[ <<La parola genocidio è stata usata in maniera selettiva dai media
occidentali e dalle elites per descrivere i crimini presunti - mai
provati - che sarebbero stati commessi dai regimi di Saddam Hussen o
di Slobodan Milosevic. Halabja in Iraq e Srebrenica in Bosnia sono
spesso usate per riferirsi - con poche o nessuna prova - ai crimini di
Hussein e Milosevic. I "simboli" di Halabja e Srebrenica sono i
pretesti addotti per giustificare le ambizioni imperialiste
occidentali. Noi adesso sappiamo che Srebrenica è stata usata per
giustificare l'attacco contro la Serbia, ed Halabja per la guerra in
Iraq...>>
Un articolo di Ghali Hassan, giornalista australiano. ]
Normalising genocide
Ghali Hassan, Online Journal Contributing Writer
November 9, 2005
So far, 2,000 U.S. soldiers have been killed since the March 2003
illegal and unprovoked U.S. war on Iraq. The number has been
meticulously pronounced and printed in every Western media outlet.
What about the hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi men, women and
children who have been needlessly massacred by the combined
U.S.-British sanctions and war? It is a deliberate genocide.
With the exception of the war on the former Republic of Yugoslavia
(Serbia)--an Orthodox nation--U.S. wars of aggression have been
consistently against defenceless people of colour. "They are the poor
of the planet, being made poorer, dominated and exploited by the
foreign policy of the U.S. and its rich allies designed for
domination, exploitation and triage," wrote Ramsey Clark, former U.S.
attorney general in the Carter Administration.
The U.S.-Britain wars on Iraq bear all the hallmarks of Western
racism. Iraqis are not only dehumanised, they are abused and tortured
to make the mass murder palatable to Western public. Meanwhile the
corporate media and Western governments have masked imperialism in the
black faces of Condoleezza Rice and Kofi Annan.
A comprehensive study conducted in December 1991 by the British
Medical Education Trust in London estimated that more than 200,000
Iraqis had died during and immediately after the massacre of the 1991
U.S. war, the so-called the "Gulf War," as a direct or indirect
consequence of attacks on civilian infrastructure. In addition, since
August 1990, Iraq has been under economic and military attacks that
contributed to the mass murder of Iraqi men, women and children in
particular.
The forgotten genocidal sanctions is estimated to have killed more
than 1.5 million Iraqi civilians, including 500,000 children under the
age of five. The wholesale destruction of Iraqi children was defended
as "a price worth it," by Madeleine Albright, the former U.S.
Secretary of State. Can you imagine anyone saying; the killing of 3000
people in the 9/11 attack is "a price worth it."
The U.S. and Britain first systematically bombed Iraq's civilian
infrastructure, including; water purification plants, sewage treatment
plants, electrical power grids, pharmaceutical plants, transportation,
communication, manufacturing, commercial properties, housing, mosques
and churches out of existence. Food production, including baby milk,
processing, storage, distribution, fertiliser and insecticide
production, was targeted for destruction. Then the U.S. and Britain
continued the sanctions to ensure that Iraq would be unable to repair
or replace most of what had been destroyed. The point of this
carefully calculated mass murder was to bully and intimidate not only
Iraq, but also any other defenceless nation that dares resist as Iraq
did. In addition, to bleeding Iraq to death, the U.N. Security Council
ordered Iraq to pay more than $50 billion in reparations claims to
Kuwait, U.S. corporations, and to many fraudulent and dubious claimants.
Despite Iraq's compliance with the terms of the 1991 war's cease-fire,
the sanctions and the weekly bombings--"anything that flies on
anything that moves"--of Iraqi cities and towns continued in order to
harm the Iraqi people. "For me what is tragic, in addition to the
tragedy of Iraq itself, is the fact that the United Nations Security
Council member states . . . are maintaining a program of economic
sanctions deliberately, knowingly killing thousands of Iraqis each
month. And that definition fits genocide," said Denis Halliday, the
former U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Iraq.
The Oxford Dictionary defines genocide as the deliberate extermination
of a nation or race of people." In the 1948 Genocide Convention, the
word genocide was defined as any act "committed with the intent to
destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic or religious group as
such." Hence, genocidal acts included causing serious "mental harm" or
inflicting "conditions of life" aimed at such destruction. Can
anything be clearer than what the U.S. and Britain are committing
against the Iraqi people?
"It is the function of the experts, and the mainstream media, to
normalise the unthinkable for the general public," wrote American
economist Edward Herman. The art of normalising mass atrocities has
always been a prerequisite to neutralise a disciplined Western
population in order to remove any conscience for moral responsibility.
According to John and Karl Mueller (Sanctions of Mass Destruction,
Foreign Affairs May/June 1999, p. 43.), the sanctions alone "have
taken the lives of more people in Iraq than have been killed by all
so-called weapons of mass destruction throughout history." Therefore
Iraq's genocide "arguably was the greatest genocide of the post World
War II era," conducted and perpetuated with the tacit support of the
U.N. member states.
Today, the U.N. is complicit in the continuing war crimes against the
Iraqi people, and the destruction of the Iraqi society. Consistent
with its role as the "handmaiden" of Western imperialism, immediately
after the illegal invasion of Iraq, the U.N. legitimised the U.S.
Occupation of a sovereign nation, and stands to support all U.S.
violations of international laws, including the U.N. Charter.
Corruption and self-interest are the endemic characteristics of the
U.N. member states and their staff. The Saddam government was able to
exploit this and extract some revenues to keep Iraq functioning as a
state despite the unjust sanctions. It was the only way available for
Iraq to break out of the sanctions by corrupting the corruptible. By
the end of 2002, the signs of genocidal sanctions were visible
everywhere in Iraq.
Will the U.N. pass a resolution--like the one demanding Syria to
"cooperate fully" with a U.N. investigation into the death of
businessman and former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq
al-Hariri--demanding the U.S. and Britain cooperate fully with a U.N.
investigation into the death of hundreds of thousands of innocent
Iraqis and the theft of tens of billion of dollars from Iraq's wealth?
Will the U.N. Security Council condemn Israeli for its criminal and
"medieval practice of political assassination" of Palestinian
political leaders? Not likely.
The U.S. criminal invasion and occupation have only doubled the
atrocity of sanctions. A recent UNICEF rapid assessment survey reveals
that acute malnutrition among Iraqi children had almost doubled since
before the war, jumping from 4 percent to almost 8 percent. The survey
adds that; "Acute malnutrition sets in very fast and is strong
indicator of the overall health of children." The general health of
Iraqi children, the elderly and pregnant women in particular has
declined because of deteriorating living conditions, including; lack
of access to potable water, food, hospital care, and sharp decline in
purchasing power.
In fact, U.S. occupying forces are deliberately starving Iraqis by
cutting food and water supplies, and blackmailing Iraqis to submit to
the Occupation. "A drama is taking place in total silence in Iraq,
where the coalition's occupying forces are using hunger and
deprivation of water as a weapon of war against the civilian
population," said Professor Jean Ziegler, the U.N. human rights
investigator at a press conference in Geneva on 15 October 2005.
"Starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is a flagrant
violation of international law," added the Swiss-born sociologist.
The 15-years long U.S. aggression and genocidal sanctions against Iraq
have devastated Iraq's human resources for many generations. The brave
generation of Iraqi men and women that lifted Iraq out of poverty and
made Iraq the beacon of progress in the Middle East have been
destroyed by the combined U.S.-British genocidal sanctions and
criminal wars of aggression perpetuated and normalised by complicit
corporate media.
It has been a taboo in Western corporate media and among Western
elites to mention the death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Only
dead U.S. soldiers are counted as humans. Iraqis do not count. As far
as I know, no one has lit candles for the more than 100,000 Iraqi
civilians killed by the U.S. forces from March 2003 to October 2004.
The conservative estimate was published on 29 October 2004 in the
reputed and peer-reviewed British medical journal The Lancet. If one
includes the atrocities of Fallujah, Ramadi, al-Qaim, Tel Afar,
Hillah, Baghdad and the daily bloodshed instigated by U.S. forces and
their collaborators, the number of Iraqis killed since March 2003
would be in the 200,000 mark or even more. The majority of the victims
were innocent women and children, betrayed by Western media complicity
in hiding U.S. war crimes from the outside world.
Dr. Les Roberts of John Hopkins University and the lead author of The
Lancet study had expected a "moral outrage" response by the public;
instead he was shocked by the muted reception. The experienced
researcher, who used the same methodology to study mortality caused by
war around the world, was praised by the scientific community for his
Iraq's study. His study's findings in the Congo have been used by the
U.N. and the International Red Cross.
"Tony Blair and Colin Powell have quoted those results time and time
again without any question as to the precision or validity," he told
The Chronicle of Higher Education. However, the Iraq study was
deliberately ignored or dismissed by the British-American corporate
media. In fact the study is censored because it reported genocide.
The word genocide has been used selectively by Western powers, the
media and the elites to describe crimes allegedly--never
proven--committed by the regime of Saddam Hussein or Slobodan
Milosevic. Halabja in Iraq and Srebrenica in Bosnia are often used to
describe crimes--with little or no evidence--allegedly committed by
Hussein and Milosevic. The 'symbols' of Halabja and Srebrenica are the
pretexts to justify the West's imperialist ambitions. We know now that
Srebrenica was used to justify the attack on Serbia, and Halabja was
used to justify the war on Iraq. Both criminal acts were disguised as
'humanitarian interventions'.
Genocide is never used to describe the mass murder of Iraqi civilians
by U.S.-sponsored genocidal sanctions and U.S. wars. Saddam was
demonised to justify the criminal policy of the West against the Iraqi
people. The motives for this deliberate genocide are the colonisation
of Iraq to enhance U.S. imperial dominance, the destruction of Arab
nationalism, and support for Israel's Zionist expansion and criminal
policies against the Palestinians.
Iraq is littered with countless U.S.-committed mass murders masked as
"U.S. operations against al-Qaida fighters." The recent indiscriminate
attacks--bombing the city water supply, electricity grid and
communication networks and heavy use of cluster bombs in civilian
areas--on towns and villages in western Iraq is a reminder of the
Fallujah massacre. The Italian daily, La Republica reported, "The
Americans are responsible for a massacre using unconventional weapons,
the identical charge for which Saddam Hussein stands accused," quoting
an Italian investigative story, which will be broadcast on Italian
RAI-3 TV on 08 November 2005 [1]. U.S. forces and their collaborators
are fighting indigenous Iraqi Resistance fighters defending their
country against new a form of U.S.-led fascism.
A new Fallujah massacre is in the making. According to recent Iraqi
and Arab media reports in al-Qaim, the "defence minister" in the
puppet government (Saadoun al-Dulaimi) is calling on U.S. forces to
"wipe out entire families and destroy the houses of resistance
fighters with their women and children inside." Iraqi community
leaders have condemned the attacks as "killing operations" and are
calling on the "International Community" to intervene to stop the mass
murder of civilians. "We call all humanitarians and those who carry
peace to the world to intervene to stop the repeated bloodshed in the
western parts of Iraq," said Sheikh Osama Jadaan, a community leader
in Husaybah, close to the Syrian boarder. "He rightly added; "we say
to the American occupiers to get out and leave Iraq to the Iraqis."
The daily bloodshed and the destruction of the country by the U.S.
forces are committed with the full complicity of the corporate media
and Western elites.
The occupying forces and the media explain the violence in cultural
terms, as "Iraqis against Iraqis," a colonial cliché to justify the
Occupation. The U.S. aim is to make the public focus on the violence
of the occupied and oppressed--the Iraqis--and justify the action of
the occupiers. However, this "sectarian violence" is created and
nurtured by the U.S. and Britain in order to terrorise the Iraqi
population and push them into the arms of the occupiers for
"protection." It is also the only way to justify an ongoing
Occupation. Iraqis are well aware of that and have united to demand
the end to U.S. violence and occupation.
We know now that there were no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in
Iraq since 1991, and the sanctions and wars were the tools for a
deliberate genocide. As it was predicted, the invasion and occupation
of Iraq have brought only disaster and misery to the Iraqi people.
More than 82 percent of Iraqis "strongly oppose" the U.S. Occupation
of their country. "Less than 2 percent of Iraqis [brought into Iraq on
the back of U.S. tanks] believe coalition forces are responsible for
any improvement in security," according to the British Ministry of
Defence's recent poll. It follows that those who oppose the withdrawal
of U.S. forces from Iraq, are acting as U.S. imperial propagandists
complicit in normalising a deliberate genocide against the Iraqi people.
Today, most Iraqis view U.S. forces as "murderous maniacs." After the
"handover" of fake sovereignty, the fraudulent January 2005 elections,
and the recent massive fraud to pass the illegal U.S.-crafted
constitution, the U.S. administration is left with one fraudulent card
to play; the scheduled December elections. After that, it is time to
put an end to the genocide and withdraw all U.S. and foreign forces
from Iraq. The sooner this will happen, the fewer Iraqi lives will be
lost. Then the "International Community" has a legal duty to prosecute
those who committed these war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Note:
[1] Fallujah. La strage nascosta (Fallujah, The Concealed Massacre)
will be shown on RAI News tomorrow November 8th at 07:35 (via HOT
BIRDTM satellite, Sky Channel 506 and RAI-3), and rebroadcast by HOT
BIRDTM satellite and Sky Channel 506 at 17:00 and over the next two days.
Ghali Hassan lives in Perth, Western Australia.
Copyright © 1998-2005 Online Journal
:: Article nr. 17635 sent on 10-nov-2005 02:50 ECT
:: The address of this page is : www.uruknet.info?p=17635
:: The incoming address of this article is :
onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_162.shtml
occidentali e dalle elites per descrivere i crimini presunti - mai
provati - che sarebbero stati commessi dai regimi di Saddam Hussen o
di Slobodan Milosevic. Halabja in Iraq e Srebrenica in Bosnia sono
spesso usate per riferirsi - con poche o nessuna prova - ai crimini di
Hussein e Milosevic. I "simboli" di Halabja e Srebrenica sono i
pretesti addotti per giustificare le ambizioni imperialiste
occidentali. Noi adesso sappiamo che Srebrenica è stata usata per
giustificare l'attacco contro la Serbia, ed Halabja per la guerra in
Iraq...>>
Un articolo di Ghali Hassan, giornalista australiano. ]
Normalising genocide
Ghali Hassan, Online Journal Contributing Writer
November 9, 2005
So far, 2,000 U.S. soldiers have been killed since the March 2003
illegal and unprovoked U.S. war on Iraq. The number has been
meticulously pronounced and printed in every Western media outlet.
What about the hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi men, women and
children who have been needlessly massacred by the combined
U.S.-British sanctions and war? It is a deliberate genocide.
With the exception of the war on the former Republic of Yugoslavia
(Serbia)--an Orthodox nation--U.S. wars of aggression have been
consistently against defenceless people of colour. "They are the poor
of the planet, being made poorer, dominated and exploited by the
foreign policy of the U.S. and its rich allies designed for
domination, exploitation and triage," wrote Ramsey Clark, former U.S.
attorney general in the Carter Administration.
The U.S.-Britain wars on Iraq bear all the hallmarks of Western
racism. Iraqis are not only dehumanised, they are abused and tortured
to make the mass murder palatable to Western public. Meanwhile the
corporate media and Western governments have masked imperialism in the
black faces of Condoleezza Rice and Kofi Annan.
A comprehensive study conducted in December 1991 by the British
Medical Education Trust in London estimated that more than 200,000
Iraqis had died during and immediately after the massacre of the 1991
U.S. war, the so-called the "Gulf War," as a direct or indirect
consequence of attacks on civilian infrastructure. In addition, since
August 1990, Iraq has been under economic and military attacks that
contributed to the mass murder of Iraqi men, women and children in
particular.
The forgotten genocidal sanctions is estimated to have killed more
than 1.5 million Iraqi civilians, including 500,000 children under the
age of five. The wholesale destruction of Iraqi children was defended
as "a price worth it," by Madeleine Albright, the former U.S.
Secretary of State. Can you imagine anyone saying; the killing of 3000
people in the 9/11 attack is "a price worth it."
The U.S. and Britain first systematically bombed Iraq's civilian
infrastructure, including; water purification plants, sewage treatment
plants, electrical power grids, pharmaceutical plants, transportation,
communication, manufacturing, commercial properties, housing, mosques
and churches out of existence. Food production, including baby milk,
processing, storage, distribution, fertiliser and insecticide
production, was targeted for destruction. Then the U.S. and Britain
continued the sanctions to ensure that Iraq would be unable to repair
or replace most of what had been destroyed. The point of this
carefully calculated mass murder was to bully and intimidate not only
Iraq, but also any other defenceless nation that dares resist as Iraq
did. In addition, to bleeding Iraq to death, the U.N. Security Council
ordered Iraq to pay more than $50 billion in reparations claims to
Kuwait, U.S. corporations, and to many fraudulent and dubious claimants.
Despite Iraq's compliance with the terms of the 1991 war's cease-fire,
the sanctions and the weekly bombings--"anything that flies on
anything that moves"--of Iraqi cities and towns continued in order to
harm the Iraqi people. "For me what is tragic, in addition to the
tragedy of Iraq itself, is the fact that the United Nations Security
Council member states . . . are maintaining a program of economic
sanctions deliberately, knowingly killing thousands of Iraqis each
month. And that definition fits genocide," said Denis Halliday, the
former U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Iraq.
The Oxford Dictionary defines genocide as the deliberate extermination
of a nation or race of people." In the 1948 Genocide Convention, the
word genocide was defined as any act "committed with the intent to
destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic or religious group as
such." Hence, genocidal acts included causing serious "mental harm" or
inflicting "conditions of life" aimed at such destruction. Can
anything be clearer than what the U.S. and Britain are committing
against the Iraqi people?
"It is the function of the experts, and the mainstream media, to
normalise the unthinkable for the general public," wrote American
economist Edward Herman. The art of normalising mass atrocities has
always been a prerequisite to neutralise a disciplined Western
population in order to remove any conscience for moral responsibility.
According to John and Karl Mueller (Sanctions of Mass Destruction,
Foreign Affairs May/June 1999, p. 43.), the sanctions alone "have
taken the lives of more people in Iraq than have been killed by all
so-called weapons of mass destruction throughout history." Therefore
Iraq's genocide "arguably was the greatest genocide of the post World
War II era," conducted and perpetuated with the tacit support of the
U.N. member states.
Today, the U.N. is complicit in the continuing war crimes against the
Iraqi people, and the destruction of the Iraqi society. Consistent
with its role as the "handmaiden" of Western imperialism, immediately
after the illegal invasion of Iraq, the U.N. legitimised the U.S.
Occupation of a sovereign nation, and stands to support all U.S.
violations of international laws, including the U.N. Charter.
Corruption and self-interest are the endemic characteristics of the
U.N. member states and their staff. The Saddam government was able to
exploit this and extract some revenues to keep Iraq functioning as a
state despite the unjust sanctions. It was the only way available for
Iraq to break out of the sanctions by corrupting the corruptible. By
the end of 2002, the signs of genocidal sanctions were visible
everywhere in Iraq.
Will the U.N. pass a resolution--like the one demanding Syria to
"cooperate fully" with a U.N. investigation into the death of
businessman and former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq
al-Hariri--demanding the U.S. and Britain cooperate fully with a U.N.
investigation into the death of hundreds of thousands of innocent
Iraqis and the theft of tens of billion of dollars from Iraq's wealth?
Will the U.N. Security Council condemn Israeli for its criminal and
"medieval practice of political assassination" of Palestinian
political leaders? Not likely.
The U.S. criminal invasion and occupation have only doubled the
atrocity of sanctions. A recent UNICEF rapid assessment survey reveals
that acute malnutrition among Iraqi children had almost doubled since
before the war, jumping from 4 percent to almost 8 percent. The survey
adds that; "Acute malnutrition sets in very fast and is strong
indicator of the overall health of children." The general health of
Iraqi children, the elderly and pregnant women in particular has
declined because of deteriorating living conditions, including; lack
of access to potable water, food, hospital care, and sharp decline in
purchasing power.
In fact, U.S. occupying forces are deliberately starving Iraqis by
cutting food and water supplies, and blackmailing Iraqis to submit to
the Occupation. "A drama is taking place in total silence in Iraq,
where the coalition's occupying forces are using hunger and
deprivation of water as a weapon of war against the civilian
population," said Professor Jean Ziegler, the U.N. human rights
investigator at a press conference in Geneva on 15 October 2005.
"Starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is a flagrant
violation of international law," added the Swiss-born sociologist.
The 15-years long U.S. aggression and genocidal sanctions against Iraq
have devastated Iraq's human resources for many generations. The brave
generation of Iraqi men and women that lifted Iraq out of poverty and
made Iraq the beacon of progress in the Middle East have been
destroyed by the combined U.S.-British genocidal sanctions and
criminal wars of aggression perpetuated and normalised by complicit
corporate media.
It has been a taboo in Western corporate media and among Western
elites to mention the death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Only
dead U.S. soldiers are counted as humans. Iraqis do not count. As far
as I know, no one has lit candles for the more than 100,000 Iraqi
civilians killed by the U.S. forces from March 2003 to October 2004.
The conservative estimate was published on 29 October 2004 in the
reputed and peer-reviewed British medical journal The Lancet. If one
includes the atrocities of Fallujah, Ramadi, al-Qaim, Tel Afar,
Hillah, Baghdad and the daily bloodshed instigated by U.S. forces and
their collaborators, the number of Iraqis killed since March 2003
would be in the 200,000 mark or even more. The majority of the victims
were innocent women and children, betrayed by Western media complicity
in hiding U.S. war crimes from the outside world.
Dr. Les Roberts of John Hopkins University and the lead author of The
Lancet study had expected a "moral outrage" response by the public;
instead he was shocked by the muted reception. The experienced
researcher, who used the same methodology to study mortality caused by
war around the world, was praised by the scientific community for his
Iraq's study. His study's findings in the Congo have been used by the
U.N. and the International Red Cross.
"Tony Blair and Colin Powell have quoted those results time and time
again without any question as to the precision or validity," he told
The Chronicle of Higher Education. However, the Iraq study was
deliberately ignored or dismissed by the British-American corporate
media. In fact the study is censored because it reported genocide.
The word genocide has been used selectively by Western powers, the
media and the elites to describe crimes allegedly--never
proven--committed by the regime of Saddam Hussein or Slobodan
Milosevic. Halabja in Iraq and Srebrenica in Bosnia are often used to
describe crimes--with little or no evidence--allegedly committed by
Hussein and Milosevic. The 'symbols' of Halabja and Srebrenica are the
pretexts to justify the West's imperialist ambitions. We know now that
Srebrenica was used to justify the attack on Serbia, and Halabja was
used to justify the war on Iraq. Both criminal acts were disguised as
'humanitarian interventions'.
Genocide is never used to describe the mass murder of Iraqi civilians
by U.S.-sponsored genocidal sanctions and U.S. wars. Saddam was
demonised to justify the criminal policy of the West against the Iraqi
people. The motives for this deliberate genocide are the colonisation
of Iraq to enhance U.S. imperial dominance, the destruction of Arab
nationalism, and support for Israel's Zionist expansion and criminal
policies against the Palestinians.
Iraq is littered with countless U.S.-committed mass murders masked as
"U.S. operations against al-Qaida fighters." The recent indiscriminate
attacks--bombing the city water supply, electricity grid and
communication networks and heavy use of cluster bombs in civilian
areas--on towns and villages in western Iraq is a reminder of the
Fallujah massacre. The Italian daily, La Republica reported, "The
Americans are responsible for a massacre using unconventional weapons,
the identical charge for which Saddam Hussein stands accused," quoting
an Italian investigative story, which will be broadcast on Italian
RAI-3 TV on 08 November 2005 [1]. U.S. forces and their collaborators
are fighting indigenous Iraqi Resistance fighters defending their
country against new a form of U.S.-led fascism.
A new Fallujah massacre is in the making. According to recent Iraqi
and Arab media reports in al-Qaim, the "defence minister" in the
puppet government (Saadoun al-Dulaimi) is calling on U.S. forces to
"wipe out entire families and destroy the houses of resistance
fighters with their women and children inside." Iraqi community
leaders have condemned the attacks as "killing operations" and are
calling on the "International Community" to intervene to stop the mass
murder of civilians. "We call all humanitarians and those who carry
peace to the world to intervene to stop the repeated bloodshed in the
western parts of Iraq," said Sheikh Osama Jadaan, a community leader
in Husaybah, close to the Syrian boarder. "He rightly added; "we say
to the American occupiers to get out and leave Iraq to the Iraqis."
The daily bloodshed and the destruction of the country by the U.S.
forces are committed with the full complicity of the corporate media
and Western elites.
The occupying forces and the media explain the violence in cultural
terms, as "Iraqis against Iraqis," a colonial cliché to justify the
Occupation. The U.S. aim is to make the public focus on the violence
of the occupied and oppressed--the Iraqis--and justify the action of
the occupiers. However, this "sectarian violence" is created and
nurtured by the U.S. and Britain in order to terrorise the Iraqi
population and push them into the arms of the occupiers for
"protection." It is also the only way to justify an ongoing
Occupation. Iraqis are well aware of that and have united to demand
the end to U.S. violence and occupation.
We know now that there were no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in
Iraq since 1991, and the sanctions and wars were the tools for a
deliberate genocide. As it was predicted, the invasion and occupation
of Iraq have brought only disaster and misery to the Iraqi people.
More than 82 percent of Iraqis "strongly oppose" the U.S. Occupation
of their country. "Less than 2 percent of Iraqis [brought into Iraq on
the back of U.S. tanks] believe coalition forces are responsible for
any improvement in security," according to the British Ministry of
Defence's recent poll. It follows that those who oppose the withdrawal
of U.S. forces from Iraq, are acting as U.S. imperial propagandists
complicit in normalising a deliberate genocide against the Iraqi people.
Today, most Iraqis view U.S. forces as "murderous maniacs." After the
"handover" of fake sovereignty, the fraudulent January 2005 elections,
and the recent massive fraud to pass the illegal U.S.-crafted
constitution, the U.S. administration is left with one fraudulent card
to play; the scheduled December elections. After that, it is time to
put an end to the genocide and withdraw all U.S. and foreign forces
from Iraq. The sooner this will happen, the fewer Iraqi lives will be
lost. Then the "International Community" has a legal duty to prosecute
those who committed these war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Note:
[1] Fallujah. La strage nascosta (Fallujah, The Concealed Massacre)
will be shown on RAI News tomorrow November 8th at 07:35 (via HOT
BIRDTM satellite, Sky Channel 506 and RAI-3), and rebroadcast by HOT
BIRDTM satellite and Sky Channel 506 at 17:00 and over the next two days.
Ghali Hassan lives in Perth, Western Australia.
Copyright © 1998-2005 Online Journal
:: Article nr. 17635 sent on 10-nov-2005 02:50 ECT
:: The address of this page is : www.uruknet.info?p=17635
:: The incoming address of this article is :
onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_162.shtml