A few obscenities for Blair and company to chew on

Jul. 31, 2005. 01:00 AM

A few obscenities for Blair and company to chew on
Gwynne Dyer says it is foolish to deny cause and effect in terrorist attacks


Let's talk dirty. The 9/11 suicide hijackers — all Arabs — attacked the U.S. instead of Brazil or Japan because the U.S. government has been neck-deep in the politics of the Arab world for a generation, whereas the Brazilian and Japanese governments haven't. There is a connection between Washington's Mideast policies — its support for oppressive Arab regimes, its military interventions in the region, and its uncritical backing for Israeli government policies — and the fact that Americans have become the preferred targets for Islamist terrorist attacks.

Indeed, no other non-Muslim nation except Israel was a target for Islamist terrorist attacks until after the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. And the attacks since then have been aimed at the citizens of countries that were complicit in that invasion: Londoners, not Parisians; Spaniards, not Germans; Australians holidaying in Bali, not Japanese holidaying in Malaysia.

There you have it: two full paragraphs of obscenity. Prime Minister Tony Blair himself says so. He informed us last Tuesday that any attempt to link the terrorist attacks in London to his decision to follow the Bush administration in invading Iraq was "an obscenity."

That's nonsense. All the comments in the first two paragraphs of this article are about cause and effect. You may agree or disagree with the analysis, but discussions of cause and effect are still permissible and even necessary. So how does Blair — and President George W. Bush in Washington, and Prime Minister John Howard in Canberra — get away with forbidding us to talk about what is causing all this?


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Do you think something as piddling as FACTS are going to get in the way? Blair was okay when he and Clinton were friends, but he's now learning from the spin-masters.

OK when he and Clinton were friends? Dragging the British armed forces into Operation Desert Fox and the war in Kosovo? Surrre :eyes:

Stopping genocide is a good use of military power.

and excusing them! Please hand yourself in to the nearest Homeland Security officer right now, before you blow someone up!

ya know, most of the leaders of the world today seem very attached to their radical doctrines. If it's not religious doctrine, it's the political doctrine of tyranny.

In any case, the big losers are the civilians, the common folk, those of us out there just trying to live our lives. Civilians are the first casualty of any radical doctrine.

My personal belief is that extremism must be ended in all forms... religious, political, social, and people should be allowed to live their lives without one group (those in power) dictating how another sub-group will live. Extremism in the guise of God or State has been the cause of more violence and resulted in more innocent civilian deaths in the last 5000 years than any other thing.

ALL radical extremism should be stopped if we're ever to consider ourselves a truly enlightened species.

We have a long, long, long way to go in that regard. :-(

Hence a good deal of social teeth-gritting and police state thinking in an attempt to reassert control. The extremism is a reaction to rapid social change too, here in the USA, in certain Muslim countries. Look for more trouble in China and India for the same reasons.