In the Name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.

US Media Insults Readers With Half-Truths, Arrogance

By Firas Al-Atraqchi
Columnist - Canada
25/08/2003

The hate mail said it all: "Iraqis are an ungrateful lot, our boys are dying
to give freedom and now you kill people at the UN. your (sic) all animals."

Throughout the US, dozens of editorials and cartoonists are screaming racial
slurs and epithets at Iraqis and Muslims. One cartoon went so far as to say
that the Qur'an, Islam's Holy Scripture, had no mention of the notion of
gratitude, but was abundant in references to death, jihad, war, etc. (The
Qur'an is replete with chapters on tolerance, gratitude, humbleness,
charity, and compassion - but that's a lesson for another day).

In the wake of the tragic attack on the United Nations compound in Baghdad,
which killed 23, including the UN's point man on humanitarian relief, and
injured dozens, the US media is abashedly trying to spin the story to blame
Iraqis for the disastrous pit their country has become.

Take The Buffalo News, for example: A syndicated column from The Washington
Post Writers Group published in The Buffalo News said, "the Iraqi people
need to step up and take more responsibility for security. By allowing a
terrorist resistance to take hold, they are blowing their chance at becoming
a prosperous, free nation that could lead the Arab world. Understandably,
the Iraqis are disappointed that America has botched things in the initial
months of occupation. But the only people who can truly safeguard Iraq's
infrastructure - its pipelines, water supply, power stations - are Iraqis
themselves."

It is unfortunate that The Buffalo News quickly helped its readers forget
that it was the US administration in Iraq that dissolved the Iraqi army, a
security force that could have deployed in Iraqi cities and brought
stability and order. Instead, former Iraqi soldiers, poor and disgruntled,
unable to feed their families or retain any sense of dignity, now shrug
their shoulders. They feel betrayed by the US; and now, US media blames them
for incompetence.

Ten million Iraqis are unemployed. That is 40 per cent of the Iraqi
population. Can you imagine how grateful America's working class would be if
40 per cent of them were unemployed?

The North Eastern US suffered a massive power outage for three days and
everyone was whining and wheezing. Iraqis laughed. Welcome to our hell, they
said. Could you imagine living in 130 degree weather for the whole summer?
Try it, and then see how grateful you are. Iraqis still, after four months
of "liberation," have no electricity, no adequately clean water. Imagine the
Bronx with no showers.

The day after the attack on UN HQ, US civilian administrator in Iraq Paul
Bremer told the Associated Press "these people [terrorists] are not content
with having killed thousands of people. They just want to keep killing and
killing. But they won't have their way." Such a statement is designed to
mislead the US public. On the one hand, he links the phrase "thousands of
people" with the tragic attacks on the Twin Towers and Virginia. On the
other hand, by making such a statement in Iraq, he is fundamentally claiming
that the people who attacked the UN HQ are one and the same the people who
perpetrated September 11th. This in fact validates the Bush administration's
invasion of Iraq, which is already a quagmire and plagued by so much
bungling and mismanagement that the US is quietly returning to its heated
arch-villain - the UN - to save it in Iraq.

Let's not forget that to this date there remains no evidence whatsoever, not
even circumstantial evidence, linking Saddam's Baathist regime with Al-Qaeda
or the September 11th attacks.

Bremer might as well have been talking about his trigger-happy troops who
have butchered entire families because they were nervous, the hot sun was
making them dehydrated or they wanted some shooting practice.

Oh, sure, Iraqis were liberated from a despot who beat and tortured them
during interrogation, gassed and killed them. Problem is, Iraqis are still
being beaten and tortured during interrogation. Amnesty International and
Human Rights Watch have detailed accounts of prisoners who were beaten and
humiliated, tortured and left in squalid conditions by coalition troops.
Hardly the act of a benevolent liberator.

And what of the women of Iraq? Perhaps, they are ungrateful for the
liberation the US forces have brought them, along with the alarming rise in
rape, honour killings, kidnappings, beatings, and murder.

The Organisation of Women's Freedom in Iraq recently sent out a plea to
international organizations saying, "Women are being shot dead because of
their professions. Raped women are being killed by their own families to
clear the 'shame' being brought to their families' 'honour' due to the act
of rape."

Yes, what an ungrateful lot because they can't leave their homes anymore.
Because they are living under a new tyranny called lawlessness. Yes, how
pugnacious of them.

And the children dying of malnutrition, which the UN reports is back to
mid-1990s levels. "Nevertheless, it shows that 7.7 percent of children under
age five are suffering from acute malnutrition, compared to last year's
figure of four percent," said a UNICEF report in May. Curse them for not
being grateful.

The Globe and Mail pointed to 12 years of US-sponsored UN sanctions as
having debilitated the public health system in Iraq. "three of Iraq's top
paediatricians said that although no statistics are available, they believe
the rate of child mortality - among the highest in the world during the past
12 years - has risen even higher since Saddam Hussein's regime fell and the
United States took over governing the country," reported The Globe and Mail'
s Mark MacKinnon in late June.

Truly, the Iraqis should be grateful for the sanctions of yesteryear and the
lawlessness of tomorrow.

Thank God for illuminated columnists like USA Today's Richard E. Rubenstein
who calls for US troops to withdraw from Iraq. His rationale is that the US
is seen as a liberator when it leaves Iraq for the Iraqis; now it is seen as
an occupier. While the White House plays the blame game and shifts the
burden of responsibility onto someone else by blaming Saudi Arabia, Syria
and Iran (didn't these countries warn against an invasion in the first
place?) for the turmoil in Iraq, Rubenstein goes straight to the core of the
dilemma:

"It makes no difference that some of the resistance forces are Islamic
extremists from other Arab countries. Foreign occupation attracts these
militants to Iraq, just as it alienates the Iraqis who suffered most under
Saddam Hussein's rule."

He concludes by reminding Americans of their wars of liberation: "Of all
people, the heirs of 1776 should understand the difference between a foreign
occupation and national liberation."

No, many predicted the cataclysm that is Iraq today. Writing in the
International Herald Tribune, William Pfaff says, "This outcome was
foreseen. It was dismissed in Washington because of the radicalism of the
neoconservative project, taken up by President George W. Bush with seemingly
little or no grasp of its sources, objectives or assumptions."

So the next time a hungry, unemployed Iraqi, who has to pass through
coalition checkpoints in his own country, passes by the Ministry of Oil, he
will be grateful that it remains the only building that was undamaged in the
war, the only building that was not looted. The only building functioning
perfectly in Baghdad.

I wonder what the new hate mail will say.

Firas Al-Atraqchi is a Canadian journalist of Iraqi heritage. Holding an MA
in Journalism and Mass Communication, he has eleven years of experience
covering Middle East issues, oil and gas markets, and the telecom industry.

http://www.islamonline.net

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