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CounterPunch
March 15,
2003
We've
Become Such Good Little Germans
If
We Care About Elizabeth Smart, Why Not the Children of Iraq?
by KURT NIMMO
Earlier this week America received good news.
Elizabeth Smart, 15, was discovered alive,
unharmed, and in good health. She was apparently abducted nine
months ago by a mentally deranged homeless preacher, Brian David
Mitchell. Today the newspapers all across America ran photographs
of a smiling and rosy-cheeked Elizabeth, her father Ed, and younger
sister Mary Katherine. Today America celebrates the return of
this innocent child to her loving parents.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world, people
were not so happy with the fate of their children. In the days
before Utah police found Elizabeth Smart, Anglo-American aircraft
bombed Basra, Iraq, a not uncommon occurrence. Six children in
Al Jumohria, a poor section of town, were killed while they slept.
"I walked down the street where
the missile had struck in the early hours," writes John
Pilger, "it had followed the line of houses, destroying
one after the other. I met the father of two sisters, aged eight
and 10, who were photographed by a local weddings photographer,
Nabil al-Jerani, shortly after the attack. Their bodies were
unlike the other four children, who were blown to bits, their
limbs and flesh in the overhead wires... These two little girls
were left intact. In Nabil's photographs, they are in their nightdresses,
one with a bow in her hair, their bodies perfectly engraved in
the rubble of their homes, where they had been bombed to death,
murdered, in their beds."
These horrid photographs were published
in the UK Mirror, not the New York Times. In Britain, where the
press enjoys more freedom than it does in America, the people
are overwhelmingly against Bush's Iraq attack.
In general, America is unaware of the
dead children of Iraq -- children killed in our name by Bush
and Blair and other war criminals. "Look closely at their
images on these pages," Pilger advises, "they are the
faces of a stricken nation of whom 42 per cent are children.
When Blair speaks about the 'moral case' for sending hundreds
of missiles against this nation of so many children, as well
as new types of cluster bombs and bunker bombs and microwave
bombs, and shells tipped with pure uranium, a form of nuclear
weapon, the images of the two sisters provide an eloquent commentary
on the Prime Minister's Christian 'morality'."
It would seem, as well, there is scant
Christian "morality" in America, even as our unelected
president claims to be a servant of Jesus, the King of Peace.
Why do so few of us care about the children
of Iraq? Are they any less precious than Elizabeth Smart? Why
do polls (CBS News/New York Times) indicate an unbelievable 55%
of Americans have reached the conclusion that the US must invade
Iraq? Are the people who participate in such polls cold and calculating
monsters -- like their president, whom so many seem to admire,
if we are to believe other polls that bother to track such things
-- or are they brainwashed, do they simply tune out the reality
of what Bush's invasion will ultimately mean: tens, if not hundreds
of thousands of people, nearly half of them children, killed
or seriously injured, maimed for life, traumatized? We don't
read about such stark possibilities in the New York Times, nor
does Sean Hannity discuss them on Fox News.
Many of us, if we even bother to glint
to truth, are too busy "making a living" or watching
sit-coms. Life's complicated enough without taking the weight
of the world upon our shoulders. Besides, Saddam is an evil man.
He has bio and chem weapons, never mind that Reagan and Dubya's
daddy sold them to him.
If a bomb like the one dropped on Al
Jumohria were released over the neighborhood in Salt Lake City
where Elizabeth Smart lives, if it resulted in American kids
blown to bits while they sleep, what would the good American
people say, what would they do? Wouldn't they want to track down
the cold-blooded murderers of such a heinous crime and bring
them to justice? Is it possible more than a few, especially the
parents and relatives of the murdered kids, would take the law
into their own hands and hunt down the perpetrators and string
them up to the nearest tree? Is it fair to say most Americans
would consider the pilots and bombardiers of such a hellish operation
terrorists? Are Palestinians who attack IDF troops or Israeli
settlers to avenge the murder of their loved ones terrorists?
Or is their one standard for Americans and Israelis, another
for Arabs?
Is Elizabeth Smart's life more important
than any number of Iraqi kids?
Unfortunately, we have become a nation
of good Germans. In Nazi Germany, average people looked the other
way when the Gestapo dragged off neighbors who happened to be
Jewish, or Marxists, or homosexuals, or leaders of the local
labor union. They knew what Hitler did in Poland, on the Russian
front, to partisans in France and Holland and a dozen other places
in Europe. The German people weren't stupid -- they knew what
Hitler was all about. Hitler told the German people they were
better than all other people. Bush tells the good American people
Arabs envy them for their Playstations, their SUVs, their freedom
to go to McDonalds unmolested. They hate our civilization, our
way of life, these backward Arabs. Bush tells Americans these
things and Americans believe him. In order to demonstrate their
agreement they paste plastic flag decals on everything.
Did Raafat Ghussein, the 18-year-old
art student of Palestinian-born Lebanese parents, hate our civilization
in the few short years of her life before she died in the Libyan
city of Tripoli, one of 55 victims of a Reagan vendetta against
Muammar Qaddafi? When Raafat's parents, Bassem and Saniya, attempted
to sue Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher for
civilian deaths during the air raids, an American judge, Thomas
Penfield Jackson, dismissed the lawsuit as "frivolous,"
and characterized the case as one that "offered no hope
whatsoever of success." He then fined Ramsey Clark, who
helped Bassem and Saniya Ghussein file the lawsuit, for wasting
his time. "I will only return to America when I know someone
will listen to me and say: 'yes, it was our fault your daughter
died, and I am sorry.' So long as they think my daughter's death
is 'frivolous,' I won't go back," Bassem told The Christian
Science Monitor.
Even if an apology were forthcoming,
Bassem may want to stay in Libya -- America is no longer a welcome
land for Arabs. John Ashcroft has demonstrated as much. So have
other Amricans who can't tell the difference between an Indain
and an Iranian when they assault them on the street.
Is it possible we don't care about Raafat
Ghussein, or the 10,000 Iraqi children who died in February,
1999, from entirely preventable diseases (as documented by UNICEF),
or the 14,396 children, age five and under, who died of diarrhea,
pneumonia and respiratory infections, and malnutrition over a
two month period the same year, all because Clinton, a popular
US president, insisted the Iraqi people must suffer and die for
the political sins of their leader? Isn't the death of more than
500,000 Iraqi children over a ten-year period -- the direct result
of a brutal sanctions regime imposed by the US and the UN --
an immense, even unpardonable crime against humanity? Shouldn't
George Bush Senior, Bill Clinton, and George Bush Junior be brought
before the International Criminal Court and charged with crimes
against humanity? If Americans want the head of Osama bin Laden
on a stick, why not George Bush's, or his father's, or Clinton's?
Is it possible Osama bin Laden is correct
-- we are immune to hypocrisy, we are arrogant and immoral?
Sadly, on the day Bush attacks Iraq,
the American people will be guilty of supporting a leader who
engages in mass murder -- just as Hitler and Stalin and the German
and Russian people were guilty of the same. Ignorance is no excuse.
Believing Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly and the editorial writers
of the Wall Street Journal is no excuse.
We know what will happen on the day Bush
attacks Iraq -- our newspapers, televisions, websites tell us,
Bush and his demented Pentagon advisors waste no time informing
us. They tell us about new and more deadly daisycutters, they
even release videotapes of these new bombs, which pack the wallop
of small nukes. They tell us about the feverish pace of cruise
missile production. They talk causally of "mini-nukes"
and how we must use them without hesitation. They discuss "shock
and awe," tell us the first 48 hours in Baghdad will be
like nothing we've ever imagined. Bush's advisors and "experts"
tell us these things with the bureaucratic dispassion of Adolf
Eichmann. We don't seem to care. If it gets too hot we simply
roulette on over to M-TV or ESPN. Instead of thought, we check
out what the Osbournes are up to.
We know what they are going to do --
and yet when the pollster calls we tell him yes, Saddam must
be eliminated, no matter the cost, and the UN and the rest of
the world (especially the French) can take a long hike into irrelevance.
Bush offers no proof of Saddam's threat, and yet large numbers
of us say he's a good man doing what's right. Like good Germans,
we follow mindlessly in lockstep behind this new Fuhrer who will
surely lead us down the path to destruction.
Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi girls
-- as precious and loved by their parents as Elizabeth Smart
-- will die horribly by incineration, blunt force trauma, decapitation,
evisceration, starvation, and disease in the days, weeks, and
months after Bush unleashes the most awesome and frightening
war machine the world has ever devised. Unperturbed, most of
us will go about with our "civilized" lives, blind
to the immense and unimaginable suffering of average Iraqis.
Bush, of course, will never face the
ICC. Chances are slim he will be impeached. We can only hope
he will lose his job come a year from November. In Britain, meanwhile,
it appears Bush's accomplice in potential mass murder, Tony Blair,
may indeed lose his job if the UN does not back the Iraq attack
and the US and Britain go it alone. Forty of his MPs are calling
for him to resign -- to make way for someone who will "stand
up to President Bush," as the Mirror put it. Obviously unconcerned
with Blair's mounting problems, Rumsfeld said Washington still
expects "a significant military contribution from the United
Kingdom," regardless of what the people of Britain or rebellious
PMs have to say about it. Bush will have his war, no matter what
-- even if Tony Blair is taken out in the process. Rumsfeld has
spoken.
So when Fox and CNN roll the footage
of jets launching from aircraft carriers -- or cruise missiles
pluming into the midnight sky with their murderous payloads --
think of Elizabeth Smart. Think about how she is lucky to live
in the most "civilized" nation in the world. Be thankful
we have finally licked the "Vietnam Syndrome," which
is say too many of us no longer care if 50,000, 500,000, or 5,000,000
people must be condemned to miserable and wholly unavoidable
deaths in order for Bush and the elite he represents to make
a point. Think about how we have become good Germans -- and good
Christians like Bush. Think about how our government is capable
of committing genocide while we go to the mall and shop until
we drop.
Don't think about what it will eventually
mean.
Kurt Nimmo
is a photographer and multimedia developer in Las Cruces, New
Mexico. Visit his excellent online
gallery. He can be reached at: nimmo@zianet.com
We highly recommend regular visits to
Nimmo's website, Another
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