ZGram - 9/17/2001 - "A Call to Sanity: Learning from the September 11 Attacks"

[Ingrid Rimland]

Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

September 17, 2001

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

This press release is the third voice in my ZGram series, "A Call to Sanity".

[START]

LEARNING FROM THE SEPTEMBER 11 ATTACKS

 Mark Weber Director,
Institute for Historical Review
weber@ihr.org

 September 15, 2001

 With thousands of victims and riveting images of death and destruction,
war has come home to America with terrible, devastating suddenness.
Together with our fellow citizens, we mourn the many victims of the
September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and
the Pentagon building. But beyond the feelings of grief and fury must come
clarity and understanding.

 President George W. Bush said on national television that "America was
targeted for attack because we're the brightest beacon for freedom and
opportunity in the world." The next day he said that "freedom and democracy
are under attack," and that the perpetrators had struck against "all
freedom-loving people everywhere in the world."

 But if "democracy" and "freedom-loving people" are the targets, why isn't
anyone attacking Switzerland, Japan or Norway? Bush's claims are just as
untrue as President Wilson's World War I declaration that the United States
was fighting to "make the world safe for democracy," and President
Roosevelt's World War II assurances that the US was fighting for "freedom"
and "democracy."

 In the wake of the September 11 attacks, speculation has been rife about
who the perpetrators may have been. That itself is an acknowledgment that
so many people hate this country so intensely that one cannot easily
determine just who may have mounted these well-organized attacks of
suicidal desperation.

 These shocking attacks were predictable. In 1993 Islamic radicals set off
a bomb at the World Trade Center that claimed six lives. In August 1998 the
United States carried out missile attacks against Afghanistan and Sudan,
strikes that senior Clinton administration officials said signaled the
start of "a real war against terrorism." In the wake of those attacks, a
high-ranking US intelligence official warned that "the prospect of
retaliation against Americans is very, very high'." (The Washington Post,
Aug. 21, 1998, p. A1)

 Our political leaders and the American mass media promote the preposterous
fiction that the September 11 attacks are entirely unprovoked and unrelated
to United States actions. They want everyone to believe that the underlying
hatred of America by so many around the world, especially in Arab and
Muslim countries, that motivated the perpetrators of the September 11
attacks is unrelated to this country's policies. It is clear, however, that
those who carried out these devastating suicide attacks against centers of
American financial and military might were enraged by this country's
decades-long support for Israel and its policies of aggression, murderous
repression, and brutal occupation against Arabs and Muslims, and/or
American air strikes and economic warfare against Afghanistan, Sudan, Iraq
and Iran.

 America is the only country that claims the right to deploy troops and war
planes in any corner of the globe in pursuit of what our political leaders
call "vital national interests." George Washington and our country's other
founders earnestly warned against such imperial arrogance, while
far-sighted Americans such as Harry Elmer Barnes, Garet Garrett and Pat
Buchanan voiced similar concerns in the 20th century.

 For most Americans modern war has largely been an abstraction -- something
that happens only in far-away lands. The victims of US air attack and
bombardment in Vietnam, Lebanon, Sudan, Libya, Iraq and Serbia have seemed
somehow unreal. Few ordinary Americans pay attention, because US military
actions normally have little impact on their day-to-day lives.

 Just as residents of Rome in the second century hardly noticed the battles
fought by their troops on the outer edges of the Roman empire, residents of
Seattle and Cleveland today barely concern themselves with the devastation
wrought by American troops and war planes in, for example, Iraq.

 Ramsey Clark, former US Attorney General, has accused the United States of
committing "a crime against humanity" against the people of Iraq "that
exceeds all others in its magnitude, cruelty and portent."  Citing United
Nations agency reports and his own on-site investigations, Clark charged in
1996 that the scarcity of food and medicine as a result of sanctions
against Iraq imposed by the United States since 1990, and US bombings of
the country, had caused the deaths of more than a million people, including
more than half a million children.

 Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State in President Clinton's
administration, defended the mass killings. During a 1996 interview she was
asked: "We have heard that half a million children have died [as a result
of sanctions against Iraq]. I mean, that is more children than died in
Hiroshima...Is the price worth it?" Albright replied: "...We think the
price is worth it." ("60 Minutes," May 12, 1996).

 President Bush is now pledging a "crusade," a "war against terrorism" and
a "sustained campaign" to "eradicate the evil of terrorism."

 But such calls sound hollow given the US government's own record of
support for terrorism, for example during the Vietnam war. During the
1980s, the US supported "terrorists" in Afghanistan -- including Osama bin
Laden, now the "prime suspect" in the September 11 attacks -- in their
struggle to drive out the Soviet invaders.

 American presidents have warmly welcomed to the White House Menachem Begin
and Yitzhak Shamir, two Israeli prime ministers with well-documented
records as terrorists. President Bush himself has welcomed to Washington
Israel's current prime minister, Ariel Sharon, whose forces have been
carrying out assassinations of Palestinian leaders and murderous
"retaliatory" strikes against Palestinians. Even an official Israeli
commission found that Sharon bore some responsibility for the 1982
massacres of Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.

 Jewish and Zionist leaders, and their American servants, have predictably
lost no time exploiting the September 11 attacks to further their own
interests. Taking advantage of the current national mood of blind rage and
revenge, they demand new US military action against Israel's many enemies.

 In the weeks to come, therefore, we can expect the US government,
supported by an enraged public, to lash out violently. The great danger is
that an emotion-driven, reactive response will aggravate underlying
tensions and encourage new acts of murderous violence.

 What is needed now is not a vengeful "crusade," but coherent, reasoned
policies based on sanity and justice.

 In the months and years ahead, most Americans will doubtless continue to
accept what their political leaders and the mass media tell them.

 But the jolting impact of the September 11 attacks -- which have, for the
first time, brought to our cities the terror and devastation of attacks
from the sky -- will also encourage growing numbers of thoughtful Americans
to see through the lies propagated by our nation's political and cultural
elite, and its Zionist allies, to impose their will around the world. More
and more people will understand that their government's overseas policies
inevitably have consequences even here at home.

 In 1948, as the Zionist state was being established in Palestine, US
Secretary of State George C. Marshall, along with nearly every other
high-level US foreign affairs specialist, warned that American support for
Israel would have dire long-term consequences. Events have fully vindicated
their concerns.

 Over the long run, the September 11 attacks will encourage public
awareness of our government's imperial role in the world, including a
sobering reassessment of this country's perverse "special relationship"
with the Jewish ethnostate. Along with that, rage will grow against those
who have subordinated American interests, and basic justice and humanity,
to Jewish-Zionist ambitions.

 For more than 20 years the IHR has sought, through its educational work,
to prevent precisely such horrors as the attacks in New York and
Washington. In the years ahead, as we continue our mission of promoting
greater public awareness of history and world affairs, and a greater sense
of public responsibility for the policies that generated the rage behind
the September 11 attacks, this work will be more important than ever.

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Thought for the Day:

"Reason, not rage, should guide our foreign policy."

(Sent to the Zundelsite)