Topic: Heather Reisman and the Taliban kid

topic by
nemesis
12/7/2001 (17:12)

Heather Reisman and the Taliban kid

By RICK SALUTIN rsalutin@globeandmail.ca

Friday, December 7, 2001 Page A23

This week's theme is hypocrisy. I'll try to make it fun.

Right after Sept. 11, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon compared Israel
to the U.S. under attack. He ordered assassinations of
Palestinians and invaded their towns. President George Bush and
Secretary of State Colin Powell were both critical. When the
Israeli leader said they reminded him of Munich, they slapped him
down. Yet, after last weekend's suicide bombings in Israel, the
U.S. accepted Israel's harsh response, as if Ariel Sharon had been
right all along. It's always amazing to see them reverse their
position on a dime and feel no need to explain. Think of Saddam
Hussein, think of Manuel Noriega, think of Osama bin Laden.

So what really changed? U.S. policy, I'd say. In the immediate
aftershock, they seemed determined to resolve festering sores that
create recruits and support for terror, like the Palestine
impasse. But it's proven tough in the face of Israeli
recalcitrance and a barrage of U.S. punditry that claims, for
instance, that there's no relation between Palestinian grievances
and Sept. 11. So the U.S. seems to have backed off, choosing to
settle for the overthrow of the Taliban and, they hope, the death
of Osama bin Laden. Then they'll look around for who to bomb and
overthrow next. It's so much more doable than peace in the
Mideast. And the trade-off is merely the certainty of future World
Trade Center attacks.

Why? Because religious fanaticism thrives under savage repression.
Look at early Christianity. You crucify their leader and they
declare a victory. Or the Jewish martyrs of Masada; 2,000 years
later, it's a tourist site. If the U.S. doesn't defuse the sources
of terror, we'll all pay a price, or our children will.

Ariel Sharon tells Yasser Arafat his police must arrest those
responsible for the latest bombings in Israel. Then Israel shuts
down travel in Palestinian areas and bombs its police stations,
making the demand impossible to meet. I'd say that gives us a
right to ask what the real purpose of Israel's attacks is. It
could be to eliminate and replace Yasser Arafat with a more
submissive leader, which is hard to picture. It could be to
reoccupy Palestinian land, or lead to the expulsion of its
inhabitants, a nightmare scenario that gets serious ice time in
Israeli politics.

Ariel Sharon says 'a war has been imposed on us.' What war? The
other side has no army, no air force, not even tanks. It isn't a
country, it's a patchwork of administrative areas. It's like
talking about a war between Canada and Telus Mobility. As for
'America's New War,' Afghanistan has sent up no planes, there have
been no battles between the two 'sides,' and most U.S. casualties
resulted from its own fire. Can we please have some new
terminology?

Speaking of terminology, take state terror and moral equivalence.
I've avoided talking about the former lest I be accused of the
latter. But there is such a thing as state terror. Just read Peter
Cheney's grim reports in The Globe of the effects on civilians of
bombing Afghanistan, whether it's 'inevitable,' as the briefers
say with scant regret, or because pilots don't want to return to
base without the thrill, as they sometimes say, of dropping their
load. The state of Israel assassinates people, then rages when one
of its own is assassinated. Five kids die because Israeli forces
mined the road to their school. It's not surprising that states
employ terror, given their power. Nor is the point that one kind
of terror justifies the other. It's that terror is reprehensible,
wherever it's used, because innocents are innocents. I think
people on the left have sometimes justified terror when it was
used in the name of causes such as national liberation; and those
on the right have done the same for the uses of state terror in
response to Sept. 11 or the suicide attacks on Israel.

Is Iraq next? Well, I agree Iraq should not be left to build
weapons of mass destruction. But no nation should, including the
U.S., which has actually dropped two of its atomic bombs. And
Israel has had those same weapons for decades, yet the U.S.
doesn't threaten to bomb it. I also agree that Iraq's 1990
invasion of Kuwait was unacceptable. But so was Israel's of Jordan
and Syria in 1967, and Lebanon in 1982. Ariel Sharon says Yasser
Arafat supports terror, which may be true; but Ariel Sharon was
officially cited in his own nation for abetting massacres in Sabra
and Shatila. The problem lies in the hypocrisy, the sight of which
drives human beings to fury. It will be damn hard to find global
solutions while you still have global Tartufferie.

Leaving us with the kid from California who joined the Taliban and
survived the jet strafing of PoWs. Will U.S. leaders stick to
their position: accept no Taliban prisoners, and prefer that
foreign ones be killed, so they don't make more trouble? And what
will Heather Reisman do? The kid got hooked on Islam by reading
The Autobiography of Malcolm X, a staple of high-school courses.
Is she at this moment clearing it off the shelves at Indigo? If
not, why not?

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BTW, Heather Reisman is the owner of Chapter and Indigo. She
removed Mein Kamph from her stores last week as she considers
it hate literature. . . . . . . nemesis