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CounterPunch
October
23, 2002
Going Back to Bali
by ANTHONY GANCARSKI
Finally, a 9/11 for our coalition partners. Something
they can stake their cases for preemptive war against the Third
World on, at long last.
It came out of nowhere, like a midnight
phone call from an ex whose voice and smell you can't shake.
Ring, ring, ring. Thirty-three dead Brits out of a total of over
200 departed souls, giving Tony Blair the perfect opening to
hold forth, W style, about eradicating the evil in our world.
Kim Sengupta in the October 15 edition of the London Independent
quotes the ever-predictable Blair as speaking of "the appalling
depths to which these extremists will sink." One senses
that the Bali tragedy primarily will be spun in the Anglo-American
media as yet another installment in this endless battle between
overzealous Islamists and the forces of reason that nominally
govern the western world.
Yet, at least in the Independent, there
are glimmers of an alternate perspective. The aforementioned
Sengupta, in the same edition of the paper, tells us that Indonesian
cleric Abu Bakar Bashir of Jemaah Islamiyah fame is a "prime
suspect" and that said cleric "expects to be arrested"
for the Bali blasts. After making that token nod to what will
be the official version of events, Sengputa then did something
fairly unheard of when the US press reports on the evildoing
of an official enemy; he used a direct quote from the enemy himself.
One wonders when or if an official of
the United States government will respond to the following claim
made by Abu Bakar Bashir. "All the allegations against me
are groundless. I challenge them to prove anything. I suspect
the bombings were carried out by the US and its allies to justify
allegations that Indonesia is a base for terrorists."
I second Bashir's challenge. For over
thirteen months now, the citizens of the US have waited in vain
for concrete proof of any claim made to justify this tumescent
War on Terror. Any broaching of the idea that the WTC and Pentagon
attacks weren't carried out by flight-school dropouts undertaking
faith-based initiatives is painted as delusional, anti-Semitic,
or anti-freedom. Meanwhile, what passes for mainstream discourse
encourages supposedly respectable folks to declare large swathes
of the world population as evil and motivated by baseless hatred.
We have heard this garbage for over thirteen months, and now
it is time for the Brits and the Aussies to embrace unabashedly
the rhetoric of this corporate apocalypse and all that comes
with it.
One wonders if the gray-faced professional
politicians of the western world can get away with this mendacity
for much longer. Now is the time to demand concrete proof. Now
is the time to refuse to accept baseless claims made by those
in the employ of any of the so-called coalition governments.
The verifiable targets of this so-called war on terror are civilian
populations, civil liberties, and the freedoms that justify US
policies of gunboat mercantilism, and it is long past time for
the people to rise up and call out the ruling class on this risible,
contemptible assault on humanity.
Anthony Gancarski makes his home in Spokane, WA. He welcomes comments
at Anthony.Gancarski@attbi.com.
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