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The Attack against the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, What is it, that really threatens Civilization and - what kind of a Civilization is this?, by Wolfgang Fischer - The awesome cruelty of a doomed people by Robert Fisk - On the Bombings by Noam Chomsky - Inevitable ring to the unimaginable by John Pilger - Folks out there have a "Distaste of Western Civilization and Cultural Values" by Edward S. Herman - Respond to Violence: Teach Peace, Not War, by Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman - TwinTowers, by Uri Avnery, Acts of Terrorism - Acts of War, Venomous Butterfly - Emperor's Clothes comments: 'Washington's Backing of Afghan Terrorists: Deliberate Policy' Article from "Washington Post' - 'Taliban Camps U.S. bombed in Afghanistan Were Built by NATO' Documentation from the 'N.Y. Times'. Combined U.S. and Saudi aid to Afghan-based terrorism totaled $6 billion or more - 'CIA worked with Pakistan to create Taliban' - 'Osama bin Laden: Made In USA' (Excerpt from article on U.S. bombing of a pill factory in Sudan in August, 1998. Argues that bin Laden was and still may be a CIA asset)- 'Excerpts from News Reports - Bin Laden in the Balkans' evidence that bin Laden aided or is aiding the U.S.-sponsored forces in Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia- 'Into the Abyss' by Rick Rozoff - 'Washington Created Osama bin Laden' by Jared Israel - 'Russian Navy Chief Says Official 9-11 Story Impossible' - September 11 And Its Aftermath by Michael Albert and Stephen R. Shalom - The Need for Dissent - Radicalism is retreating, but it's more necessary than ever before by George Monbiot - Welcome to the Warnacular by Laura Flanders - What Kind of War? by Michael T. Klare- America Under Attack? by Dan Berger - White House lied about threat to Air Force One by Jerry White - Tony Blair's bin Laden dossier: a pretext instead of proof by Chris Marsden and Barry Grey - A Brief (and partial) History of US Sponsored Terrorism Abroad, Mark Zapezauer - If CIA and the government weren't involved in the September 11 attacks what were they doing? by Michael C. Ruppert - US planned war in Afghanistan long before September 11 by Patrick Martin - Gaping Holes in the 'CIA vs. bin Laden' Story by Jared Israel, Was the US government alerted to September 11 attack? -"What really happend on 9-11?" Jared Israel interviewed by Mark Haim (April 2002) (pdf.version)

see also: Who Is Osama Bin Laden? by Michel Chossudovsky
and:
The GW Bush - Osama Bin Ladin Connection
Where is the Bush administration taking the American people? By the WSWS Editorial Board (Sept.22.01)
Emergency, Terrorism and War on ZNet
and:
a kind of different statistics
WAR - looking behind the smoke: War of Lies by Rahul Mahajan and Robert Jensen
The Top Five Lies About This War
Kill, Kill, Kill by Russell Mokhiber
EMPEROR'S CLOTHES ARTICLES ON 9-11 * A GUIDE / site mirror here
The Complete 9/11 Timeline by Paul Thompson
9/11 WIDOW'S BUSH TREASON SUIT DISAPPEARS FROM MEDIA,by W. David Kubiak (Dec. 03)

911 BOOK (full text) New Pearl Harbor,Theology professor David Ray Griffin has written a book about the possible complicity of the Bush administration in the events of 9-11.

Why Did the WTC Buildings Collapse? (02.06)

Pentagon Strike - What hit the Pentagon on 911 ???

http://www.physics911.net (04.06)

IRAQ - Occupation and Resistance Report, Psychoanalysts for Peace and Justice

Senior Military, Intelligence, and Government Officials Question 9/11 Commission Report

Loose Change (10. 06): loosechange911.com

 

A CALL TO ACTION FOR PEACE

 

The Attack against the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington and the Consequences

 What is it, that really threatens Civilization and - what kind of a Civilization is this?

 

By Wolfgang Fischer

( german version ) (spanish version)

The attack against the WTC and the Pentagon.

The sorrow and suffering of the innocent victims of this attack and of their relatives and friends is added to the pain of all people, who have had to suffer since ages from the fact, that 'Justice', as meted out by those in power - is robbing the powerless majority of a viable future.

What is really threatening civilization, the attack itself or the historically developed causes and backgrounds, which drive people into humiliation to such an extent, that it is motivating them to deadly and suicidal attacks?

Have we really been confronted with a new dimension of violence on Sept. 11. 2001 or is a well known dimension only showing up at quite an unexpected location?

Are not, for example, the Iraqi people suffering from daily bombardements and what else have been those two bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki than acts of terror?

We must allow such questions if we do not totally want to forfeit any hope for a peaceful future.

So why all this violence?

On the one hand we have politically motivated violent expansion of power against the vital interests of human beings and whole peoples, who are being deprived of their living space and material as well as spiritual nourishment. And what is no less reprehensible: - people of questionable moral motivation are being financed and strategically used by secret services to satisfy the criminal interests of the investors.

And on the other hand we find the resistance against all the insanity of the world, acts of despair committed by people, who want to draw attention to the hopelessness and desperation of their existence. Permanent humiliation gives birth to the courage of despair and hatred, the spirit of ultimate destruction.

Violence must come to an end.

Only a politics considering the basic interests of Life, treating peoples of all different religions, races and nations as equal - a politics which respects Life and takes care of Nature as our basic source of existence will instantly lead to a termination of violence. If, however, we fail to move in this direction of an 'Infinite Justice' by means of actions such as used by Gandhi, further losses of freedom and quality of Life around the globe are inevitable.

The US-built anti-terror alliance named their answer to the attacks of Sept.11.: "Enduring Freedom"

According to the goals of capitalism the motto seems correct as this war is only trying to reinforce the freedom of exploitation and suppression by the industrialized countries. Pretending to be guided by humanistic motivations in waging this kind of war is pure lie and hypocrisy.


Privatised Violence in the Service of State Terrorism is Threatening World Peace. (w.f., 21.12. 2001)

For decades, and ever more aggressively, the US through their secret service agencies have been supporting sources of conflict all over the world with a view to destabilising certain situations to suit their own interests. This is a clear-cut strategy, thought out by clever heads like former Security Adviser Brzezinski ("The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives") and supported by scenarios like those designed by US historian Huntington ("The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order") See also: http://www.newamericancentury.org

If such views are familiar to our former State Secretary of Defence and Federal Research Minister Andreas von Bülow, who publicised them in book form ("In the Name of the Government - CIA, BND and the Criminal Intrigues of the Secret Services"), and if he claims without any official denial, that even in 1993 when the first bombing of the WTC took place, the primer had been supplied by the FBI, then a man like Schily, our Minister of the Interior, cannot be ignorant of them. Speaking of a "war beyond nations", Otto Schily is showing his true face as a collaborator with terror, and the same goes for all other politicians who support this manipulative interpretation.

On the one hand, they cover up for all those who, with profits from the trade with heroin and cocaine, are financing the terror at the cost of an army of millions of addicts, thereby in contravention of international law globally preventing peaceful coexistence. And on the other hand, they have a terrorising effect upon citizens at home, whose basic human rights continue to be abrogated through so-called anti-terror" legislation.


more (source: http://www.zmag.org/Commentaries/donorform.htm)

 

The awesome cruelty of a doomed people

By Robert Fisk

So it has come to this. The entire modern history of the Middle East - the collapse of the Ottoman empire, the Balfour declaration, Lawrence of Arabia's lies, the Arab revolt, the foundation of the state of Israel, four Arab-Israeli wars and the 34 years of Israel's brutal occupation of Arab land - all erased within hours as those who claim to represent a crushed, humiliated population struck back with the wickedness and awesome cruelty of a doomed people. Is it fair - is it moral - to write this so soon, without proof, without a shred of evidence, when the last act of barbarism in Oklahoma turned out to be the work of home-grown Americans? I fear it is. America is at war and, unless I am grotesquely mistaken, many thousands more are now scheduled to die in the Middle East, perhaps in America too. Some of us warned of "the explosion to come''. But we never dreamed this nightmare.

And yes, Osama bin Laden comes to mind, his money, his theology, his frightening dedication to destroy American power. I have sat in front of bin Laden as he described how his men helped to destroy the Russian army in Afghanistan and thus the Soviet Union. Their boundless confidence allowed them to declare war on America. But this is not the war of democracy vs terror that the world will be asked to believe in the coming hours and days. It is also about American missiles smashing into Palestinian homes and US helicopters firing missiles into a Lebanese ambulance in 1996 and American shells crashing into a village called Qana a few days later and about a Lebanese militia - paid and uniformed by America's Israeli ally - hacking and raping and murdering their way through refugee camps.

No, there is no doubting the utter, indescribable evil of what has happened in the United States. That Palestinians could celebrate the massacre of 20,000, perhaps 35,000 innocent people is not only a symbol of their despair but of their political immaturity, of their failure to grasp what they had always been accusing their Israeli enemies of doing: acting disproportionately. But we were warned. All the years of rhetoric, all the promises to strike at the heart of America, to cut off the head of "the American snake'' we took for empty threats. How could a backward, conservative, undemocratic and corrupt group of regimes and small, violent organizations fulfil such preposterous promises? Now we know.

And in the hours that followed yesterday's annihilation, I began to remember those other extraordinary, unbelievable assaults upon the US and its allies, miniature now by comparison with yesterdays' casualties. Did not the suicide bombers who killed 241 American servicemen and almost 100 french paratroops in Beirut on 23 October 1983, time their attacks with unthinkable precision?

It was just 7 seconds between the Marine bombing and the destruction of the French three miles away. Then there were the attacks on US bases in Saudi Arabia, and last year's attempt - almost successful it now turns out - to sink the USS Cole in Aiden. And then how easy was our failure to recognize the new weapon of the Middle East which neither Americans or any other Westerners could equal: the despair-driven, desperate suicide bomber.

All America's power, wealth - and arrogance, the Arabs will be saying - could not defend the greatest power the world has ever known from this destruction.

For journalists, even those who have literally walked through the blood of the Middle East, words dry up here. Awesome, terrible, unspeakable, unforgivable; in the coming days, these words will become water in the desert. And there will be, naturally and inevitably, and quite immorally, an attempt to obscure the historical wrongs and the blood and the injustices that lie behind yesterday's firestorms. We will be told about "mindless terrorism'', the "mindless" bit being essential if we are not to realise how hated America has become in the land of the birth of three great religions.

Ask an Arab how he responds to 20 or 30 thousand innocent deaths and he or she will respond as good and decent people should, that it is an unspeakable crime. But they will ask why we did not use such words about the sanctions that have destroyed the lives of perhaps half a million children in Iraq, why we did not rage about the 17,500 civilians killed in Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, why we allowed one nation in the Middle East to ignore UN Security Council resolutions but bombed and sanctioned all others who did. And those basic reasons why the Middle East caught fire last September - the Israeli occupation of Arab land, the dispossession of Palestinians, the bombardments and state sponsored executions, the Israeli tortures ... all these must be obscured lest they provide the smallest fractional reason for yesterday's mass savagery.

No, Israel was not to blame - that we can be sure that Saddam Hussein and the other grotesque dictators will claim so - but the malign influence of history and our share in its burden must surely stand in the dark with the suicide bombers. Our broken promises, perhaps even our destruction of the Ottoman Empire, led inevitably to this tragedy. America has bankrolled Israel's wars for so many years that it believed this would be cost-free. No longer so. It would be an act of extraordinary courage and wisdom if the United States was to pause for a moment and reflect upon its role in the world, the indifference of its government to the suffering of Arabs, the indolence of its current president.

But of course, the United States will want to strike back against "world terror'', who can blame them? Indeed, who could ever point the finger at Americans now for using that pejorative and sometimes racist word "terrorism''? There will be those swift to condemn any suggestion that we should look for real historical reasons for an act of violence on this world-war scale. But unless we do so, then we are facing a conflict the like of which we have not seen since Hitler's death and the surrender of Japan. Korea, Vietnam, is beginning to fade away in comparison.

Eight years ago, I helped to make a television series that tried to explain why so many Muslims had come to hate the West. Last night, I remembered some of those Muslims in that film, their families burnt by American-made bombs and weapons. They talked about how no one would help them but God. Theology vs technology, the suicide bomber against the nuclear power. Now we have learnt what this means.


On the Bombings

By Noam Chomsky

The terrorist attacks were major atrocities. In scale they may not reach the level of many others, for example, Clinton's bombing of the Sudan with no credible pretext, destroying half its pharmaceutical supplies and killing unknown numbers of people (no one knows, because the US blocked an inquiry at the UN and no one cares to pursue it). Not to speak of much worse cases, which easily come to mind. But that this was a horrendous crime is not in doubt. The primary victims, as usual, were working people: janitors, secretaries, firemen, etc. It is likely to prove to be a crushing blow to Palestinians and other poor and oppressed people. It is also likely to lead to harsh security controls, with many possible ramifications for undermining civil liberties and internal freedom.

The events reveal, dramatically, the foolishness of the project of "missile defense." As has been obvious all along, and pointed out repeatedly by strategic analysts, if anyone wants to cause immense damage in the US, including weapons of mass destruction, they are highly unlikely to launch a missile attack, thus guaranteeing their immediate destruction. There are innumerable easier ways that are basically unstoppable. But today's events will, very likely, be exploited to increase the pressure to develop these systems and put them into place. "Defense" is a thin cover for plans for militarization of space, and with good PR, even the flimsiest arguments will carry some weight among a frightened public.

In short, the crime is a gift to the hard jingoist right, those who hope to use force to control their domains. That is even putting aside the likely US actions, and what they will trigger - possibly more attacks like this one, or worse. The prospects ahead are even more ominous than they appeared to be before the latest atrocities.

As to how to react, we have a choice. We can express justified horror; we can seek to understand what may have led to the crimes, which means making an effort to enter the minds of the likely perpetrators. If we choose the latter course, we can do no better, I think, than to listen to the words of Robert Fisk, whose direct knowledge and insight into affairs of the region is unmatched after many years of distinguished reporting. Describing "The wickedness and awesome cruelty of a crushed and humiliated people," he writes that "this is not the war of democracy versus terror that the world will be asked to believe in the coming days. It is also about American missiles smashing into Palestinian homes and US helicopters firing missiles into a Lebanese ambulance in 1996 and American shells crashing into a village called Qana and about a Lebanese militia &endash; paid and uniformed by America's Israeli ally &endash; hacking and raping and murdering their way through refugee camps." And much more. Again, we have a choice: we may try to understand, or refuse to do so, contributing to the likelihood that much worse lies ahead.


Inevitable ring to the unimaginable

By John Pilger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That Tony Blair, whose government sells lethal weapons to Israel and has sprayed Iraq and Yugoslavia with cluster bombs and depleted uranium and was the greatest arms supplier to the genocidists in Indonesia, can be taken seriously when he now speaks about the "shame" of the "new evil of mass terrorism" says much about the censorship of our collective sense of how the world is managed.

One of Blair's favourite words - "fatuous" - comes to mind. Alas, it is no comfort to the families of thousands of ordinary Americans who have died so terribly that the perpetrators of their suffering may be the product of Western policies. Did the American establishment believe that it could bankroll and manipulate events in the Middle East without cost to itself, or rather its own innocent people?

The attacks on Tuesday come at the end of a long history of betrayal of the Islamic and Arab peoples: the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the foundation of the state of Israel, four Arab-Israeli wars and 34 years of Israel's brutal occupation of an Arab nation: all, it seems, obliterated within hours by Tuesday's acts of awesome cruelty by those who say they represent the victims of the West's intervention in their homelands.

"America, which has never known modern war, now has her own terrible league table: perhaps as many as 20,000 victims."

As Robert Fisk points out, in the Middle East, people will grieve the loss of innocent life, but they will ask if the newspapers and television networks of the west ever devoted a fraction of the present coverage to the half-a-million dead children of Iraq, and the 17,500 civilians killed in Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon. The answer is no. There are deeper roots to the atrocities in the US, which made them almost inevitable.

It is not only the rage and grievance in the Middle East and south Asia. Since the end of the cold war, the US and its sidekicks, principally Britain, have exercised, flaunted, and abused their wealth and power while the divisions imposed on human beings by them and their agents have grown as never before.

An elite group of less than a billion people now take more than 80 per cent of the world's wealth.

In defence of this power and privilege, known by the euphemisms "free market" and "free trade", the injustices are legion: from the illegal blockade of Cuba, to the murderous arms trade, dominated by the US, to its trashing of basic environmental decencies, to the assault on fragile economies by institutions such as the World Trade Organisation that are little more than agents of the US Treasury and the European central banks, and the demands of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in forcing the poorest nations to repay unrepayable debts; to a new US "Vietnam" in Colombia and the sabotage of peace talks between North and South Korea (in order to shore up North Korea's "rogue nation" status).

Western terror is part of the recent history of imperialism, a word that journalists dare not speak or write.

The expulsion of the population of Diego Darcia in the 1960s by the Wilson government received almost no press coverage. Their homeland is now an American nuclear arms dump and base from which US bombers patrol the Middle East.

In Indonesia, in 1965/6, a million people were killed with the complicity of the US and British governments: the Americans supplying General Suharto with assassination lists, then ticking off names as people were killed.

"Getting British companies and the World Bank back in there was part of the deal", says Roland Challis, who was the BBC's south east Asia correspondent.

British behaviour in Malaya was no different from the American record in Vietnam, for which it proved inspirational: the withholding of food, villages turned into concentration camps and more than half a million people forcibly dispossessed.

In Vietnam, the dispossession, maiming and poisoning of an entire nation was apocalyptic, yet diminished in our memory by Hollywood movies and by what Edward Said rightly calls cultural imperialism.

In Operation Phoenix, in Vietnam, the CIA arranged the homicide of around 50,000 people. As official documents now reveal, this was the model for the terror in Chile that climaxed with the murder of the democratically elected leader Salvador Allende, and within 10 years, the crushing of Nicaragua.

All of it was lawless. The list is too long for this piece.

Now imperialism is being rehabilitated. American forces currently operate with impunity from bases in 50 countries.

"Full spectrum dominance" is Washington's clearly stated aim.

Read the documents of the US Space Command, which leaves us in no doubt.

In this country, the eager Blair government has embarked on four violent adventures, in pursuit of "British interests" (dressed up as "peacekeeping"), and which have little or no basis in international law: a record matched by no other British government for half a century.

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

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

But how patient the oppressed have been.

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

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

September 13, 2001


Folks out there have a "Distaste of Western Civilization and Cultural Values"

By Edward S. Herman

One of the most durable features of the U.S. culture is the inability or refusal to recognize U.S. crimes. The media have long been calling for the Japanese and Germans to admit guilt, apologize, and pay reparations. But the idea that this country has committed huge crimes, and that current events such as the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks may be rooted in responses to those crimes, is close to inadmissible. Editorializing on the recent attacks ("The National Defense," Sept. 12), the New York Times does give a bit of weight to the end of the Cold War and consequent "resurgent of ethnic hatreds," but that the United States and other NATO powers contributed to that resurgence by their own actions (e.g., helping dismantle the Soviet Union and pressing Russian "reform"; positively encouraging Slovenian and Croatian exit from Yugoslavia and the breakup of that state, and without dealing with the problem of stranded minorities, etc.) is completely unrecognized.

The Times then goes on to blame terrorism on "religious fanaticism...the anger among those left behind by globalization," and the "distaste of Western civilization and cultural values" among the global dispossessed. The blinders and self-deception in such a statement are truly mind-boggling. As if corporate globalization, pushed by the U.S. government and its closest allies, with the help of the World Trade Organization, World Bank and IMF, had not unleashed a tremendous immiseration process on the Third World, with budget cuts and import devastation of artisans and small farmers. Many of these hundreds of millions of losers are quite aware of the role of the United States in this process. It is the U.S. public who by and large have been kept in the dark.

Vast numbers have also suffered from U.S. policies of supporting rightwing rule and state terrorism, in the interest of combating "nationalistic regimes maintained in large part by appeals to the masses" and threatening to respond to "an increasing popular demand for immediate improvement in the low living standards of the masses," as fearfully expressed in a 1954 National Security Council report, whose contents were never found to be "news fit to print." In connection with such policies, in the U.S. sphere of influence a dozen National Security States came into existence in the 1960s and 1970s, and as Noam Chomsky and I reported back in 1979, of 35 countries using torture on an administrative basis in the late 1970s, 26 were clients of the United States. The idea that many of those torture victims and their families, and the families of the thousands of "disappeared" in Latin America in the 1960s through the 1980s, may have harbored some ill-feelings toward the United States remains unthinkable to U.S. commentators.

During the Vietnam war the United States used its enormous military power to try to install in South Vietnam a minority government of U.S. choice, with its military operations based on the knowledge that the people there were the enemy. This country killed millions and left Vietnam (and the rest of Indochina) devastated. A Wall Street Journal report in 1997 estimated that perhaps 500,000 children in Vietnam suffer from serious birth defects resulting from the U.S. use of chemical weapons there. Here again there could be a great many people with well-grounded hostile feelings toward the United States.

The same is true of millions in southern Africa, where the United States supported Savimbi in Angola and carried out a policy of "constructive engagement" with apartheid South Africa as it carried out a huge cross-border terroristic operation against the frontline states in the 1970s and 1980s, with enormous casualties. U.S. support of "our kind of guy" Suharto as he killed and stole at home and in East Timor, and its long warm relation with Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, also may have generated a great deal of hostility toward this country among the numerous victims.

Iranians may remember that the United States installed the Shah as an amenable dictator in 1953, trained his secret services in "methods of interrogation," and lauded him as he ran his regime of torture; and they surely remember that the United States supported Saddam Hussein all through the 1980s as he carried out his war with them, and turned a blind eye to his use of chemical weapons against the enemy state. Their civilian airliner 655 that was destroyed in 1988, killing 290 people, was downed by a U.S. warship engaged in helping Saddam Hussein fight his war with Iran. Many Iranians may know that the commander of that ship was given a Legion of Merit award in 1990 for his "outstanding service" (but readers of the New York Times would not know this as the paper has never mentioned this high level commendation).

The unbending U.S. backing for Israel as that country has carried out a long-term policy of expropriating Palestinian land in a major ethnic cleansing process, has produced two intifadas- uprisings reflecting the desperation of an oppressed people. But these uprisings and this fight for elementary rights have had no constructive consequences because the United States gives the ethnic cleanser arms, diplomatic protection, and carte blanche as regards policy.

All of these victims may well have a distaste for "Western civilization and cultural values," but that is because they recognize that these include the ruthless imposition of a neoliberal regime that serves Western transnational corporate interests, along with a willingness to use unlimited force to achieve Western ends. This is genuine imperialism, sometimes using economic coercion alone, sometimes supplementing it with violence, but with many millions-perhaps even billions-of people "unworthy victims." The Times editors do not recognize this, or at least do not admit it, because they are spokespersons for an imperialism that is riding high and whose principals are unprepared to change its policies. This bodes ill for the future. But it is of great importance right now to stress the fact that imperial terrorism inevitably produces retail terrorist responses; that the urgent need is the curbing of the causal force, which is the rampaging empire.


Respond to Violence: Teach Peace, Not War

By Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

Open the Washington Post to it's editorial pages, and war talk dominates.

Henry Kissinger: Destroy the Network.

Robert Kagan: We Must Fight This War.

Charles Krauthammer: To War, Not to Court.

William S. Cohen: American Holy War.

There is no column by Colman McCarthy talking peace. From 1969 to 1997, McCarthy wrote a column for the Washington Post. He was let go because the column, he was told, wasn't making enough money for the company. "The market has spoken," was the way Robert Kaiser, the managing editor at the Post, put it at the time.

McCarthy is a pacifist. "I'm opposed to any kind of violence - economic, political, military, domestic."

But McCarthy is not surprised by the war talk coming from the Post. He has just completed an analysis of 430 opinion pieces that ran in the Washington Post in June, July and August 2001.

Of the 430 opinion pieces, 420 were written by right-wingers or centrists. Only ten were written by columnists one might consider left.

Nor is he surprised by the initial response of the American people to Tuesday's horrific attacks on innocent civilians. According to a Washington Post/ABC News poll, nine of ten people supported taking military action against the groups or nations responsible for the attacks "even if it led to war."

"In the flush of emotions, that is the common reaction," McCarthy says. "But is it a rational and sane reaction?" So, how should we respond? "We forgive you. Please forgive us." Forgive us for what? "Please forgive us for being the most violent government on earth," McCarthy says. "Martin Luther King said this on April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church in New York. He said 'my government is the world's leading purveyor of violence.'"

What should Bush do? "He should say that the United States will no longer be the world's largest seller of weapons, that we will begin to decrease our extravagantly wasteful military budget, which runs now at about $9,000 a second." What will Bush do? "Within the week, we will be bombing somebody somewhere," McCarthy says. "This is what his father did, this is what Clinton did."

"In the past 20 years, we have bombed Libya, Grenada, Panama, Somalia, Haiti, Afghanistan, Sudan, Iraq, and Yugoslavia. There are two things about those countries - all are poor countries, and the majority are people of dark colored skin."

Are you saying that we should just turn the other cheek? "No, that's passivity," McCarthy says. "Pacifism is not passivity. Pacifism is direct action, direct resistance, refusing to cooperate with violence. That takes a lot of bravery. It takes much more courage than to use a gun or drop a bomb."

Since leaving the Post, McCarthy has dedicated his life to teaching peace. He has created the Center for Teaching Peace, which he runs out of his home in Northwest Washington. He teaches peace and non-violence at six area universities and at a number of public secondary and high schools.

But he's up against a system that systematically teaches violence -from that all pervasive teacher of children - television - to the President of the United States.

"In 1999, the day after the Columbine shootings, Bill Clinton went to a high school in Alexandria, Virginia and gave a speech to the school's Peer Mediation Club," McCarthy says. "Clinton said 'we must teach our children to express their anger and resolve their conflicts with words not weapons.'"

"It was a great speech, but he went back that same night and ordered up the most intense bombing of Belgrade since that war began four weeks before." Message to children: kid's violence is bad, but America's violence is good.

McCarthy says we should teach our children forgiveness, not to demonize people who have a grievance. "When you hit your child, or beat up the person you are living with, you are saying - 'I want you to change the way you think or behave and I'm going to use physical force to make you change your way or your mind,'" he says. "In fact, violence is rarely effective. If violence was effective, we would have had a peaceful planet eons ago."

How to break the cycle of violence? "The same way you break the cycle of ignorance - educate people," McCarthy responds. "Kids walk in the school with no idea that two plus two equals four. They are ignorant. We repeat over and over - Billy, two plus two equals four. And Billy leaves school knowing two plus two equals four. But he doesn't leave school knowing that an eye for an eye means we all go blind."

"We have about 50 million students in this country," McCarthy says. "Nearly all of those are going to graduate absolutely unaware of the philosophy of Gandhi, King, Dorothy Day, Howard Zinn, or A.J. Muste." When he speaks before college audiences, McCarthy holds up a $100 dollar bill and says "I'll give this to anybody in the audience who can identify these next six people - Who was Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, and Paul Revere? All hands go up on all three."

"Then I ask - Who was Jeanette Rankin (first women member of Congress, voted against World War I and World War II, said 'you can no more win a war than win an earthquake,' Dorothy Day (co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement), Ginetta Sagan (founder of Amnesty USA)."

"The last three are women peacemakers. The first three are all male peacebreakers. The kids know the militarists. They don't know the peacemakers." He hasn't lost his $100 bill yet to a student. Of the 3,100 colleges and universities in the country, only about 70 have degree programs in peace studies and most are underfunded.

Instead of bombing, we should start teaching peace. "We are graduating students as peace illiterates who have only heard of the side of violence," McCarthy laments. "If we don't teach our children peace, somebody else will teach them violence."

[The Center for Teaching Peace has produced two text books, Solutions to Violence and Strength Through Peace, both edited by Colman McCarthy. Each book contains 90 essays by the world's great theorists and practitioners of non-violence. ($25 each). To contact Colman McCarthy, write to: Center for Teaching Peace, 4501 Van Ness Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20016 Phone: (202) 537-1372]

Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime Reporter. Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational Monitor. They are co-authors of Corporate Predators: The Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1999).


TwinTowers

By Uri Avnery

After the smoke has cleared, the dust has settled down and the initial fury blown over, humankind will wake up and realize a new fact: there is no safe place on earth.

A handful of suicide-bombers has brought the United States to a standstill, caused the President to hide in a bunker under a far-away mountain, dealt a terrible blow to the economy, grounded all aircraft, and emptied government offices throughout the country. This can happen in every country. The Twin Towers are everywhere.

Not only Israel, but the whole world is now full of gibberish about "fighting terrorism". Politicians, "experts on terrorism" and their likes propose to hit, destroy, annihilate etc., as well as to allocate more billions to the "intelligence community". They make brilliant suggestions. But nothing of this kind will help the threatened nations, much as nothing of this kind has helped Israel.

There is no patent remedy for terrorism. The only remedy is to remove its causes. One can kill a million mosquitoes, and millions more will take their place. In order to get rid of them, one has to dry the swamp that breeds them. And the swamp is always political.

A person does not wake up one morning and tell himself: Today I shall hijack a plane and kill myself. Nor does a person wake up one morning and tell himself: Today I shall blow myself up in a Tel-Aviv discotheque. Such a decision grows in a person's mind through a slow process, taking years. The background to the decision is either national or religious, social and spiritual.

No fighting underground can operate without popular roots and a supportive environment that is ready to supply new recruits, assistance, hiding places, money and means of propaganda. An underground organization wants to gain popularity, not lose it. Therefore it commits attacks when it thinks that this is what the surrounding public wants. Terror attacks always testify to the public mood.

That is true in this case, too. The initiators of the attacks decided to implement their plan after America has provoked immense hatred throughout the world. Not because of its might, but because of the way it uses its might. It is hated by the enemies of globalization, who blame it for the terrible gap between rich and poor in the world. It is hated by millions of Arabs, because of its support for the Israeli occupation and the suffering of the Palestinian people. It is hated by multitudes of Muslims, because of what looks like its support for the Jewish domination of the Islamic holy shrines in Jerusalem. And there are many more angry peoples who believe that America supports their tormentors.

Until September 11, 2001 - a date to remember - Americans could entertain the illusion that all this concerns only others, in far-away places beyond the seas, that it does not touch their sheltered lives at home. No more.

That is the other side of globalization: all the world's problems concern everyone in the world. Every case of injustice, every case of oppression. Terrorism, the weapon of the weak, can easily reach every spot on earth. Every society can easily be targeted, and the more developed a society is, the more it is in danger. Fewer and fewer people are needed to inflict pain on more and more people. Soon one single person will be enough to carry a suitcase with a tiny atomic bomb and destroy a megalopolis of tens of millions.

This is the reality of the 21st century that started this week in earnest. It must lead to the globalization of all problems and the globalization of their solutions. Not in the abstract, by fatuous declarations in the UN, but by a global endeavor to resolve conflicts and establish peace, with the participation of all nations, with the US playing a central role.

Since the US has become a world power, it has deviated from the path outlined by its founders. It was Thomas Jefferson who said: No nation can behave without a decent respect for the opinion of mankind. (I quote from memory). When the US delegation left the world conference in Durban, in order to abort the debate about the evils of slavery and in order to court the Israeli right, Jefferson must have turned over in his grave.

If it is confirmed that the attack on New York and Washington was perpetrated by Arabs - and even if not! - the world must at long last treat the festering wound of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is poisoning the whole body of humanity. One of the wise guys in the Bush administration said only a few weeks ago: "Let them bleed!" - meaning the Palestinians and the Israelis. Now America is bleeding. He who runs away from the conflict is followed by it, even into his home. Americans, and Europeans too, should learn this lesson.

The distance from Jerusalem to New York is small, and so is the distance from New York to Paris, London and Berlin. Not only multi-national corporations embrace the globe, but terror organizations do so, too. In the same way, the instruments for the solution of conflicts must be global.

Instead of the destroyed New York edifices, the twin towers of Peace and Justice must be built.

For information about Gush Shalom visit the website: http://www.gush-shalom.org/ - email: info@gush-shalom.org


On the 11 Sept 2001, 36615 children also died through hunger. Here's the statistics...

Victims: 35615 (according to FAO)
Location: the poorest countries in the world
Special TV reports on the tragedy: NONE
Newspaper articles: NONE
Messages from heads of states: NONE
Appeals by organisations against the crisis: NONE
Solidarity messages: NONE
Minutes of silence: NONE
Homages to the victims: NONE
Special s organised: NONE
Messages from the Pope: NONE
Stock exchanges: situation normal
Alarm level: NONE
Mobilisation of armed forces: NONE
Media speculation over the identity of the perpetrators of this crime: NONE
Those probably responsible for the crime: the global capitalist class.


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Emanzipation Humanum, version 9.2001, Criticism, suggestions as to form and content, dialogue, translation into other languages are all desired

http://emanzipationhumanum.de/english/WTC.html

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