09 August 2010
By Jacob G. Hornberger Statists who oppose the building of that mosque
near the World Trade Center site are missing the
point, and the reason they’re missing the point is
that they simply cannot bring themselves to recognize
that the problem is not with Islam or Muslims. The
problem is with the U.S. government and specifically,
its imperial, interventionist foreign policy that
waged war against people in the Middle East for years
prior to the 9/11 attacks. In other words, the 9/11 terrorists did not attack
New York and Washington because of Islam,
Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, or any
other religion. They attacked because they were
retaliating for the horrible things that the U.S.
government had done to people in the Middle East, most
of whom happen to have been Muslims. What bad things, you ask? Well, how about the intentional and deliberate
killing of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children. If
you want to read the sordid details on how that took
place, go to this page on The Future of Freedom
Foundation’s website or, better yet, purchase and read
a copy of Joy Gordon’s new book Invisible War: The
United States and the Iraq Sanctions. The U.S. Empire killed those kids with one of the
most brutal systems of economic sanctions in history.
Since 99 percent of the population of Iraq is Muslim,
the odds are that 99 percent of those dead Iraqi
children were Muslim. Now, that’s not to say that the U.S. government
killed those children because they were Muslim. It’s
simply to say that the kids they killed in Iraq were
Muslims. Why did they kill those children? Because they
hoped that Saddam Hussein would leave office rather
than continue to watch his own people die from the
sanctions. They were using the Iraqi children as the
means by which to pressure him into relinquishing
power in favor of a U.S.-approved ruler. The strategy didn’t work. Saddam let the children
die, as did the U.S. government, year after year after
year. Did U.S. officials express any remorse for killing
all those kids? Are you kidding? It was the exact
opposite — they felt that the killing of those
children was “worth it.” That was the precise phrase
used by U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations
Madeleine Albright when “Sixty Minutes” asked her if
the deaths of half-a-million children from the
sanctions had been worth it. Her response reflected
the official position of the Empire: “I think that is
a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price
is worth it.” Not surprisingly, people throughout the Middle East
were boiling over with anger over these deaths and the
callous, indifferent attitude toward the deaths. It
also shouldn’t surprise anyone that the people who
were boiling over with anger and rage happened to have
been Muslim, simply because the children who were
dying were Muslim. Adding fuel to the fire was the U.S. government’s
unconditional flow of foreign-aid largess to the
Israeli government; the stationing of U.S. troops,
most of whom had to have been Christians and Jews, on
the holiest lands in the Muslim religion — Mecca and
Medina; and the illegal no-fly zones that were being
used to kill even more Iraqis. As Ron Paul put it in his famous presidential
debate exchange with Rudy Giuliani, “They attack us
because we've been over there, we've been bombing Iraq
for 10 years. We've been in the Middle East. I think
Reagan was right. We don't understand the
irrationality of Middle Eastern politics.” When will Americans come to see that the
never-ending terrorist crisis, along with the
concomitant loss of our civil liberties, is rooted in
U.S. statism, imperialism, and interventionism rather
than in religion? When will they stop treating the
U.S. government like a god? Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The
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