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<span class="post_date" title="2015-11-27">November 27, 2015</span>
<h1 class="headline" itemprop="name"><a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/11/27/forget-isis-humanity-is-at-stake/"
rel="bookmark">Forget ISIS: Humanity is at Stake</a></h1>
<p class="post_meta"> <span class="post_author_intro">by</span> <span
class="post_author" itemprop="author"><a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/author/ramzy-baroud/"
rel="nofollow">Ramzy Baroud</a></span> </p>
<div class="post_content" itemprop="articleBody"><b><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/11/27/forget-isis-humanity-is-at-stake/">http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/11/27/forget-isis-humanity-is-at-stake/</a></small></small></b><br>
<p>I still remember that smug look on his face, followed by the
matter-of-fact remarks that had western journalists laugh out
loud.</p>
<p>“I’m now going to show you a picture of the luckiest man in
Iraq,” General Norman Schwarzkopf, known as ‘Stormin’ Norman,
said at a press conference sometime in 1991, as he showed a
video of US bombs blasting an Iraqi bridge, seconds after the
Iraqi driver managed to cross it.</p>
<p>But then, a far more unjust invasion and war followed in 2003,
following a decade-long siege that cost Iraq a million of its
children and its entire economy.</p>
<p>It marked the end of sanity and the dissipation of any past
illusions that the United States was a friend of the Arabs. Not
only did the Americans destroy the central piece of our
civilizational and collective experience that spanned millennia,
it took pleasure in degrading us in the process. Their soldiers
raped our women with obvious delight. They tortured our men, and
posed with the dead, mutilated bodies in photographs – mementos
to prolong the humiliation for eternity; they butchered our
people, explained in articulate terms as necessary and
unavoidable collateral damage; they blew up our mosques and
churches and refused to accept that what was done to Iraq over
the course of twenty years might possibly constitute war crimes.</p>
<p>Then, they expanded their war taking it as far as US bombers
could reach; they tortured and floated their prisoners aboard
large ships, cunningly arguing that torture in international
waters does not constitute a crime; they suspended their victims
on crosses and photographed them for future entertainment.</p>
<p>Their entertainers, media experts, intellectuals and
philosophers made careers from dissecting us, dehumanizing us,
belittling everything we hold dear; they did not spare a symbol,
a prophet, a tradition, values or set of morals. When we reacted
and protested out of despair, they further censured us for being
intolerant to view the humor in our demise; they used our angry
shouts to further highlight their sense of superiority and our
imposed lowliness.</p>
<p>They claimed that we initiated it all. But they lied. It was
their unqualified, inflated sense of importance that made them
assign September 11, 2001 as the inauguration of history. All
that they did to us, all the colonial experiences and the
open-ended butchery of the brown man, the black man, any man or
woman who did not look like them or uphold their values, was
inconsequential.</p>
<p>All the millions who died in Iraq were not considered a viable
context to any historical understanding of terrorism; in fact,
terrorism became us; the whole concept of terror, which is
violence inflicted on innocent civilians for political ends,
abruptly became an entirely Arab and Muslim trait. In
retrospect, the US-Western-Israeli slaughter of the Vietnamese,
Koreans, Cambodians, Palestinians, Lebanese, Egyptians, South
Americans, Africans, was spared any censure. Yet, when Arabs
attempted to resist, they were deemed the originators of
violence, the harbingers of terror.</p>
<p>Furthermore, they carried out massive social and demographic
experiments in Iraq which have been unleashed throughout the
Middle East, since. They pitted their victims against one
another: the Shia against the Sunni, the Sunni against the
Sunni, the Arabs against the Kurds, and the Kurds against the
Turks. They called it a strategy, and congratulated themselves
on a job well done as they purportedly withdrew from Iraq. They
disregarded the consequences of tampering with civilizations
that have evolved over the course of millennia.</p>
<p>When their experiments went awry, they blamed their victims.
Their entertainers, media experts, intellectuals and
philosophers flooded every public platform to inform the world
that the vital mistake of the Bush administration was the
assumption that Arabs were ready for democracy and that, unlike
the Japanese and the Germans, Arabs were made of different
blood, flesh and tears. Meanwhile, the finest of Arab men were
raped in their jails, kidnapped in broad daylight, tortured
aboard large ships in international waters, where the Law did
not apply.</p>
<p>When the Americans and their allies claimed that they had left
the region, they left behind bleeding, impoverished nations,
licking their wounds and searching for bodies under rubble in
diverse and macabre landscapes. Yet, the Americans, the British,
the French and the Israelis, continue to stage their democratic
elections around the debate of who will hit us the hardest,
humiliate us the most, teach the most unforgettable lesson and,
in their late night comedies, they mock our pain.</p>
<p>We, then, sprang up like wild grass in a desert, multiplied,
and roamed the streets of Rabat, Baghdad, Damascus and Cairo,
calling for a revolution. We wanted democracy for our sake, not
Bush’s democracy tinged with blood; we wanted equality, change
and reforms and a world in which Gaza is not habitually
destroyed by Israel and children of Derra could protest without
being shot; where leaders do not pose as divinities and relish
the endless arsenals of their western benefactors. We sought a
life in which freedom is not a rickety dingy crossing the sea to
some uncertain horizon where we are treated as human rubbish on
the streets of western lands.</p>
<p>However, we were crushed; pulverized; imprisoned, burnt, beaten
and raped and, once more, told that we are not yet ready for
democracy; not ready to be free, to breathe, to exist with even
a speck of dignity.</p>
<p>Many of us are still honorably fighting for our communities;
others despaired: they carried arms and went to war, fighting
whoever they perceive to be an enemy, who were many. Others went
mad, lost every sense of humanity; exacted revenge, tragically
believing that justice can be achieved by doing unto others what
they have done unto you. They were joined by others who headed
to the West, some of whom had escaped the miseries of their
homelands, but found that their utopia was marred with
alienation, racism and neglect, saturated with a smug sense of
superiority afflicted upon them by their old masters.</p>
<p>It became a vicious cycle, and few seem interested now in
revisiting General Schwarzkopf’s conquests in Iraq and Vietnam –
with his smug attitude and the amusement of western journalists
– to know what actually went wrong. They still refuse to
acknowledge history, the bleeding Palestinian wound, the
heartbroken Egyptian revolutionaries and the destroyed sense of
Iraqi nationhood, the hemorrhaging streets of Libya and the
horrifying outcomes of all the western terrorist wars, with
blind, oil-hungry dominating foreign policies that have
shattered the Cradle of Civilization, like never before.</p>
<p>However, this violence no longer affects Arabs alone, although
Arabs and Muslims remain the larger recipients of its horror.
When the militants, spawned by the US and their allies, felt
cornered, they fanned out to every corner of the globe, killing
innocent people and shouting the name of God in their final
moment. Recently, they came for the French, a day after they
blew up the Lebanese, and few days after the Russians; and,
before that, the Turks and the Kurds, and, simultaneously, the
Syrians and the Iraqis.</p>
<p>Who is next? No one really knows. We keep telling ourselves
that ‘it’s just a transition’ and ‘all will be well once the
dust has settled’. But the Russians, the Americans and everyone
else continue bombing, each insisting that they are bombing the
right people for the right reason while, on the ground, everyone
is shooting at whoever they deem the enemy, the terrorist, a
designation that is often redefined. Yet, few speak out to
recognize our shared humanity and victimhood.</p>
<p>No – do not always expect the initials ISIS to offer an
explanation for all that goes wrong. Those who orchestrated the
war on Iraq and those feeding the war in Syria and arming Israel
cannot be vindicated.</p>
<p>The crux of the matter: we either live in dignity together or
continue to perish alone, warring tribes and grief-stricken
nations. This is not just about indiscriminate bombing – our
humanity, in fact, the future of the human race is at stake.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p class="author_description"> <em><strong>Dr. Ramzy Baroud</strong>
has been writing about the Middle East for over 20 years. He
is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media
consultant, an author of several books and the founder of
PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is My Father Was a
Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story (Pluto Press, London).
His website is: ramzybaroud.net</em> </p>
</div>
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