I have never felt so happy and pleased with America. Indeed, it has been the first time since I began understanding what was happening around me that I have felt like this toward that country. I grew up with people around me adoring everything American — from the T-shirt to the food. I saw them glorify America’s values, sciences, freedom and way of life. The sole dream for them was to travel to America to study and then settle there and live like an American.
I am happy that America has at last let its mask slip and now we can see what lies behind it. It seems that America was not what it wanted us to think or what we thought it was.
Today, I say “Thank you, America” because it has shown the entire world and not only the Saudis, Iraqis, Syrians, Egyptians, Lebanese and others, what it really stands for. Even America’s cousins, the Europeans, woke up to find themselves dealing with an America which they did not know and which was unfamiliar to them.
The credit for what we have learned must be given to modern information technology. Sitting in our homes we have been able to see how the Security Council functions and how summit conferences are run — all of this through live television coverage. Through the same television, we have also been able to see America’s barbarity, the massacres it commits and apparently condones against those it imagines to be its enemies. We have all heard and read a great deal about occupation and colonization. Today, we can see it with our naked eyes. We see how the American soldiers treat Iraqi civilians and how insensitive they are to the feelings and traditions of Islam and Muslims.
In the past, colonizers used to enter a country, occupy it and then start directing its affairs by sending their soldiers into the streets to maintain order. This American colonization is different, however. Like the sexual freedom so common in the United States where every one is free to do what they like — no matter what and with no consideration whatsoever for religious or human values — the Americans have brought this kind of freedom to Iraq. A country of millions has been left without administration or any kind of government.
America, the great nation which possesses the most advanced technologies and is capable of making the most unimaginable of plans, entered and occupied Iraq but forgot to prepare itself for what might happen next. It forgot to plan for any kind of provisional administration to run the country but was very keen to occupy and carefully guard those government institutions which concerned it and that are the reason behind its occupation — the Iraqi Ministry of Petroleum and the country’s oil fields. The rest of the country is of no importance and has thus been left to enjoy American freedom and democracy; the looting, burning and systematic destruction of Iraq. Today it is Iraq. Tomorrow Syria? Who will be next?
Arab News From the Local Press 20 April 2003
