For 50 years or so we have assumed, in the main, that Israel could do little wrong and that the treatment of the Jews by the Nazis justified Israel’s toughness.

THE COLLINS COLUMN, September 21, 2001

IDEAS HAVE LEGS

by Doug Collins

NEARLY two weeks after the bombing disasters in the U.S. the mind still boggles at it all. All other news seems to be irrelevant, and not worth talking about.

“We are at war,” scream the headlines. And the shock we have been given is worse than what happened in September, 1939. At that time, we knew what was coming. This time, we were taken by surprise. There was a reason for that. It lay in our innocence and in our stupidity. For in fact the “new” war had been going on for years. In the National Post, Barbara Amiel, one of Zionism’s leading ladies, was right about that. But she was wrong in calling in effect for a Holy War against Islam, which we could not win without mass destruction. And perhaps not “win” at all, the nature of war having changed.

She was wrong, too, in assuming that all the terrorism comes from one side.

We have, you see, been the victims of our own press releases. Or at least of the press releases we have been allowed to see. I do not mean by that that it was impossible to find out what was going on in Islam, but that the emphasis has been been slanted.

For 50 years or so we have assumed, in the main, that Israel could do little wrong and that the treatment of the Jews by the Nazis justified Israel’s toughness. Which, of course, left the Palestinians out of the equation.

In that respect it is worth considering an article by Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk in The Independent that would not be published in the mainstream media in Canada or the U.S.

“This is not the war of democracy versus terror that the world will be asked to believe in the coming hours and days,” he wrote. “It is also about American missiles crashing into Palestinian homes. Ask an Arab how he responds to 20 or 30 thousand innocent deaths [in the U.S.] and he or she will respond as good and decent people should, that it is an unspeakable crime. But they will ask why we did not use such words about the sanctions that have destroyed perhaps half a million children in Iraq, why we did not rage about the 17,500 civilians killed in Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, why we allowed one nation in the Middle East to ignore UN Security Council resolutions but bombed and sanctioned all others who did.”

Fisk deplores the dreadful events in New York and Washington but is not alone in making such comments.

David Dimbleby, a top BBC interviewer, brought a former U.S. ambassador to tears by stating that “millions of people across the world hate the U.S.”

So as we “go to war”, an apparently blind war against whom we are not sure, the genie appears to have escaped the bottle.

An American who was writing BEFORE the tragedies in the U.S. took place is Doug Casey, a man who is deeply involved in the market and puts out the International Speculator newsletter.

In a recent edition, published just before the attacks on the World Trade Centre, one of his chapter headings read, “Waiting for WWIII”, in which he predicted an early escalation of the conflict between the U.S. and Islam.

“Boobus Americanus,” he wrote, “has been programmed for a generation to see Muslims as The Enemy. The U.S. government consistently supports Israel, which the Muslims regard as an outlaw, terrorist state. Show me a single movie since Lawrence of Arabia in which Muslims are portrayed sympathetically.”

“U.S. troops,” he went on, “are an accident waiting to happen. Who, after all could have predicted that the US would invade Somalia in 1991, a country few people other than stamp collectors even knew existed? No place is safe from being attacked in the National Interest of the world’s self-appointed policeman.”

Which reminds me that it was our American friends, inspired by Madeleine Albright, who led the West to war in Kosovo. Why? To defend the Albanian Muslims against the Serbs. What an irony! Especially as the Albanians have turned out to be not a whit better than the Serbs. In war, as the saying goes, truth is the first casualty. In this case, it was the first casualty long before the war started.

Against whom are we going to fight? It is not a country. It is an idea. Ideas have legs, and this one may have as many legs as a centipede.

Douglas Collins, veteran of Dunkirk and WWII, died aged 81 in a Vancouver BC hospital on September 30, 2001.

Previous column on this website: 

 A JOG AROUND ABSURDISTAN