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 Letter From Airstrip One: Fear Over Facts
By
Chris Floyd
The
Milli Gazette Online
18 August 2006
London - Swift action by British
intelligence services foil an imminent terrorist strike by religious
extremists that would have resulted in mass death and social upheaval on
an unprecedented scale. Government ministers heatedly denounce the
plotters as the evil agents of a worldwide sectarian conspiracy seeking to
impose its totalitarian ideology on free nations everywhere.
The country goes on high alert,
with raids on private homes and places of worship. Native adherents of the
suspect faith fall under a cloud of suspicion as "the enemy
within"; neighborhoods are riven with distrust. Any attempts at
exploring the grievances that so radicalized the plotters are dismissed as
treasonous coddling of a monstrous foe impervious to reason.
The year, of course, is 1605.
The foiling of the Gunpowder Plot
400 years ago - when a small group of radical Catholics tried to blow up
Parliament and the royal family - is still celebrated as one of the chief
national holidays in the UK: November 5, "Guy Fawkes Day,"
named, oddly enough, after the chief plotter. Effigies of the dastardly
terrorist - who was tortured, hanged, drawn and quartered for his pains -
are still burned each year at night rallies across the country.
It's unlikely, however, that last
week's apparent thwarting of an alleged test-run by one alleged
conspirator in an alleged plot by a group of alleged religious extremists
to allegedly blow up an ever-shifting number of US-bound airplanes with
some sort of liquid explosive or other will be celebrated centuries from
now as "Rashid Rauf Day," after the alleged plot mastermind who
was arrested in Pakistan and is now, after the gentle ministrations of the
ISI, said to be "cooperating with authorities." But Britain's
political and media elites have reacted to the incident with a degree of
fearmongering and rancor that would have done old Guy's torturers and
quarterers proud.
In fact, the level of government
bombast and media Muslim-bashing following the Great Bomb Scare Plot far
surpasses that seen after the successful terrorist attack on July 7 last
year, when 56 people were killed by bombs on London's transport system.
And it's off the scale when compared to the nation's measured stoicism in
the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when 78 Britons died in the attacks on
American soil. It seems Tony Blair and the UK commentariat are operating
by some strange law of inverse proportion: the less dire the incident, the
greater the frenzy.
Of course, Blair himself reacted to
this "imminent threat" of "mass murder on an unimaginable
scale," this moment of extreme national peril, by cruising the
Caribbean. The sight of Blair sunning on a luxury yacht while security
troops stormed suburban homes and surrounded mosques back home was just
one of the many surreal juxtapositions in the vast media spectacle that
quickly overwhelmed whatever kernel of reality lay behind the plot.
The inherent schizophrenia of the
"War on Terror" was everywhere in evidence. Britons were told
they were facing the greatest threat to the life of the nation since World
War II, requiring tireless vigilance, a "huge effort of will and
courage" - but they should keep shopping, keep traveling, carry on
with their normal lives (as their tanned and jaunty leader was doing).
They were pipelined stories by an unquestioning media about the dazzling
triumph of the super-efficient security services - the same services that
had botched the Iraq WMD intelligence, shot dead a Brazilian carpenter
they mistook for a terrorist last year and, just two months before, sent
250 heavily armed agents on a raid to seize two alleged "chemical
bombers" (and shoot one of them) on the false word of a single
informant. Britain has arrested more than 700 people on terrorism charges
in the last five years; only 17 have been found guilty - and only three of
these convictions were related to "Islamic terrorism," as
CounterPunch and the Guardian report.
For days, TV screens here were
filled with the gruff visage of Home Secretary John Reid, a former
Stalinist who used to enforce the party line on his communist comrades
with his fists, and now serves the same function - sans knuckles - for
Blair's increasingly right-wing regime. Reid is the point man for a raft
of draconian measures that Blair has been pushing for years, including
national ID cards; trials without jury; summary powers for police to
dispense "instant justice," without trial or defense, for a
range of street crimes; and ever-broader expansions of the state's
surveillance and arbitrary detention powers, which in many cases already
outstrip those claimed by Bush's "unitary executive." You will
not be shocked to hear that Reid has now seized on the bomb scare as
bullwhip to drive Parliament forward on these and other "security
reforms."
Reid is the rising star of the
Blair Remnant, which aims to prevent Tony's long-time rival and putative
successor, Chancellor Gordon Brown, from seizing the Labour crown when
Blair makes his long-promised, much-delayed exit. In the bomb plot media
blitz, Reid completely eclipsed the nominal head of government in Blair's
absence, Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, who was already in the
doghouse after an adultery scandal - and who will likely be eased out
altogether now that he has committed the ultimate heresy of Blair's inner
circle: denigrating George W. Bush. In private remarks leaked to the
Independent this week, Prescott called Bush's Middle East policy
"crap" and mocked him as "cowboy with his Stetson on."
Doubtless Prescott is now mulling the fate of ex-Foreign Minister Jack
Straw, who was dumped from his post earlier this year after publicly
declaring that the Bush administration's obvious yen for a war with Iran
was "nuts." Those who speak ill of the Master in the White House
are not long toleratd by his satrap in Downing Street.
But perhaps the most surreal and
jarring juxtaposition of all was the assertion by the British
Establishment that the UK's central role in the Iraq War - and Blair's
lockstep behind Bush's "crap" policy of giving Israel's hardline
government free rein in the Middle East - have played no part in
radicalizing young Muslims. Leading writers
from the left-leaning Guardian and Observer to the staid rightists of the
Times and the Telegraph joined Blair and Reid (and Bush and even Bill
Clinton) in advancing this remarkable thesis. No, they all said, the fact
that America and Britain invaded the Islamic heartland on false pretenses
and have killed more than 100,000 innocent Muslim civilians there could
not possibly have angered a small handful of Muslims to the point of
wanting to answer violence with violence. Nor could the pictures of
shredded infants being pulled from the rubble of farming villages in
Lebanon while Bush and Blair cheered on Israel's inducement of "birth
pangs" in the region have had any effect on anguished and
impressionable minds.
Not even the "Intelligent
Design" crowd denies reality with such willful ignorance as this.
After all, both the US and UK intelligence services have clearly stated
that the war in Iraq is fomenting more terrorism worldwide. Yet when a
group of leading Establishment Muslims - "good" Muslims, you
understand, including some peers of the realm - echoed this rational,
fact-based assessment in a polite public letter to Blair, they were
castigated across the commentariat for their defeatism, their
terrorist-coddling, even their ingratitude. Didn't they realize, thundered
the Observer, that America and Britain were actually in Iraq to save Islam
from the extremists who pervert the faith? Why, that's what the war is all
about!
The Sunday Times best encapsulated
the Establishment mood with an ominous piece entitled - what else? -
"The Enemy Within." It is not Iraq
or Palestine or any other so-called grievance that is generating
terrorism, said the paper; it's just pure evil, a floating, motiveless
malignancy which has infected "a generation of disaffected
Muslims" who seek any excuse "for killing their fellow
citizens." These deadly microbes in the body politic may "seem
all too ordinary, perhaps enthusiastic about football and cricket and
living 'normal' westernized existences in neat terraced houses. They work,
study or run small businesses," but any one of them - or maybe all of
them, a whole "generation" - might be secretly plotting to
"destroy our way of life."
This is about as far as you can go
in Muslim-baiting short of calling for an outright pogrom. It appeared in
one of the nation's most venerable and respected papers. It evoked not a
single spark of controversy. Indeed, it represents the conventional wisdom
of an Establishment that, with few exceptions, now seems addicted to the
manufacture of hysteria, the exaltation of fear over facts: blind to the
corrosive effects of its own use of death and violence for political ends;
inflating moderate risks into existential threats; sacrificing liberty for
an illusory security; and obliterating the complexities of reality with
cartoonish rhetoric that poisons public discourse - and official policy -
with fear and suspicion.
Happy Rashid Rauf Day everyone.
Don't forget your effigies.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/081806Z.shtml
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