Sunday, May 5, 2013

Creating Hatred Where It Didn't Exist Before

Trey Smith

April is usually a cheerful month in New England, with the first signs of spring, and the harsh winter at last receding. Not this year.

There are few in Boston who were not touched in some way by the marathon bombings on April 15 and the tense week that followed. Several friends of mine were at the finish line when the bombs went off. Others live close to where Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the second suspect, was captured. The young police officer Sean Collier was murdered right outside my office building.

It's rare for privileged Westerners to see, graphically, what many others experience daily - for example, in a remote village in Yemen, the same week as the marathon bombings.

On April 23, Yemeni activist and journalist Farea Al-Muslimi, who had studied at an American high school, testified before a US Senate committee that right after the marathon bombings, a drone strike in his home village in Yemen killed its target.

The strike terrorized the villagers, turning them into enemies of the United States - something that years of jihadi propaganda had failed to accomplish.

His neighbors had admired the US, Al-Muslimi told the committee, but "Now, however, when they think of America, they think of the fear they feel at the drones over their heads. What radicals had previously failed to achieve in my village, one drone strike accomplished in an instant."

Rack up another triumph for President Obama's global assassination program, which creates hatred of the United States and threats to its citizens more rapidly than it kills people who are suspected of posing a possible danger to us someday.
~ from The Boston Bombings Gave Americans a Taste of the Terrorism the U.S. Inflicts Abroad Every Day by Noam Chomsky ~
This line of reasoning is just plain commonsense. If you continually attack others -- particularly when it kills and maims innocent bystanders -- it will tick people off big time. Who wants to live their life with the constant threat of drones flying overhead, never knowing when the next missile will be fired?

When I was younger, I surmised that, for whatever reason, US elites simply must not have thought this whole process through. I now realize that I was being naive. They damn well know that continuous American aggression engenders the very thing -- hatred -- that they say they are trying to eradicate. They don't want to eliminate animus towards our nation. They live for it! They want to create as much as they possibly can.

Why? Because it offers them a ready excuse for more war, more evisceration of constitutional rights and more taxpayer dollars siphoned into their pockets. It is both immoral and outrageous, but it is business as usual!

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