Bush’s definition of terror leaves a lot to
be desired
George W. Bush took his “war on terror” act to Berlin on Tuesday, but the US
president’s real audiences were much further afield. A confluence of interests has
Washington and Moscow in the same camp with regard to Islamic fundamentalism, and now the
United States is trying to bribe Russia into toeing its line even more faithfully. And not
all of Bush’s agenda is about terrorism: BusinessWeek magazine has quoted an
unidentified oil industry official as describing energy-rich Central Asia, once a part of
the now-defunct Soviet Union, as America’s prospective “51st state.”
The vast majority of Muslims are as appalled by terrorism as Bush is. The discrepancies
arise because of his one-sided definition. He told the Bundestag on Thursday that
terrorists “hate democracy and tolerance and free expression and women and Jews and
Christians and all Muslims who disagree with them” and a great many of them do. He
neglected to mention, however, that there are some repugnant people of other faiths around
as well: They brandish a banner of phony democracy in order to hide their penchant for a
fraudulent one, demand tolerance for their own extremist views even as they deny the right
of others to so much as live on their own land, claim to champion free speech but try to
intimidate their critics by labeling them “anti-Semitic,” and regard women as
chattel, Christians as heretics, Muslims as vermin, and Jews who disagree with them as
traitors. They are the Jewish settlers who live on occupied land in the West Bank and the
Gaza Strip, and what they do coupled with the massive military might deployed to
protect them has terrorized an entire people for almost 35 years.
So long as one side’s militants are allowed to violate the rights of others from the
comfort of homes and under the guns of a military machine paid for with US government
money, no one should expect that those whom they have dislodged will remain insensate to
the injustice they have suffered: And some of these unfortunate souls and their allies
will resort to violence as a means of regaining what is rightfully theirs.
Few would begrudge the United States a purview to further its own interests by securing
alternative sources of oil and gas in Central Asia, and the struggling nation-states that
have cropped up there since the fall of the Soviet Union have every reason to desire the
formidable protection afforded by allying themselves with Washington. But Bush’s
moves in the region will continue to be met with justifiable suspicion by Muslims there
and everywhere else so long as he seems to regard the ex-Soviet republics’ energy
resources as a scalpel with which to castrate the Arab world economically and politically.
The “51st state” is an only slightly hyperbolical description of the importance
attached by the United States to Central Asia. For the Palestinians, it would be
impossible to exaggerate their ties to their historic land. For them, there is only one
state that matters: their own. And until Washington imposes limits on the terrorists who
work to perpetuate a self-evidently unfair status quo, Palestinians and their supporters
can be expected to respond in kind. Copyright
© The Daily Star |
