Americans can understand suicide bombers

[Bob Rogers <brogers@xxxxxxx>]

ZNet Commentary
Yes, Americans can understand suicide bombers. December 11, 2002
By Justin Podur 

It might be hard to believe, but Americans have within themselves all of
the emotional equipment needed to understand suicide bombers. What is
required is shock, rage, and an irrational desire for revenge that goes so
deep that it ceases to be picky about what the targets for that revenge
actually are. Such feelings can then be manipulated into support for
bombing innocents. 

Shock and rage were natural human reactions to the calamity of 9/11 2001.
What other reaction was possible, when entire buildings full of people were
leveled, when thousands of innocents were killed? Nor was it only the
families or friends of those who died, but people all over the United
States and all over the world, who felt these things. 

Americans can therefore understand how Arabs and Muslims all over the world
feel when they see the ongoing destruction of the West Bank and Gaza:
missile attacks against crowded apartment buildings that kill 14 innocents
and a single ?suspect? in Gaza City in July 2002; a leveling of entire
neighbourhoods in a refugee camp to ?root out suspected terrorists? in
Jenin in April 2002. 

Americans can also understand how Arabs and Muslims all over the world feel
when they see footage and hear about the deaths due to destroyed
infrastructure and sanctions against Iraq that have hundreds of thousands
of people. Americans are capable of understanding what it feels like to
wait to be bombed to death, as millions of innocent Afghans did in the
months following September 2001, thousands of whom were killed, and as
millions of innocent Iraqis are doing today, untold numbers of whom will be
killed if the US attacks (one estimate is in the hundreds of thousands: 

http://www.mapw.org.au/iraq/2002/ippnwiraq/MedAct_report_Iraq_12_11.html). 

An irrational desire for revenge is not a healthy feeling, but it is
certainly something that Americans are capable of understanding. Just after
9/11, the Los Angeles Times and New York Times both conducted polls that
showed vast majorities of respondents supporting military retaliation
against Afghanistan even if civilian casualties were involved. 

Those polled also said they would support more restrictions on foreign
students and other visitors and restricted freedoms for themselves. This
suggests that even a majority of Americans are capable of understanding how
those who have suffered a devastating military attack might feel an
irrational, counterproductive desire to retaliate against innocents. 

While it is true that the 9/11 hijackers did not come from Iraq, Palestine,
or Afghanistan-- three of the countries whose populations have suffered the
most from US foreign policy in recent years -- the vengeful sentiments
expressed in the polls represented feelings all over the United States and
not only of those who were directly affected. This is not unlike the way
people all over the Middle East must feel about what is happening in
Afghanistan, Palestine, or Iraq.

Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz wrote a book called ?Why Terrorism Works?
in which he offers Israel as a model for dealing with terrorists. The US
has since done an assassination of an al-Qaeda suspect in Yemen (in
November, 2002, see
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=40&ItemID=2592) a
manner not unlike Israel?s assassinations against suspected members of
Hamas or Islamic Jihad in Palestine. Amnesty International said about this
assassination: "if this was the deliberate killing of suspects in lieu of
arrest, in circumstances in which they did not pose an immediate threat,
the killings would be extra-judicial executions in violation of
international human rights law." 

It seems that the US has taken Dershowitz?s advice. If this is true, and
the US wants to be Israel and turn the whole Middle East into its West Bank
and Gaza, Americans should also listen to Yitzhak Frankenthal, an Israeli
who lost his son in a Palestinian attack. Frankenthal said:
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=22&ItemID=2173 

"If to hit his killers, innocent Palestinian children and other civilians
would have to be killed, I would ask the security forces to wait for
another opportunity. If the security forces were to kill innocent
Palestinians as well, I would tell them they were no better than my son?s
killers." 

Frankenthal also shows that he, like Americans, is capable of understanding
the feelings of a suicide bomber: "Had I myself been born into the
political and ethical chaos that is the Palestinians? daily reality, I
would certainly have tried to kill and hurt the occupier; had I not, I
would have betrayed my essence as a free man... I can say for myself that
I, Yitzhak Frankenthal, would have undoubtedly become a freedom fighter and
would have killed as many on the other side as I possibly could."

The last piece of the puzzle Americans need in order to understand suicide
bombers is how these feelings of rage and vengefulness can be manipulated.
Christopher Hitchens understands this. 

In his essay, ?Against Rationalization? he writes of al-Qaeda that "the
people who leveled the World Trade Center are the same people who threw
acid in the faces of unveiled women in Kabul and Karachi, who maimed and
eviscerated two of the translators of The Satanic Verses. . . what they
have in mind [is] a bleak and sterile theocracy enforced by advanced
techniques." 

That is, those who mastermind and lead the terrorist attacks are not those
who feel the rage and vengefulness the most. They are instead those who
want to manipulate that rage and vengefulness for their own agenda: in the
case of al-Qaeda, to try to further a ?bleak and sterile theocracy?. 

That Hitchens can understand this about al-Qaeda means that he must also be
capable of understanding it about the US government. If people in the US
are still feeling vengeful over 9/11, 2001, they have no reason to feel
vengeful towards Iraq - - Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are bitter
enemies, and Iraq had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. But the US is
planning an attack on Iraq. 

It is thus clear that the US is manipulating the feelings of anger and
vengefulness felt by Americans to further its desire for war in Iraq, a war
that would bring the oil resources of Iraq back under US control and
continue the momentum of the ?war on terror?, in just the same way that
al-Qaeda manipulates the feelings of anger and vengefulness felt by Arabs
and Muslims in order to further its own program.

And, since Israel is to be the model for the US War on Terror, it is worth
emphasizing again the road that the US is taking Americans along. The July
23rd Gaza City bombing is a good example. In that attack: "an American-made
F-16 fighter jet, paid for with American tax dollars granted to Israel,
launched a missile at a Gaza City apartment building, with the goal of
killing Sheikh Salah Shehada, a leader of Hamas' military wing. 

Fifteen people were killed in the attack, including Shehada and his
bodyguard. That thirteen other people were killed is a crime. But that
barely scratches the surface. Of those thirteen others killed, nine -- NINE
-- were children. The ages of the children were 15, 11, 6, 5, 4 1/2, 4, 4,
1 1/2 and 2 months."
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=22&ItemID=2157

The day before the attack, "the spiritual leader of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed
Yassin, had announced that Hamas would be willing to agree to a cease-fire,
including a halt to suicide bombings, in exchange for Israeli withdrawal
from the areas that had previously been under Palestinian administration
under the Oslo agreements." 

In the words of Mitchell Plitnick from A Jewish Voice for Peace, "the Gaza
City bombing was intended to provoke a response, and, as seems always to be
the case, some Palestinian armed group was at the ready to dutifully
provide Ariel Sharon with just what he wants. On July 31, a member of Hamas
left a bomb inside a café on the Hebrew University campus. It killed seven
people and injured over 80 immediately, and the death toll... has risen
since" http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=22&ItemID=2213

Imagine this, multiplied a hundredfold. This is the future that the US ?War
on Terrorism?, with help from al-Qaeda, promises the whole world. Perhaps
the first step in avoiding such a future is admitting that "they" are not
actually all that different from "us".





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