For many of us it was no coincidence that the tragic London underground bombings took place while the G8 was wining and dining in Gleneagles — hypocritically using Africa as a smokescreen to desperately hide the key international issue — the festering sore of the Iraqi occupation.
As thousands of people protested the G8 summit and even more thousands filled the Live 8 concerts to "Make poverty history", the most sadistic poverty creator of all — war — was raging in the streets of many an Iraqi city. It is now estimated that one Iraqi dies per hour as a consequence of the occupation in Iraq.
The G8 leaders pretended that Iraq didn't exist. Well, Iraq came to London, with British suicide bombers angered by Britain's participation in the occupation of Iraq killing innocent people, messing up the Olympic celebrations, exploding the G8's mirage of love for African children and disrupting PM Tony Blair's stay at Gleneagles.
Not surprisingly the demonisation of Muslims and "dark skin foreigners" accelerated to breakneck speed and ended in the police killing of an innocent Brazilian and a chilling police warning that this would not be the last such killing.
While Blair and Australian PM John Howard have been desperately trying to de-link the bombing with the occupation of Iraq, calling the bombings an "attack on our way of life, our civilisation", 85% of Britons think otherwise. They blame Britain's foreign policy. And what more proof than when it comes from the horse's mouth — a terrorist bomber's confession that his actions were not motivated by religion but by the unjust war on Iraq.
The anti-war movement has been calling on the Howard government to bring the troops home from Iraq and not send more to Afghanistan. The Australian government is making a huge mistake in sending troops to Afghanistan. Intensifying the occupation of that country premised on "fighting terrorism" is a furphy and only delays the Afghan people's right to determine their own future.
The idea that Osama bin Laden is directing every terrorist attack around the world from his mountain hide-out is just as illogical as thinking that Saddam Hussein was directing the Iraqi insurgency from a hole in the ground. Western and Western-backed occupations are the basic ingredients fueling Islamic terrorism.
The so-called "war on terror" has not made the world a safer place but has unleashed great suffering onto millions of people in the Third World, and hatred for their actions. It is a war to terrorise the Third World into submission and subjugation, with the aim to steal and dominate as much as possible in the name of the free market.
Intensifying the occupation of Afghanistan and continuing the oppression of the Iraqi people will only increase already the mind-boggling injustice, heighten anti-Western sentiment and will be the major impediment to peace.
[Margarita Windisch is a Socialist Alliance member active in the Melbourne Stop the War Coalition.]
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, August 24, 2005.
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