Jul. 31, 2005. 01:00 AM
A few obscenities for Blair and company to chew on
Gwynne Dyer says it is foolish to deny cause and effect in terrorist attacks
Let's talk dirty. The 9/11 suicide hijackers — all Arabs — attacked the U.S. instead of Brazil or Japan because the U.S. government has been neck-deep in the politics of the Arab world for a generation, whereas the Brazilian and Japanese governments haven't. There is a connection between Washington's Mideast policies — its support for oppressive Arab regimes, its military interventions in the region, and its uncritical backing for Israeli government policies — and the fact that Americans have become the preferred targets for Islamist terrorist attacks.
Indeed, no other non-Muslim nation except Israel was a target for Islamist terrorist attacks until after the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. And the attacks since then have been aimed at the citizens of countries that were complicit in that invasion: Londoners, not Parisians; Spaniards, not Germans; Australians holidaying in Bali, not Japanese holidaying in Malaysia.
There you have it: two full paragraphs of obscenity. Prime Minister Tony Blair himself says so. He informed us last Tuesday that any attempt to link the terrorist attacks in London to his decision to follow the Bush administration in invading Iraq was "an obscenity."
That's nonsense. All the comments in the first two paragraphs of this article are about cause and effect. You may agree or disagree with the analysis, but discussions of cause and effect are still permissible and even necessary. So how does Blair — and President George W. Bush in Washington, and Prime Minister John Howard in Canberra — get away with forbidding us to talk about what is causing all this?
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