A Survey of the Current Political Lexicon
By admin Yamin Zakaria (12/14/05)
The values of nations are subjective. Each nation evaluates notions of justice, morality, law, representative government etc. according to its ideological viewpoint. For example, all nations may condemn murder, but what constitutes murder varies widely; some argue that the deaths of 100,000 Iraqi civilians caused by the pre-emptive strike on Iraq is not murder, but the deaths of 3,000 Americans on 9/11 is! Homosexual activity is another example, which is a crime in some societies, punishable by law. In contrast, leading democracies project such trends as a sign of progression, depicting values like freedom; values that Bush and Blair are trying to impose on other nations by declaring it as universal.
When certain nations proclaim to the world that their values are universal, it is usually a pretext to subjugate other states. Implicitly, the declaration becomes a basis for making demands on other nations to be compliant. Subsequently, pressure is applied on the non-complaint states, which can range from political isolation, economic sanctions to military actions. Universal values should be self-evident. It should manifest in most of the nations, who are willingly adhering and advocating those values, proving their universal nature. But such values do not exist and the notion of universal values is a product of sheer propaganda.
The closest position to universal values is the consensus of all nations, and that should be the basis for defining and applying terms like terrorism, war crimes, human rights etc. Instead, only the powerful countries are coining, interpreting or reinterpreting those terms for their convenience. Consequentially, they always occupy the position of judge, jury and executioner - constantly issuing judgements against their opponents. Listed below are samples of those political lexicons with a brief explanation.
Terrorism and Terrorists
Nobody disagrees that terrorists deliver terror. However, the notion of “terrorism” has no relationship with the magnitude of terror, or the number of people killed and maimed! Classification of terrorism is dictated by the identity of the killers and/or their victims. Compare the example of US fighter pilots dropping 500 pound bombs in Iraq to the ‘suicide’ bombers in London. Only the latter event is considered an act of terrorism, based on the identity of the victims and the perpetrators. For sure, the explosives from the ‘suicide’ bombers are a fraction of the size of what is being dropped in Iraq. Likewise the victims of the ‘suicide’ bombers are only a small fraction of the total number of Iraqi victims.
Classification of terrorism is simply the product of propaganda and spin rather than any form of objective assessment. Fact is, those who constantly bark about terrorism are the biggest and the most efficient deliverers of mass terror, consuming the largest number of victims - no sane person can deny this. So the Iraqi victims exceed the Americans by many folds as does the Palestinian victims over the Israeli Jews.
Pre-Emptive Strike
Pre-Emptive strike by definition means that you are punishing a people for what they would have done but not for what they did. The idea is you eliminate the potential threat before it can become a threat and act against you. Accordingly, killing children is natural because children of today are tomorrows ‘terrorists’. Hence, there was little remorse in killing more Iraqi children after murdering 500,000 of them through a decade of cruel sanctions. In essence, Pre-Emptive strike reverses the notion of: “innocent until proven guilty”, which is supposed to be a pillar of liberal democracy.
Who is the evil doer: a ‘suicide’ bomber or a B52 bomber?
When democracies drop 500 pound bombs or even Nukes, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, it is ‘liberation’. But a ‘suicide’ bomber, acting in retaliation, killing handful of people is automatically evil! The leading democracies claim to have the higher moral ground, because they say, their bombers do not target civilians indiscriminately. The reality is: their bombs are far more indiscriminate, consuming far more number of civilians than all suicide bombers combined! Once again, the notion of ‘evil’ has no relationship to the level of wanton carnage and destruction caused - it is dependent upon the identity of the perpetrators and/or their victims.
Innocent Victims and Collateral Damages
After 9/11, many howled, claimed to be innocent victims (after killing 500,000 Iraqi children for oil), but they had no hesitation in lashing out indiscriminately at the innocent Muslims/Arabs around them. Then, they supported their governments who inflicted collective punishments in Iraq, killing innocent people while admitting that Iraq had no WMDs or any connection to 9/11. What about the collective punishment dispensed in Palestine for the last 60 years by the Israelis with direct help from the West?
The innocent victims in Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan are faceless collateral damages, they are only numbers and there is no standing minutes of silence for them, because they are victims of Western interests. In contrast, the victims in the West are ‘innocent’ victims, with names and faces to remember. Once again, depending upon the identity of the victims in relation to their perpetrators they are either collateral damages or innocent victims.
War Crimes
According to the UN Secretary, Kofi Annan, the US violated the UN Charter by attacking Iraq, which led to the deaths of 100,000 plus civilians. Yet, the UN cannot even issue verbal condemnation, let alone call for the US to face war crimes charges. The wanton mass killing of civilians in Vietnam, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, First Gulf War (Road to Basra), Dresden etc. did not lead to anyone been charged with war crimes either. However, when Saddam allegedly used chemical weapons (supplied by the US) against the Kurds in Halabja in 1988, conveniently it became a war crime in 2003!
Therefore, war crimes are not identified by the number of civilians killed unjustly, but by the allegiance of the perpetrators to Western interests. It is the US and its allies in the free world that defines war crimes and applies to the various situations as judge, jury and executioner for their convenience – and not for justice or world peace. This is why we only ever witness the opponents of the US in the docks facing war crimes charges.
Foreign Fighters
A foreign fighter in Iraq is usually a foreigner, with Arab/Muslim heritage, fighting with the resistance. Even if some of those individuals who have come across the border have tribal links (blood ties) with the Iraqis, sharing the same culture, language and religion, they are still described as foreign fighters. But not the US forces and their allies coming from distant lands, with their beer cans, pork chops, sadistic Abu-Ghraib porn culture, swapping pictures of the genitals of dead Iraqis to gain access to porn sites! Are these coalition soldiers more representative of Arab/Islamic values, than the so-called ‘foreign’ fighters?
Radical and Moderate
What is the difference between the radical cleric, Moqtada as-Sadr and the moderate cleric Sistani? Ayatollah Sistani is calling for cooperation with the US forces, where as Moqtada as-Sadr is advocating resistance to the US designs in Iraq. The radical or moderate label has nothing to do with their interpretations of the Islamic texts but everything to do with how much they align themselves with the occupiers. To further illustrate the point at another level, Bush can claim to have a hotline to God, Israelis can invoke their Bible to justify ethnic cleansing as the so-called ‘chosen’ people of God, but only the Muslims can be given the religious fanatic label, even they are nominal Muslims!
Torture or Abuse
The prisoners of Abu-Ghraib under Saddam were tortured but under the US they were abused, even though both parties employed similar methods! George Bush recently said: “we don’t torture”, because the US subcontracts it out to other countries in the spirit of free market or globalisation! Condoleezza Rice recently denied this during her tour of Europe, surpassing the idiocy, arrogance and hypocrisy of an Afro-American justifying the African slave trade. No wonder such ‘noble’ people like her are being used to paint the White House black, to show signs of racial equality!
To evade allegations of torture the US uses terms like “softening-up prisoners”, “interrogation”, "enhanced interrogation technique". However, when the evidence of torture against the US is damming, then they are acts of minority of soldiers, who are letting off steam. Why suddenly the behaviour of US solders should be subjected to the democracy barometer? Is the argument now that, unless majority of US soldiers committed such acts of ‘abuse’ (torture) they are not significant? This implies that the US is asking the world to judge them favourably by what it did not do and ignore what they did!
International Community
Voice of the US leadership and their allies in Europe, automatically qualifies as the voice of the ‘international’ community. We never hear the voice of Africa, South America, India and the 1.2 plus Billion Muslims, all of them collectively making up at least 50% of world’s population. But the likes of Bush and Blair scream that automatically equates to the voice of the international community. Here democracy is hanged. Neither the majority voice of the world’s total population, nor the majority vote in the UN General Assembly reflecting majority voice of all the world’s nations, qualifies as the voice of international community. How ironic that in seeking universal consensus, i.e. the voice of the international community, Bush and Blair has conveniently ignored the voice of the majority in the world, thereby ignoring their so-called universal value of democratic principle, which advocates majority rule!
Intelligence Reports
To date, no WMDS in Iraq and no war reparations announced for this unprovoked attack on Iraq. Forget the 100,000 plus civilians murdered, the ones who are alive are expected to view Bush and Blair as innocent. Because, the pair acted in good faith, mislead by ‘faulty’ intelligence, they launched a pre-emptive strike on Iraq. So the Iraqis are not the real victims but Bush and Blair is as they were deceived by the faulty intelligence! But regardless, Bush and Blair have no regrets over the war, killing of so many civilians and causing so much destruction was more than compensated by a regime change. This also implies that WMDs were clearly a false pretext and irrelevant. Not surprisingly the intelligence reports making the case to disarm Iraq of its WMDs were not faulty but they were constructed through a combination of manufacturing and manipulating, evidences.
After having committed mass murder, if we are expected to accept their (Bush and Blair) plea of innocence, then surely all the miniature murderers held in prison are entitled to that same claim of innocence, as they also acted in good faith, based on faulty information, in self-defence they launched a pre-emptive strike killing their victim(s). They should be held responsible for their actions, especially as they have been so dogmatic and arrogant in their claims prior to attacking Iraq. Their words should be ignored as they have been proven to be liars from the onset.
Yamin Zakaria (www.iiop.org, 13th December 2005)
London, UK
Copyright © 2005 by Yamin Zakaria
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