It was over a decade ago when Saddam Hussein violated international convention and invaded a neighboring country. In the pursuit of someone else’s land, his motive was greed. And it’s been approaching two decades now that Ariel Sharon of Israel has been pursuing his own sinister motives. And that of an ethnic termination of a people from their own lands.
This incursion by Sharon has shown no let up over the years. On assumption of power and encouraged by the hawks within the US administration, Sharon has been daily violating international principles and has directly contributed to the death and murder of countless innocent civilians. Civilians who refuse to bow to the expansionist aims of a tyrant, and who will give up their own lives in the struggle for freedom.
Saddam Hussein has been reluctant to allow UN inspectors into his country to inspect sites of nuclear development indefinitely. Iraq did allow them from 1991 until 1998, but Washington still wouldn’t take off the trade blockade under which thousands of children were dying every week. More than one million Iraqis have died — 500,000 of them children — as a direct consequence of economic sanctions. Britain and Washington have now put forward a plan demanding that Iraq must allow inspections, but that the trade blockade would remain in effect indefinitely.
Sharon and Israel have absolutely refused UN inspectors any entry into their own land to inspect anything remotely associated with their own nuclear weapons industry! And while there are those who claim that Saddam may be capable of using such weaponry against his foes, Saddam is if anything shrewd. He could have used these weapons during the Gulf War but didn’t, even when his nation was being destroyed. Sharon has demonstrated that he is capable of anything, witness the last F-16 strike that delivered the payload of a one-ton bomb against helpless civilians in the middle of the night!
And while several UN agencies have been allowed into Iraq to serve humanitarian aid, Sharon has allowed none into Palestine! Britain and Washington while keeping Iraq under tight sanctions, remain silent when it comes to Israel and the crimes and illegal occupations being carried out daily in the name of security.
And while Sharon remains stubbornly defiant and insolent to all UN resolutions and calls of withdrawal from the occupied territories and restraint, Mr. Bush continues to call Mr. Sharon a man of peace; a terrorist who "bulldozes his way through the West Bank and Gaza, murders suspects, arrests the families of suspects, threatens to deport whole families guilty of no crime, and calls his dirty work a fight against terrorism. US defenders of his brutality call any questioning to these actions anti-Semitic."
Israel stands in open defiance of more than 60 United Nations resolutions, undoubtedly encouraged by the last vote on a resolution demanding "an immediate end to Israeli military incursions and all acts of violence, terror, provocation, incitement and destruction in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories." The UN draft resolution (document A/ES-10/L.11) was adopted by a recorded vote of 114 in favor to 4 against, as follows:
Those for the resolution: Most of the civilized world. Those 4 countries against the resolution: The tiny Federated States of Micronesia, tinier Marshall Islands, Israel and the United States. Surprised? Don’t be. These are the facts!
The US media rarely report such facts. "In a sustained anti-Iraq campaign to justify this outrage, journalists on both sides of the Atlantic have been used as channels for a stream of rumors and lies. These have ranged from false claims about an Iraqi connection with the anthrax attacks in America to a discredited link between the leader of the Sept. 11 hijacks and Iraqi intelligence. When the attack comes, these proponents of lies and half-truths must share responsibility for the crime."
And this raises the question. Shouldn’t Israel be bombed as well?" To partake its share of the payloads of B-52s planned against the Iraqi people? Shouldn’t the same fervor for striking Iraq apply to the Israelis? Or is US policy just adopting similar hypocritical paths it has taken with other issues? In recent times, the Bush regime has torn up the Kyoto treaty that would ease global warming, to which the United States is single-handedly the greatest contributor. It has threatened the use of nuclear weapons in ‘pre-emptive’ strike. It has tried to abort the birth of an International Criminal Court to investigate war crimes. It has further undermined the United Nations by blocking a UN investigation of the Israeli assault on a Palestinian refugee camp; and it has ordered the Palestinians to replace their elected leader with one more to their liking. The hypocrisy is too evident. It’s no wonder that Washington is now looked upon in the Arab world as an instrument of Israeli policies.
Yet there are voices of reason within the US. Of a people who are seeing beyond the lies and half-truths, and who are alarmed at the growing menace from within which is threatening the democratic ideals their country once stood for. First Ramsey Clark, a respected US statesman who called this preparation of war a ‘criminal offense’, and then the other day, in an open letter to their countrymen and the world, almost 100 of America’s most distinguished names in art, literature and education wrote this:
"Let it not be said that people in the United States did nothing when their government declared a war without limits and instilled stark new measures of repression. We believe that questioning, criticism and dissent must be valued and protected. Such rights are always contested and must be fought for. We, too, watched with shock the horrific events of Sept. 11. But the mourning had barely begun when our leaders launched a spirit of revenge. The government now openly prepares to wage war on Iraq — a country that has no connection with Sept. 11.
"We say this to the world, too many times in history people have waited until it was too late to resist. We draw on the inspiration on those who fought slavery and all those other great causes of freedom that began with dissent. We call on all like-minded people around the world to join us."
And join you we vigorously shall. For that is the only honorable way!
— Tariq A. Al-Maeena, [email protected]
