"WE (Americans, British and Israelis) ARE THE REAL TERRORISTS" writes the journalist, John Pilger
"In a lie backed by the media, countries most guilty of atrocities have protected their culpability onto their victims, " "Having taken part in the killing of as many as 37,000 Iraqi civilians, Blair's distractions, not his victims, are news: from his arcane rivalry with Chancellor Gordon Brown, his political Tweedledee, to his Damascene conversation to the perils of global warning. On the atrocity at Beslan, Blair is allowed to say, without irony or challenge, that "this international terrorism will not prevail". These are the same words by Mussolini after he had bombed civilians in Abyssinia .
Heretics who look behind the one-way mirror and see utter the dishonesty of all this, who identify Blair, US President George Bush and their collaborators as war criminals on the literal and legal sense, and present evidence of their cynicism and immorality, are few; but they have wide support among the European public, whose awareness has never been higher, in my experience. It is the public's passionate indifference, if not contempt, for the political games of "business as usual", and its accelerating interest in the way the world really is, that unnerves those with power.
Let's look at a few examples of the way the world is presented and the way it really is.
The occupation of Iraq is presented as "a mess": a blundering incompetent US military up against Islamic fanatics. In truth, it is a systematic, murderous assault on a civilian population by a corrupt US officer class, given licence by its superiors in Washington .
Last May, the US Marines used battle tanks and helicopter gun ships to attack the slums of Fallu-jah. They admitted killing 600 people, a figure far greater than the total number of civilians killed by the "insurgents" during the past year. The generals were candid; this futile slaughter was an act of revenge for the killing of three US mercenaries.
These days the Americans routinely fire missiles into Fallujah and other dense urban areas; they murder whole families. If the word terrorism has any modem application, it is this industrial state terrorism.
The British have a different style. More than 40 Iraqis are known to have died at the hands of British soldiers; just one soldier has been charged. In the current issue of the magazine The Journalist, Lee Gordon, a freelance reporter, writes:
"Working as a Brit in Iraq is hazardous, particularly in the south where our troops have a reputation (unreported at home) for brutality."
Neither is the growing disaffection among British troops reported at home.
Only by recognizing the terrorism of states is it possible to understand, and deal with, acts of terrorism by groups and individuals which, however horrific, are tiny by comparison. Moreover, their source is inevitably the official terrorism for which there is no media language.
ISRAELI TERRORISM
Thus. The state of Israel has been able to convince many outsiders that it is merely a victim of terrorism when, in fact, its own unrelenting, planned terrorism is the cause of the infamous retaliation by Palestinian suicide bombers.
For all of Israel 's perverse rage against the European media, especially the BBC- a successful form of intimidation- BBC reporters never report Israelis as terrorists: the term belongs exclusively to Palestinians imprisoned in their own land. It is not surprising, as a recent Glasgow University study concluded, that many television viewers in Britain believe that the Palestinians are the invaders and occupiers.
On September 7, a Palestinian suicide bomber killed 16 Israelis in the town of Beersheba . Most television news reports allowed the Israeli government spokesman to use this tragedy to justify the building of an apartheid wall-when the wall is pivotal to the causes of Palestinian violence. Almost every news report marked the end of a five-month period of "relative peace and calm" and "a lull in the violence".
But during these months of relative peace and calm, almost 400 Palestinians were killed, 71 of them assassinated. During the lull in the violence, more than 73 Palestinian children were killed.
A 13-year-old was murdered with a bullet through the heart, a five-year-old was shot in the face as she walked arm in arm with her two-year-old sister. The body of Mazen Majid, aged 14, was riddled with 18 Israeli bullets as he and his family fled their bulldozed home.
None of this was reported in the mainstream media as terrorism. Most of it was not reported at all. After all, this was a period of peace and calm, a lull in violence.
On May 19, Israeli tanks and helicopters, fired on peaceful demonstrators, killing eight of them.
CHECHNYA
The truth of Chechnya is similarly suppressed. On February 4 2000 , Russian aircraft attacks the Chechen village of Katyr Yurt . They used 'vacuum bombs', which release petrol vapour and suck people's limbs out, and are banned under the Geneva Convention.
The Russians bombed a convoy of survivors under a white flag. They murdered 363 men, women and children. It was one of countless, little-known acts of terrorism in Chechnya perpetrated by the Russian state, whose leader, Vladimir Putin, has the "complete solidarity" of Blair."
(Sunday Times 3rd October 2004 )
