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The Real Anti-Americans
Like the present day Germans, who hates even to talk about Hitler and his associates, the time is not far away when Americans will feel embarrassed to discuss their present day most “patriotic” Americans as their worst enemies, responsible for a disgraceful fall of the most successful nation ever existed.
Americans with their simple hearts do not realize that those, who make them look for anti-Americans among people of other faiths, are the real anti-Americans. The Americans watch and read them on daily basis. They defied because they are not Al-Qaeda members. They do bomb American interests and can never be “suicide bombers.” Their words, ideas and influence, however, are so powerful that they have mesmerized most of the nation and have taken their fellows in policy-making circles to the unimaginable extreme. Knowingly or unknowingly, they are forcing America to use its might against itself.
There extremist tendency, wrapped in the cover of tolerance, is leading these anti-Americans to present wrong side of the picture. The most obvious and most recent example of this phenomenon of digging a grave for the American nation is the New York Times, May 14, 2003 issue. Its editorial, “Death in Riyadh” regurgitates contrived reasons for “terrorist attack” on the US as follows: 1. “lifestyles” which the American have “back home”; 2. “means of maintaining cultural preferences,” such as “free mixing of the sexes and the availability of alcohol and uncensored movies,” 3. symbols of “the modern Western culture,” which “Islamic fundamentalists despise”; and 4. “the population of unemployed, angry, disenfranchised young people.”
According to The New York Times “terrorist” want “intense publicity.” Ignoring the 24,000 lives — according to the most conservative estimates — the US has taken in Afghanistan and Iraq in the past eighteen months, the New York Times considers that “terrorists” are making “a political point by … murderous attack.” And concludes the editorial with a pro-Israel comment: “But it is the best current chance for a way out, toward a future in which suicide attacks on innocent civilians will be understood by Muslims around the world not as a form of political protest, but as utter insanity.”
In the same issue, Maureen Dowd’s apparent attack on the establishment’s false assumptions in her column “Osama’s Offspring,” is actually encouraging a wrong solution by drawing wrong conclusion. Bush Administration has not wrongly assumed that Al-Qaeda is finished. It is a miscalculation. The wrong assumption is that it is only Al-Qaeda vs. US. Quoting Dick Cheney — “the only way to deal with this threat ultimately is to destroy it” — she concludes: “So destroy it.”[1][1]
Bush has also shown great interests in “newer, smaller nuclear bombs”[2][2] to carryout the mission of completely annihilating the enemy. In fact, the real anti-Americans are giving wrong reasons for violent action against the US. Similarly, they are giving wrong signals to the administration that destruction is the only option it can exercise.
Wrong assumptions and solutions keep them entangled in their little world. In turn, they have forced the administration to control the world like a police state. As a result, “terrorism” stays and they keep looking for the source of terror in wrong places.
Terror actually lies in the hearts of the oppressors, not in the shacks of
the oppressed. Victims do not carry it out. It is both a state of mind and
tool of the oppressors who use it as a weapon and justify their crimes
against humanity under different pretexts. Their hearts and minds, however,
do not accept such justifications. Punishment from nature follows them. They
live in constant fear of a reaction to their inhuman deeds. A blip of
reaction generates far more fear in their heart than their thunderbolts of
aggression and the resultant “shock and awe.”
There is no way to completely protect perpetrators of systematic aggression
from retaliatory acts of the weak victims. Even one person, determined to
die for his nation’s woes at the hands of US and its Allies, can easily
cause immense damage – whether that be shooting a single American GI in
Kabul or Baghdad, or bombing marine barracks in any occupied land.
Exercising brute military force can never protect any nation from the
consequences of its crimes against humanity.
What is unfathomable to real anti-Americans, bent on
destroying the US as we know it, is the depth of pain and agony of direct
and indirect American oppression. The real anti-Americans are those, who
make the rest of Americans misunderstand the pain of Muslim masses, which is
directly proportional to the amount of terror in the hearts of world
mastering demi-gods sitting in Washington. Their hearts are abode of terror
long before the US suffers an attack on its vital interests. The
post-retaliatory-attacks-feeling is only that of an unrepentant shock.
This pain would remain, no matter how the real anti-Americans may try to
hide it behind the rhetoric of false assumptions, such as: this is wrath of
the fundamentalists who want to overturn the international modernisation, or
who hate Western freedom and democracy. The more they brush aside the real
causes of pain in Muslim societies, the more hegemonic designs would be
implemented by Washington and terror will swell in the hearts of their
leadership. Chances of retaliatory attacks by non-state actors would not
diminish and, in Washington’s terminology, “potential threat of terrorism”
would prevail.
The real anti-Americans argue that the central point is not whether point of view of the oppressed is true or false, right or wrong. To them what is relevant is that these “allegations” form a political basis for terrorist actions and subsequently serve to justify it. It is natural that as long as genuine grievances of masses would be considered as “allegations,” some of the non-state actors will continue to violently refuse to accept an order that perpetrates inequalities and injustices.
Partly because the real anti-Americans have confused phenomenon of “terrorism,” and partly because there are no legal ways to respond to the modern ways of American domination – a kind of colonialism that is far more dangerous and abusive than colonialism of the 19th and 20th centuries has taken grip of almost all Muslim countries. The victims often find themselves in breach of “international law” when they attempt to break the chains of domination. The check onslaught of the real anti-Americans, the silent majority of simple hear American need to:
1. read between the lines of real anti-Americans, listen to perspective of the oppressed and respond to the insane suggestion coming from the sources called mainstream media;
2. convince American leadership to let other nations live a life of their own choice; stop interference in the internal and external affairs and stop sponsoring oppressive and puppet regimes, such as Musharraf, Mubarak, Karzai, etc.,
3. instead of polarising Muslim societies by encouraging a “war within Islam,” help victim states to constructively engage the non-state actors through dialogue – no solution is possible without listening to all as equal human beings.
4. Understand and address “terrorist’s” message notwithstanding that one does not agree with it. This exercise is relevant for the purpose of acknowledging the political dimension of “terrorist” acts. This approach does not necessarily favour “terrorist.” By acknowledging “terrorist” messages and looking into their grievances, real terrorists can be exposed and condemned by a greater number of States.
5. Recognize that we cannot condemn and approve “terrorism” of the same kind in two difference places. Occupations by Israel and US need as much condemnation, if not physical punishment, as occupation of Kuwait by Iraq. Similarly, forces fighting US occupation in 21st century need to be looked at in the perspective of full support extended to forces engaged against Soviet occupation in the 20th century.
Unless silent majority of the Americans is willing to see problems of the suffering humanity in the fully or semi-occupied Muslim states through their own eyes, or view their own behavior through the eyes of their critics, even if the critics are also “terrorists,” they may never gain the understanding needed to address the fear generated by real anti-Americans in the heart of their leadership and the steady erosion of claims to civilized life that the continued injustice by their governments is causing.