is tribal. The tribal code of ethics consists of two words: loyalty and revenge. You are my friend. You keep your word. I am loyal to you. You break your word, I go on my path of revenge. For him, America has broken its word. The loyal friend has betrayed. The one to whom you swore blood loyalty has betrayed you. They’re going to go for you. They’re going to do a lot more.

These are the chickens of the Afghanistan war coming home to roost. This is why I said to stop covert operations. There is a price attached to those that the American people cannot calculate and Kissinger type of people do not know, don’t have the history to know.

—
Courtesy: University of Colorado. Eqbal Ahmad, Professor Emeritus of International Relations and Middle Eastern Studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, also served as a managing editor of the quarterly Race and Class. A prolific writer, his articles and essays have been published in The Nation, Dawn (Pakistan), among several other journals throughout the world. He died in 1999.

[The prime minister of Turkey, Israel’s closest ally in the Middle East, has accused Ariel Sharon of “state terrorism” against Palestinians and likened their treatment to that of Jews under the Spanish inquisition.–Chris McGreal, “Turkish PM accuses Israel of practising state terrorism,” Guardian, June 4, 2004]

Occupation, not Islam, Breeds Terrorism …

by MuslimMatters.org

Occupation breeds terror

Israel must leave the territories, and must do it soon – whether accompanied by concessions on the Palestinian side or not

- Share
Comments (340)

- Seth Freedman
- guardian.co.uk, Monday 19 November 2007 07.00

Occupation breeds terrorIsrael must leave the territories, and must do it soon – whether accompanied by concessions on the Palestinian side or notShare
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Comments (340)Seth Freedman
Seth Freedman
guardian.co.uk, Monday 19 November 2007 07.00 GMT
Article historyWhen I first moved to this country, I was prepared to play my part by enlisting in the IDF and serving in the West Bank. While there, I saw for myself the effect my mere uniformed presence had on the Palestinians I encountered on a daily basis. Every interaction took place with me holding all the cards – it was me with the loaded gun in my hands; it was me barking instructions to “stop or I’ll shoot”, “lift up your shirt”, “don’t come another step closer”; it was me playing with my quarry as though they were puppets on the end of short, taut strings.However, I still believed that we “did what we had to do”, since it was a case of us or them, and we could never ease up in our actions for fear that the next Palestinian we encountered was the one with a bomb strapped to his chest. And so it continued, bursting into buildings to round up the residents and lock them in their own basement, so that we could take over the house and grab a few hours’ sleep in the middle of a mission – and all perfectly acceptable in the context of war.But that was when I saw the wide, silent eyes of the families’ children as we screamed at their father – their hero, their protector – and wrested from him the reins of power inside his own house. And that’s when it started to dawn on me just what kind of effect our actions were having on the next generation, who were guaranteed to end up hating us when all they saw was us herding them like cattle and imposing our will on them through the sights of our guns.Once I left the army, my forays into the West Bank were on more equal terms, as I sought to meet the very people whose towns I’d previously patrolled, to hear their stories about life under military rule. From Jenin to Bethlehem to Ramallah and beyond, the extent of the suffering and the depth of the torment was exposed to me time and again. There was no doubt in my mind that our mere presence in their daily routines was twisting the knife every time they encountered a soldier – and breeding extremism and radicalism all the while.The unspoken truth that every Israeli knows, uncomfortable as it may be to admit, is that occupation breeds terror. Every incursion, every raid, every curfew and collective punishment, drives the moderates into the welcoming arms of the militants, who promise to return their honour and their wounded pride by fighting the oppressors’ fire with fire of their own. And that fact alone should be enough to shake Israelis awake and realise that the occupation has to end, as much for our own security as for the sake of the Palestinians that we’re subjugating.

Even those who only care about the safety of the Israeli people, and to hell with the Palestinians, should be backing the withdrawal of troops to the Green Line. They should know that the labyrinthine network of checkpoints is not actually making them safer, but is there just to make the Palestinians’ lives a misery, thus endangering Israeli lives further in the end. And they should recognise that while Israel’s presence continues to fester in the Palestinian territories like an open sore, there is little to no chance that the Palestinians will seek rapprochement and dialogue with their neighbours.

And that means that any coexistence projects – such as those promoted by OneVoice, the Clubhouse network, and so on – are doomed to fail while the occupiers refuse to acknowledge the plight of the occupied. Israel has the upper hand whichever way you look at it, and to treat the situation as somehow balanced is to overlook totally the sheer injustice of it all.

Of course, the Israelis have suffered decades of terrorism at the hands of extremist Palestinian groups, and as such have every right to demand their government protects them from similar atrocities in the future. But, for all that Israelis have had it bad, they haven’t seen every facet of their lives systematically destroyed at the hands of an uncaring occupying force. They haven’t seen their economy run into the ground by crippling border closures and sanctions, they haven’t been denied freedom of movement between their homes and farmlands, and they haven’t had to beg soldiers to let their wives through checkpoints in order to give birth in hospital.

At the same time, the settlements are as much of a problem to a viable Palestinian state as anything, thanks to the watertight security their presence demands from the army, restricting Palestinian movement and cutting the West Bank into tiny ribbon-like strips. As one Palestinian said, in Emma Williams’ essential book on the region, “thanks to the settlers and their infrastructure, we’re locked so tight into the State of Israel we’re like a bug in concrete.”

But still the expansion continues, and still the stranglehold on the Palestinians persists. While the Israeli public stays silent, while their taxes swell the government’s coffers, they are tacitly aiding and abetting slow torture on a national scale. On top of the sporadic killing that the occupation inevitably causes, the killing of an entire people’s hopes and dreams takes place 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

And it has to stop. Even though it’s no doubt too late to pull many of the current generation back from the brink of hate and enmity, there’s still time to ensure that today’s resentment doesn’t have to be instilled into the children of tomorrow. Playing the “fighting terror” card might win Knesset votes, but it doesn’t push things forward nor work out how to pave the way towards long-lasting future peace.

Israel must leave the territories, and they must do it soon – whether accompanied by concessions on the Palestinian side or not. The occupation is illegal, it is abhorrent, and it is utterly counterproductive if its aim is to bring security to Israelis. Anyone who ventures into the Palestinian towns and cities, who witnesses the devastation for themselves and hears the tragic tales from the horse’s mouth, knows this. And anyone who prefers to cover their ears or avert their eyes is only doing damage to both sides in the long run. Israel will never have peace whilst it crushes Palestinian aspirations – and both sides deserve far better lives than those they are being forced to endure at present.

LEAFLET FOR SOLDIERS
by Yesh Guvl (“There is a limit !”), Israeli support group for soliders who refuse service in the occupied territories (2002) See: http://www.yesh-gvul.org/english.html
SOLDIER
We all want to defend our country. We’re all sick and tired of terrorism. We all want peace. But do our actions permit of an end to the cycle of bloodshed ?
Since 1967, Israel has ruled over 3.5 million Palestinians, running their lives by means of a forcible occupation, with continual violations of human rights.
The occupation regime has merely exacerbated Israel’s security problems; at this time, it endangers the life of each one of its citizens, yours included ! SOLDIER, it’s in your hands
Ask yourself whether your actions in the course of your military service enhance national security ? Or do those actions merely fuel the enmity and the acts of violence between us and our Palestinian neighbours ?
YOU CAN STOP THE VIOLENCE
SOLDIER: THE OCCUPATION BREEDS TERRORISM
When you take part in extrajudicial killings (“liquidation” in the army’s terms); When you take part in demolishing residential homes; When you open fire at unarmed civilian population or residential homes; When you uproot orchards When you interdict food supplies or medical treatment –
YOU ARE TAKING PART IN ACTIONS DEFINED IN INTERNATIONAL CONVENTIONS (SUCH AS THE FOURTH GENEVA CONVENTION) AND IN ISRAELI LAW, AS WAR CRIMES.
As far back as 40 years ago, an Israeli court ruled that a soldier is forbidden to obey a flagrantly illegal order.
Soldier – do you consider such war crimes justifiable ?
Don’t acts of “liquidation” provoke suicide bombings ? Is it justifiable to demolish the homes and vandalise the property of entire families ? Can one justify the killing of children, women, old people – or, overall, of unarmed civilians ? What are the “security” grounds to justify starving entire villages and depriving the sick of medical care ?
Soldier: don’t these daily acts of repression, which are part of the routine of the occupation – curfew and blockade, land confiscation, preventing people from working or studying, the run-around and humiliation at the roadblocks and the violent searches in Palestinian homes – fuel hatred of us ?
END THE OCCUPATION – END THE CYCLE OF BLOODSHED !
SOLDIER: THE OCCUPATION CAUSES LOSS OF LIFE
Even the heads of the defence establishment concede that there is no military solution to terrorism.
“All the preventative work we’ve done this past year is like trying to empty out the sea with a teaspoon,” a senior security official admitted. (“Haaretz”, 19.12.2001)
Ami Ayalon, former head of the Shabak security police, says: “An ideology can’t be killed by killing leaders.”
Soldier, is there a people anywhere in the world that will not resist an occupation regime ? If you were in the Palestinians’ shoes, would you be willing to bow your head to a foreign ruler ?
Two years ago, we were convinced that the occupation of southern Lebanon was vital for our security. Twenty years ago, we were certain that our occupation of the Sinai peninsula guaranteed our security. But thanks to termination of our occupation of those areas, we have avoided shedding the blood of our soldiers.
Since the onset of the current intifada, over a thousand Israelis and Palestinians have been killed, most of them unarmed civilians taking no part in the fighting. As long as we hold on to the occupied Palestinian territories, we will continue to shed our own blood and that of the Palestinians.
END THE OCCUPATION – END THE BLOODSHED ! SOLDIER: THE OCCUPATION UNDERMINES OUR COUNTRY
We are all concerned for the wellbeing of the state of Israel. We all want the state to invest more in education, social services, health, and development of our infrastructure. But to maintain the occupation, the state spends billions on upkeep of the army in the territories, on settlements, on laying bypass roads and all the rest.
The state is cutting back on civilian services to enlarge the military budget. The occupation, and the violence that it prompts, drag the economy down into recession. Investors are in flight, tourists stay away, entire sections of the economy are in collapse.
Wouldn’t it be preferable to use the money to reinforce our social structures ? Wouldn’t it be preferable to channel the funds to our crumbling health and education systems ? Is it just to neglect the aged, the handicapped and the unemployed in favour of further settlements ?
END THE OCCUPATION, PUBLIC ALLOTMENTS TO THE DISADVANTAGED, NOT THE SETTLEMENTS! SOLDIER, THE OCCUPATION UNDERMINES THE ARMY
The occupation is harmful to the army and its soldiers. Training is called off because soldiers spend so much time on routine duty in the territories – guarding settlements, protecting highways, and forays into Palestinian towns and villages.
Soldiers are required to serve under inhuman conditions – like the four soldiers of the armour corps who spent 234 uninterrupted hours in their tank. In order to sustain the occupation, they weren’t even allowed out to relieve themselves.
Military sources admit the occupation routine subjects soldiers to exhaustion – and exhaustion leads to a decline in fitness and causes accidents.
Wouldn’t it be better to dedicate the time to the country’s real defence needs ?
Ending the occupation will restore the army’s combat readiness. Wouldn’t it be better to reduce the burden borne by reservists and grant conscripts better conditions ?
END THE OCCUPATION –
REDUCE MILITARY SERVICE TO TWO YEARS !!
CUT DOWN THE BURDEN OF RESERVE DUTY!!
SOLDIER
There are acts that decent people don’t commit, even if they’re given orders ! Decent people don’t demolish homes; they don’t kill children, women and babies; they don’t starve the neighbouring people, and don’t deny medical care to people just like you and me. Such conduct weakens our country’s moral fibre.
These acts are actually harmful; even if we’re told they’re for “security purposes”. Every “liquidation” (killing) prompts a bombing. The child you wounded today is tomorrow’s terrorist. Anyone concerned for national security won’t do things that fuel terrorism.
SOLDIER – IT’S IN YOUR HANDS
We don’t have a sure fire recipe. Make up your own mind, guided by your conscience, your feelings, your convictions. We can’t take the decision for you. We can only tell you that many, very many soldiers, have said “NO !” to war crimes ! From the Lebanon war, right up to the present intifada, thousands of soldiers – conscripts and reservists – have plucked up the courage to say “NO !”
Anyone who decides to refuse, reaches that decision on his own. But when he does make up his mind, he will find us extending a helping hand, offering advice, support and help.
For those who gird on implement of war
-And that includes us –
Whether in fact,
Or by an acquiescent slap on the back,
Are propelled,
Mumbling ‘necessity’ or ‘revenge’,
Into the domain of war criminals.
Nathan Alterman, 1948
Refusing to kill

and on and on

Learn The Truth About War – Find Out Who The Real Terrorists Are.

Uploaded by tradgedyandhope on Jul 29, 2011

Since being in Iraq and Afghanistan over 1 million civilians have been killed and thousands of soldiers have lost their lives to empire, to the bankers and elite who make a profit from human suffering, they are the real terrorists..This video was dedicated to those who have lost their lives to these criminals…. The final video with the girl speaking was not edited by me it was made the Youtube user TheParadigmShift it is an excerpt from an amazing video, which I recommend everyone watches.

This is a well done video. It appears here because it speaks the truth. Truth is what I seek. Truth needs to be told – far and wide. As an American it really hurts to watch this, but it needs watching. Please share it with your friends, put it on Facebook and Twitter and on your own blogs and sites. Thanks. You know it’s important. Most people just do not know about these things. Tell them. Thanks.

“The real terrorist was me” : US Soldier

Posted September 3, 2010 by Hala in TV/Movies. Leave a Comment

wow…

The real terrorist was me US Soldier – Subtitulado

Posted by Dr Mark Daniels on August 6, 2011Leave a comment (2)Go to comments

I tried hard to be proud of my service, but all I could feel was shame. Racism could no longer mask the reality of the occupation. These were people, these were human beings. I’ve since been plagued by guilt, any time I see an elderly man, li…ke the one who couldn’t walk, who we rolled onto a stretcher, and told the Iraqi police to take him away. I feel guilt any time I see a mother with her childen, like the one who cried hysterically, and screamed that we’re worse than Saddam, as we forced her from her home. I feel guilt any time I see a young girl, like the one I grabbed by the arm, and dragged into the street. We were told we were fighting terrorists.. the real terrorist was me, and the real terrorism was this occupation. Racism within the military has long been an important tool to justify the destruction and occupation of another country, it has long been used to justify the killing, subjugation and torture of another people. Racism is a vital weapon employed by this government; it is a more important weapon than a rifle, a tank, a bomber, or a battleship; it is more destructive than an artillery shell, or a bunker buster, or tomahawk missile. While all those weapons are created and owned by this government, they are harmless without people willing to use them. Those who send us to war, do not have to pull the trigger, or lob a mortar round; they do not have to fight the war, they merely have to sell the war. They need a public who’s willing to send their soldiers …
Video Rating: 5 / 5

“The real terrorist was me”: Confessions of a US soldier

SEP 6

Posted by Pamir Times

“I tried hard to be proud of my service, but all I could feel was shame. Racism could no longer mask the reality of the occupation. These were people, these were human beings. I’ve since been plagued by guilt, any time I see an elderly man, like the one who couldn’t walk, who we rolled onto a stretcher, and told the Iraqi police to take him away. I feel guilt any time I see a mother with her childen, like the one who cried hysterically, and screamed that we’re worse than Saddam, as we forced her from her home. I feel guilt any time I see a young girl, like the one I grabbed by the arm, and dragged into the street.

We were told we were fighting terrorists.. the real terrorist was me, and the real terrorism was this occupation. Racism within the military has long been an important tool to justify the destruction and occupation of another country, it has long been used to justify the killing, subjugation and torture of another people. Racism is a vital weapon employed by this government; it is a more important weapon than a rifle, a tank, a bomber, or a battleship; it is more destructive than an artillery shell, or a bunker buster, or tomahawk missile.

While all those weapons are created and owned by this government, they are harmless without people willing to use them. Those who send us to war, do not have to pull the trigger, or lob a mortar round; they do not have to fight the war, they merely have to sell the war. They need a public who’s willing to send their soldiers into harm’s way. They need soldiers who are willing to kill and be killed, without question…

They can spend millions on a single bomb, but that bomb only becomes a weapon, when the ranks of the military are willing to follow orders to use it. They can send every last soldier anywhere on Earth, but there will only be a war, if soldiers are willing to fight.. And the ruling class, the billionaires who profit from human suffering, care only about expanding their wealth, controlling the world economy.

Understand that their power lies only in their ability to convince us that war, oppression, and exploitation is in our interest. They understand that their wealth is dependent on their ability to convince the working class to die, to control the market of another country, and convincing us to kill and die, is based on their ability to make us think that we are somehow superior.

Soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen, have nothing to gain from this occupation. The vast majority of people living in the U.S. have nothing to gain from this occupation. In fact, not only do we have nothing to gain, but we suffer more because of it. We lose limbs, endure trauma, and give our lives. Our families have to watch flag-draped coffins lowered into the earth.

Millions in this country without health care, jobs, or access to education, have watched this government squander over FOUR-HUNDRED AND FIFTY MILLION DOLLARS A DAY ON THIS OCCUPATION. [IRAQ]

Poor and working people in this country, are send to kill poor and working people in another country, to make the rich richer; and without racism, soldiers would realize that they have more in common with the Iraqi people, than they do with the billionaires who send us to war.

I threw families onto the street in Iraq, only to come home and find families thrown onto the street in this country, and it’s a tragic, and unnecessary foreclosure crisis.

We need to wake up and realize that our real enemies are not in some distant land, they’re not people whose names we don’t know, and cultures we don’t understand. The enemy is people we know very well, and people we can identify. The enemy is a system that wages war when it’s profitable. The enemy is the CEO’s who lay us off from our jobs when it’s profitable; it’s the insurance companies who deny us health care when it’s profitable; it’s the banks who take away our homes when it’s profitable.

Our enemy is not five thousand miles away, they are right here at home. When we organize, and fight with our sisters and brothers, we can stop this war, we can stop this government, and we can create a better world.”

Text of the speech made by a US soldier.

The Real Terrorist was ME! An Amazing Speech by an Iraq Veteran.

“The Real Terrorist Was Me”
Speech By War Veteran

Our real enemies are not those living in a distant land whose names or policies we don’t understand; The real enemy is a system that wages war when it’s profitable, the CEOs who lay us off our jobs when it’s profitable, the Insurance Companies who deny us Health care when it’s profitable, the Banks who take away our homes when it’s profitable. Our enemies are not several hundred thousands away. They are right here in front of us
– Mike Prysner

Posted July 29, 2010

Please Support the Veterans at:
http://www.ivaw.org/

AMAZING SPEECH BY WAR VETERAN

I tried hard to be proud of my service but all i can feel is shame

I seem i claim by guilt everytime i see an eldery man like the one that could’t walk and we brought by the stretcher and we called the Iraq’s Police to take him away

I feel guilt everytime i see a mother with her children like the one who cried hystericly and screaming that we are worst than Saddam, as we forced her from her home.

I feel guilt anytime I see a young girl, like the one I grabbed by the arm, and dragged into the street.

We are told we are fighting terrorists; the real terrorist was me and the real terrorism is in this occupation.

Those who send us to war do not have to pull a trigger, or lab a mortal round.

They don’t have to fight the war, they merely have to sell the war.

They need a public who is willing to send their soldiers in the harms way.

They need soldiers who are willing to kill and be killed without question.

They can spend millions on a single bomb

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akm3nYN8aG8&feature=player_embedded

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article26047.htm

THE BRITISH VETERANS AGAINST THE WAR!

The descent of Britain’s Afghan campaign into a Vietnam-style madness
By CAPTAIN DOUG BEATTIE MC

‘I really wanted to believe the greater good was being served in Afghanistan. But I wasn’t convinced; not by a long shot,’ said Doug Beattie
That night, as I lay staring into the inky blackness, the horrors replayed themselves time and again in my mind. I kept coming back to the futility of it all. The waste of lives – on all sides. How had things got so bad that children were prepared to act and die in such a hideous manner?

Soon afterwards news came that Sergeant Jon Mathews had been killed in Marjah. He left behind a wife and young daughter. Then it was announced that the base was being closed. So what had been the point of ever setting it up? Of allowing ourselves to get bogged down in yet another enemy town with limited manpower and no easy way of being re-supplied? In my mind it had been a waste of time, a waste of resources and a waste of Jon’s life.

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m58338&hd=&size=1&l=e

US AND UK GOVERNMENT DO NOT CARE ABOUT SOLDIERS , THEY CARE ABOUT PROFIT AND SELF-IMAGE.
SO LONG AS THIER DEFENCE STOCK PORTFOLIOS ARE MAKING MONEY AND THEY DO NOT LOOK STUPID IN PUBLIC (LIKE ADMITTING THEY WHERE WRONG OR LYING OR BEING BLACKMAILED!!) LET THE WAR AND THE SLAUGHTER CONTINUE , SO SOME MORE SOLDIERS AND CIVILIANS GET MUTILATED…NO BIG DEAL FOR OUR GOVERNMENT REPRESENTATIVES

BUT WE THE PEOPLE AND THE SOLDIERS WILL BE PAYING THE PRICE FOR GENERATIONS TO COME!!!

“By now most people know that DU has damaged tens of thousands of our own troops and caused soaring cancer rates in target populations, including the people of Iraq, Kosovo, and Afghanistan. Over 130,000 veterans of the first Gulf War have been declared “unfit for service” because of medical conditions which independent scientists and physicians connect to exposure to depleted uranium.

What is less well known is the staggering rate of birth defects in the children of the veterans of these wars. The British are reporting rates as high as 65%. It seems that breathing in the radioactive dust from exploded DU shells not only causes decapacitating illnesses, but massive genetic damage as well.

How the military poisons its own troops. “U.S War Crimes”

http://eclipptv.com/viewVideo.php?video_id=11812

The Roots of Gulf War Illness.
The US military has a long tradition of using its soldiers as medical guinea pigs.

In recent years, with the involvement of pharmaceutical executives like Donald Rumsfeld with the Department of Defense, the trend has accelerated. Now hundreds of thousands of US servicemen and women receive vaccines that are untested and experimental in nature.

On October 16, 2006, the Department of Defense announced that it will resume its previously court-halted anthrax vaccination program and that troops who do not agree to receive the six-injection series voluntarily will be faced with disciplinary action.

Untested vaccinations are believed to be one of the source of Gulf War Illness, a crippling condition which disabled tens of thousands of soldiers after the first Gulf War.

To learn more, visit this site: www.beyondtreason.com.

http://cuthulan.wordpress.com/2010/02/26/health-in-the-21st-cenutry-is-killing-us/

BE PREPARED TO LOOSE ANOTHER 100 SOLDIERS THIS SUMMER. ITS THE AFGHAN GROUSE SEASON , AND OUR TROOPS ARE THE TARGETS!!

http://cuthulan.wordpress.com/2010/07/19/tis-the-killing-season-afghanistans-grouse-season-2/

SOLDIERS ARE HUMAN BEINGS TOO, AND THEY KNOW THAT THIER POLITIONS HAVE SENT THEM OFF TO SLAUGHTER . IT PUTS AN AMAZING MENTAL STRAIN ON SOLDIERS WHEN THEY REALISED THEY ARE THE BAD GUYS!!!!
THUS THE US MILITARY SEEMS TO HAVE A SUICIDE DIVISION EVEN AL QUADA OR THE TALIBAN WOULD BE PROUD OF!!!

18 veterans commit suicide each day

By Rick Maze – Staff writer
Posted : Monday Apr 26, 2010 8:00:40 EDT

Troubling new data show there are an average of 950 suicide attempts each month by veterans who are receiving some type of treatment from the Veterans Affairs Department.

http://www.armytimes.com/news/2010/04/military_veterans_suicide_042210w/

http://cuthulan.wordpress.com/2010/05/08/darwin-award-for-soldiers-and-israel-will-natural-selection-end-war-and-israel/

SO WHO BENEFITS FROM THESE WARS?

POLITIONS ,DEFENCE CONTRACTORS AND DRUG DEALERS BENEFIT-

WASHINGTON – U.S. lawmakers have a financial interest in military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, a review of their accounts has revealed.

Members of Congress invested nearly 196 million dollars of their own money in companies that receive hundreds of millions of dollars a day from Pentagon contracts to provide goods and services to U.S. armed forces, say nonpartisan watchdog groups.
Lawmakers charged with overseeing Pentagon contractors hold stock in those very firms, as do vocal critics of the war in Iraq, says the Centre for Responsive Politics (CRP).

http://cuthulan.wordpress.com/2009/10/12/us-government-making-a-killing-on-war/

Blair certainly did what he “thought was right” for Tony Blair. As Peter Oborne pointed out in March : “We now know that the wretched Blair has multiplied his personal fortune many times over by trading off the connections he made while in Downing Street. Shockingly, he fought a long battle to conceal the source of his new-found wealth, and only this month did it finally become public that one of his largest clients was a South Korean oil company, the UI Energy Corporation, with extensive interests in Iraq … he has also made £1million from advising the Kuwaiti royal family. It can be fairly claimed that Blair has profiteered as a result of the Iraq War in which so many hundreds of thousands of people died … in the league of shame, Tony Blair is arguably the worst of them all.”

Tony Blair tried to keep the public in the dark over his dealings with South Korean oil firm UI Energy Corporation
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1260204/Tony-Blairs-legacy-sleaze-cleaned-up.html#ixzz0tAqgpoDn

http://cuthulan.wordpress.com/2010/07/16/raoul-moat-tony-blair-or-the-police-who-is-the-biggest-murderer/

BLAIR also spent a great deal of effort covering up PEDOPHILE RINGS ,that seemed to point straight to his advisors and cabinet ministers.

http://cuthulan.wordpress.com/2010/01/07/uk-government-blackmailed-into-war-blair-covers-mps-paedophile-ring-and-the-dunblane-massacre/

http://cuthulan.wordpress.com/2010/07/20/tony-blair-i-told-you-so-and-so-did-millions-of-others/

DRUGS DEALERS ARE MAKING MASSIVE PROFITS-“Afghan drug trafficking brings US $50 billion a year”
The US is not going to stop the production of drugs in Afghanistan as it covers the costs of their military presence there, says Gen. Mahmut Gareev, a former commander during the USSR’s operations in Afghanistan.
http://www.russiatoday.com/Top_News/2009-08-20/afghanistan-us-drug-trafficking.html
http://cuthulan.wordpress.com/2010/07/22/dying-for-drugs-drugs-war-finance-and-your-government-representative/

AND DO THEY REDUCE TERRORISM? ..NO!!!

Baroness Manningham-Buller said the terrorist threats resulting from the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan left MI5 “swamped”
Iraq inquiry: Ex-MI5 boss says war raised terror threat
Baroness Manningham-Buller said the terrorist threats resulting from the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan left MI5 “swamped”
The invasion of Iraq “substantially” increased the terrorist threat to the UK, the former head of MI5 has said.

Giving evidence to the Iraq inquiry, Baroness Manningham-Buller said the action “radicalised” a generation of young people, including UK citizens.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-10693001

SOLDIERS ,ITS TIME TO PUT DOWN THE WEAPONS AND COME HOME . ITS NOT YOUR FAULT AND ITS NOT YOUR WAR!!!!

http://cuthulan.wordpress.com/2010/01/10/the-real-uk-legacy-of-the-iraq-and-afghan-wars-death-stalks-our-streets-and-the-world/

http://cuthulan.wordpress.com/2010/04/07/military-heroes-or-welfare-zeros/

OTHERS ,WHO SHOULD OF AND CLAIMED TOO, KNOW BETTER SENT YOU OUT TOO FIGHT. THEY LIED AND THEY PROFITED BIG TIME!!!!

http://cuthulan.wordpress.com/2009/09/10/are-us-wars-in-iraq-and-afghanistan-well-intended-mistakes-what-we-now-know-from-the-evidence/

http://cuthulan.wordpress.com/2010/07/13/the-last-act-of-any-government-is-to-loot-the-nation-do-you-have-the-feeling-youre-being-robbed/

ITS NOT LIKE WE HAVE NOT BEEN HEAR BEFORE!!!!

THE SOLDIER

When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
and the women come out to cut up what remains,
jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
and go to your gawd like a soldier.

THE POLITION

”Now all my lies are proved untrue
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?”
(Epitaphs of War, Rudyard Kipling, 1865-1936.)

THE REAL GAME PLAN EXPLAINED
The Divide and Rule .The NWO capitalist, communist con!! Stalin was a good state capitalist!
http://cuthulan.wordpress.com/2009/09/02/a-short-history-of-global-domination-or-rockefella-rothschild-and-the-capitalist-communist-nwo-con/
USA spreading death and destruction aka democracy since 1945
http://cuthulan.wordpress.com/2010/06/22/us-government-spreading-freedom-and-democracy-since-1945/
The system keeps repeating. Here is the 1933 game plan , exactly the same as today!
http://cuthulan.wordpress.com/2009/09/02/33/
Here is the obvious evidence for a 911 INSIDE JOB!!
http://cuthulan.wordpress.com/2010/06/11/911-the-case-for-an-inside-job/

“We were told we were fighting Terrorists but the real terrorist was me” US Soldier speaks out

8022011

Let us not forget what Wikileaks has exposed and the price Bradley Manning is paying for revealing the loss suffered by the people of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The WAR Of TERROR must end and those responsible for engineering such crimes against humanity should be held accountable.
This soldier is absolutely inspiring. This is a must WATCH video… please share

– WACA –

Wikileaks exposes the real terrorists in Afghanistan

By Nick Everett

“I’ve been waiting for [this] for a long time”, tweeted Daniel Ellsberg, in reference to the release of more than 92,000 pages of classified US military documents by the whistle-blower website Wikileaks, on July 25.

Ellsberg, who famously leaked thousands of pages of a classified document revealing the secret history of the Vietnam War (the Pentagon Papers) in 1971, told Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman: “It is the first release in 39 years on the scale of the Pentagon Papers. How many times in these years should there have been the release of thousands of pages showing our being lied into war in Iraq, as in Vietnam, and the nature of the war in Afghanistan?”

Wikileaks’ “Afghanistan War Diary” is an archive of reports written mostly by soldiers on the ground between 2004 and 2009, detailing killings of civilians, including children, the growing strength of the resistance to the occupation and covert support for the Taliban from Pakistan’s military. Its release has left White House and Pentagon spokespeople floundering to defend the nine-year war, which the US military and its NATO allies are losing.

At first, they claimed that the documents didn’t reflect the reality of the war, since they predated the Obama administration’s “surge” of combat troops announced late last year. Then national security adviser General James Jones condemned the disclosure, saying it “could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk, and threaten our national security”. At the same time, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said, “There’s no broad new revelations in this”. Admiral Mike Mullen, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a news conference, “[Wikileaks founder and chief editor Julian] Assange can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing, but the truth is [Wikileaks] might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family”.

Slaughter of the innocents

But — as the leaked documents reveal — it is not Wikileaks that has blood on its hands. It’s the Obama administration, which continues to send troops to fight and die for its imperial interests in both Afghanistan and Iraq. With public support for the war already waning, this leak can only strengthen the call for the troops to come home.

Following the release, Assange told Amy Goodman: “Most civilian casualties occur in instances where one, two, 10 or 20 people are killed — they rarely numerically dominate the list of events … The way to really understand this war is by seeing that there is one killed after another, every day, going on and on.” Assange described a massacre, which he referred to as a “Polish My Lai”. On August 16, 2007, after returning to a village where they had suffered a roadside bomb that morning, Polish troops — part of the NATO occupation troops in Afghanistan — launched mortars into the village, striking a house where a wedding party was under way.

In another incident in 2007, reported in the Guardian, a convoy of US Marines was struck by a minivan rigged with explosives near the city of Jalalabad. As they raced the six miles back to their base, the Marines opened fire with automatic weapons, spraying bullets at anything in their path, including “teenage girls in fields, motorists in their cars, old men as they walked along the road”. In what the Guardian described as a “bloodbath”, “nineteen unarmed civilians were killed and 50 wounded”. The Wikileaks documents demonstrate a cover-up by the US military, which, according to the Guardian, initially reported that, simultaneously with the suicide explosion, “the patrol received small arms fire from three directions”. The six-mile rampage back to the base — which the Guardian notes was later the subject of a 17-day military inquiry and 12,000-page report — was described as simply, “The patrol returned to JAF [Jalalabad air field].”

The documents also illustrate how the massacre and initial cover-up sparked public fury among Afghan civilians at their US occupiers. Demonstrators ran through the streets of Jalalabad breaking windows and blocking roads.

A month later, in April 2007, the Afghan Human Rights Commission published a report into the shooting which said the victims included a 16-year-old woman carrying a bundle of grass and a 75-year-old man walking back from the shops. By then, a US army colonel had admitted to the Afghan puppet government that the shootings were a “terrible, terrible mistake” and “a stain on our honour”. Two thousand dollars were paid to the families of each victim. Yet all of the Marines involved in the incident were later exonerated by the military of any wrongdoing.

The Polish “My Lai” and the massacre near Jalalabad are only two war crimes among many. According to theGuardian, the documents show at least 144 separate instances of the killing of innocent Afghan civilians, ranging from individual shootings at the hands of CIA paramilitaries to mistaken air strikes that wiped out entire families and villages.

Air strikes

In July 2008, American planes attacked an Afghan bridal party of 70 to 90 people on a road near the Pakistani border. The bride and at least 27 other members of the party, including children, were killed. A month later, a memorial service for a tribal leader in the village of Azizabad in Afghanistan’s Herat province was hit by repeated US air strikes that killed at least 90 civilians, including 15 women and up to 60 children, according to a United Nations report. Among the dead were 76 members of one extended family, headed by a “wealthy businessman with construction and security contracts with the nearby American base at Shindand airport”, according to New York Times journalist Carlotta Gall. A local tribal leader told Gall: “It is quite obvious, the Americans bombed the area due to wrong information. I am 100 percent confident that someone gave the information due to a tribal dispute … These people they killed were enemies of the Taliban.”

Afghan President Hamid Karzai denounced the strikes against Azizabad and fired two Afghan commanders, including the top ranking officer in western Afghanistan, for “negligence and concealing facts”. An investigation launched by Karzai concluded that more than 90 Afghan civilians had died. The US military initially denied any civilians had died, claiming 30 Taliban “militants” had been killed. This estimate was then revised to 25 Taliban fighters and five “non-combatants”, including a woman and two children. A military “investigation” released findings on August 29, 2008, that supposedly corroborated this casualty count.

Ironically, the US military claimed that its now discredited findings at Azizabad “were corroborated by an independent journalist embedded with the U.S. force”, That “independent journalist” (working for Fox News) was Oliver North, who gained notoriety not only for his role in the Reagan administration’s cover-up of the Iran-Contra scandal, but for his testimony in defence of one of the Marines accused of carrying out a massacre of Vietnamese at Son Thang in February 1970.

This year more reports of civilian casualties have emerged. In February, US helicopters shot at a convoy of mini-buses, killing up to 27 civilians, including women and children. Also in February, in a special operations night raid, two pregnant women and a teenage girl, as well as a police officer and his brother, were shot dead in their home in a village in Paktia province. The soldiers reportedly dug the bullets out of the bodies, washed the wounds with alcohol, and tried to cover up the incident.

On July 23, two days before the release of the Wikileaks documents, a NATO missile attack killed 52 civilians in a small town in Helmand province, in southern Afghanistan. Women and children from eight families were packed into a house to escape a US incursion into the village when the residence was demolished from the sky. “They have ruined us, and they have killed small children and innocent women”, a 57-year-old resident told reporters, after he dragged the bodies of his relatives and neighbours from the carnage, according to a report in the New York Times. This incident, like so many others, was initially denied by US and NATO spokespeople and is now being “investigated”.

Previous Afghan war commander General Stanley McChrystal, after being sacked by the Obama administration, admitted candidly, “We’ve shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force”. McChrystal’s replacement, General David Petraeus, has promised to escalate the violence in order to subdue the Afghan resistance and force it to make a deal with Washington. The Wikileaks documents also reveal that the Pentagon set up a secret commando unit, Task Force 373 – made up of Army and Navy special operatives whose task is to assassinate individuals from a list of 2000 targets.

Changed strategy?

Obama used Wikileaks’ disclosures to announce a “change in strategy”.

Thirty-six hours after Wikileaks released the Afghan War Diary, the US House of Representatives voted to pass a bill that funds the war in Afghanistan with an extra US$33 billion and 30,000 more troops, for another year. This “change in strategy” follows a “surge” of 60,000 additional troops deployed to Afghanistan in late 2009.

With each additional deployment, troop casualties mount. July 2010 was the deadliest month of the entire war for both US and NATO troops. The US death count of at least 66 surpassed the June record of 50 killed. US soldiers are being maimed at four times the rate of 2009, and the number of wounded in 2009 was almost three times that of 2008. Ten Australian troops have been killed since June, nearly half the 21 fatalities suffered by Australian forces since 2001. More than 150 Australian soldiers have been wounded.

After the death of three Australian commandos in a helicopter crash on June 21, the Australian defence minister, John Faulkner, told ABC Radio: “It is absolutely critical for the safety and security of Australians and Australia to help prevent Afghanistan from again becoming a training ground and operation base for international terrorists”. Throughout the federal election campaign, both Prime Minister Julia Gillard and opposition leader Tony Abbott used the funerals of troops killed in Afghanistan to pledge their commitment to the war. But their calls for Australians to support the occupation are not being heeded. On the same day the three commandos were killed, a poll conducted by Essential Research found that 60% of Australians want the troops withdrawn from Afghanistan.

What the Wikileaks documents so clearly reveal — and the US and Australian governments have been determined to hide — is that the occupation troops are the real terrorists in Afghanistan today. Only their withdrawal can bring peace for the people of Afghanistan.

Oppression breeds Terror and Terrorism

No Justice No Peace

Cutting the Fuse: The Explosion of Global Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It,

Demonstrators protest US troop increase for Afghanistan in Los Angeles

US soldiers kill 16 Afghan civilians in revenge [Peace and war, Human rights, Media] — Administrator @ 9:47 am

Jewish protests against Israel not reported by press.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFpfy1SBCgo

THOUSANDS IN MANCHESTER PROTEST FOR GAZA

Foreign Occupation main reason for ‘blowback’ Terrorism

Instead, the root cause is foreign military occupation, which triggers secular and religious people to carry out suicide attacks.

It’s the Occupation, Stupid

Extensive research into the causes of suicide terrorism proves Islam isn’t to blame — the root of the problem is foreign military occupations.

BY ROBERT A. PAPE | OCTOBER 18, 2010

CATO ORG BOOK

Does U.S. Intervention Overseas
Breed Terrorism?
The Historical Record

US Foreign Policy Makes America Less Safe in the War on Terrorism

The “Green Peril”:
Creating the Islamic Fundamentalist Threat

Terrorism: Theirs and Ours

Occupation, not Islam, Breeds Terrorism …

Occupation breeds terror

Learn The Truth About War – Find Out Who The Real Terrorists Are.

“The real terrorist was me” : US Soldier

The real terrorist was me US Soldier – Subtitulado

“The real terrorist was me”: Confessions of a US soldier

The Real Terrorist was ME! An Amazing Speech by an Iraq Veteran.

“We were told we were fighting Terrorists but the real terrorist was me” US Soldier speaks out

Share this:

Wikileaks exposes the real terrorists in Afghanistan

Slaughter of the innocents

Air strikes

Changed strategy?

so much more but you search for yourself to be convinced

and reflect and return to your own soul which must stand for the accounting on the Final Judgement of the ONE God

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Cutting the Fuse: The Explosion of Global Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It,

Demonstrators protest US troop increase for Afghanistan in Los Angeles

US soldiers kill 16 Afghan civilians in revenge [Peace and war, Human rights, Media] — Administrator @ 9:47 am

Jewish protests against Israel not reported by press. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFpfy1SBCgo

Foreign Occupation main reason for ‘blowback’ Terrorism

Instead, the root cause is foreign military occupation, which triggers secular and religious people to carry out suicide attacks.

Extensive research into the causes of suicide terrorism proves Islam isn’t to blame — the root of the problem is foreign military occupations.

BY ROBERT A. PAPE | OCTOBER 18, 2010

CATO ORG BOOK

Does U.S. Intervention Overseas Breed Terrorism? The Historical Record

The “Green Peril”: Creating the Islamic Fundamentalist Threat

Terrorism: Theirs and Ours

Occupation, not Islam, Breeds Terrorism …

Occupation breeds terror

The real terrorist was me US Soldier – Subtitulado

“The real terrorist was me”: Confessions of a US soldier

Share this:

Wikileaks exposes the real terrorists in Afghanistan

Slaughter of the innocents

Air strikes

Changed strategy?

so much more but you search for yourself to be convinced

and reflect and return to your own soul which must stand for the accounting on the Final Judgement of the ONE God

Pages

Recent Posts

Archives

Categories

Meta

Top Clicks

Jewish protests against Israel not reported by press.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFpfy1SBCgo

Does U.S. Intervention Overseas
Breed Terrorism?
The Historical Record

The “Green Peril”:
Creating the Islamic Fundamentalist Threat