MARCH 2007

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
No Sympathy?
Date: Sun, 04 Feb 2007 13:04:19 +0000

If you were to be completely honest with yourself would you, like me, have to admit to a certain amount of restrained, uncomfortable, glee when confronted now with the physical legacy of the 9/11 attacks on the United States? I’ll explain with an example.

I recently sat watching "The Gangs Of New York", again. Incidentally my least favourite Scorsese film because, for me, among other things it suffers from an appalling musical soundtrack and an ill advised attempt to turn the mundane and routinely brutal realities of the past, and indeed for that matter the present, into an historic epic. At the long awaited ending the camera holds on some headstones in a cemetery, and then pulls back to take in the New York cityscape in the background. This shot begins to slowly cross dissolve into progressively more contemporary versions of that famous skyline. It finally settles on a view that includes the twin towers. Instantly, reflexively, my inner voice kicked in with something along the lines of ‘Well you don’t have those any more’.

Does this happen to you? It does to me, relentlessly. After the first couple of times I found myself thinking along these lines I started to ponder and analyse why but it continued to happen regardless. My friend who sat watching the film with me said "They should have kept on going withthat to bring it up to date" so I knew that at least on this occasion I was not alone. Actually her saying this prompted me to check the release date of the film which as I had suspected was 2002. I could be inventing this but I seem to remember reading something at the time about the decision toinclude the image of the World Trade Centre as a sort of homage to its memory and that of the victims.

I would say that I find this understandable if a tad U.S. in its degree of delusory denial. Symbolically it also jars slightly for me given that the subtext of the film deals with the appalling exploitation, manipulation and gross mistreatment of the poor. Perhaps to have cross-dissolved one last time and have it disappear could have worked much more poignantly on a number of levels. At least it would have been realistic.

So there you have it I for one have to admit to a capacity for a certain amount of frigid non-sympathy when it comes to the attacks on the U.S. But why is this so? I am not by nature a cold or heartless person. Indeed I remember weeping quietly as I watched, some months later, the part of that documentary shot on the day by the two fire brigade embedded French brothers, where you could here the explosive impacts of the people hitting the ground as they leapt from the upper floors. To put myself in the position of someone for whom it was preferable to leap from that height to their death made me ponder with chilling effect what they must have been leaping from. I also know that I have always felt nothing but sympathy for the actual victims. So the answer does not lie here.

Neither am I an Islamic sympathiser. I have an extremely limited idea of the teachings of the Koran let alone a fundamentalist interpretation of them. I would also have some pretty deep reservations about the inherent gender issues of that cultural belief system but I do firmly believe that Muslims are as entitled as any other group to practice their faith. Of course the Catholic church, for example, is only one step ahead of Islam in this regard and any socio-cultural advancements in western society when it comes to gender parity have had very little to do with any church input.

The vast majority of Muslims were as shocked and appalled as anyone else by the attacks in 2001 and remain so. It is, I should think, understood by all but the most abjectly ignorant among us that ultimately the motive for the September 11th attacks had as little to do with religion as the subsequent invasion of Iraq had to do with weapons of mass destruction.

Now, if you can accept that the weapons of mass destruction argument was at best a piece of necessary propaganda then perhaps you will be able to see why it is that I believe that I have the reaction I do to the 9/11 legacy.

I believe I react the way I do because of the more or less constant seething indignation I feel when it comes to United States foreign policy past and present. The bare faced lying of the propaganda machine does not, in itself, annoy me all that much, and can quite often be a source of ridiculous humour. Instead I find irritation in the endemic puritanical hypocrisy of the majority belief in the U.S. that the actions of their government are synonymous with spreading liberty, democracy, and justice to less fortunate corners of the globe. It would of course be too easy to despise the stereotypical dupe who articulates this nonsense. I feel genuinely sorry for them, caught as they are in a culture that is so damaging and emasculating to the average citizen as to render them incapable of informed opinion.

For me the United States is like some vast and tremendously dysfunctional family, and like all good dysfunctional families it has its favoured few. These are the shits I despise. The ones who know and understand everything but do nothing because it is not in their interest to buck the system.

The attacks carried out on the eleventh of September 2001 were everything that they are said to have been and more. Cowardly, audacious, clinical, fanatical, meticulously planned, and in the end, for me, somewhat suspiciously easy to execute in the way that they were. I make no attempt to diminish the suffering or loss of the thousands of ordinary people touched by the events of that day. But I recall feeling an instant discomfort and sense of wrongness at the immediacy, and polished vulgarity, with which the ownership of this grief was claimed by the political class and the media in order to foist upon the world their own apparently carefully rehearsed response. All comment suddenly seemed to harmoniously sing from the same song sheet, and the chorus told of the inevitability of the revenge which would be sought for this the greatest crime in the history of the world.>

I do not know if it was the disconcerting nature of having witnessed the vivid television footage of history unfolding, or the subsequent barrage of western sectarian indignation, but it seemed to me that many heretofore healthily dissenting, sceptical voices seemed to fall silent or change tack to better suit the new order. It was many weeks, even months later before once again we could hear a significant balance to the debate.

Even to this day it is still very uncommon to hear any mainstream acceptance that in the litany of horrors that is the bloody chronicle of post World War Two human history the attacks of 9/11 register as some sort of minor incident. Of course this is only true if your measure is loss of life and infrastructure. For the opposite, accepted analysis, to prevail you simply need to use theatricality and global saturation as your scale.

No I cannot sympathise with the United States as a nation for the 9/11 attacks no more than I would have sympathised with Nazi Germany had a lucky Jew managed to give Adolph Hitler a bloody nose at the Nuremberg Rallies. Or to contemporize that analogy, if a Palestinian were to have managed to slight Israel by hitting Ariel Sharon on his fat head with a brick. Sorry.

Gary.

From: DC Antiwar Network <dawnactivists@yahoo.com>

Call to Protest AIPAC’s Annual Conference
MONDAY, MARCH 12 - 6 to 8 PM
DC Convention Center, Mount Vernon Place between 7th & 9th Streets NW


CONGRESS, STAND UP TO AIPAC
Stop Funding Crimes Against Palestinians
And Iraq and Iran Wars

DC Antiwar Network invites other peace and justice organizations to endorse and/or participate in a peaceful “Congress Stand Up to AIPAC” demonstration on Monday, March 12 from 6:00 to 8:00 pm. We will protest the “Gala Banquet” of the 2007 American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) annual conference being held at the DC Convention Center. Dozens of congressional representatives and executive branch officials will attend the AIPAC banquet. Senate leaders Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell and house leader Nancy Pelosi will speak. We encourage those inside and outside of D.C. who cannot attend to take other action: * call congressional representatives, especially Reid, McConnel and Pelosi, and ask them NOT to attend the AIPAC conference. * lobby congressional representatives in person or via phone on March
13th for Palestinian rights and/or against Iraq and Iran wars. On the afternoon of March 13th one thousand or more AIPAC conference goers will be lobbying congress in person against Palestinian rights and in support of war against Iran. To endorse this call and be listed in the press release e-mail dawnactivists@yahoo.com by noon March 8, 2007. Feel free to include a web page link, e-mail or phone contact for our web page http://dawndc.net

OUR CONCERNS

We protest AIPAC, a non-registered agent of the State of Israel, bribing and bullying American congressional representatives into supporting Israel, often in ways that ultimately harm Americans. Although AIPAC does not even represent a majority of American Jews, its massive network of allied political groups and committed supporters raise money and apply political muscle with two main goals:

* AIPAC works to perpetuate Israel’s illegal occupation and apartheid practices in the West Bank and Gaza, including the building of an “apartheid” wall which has been condemned as illegal by the
International Court of Justice. It supports ongoing discriminatory practices, land confiscation and ethnic cleansing in both the occupied territories and Israel. AIPAC and its allies’ propaganda efforts have misled most Americans into thinking the Palestinians merely are terrorists trying to destroy Israel, instead of being victims of 60 years of Israeli aggression who seek equal political rights, including to return to their illegally confiscated lands and homes.

* AIPAC works to protect Israel’s confiscated Palestinian lands by promoting U.S. dominance in the Middle East. AIPAC and its “neoconservative” and “Christian Zionist” allies promoted an illegal
American war against Iraq. They now promote an Israeli and/or U.S. attack on Iran, even though the U.S. Department of Justice is prosecuting former AIPAC staffers for spying on the U.S. to gain
information about Iran to relay to Israel. AIPAC supports Israeli threats to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities to force President Bush to do so. Any attack on Iran could lead to the first use of nuclear weapons since 1945, deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iranian civilians, retaliations by Iran and Shiites in Iraq that could kill thousands of U.S. troops in Iraq, a cut off of oil supplies that could devastate the world economy, and escalation to regional or even world nuclear war.

AIPAC’s destructiveness has been highlighted in the last year by the writings of respected Professors Walt and Mearsheimer (“The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy”) and former President Jimmy Carter (“Palestine: Peace Not Apatheid”). Dozens of pundits, left, right and mainstream have echoed their analysis. AIPAC provides ideological propaganda and political muscle to promote wars that its military contractor allies need to profit from wars. These special interests undermine American democracy by making congressional representatives and the president more responsive to them than to American voters.

Those who sign on to this call demand congress stand up to special interests like AIPAC, end U.S. support for illegal Israeli policies, end war on and occupation of Iraq and prevent any war against Iran. We support just reparations for aggrieved Palestinians and Lebanese for their economic and personal suffering over many decades.

We predict that should either Israel or the U.S. initiate war against Iran, the various peace and justice movements, as well as Americans from a variety of groupings, will work to hold accountable those responsible for mass murder against innocent Arabs and Muslims, as well as the unnecessary deaths of thousands of American service people. Such initiatives might include: driving responsible representatives and officials from office and electing ones who truly represent the American people; registering AIPAC and other defacto Israel lobbies as foreign agents; forbidding anyone with dual citizenship from working in the United States government; permanently ending all aid to Israel; prosecuting for war crimes the most culpable American and Israeli officials and lobbyists; and many other efforts.

Organizer: DC Anti-War Network. Current Endorsers: