Comments on: Yesterday’s bombings

By: John Kozak

John Kozak — Sat, 22 Nov 2003 13:01:50 +0000

I was a bit aggressive there; thanks for the temperate response. My point about disingenuousness is this: a number of your posts take the form “War in Iraq is really bad, but X” where X is something like a student calling Bush a Nazi, or a Guardian columnist perhaps slightly overstating a causal connection. Collectively, these read to me like a rhetorical device intending to show that actually the war in Iraq is almost completely unimportant, as it’s deemed less worthy of note than the witterings of Polly Toynbee or some random 19-year old. I’m sure this wasn’t your intent, but that’s why I got narked.

By: John S

John S — Sat, 22 Nov 2003 09:51:54 +0000

Radish: is that a joke? US fascists are so vicious and evil they await the results of elections and then, if they’re close enough, resort to the law? Evil! Mind you, funny definition of fascist. On that basis, there isn’t anyone in politics who isn’t fascist.

By: nelson ascher

nelson ascher — Sat, 22 Nov 2003 04:44:03 +0000

Dick, you say that “You fail to mention that Al Quaeda was a creation of the CIA: Casey’s war in the 1980s against the USSR in Adghanistan.So the Guardian is right that chickens have come home to roost.” Know something? I happen to agree with you. If the US army hadn’t beaten the Krauts out of France and then helped both France and Germany to recover, they wouldn’t be able now to oppose American policy. If the US hadn’t protected both countries plus the UK during the Cold War, Bush wouldn’t have to put up nowadays with Londoners, Parisians and Berliners (that’s doughnuts in German) protesting. Seems the US has, everywhere in the world, a lot of chickens that are coming home to roost. It must also have been because they’ve been supplying Israel with choppers and planes since Roman times that the Mossad destroyed the Twin Towers, right?

By: Dick Fitzgerald

Dick Fitzgerald — Sat, 22 Nov 2003 01:50:48 +0000

You fail to mention that Al Quaeda was a creation of the CIA: Casey’s war in the 1980s against the USSR in Adghanistan.So the Guardian is right that chickens have come home to roost.

By: Dick Fitzgerald

Dick Fitzgerald — Sat, 22 Nov 2003 01:50:47 +0000

You fail to mention that Al Quaeda was a creation of the CIA: Casey’s war in the 1980s against the USSR in Adghanistan.So the Guardian is right that chickens have come home to roost.

By: Dick Fitzgerald

Dick Fitzgerald — Sat, 22 Nov 2003 01:50:43 +0000

You fail to mention that Al Quaeda was a creation of the CIA: Casey’s war in the 1980s against the USSR in Adghanistan.So the Guardian is right that chickens have come home to roost.

By: Dick Fitzgerald

Dick Fitzgerald — Sat, 22 Nov 2003 01:50:35 +0000

You fail to mention that Al Quaeda was a creation of the CIA: Casey’s war in the 1980s against the USSR in Adghanistan.So the Guardian is right that chickens have come home to roost.

By: radish

radish — Sat, 22 Nov 2003 01:29:45 +0000

Tell you what, if next year’s elections are canceled I’ll accept you’re right. you’re very demanding John. I suspect that the real fascists among us are not quite so naive, and would cheerfully settle for another divisive and strongly contested election, with sufficient errors and uncertainties to invoke either judicial or legislative intervention…

By: nelson ascher

nelson ascher — Fri, 21 Nov 2003 23:09:26 +0000

And, Patrick, concerning your question: “I would also ask whether certain people really believe that if war critics and left-leaning polemicists behave themselves perfectly, the Bush administration and its coalition of corporate power and nascent brownshirtism will “go away.”” the answer’s quite simple. Maybe if they explain to the US voters their points, instead of commemorating every dead American, dancing around American corpses, sending money to the sadaamites, calling all or most Americans fat idiots who had it coming, painting swastikas on the American and Israeli banners (but not on any other save, sometimes, the Union Jack) before burning them, keeping silent when synagogues are burnt down or blown up or saying “no anti-Semitism” here, welcoming Mugabe, Baby Doc Assad, Putin and others, complaining endlessly about some hundreds of prisoners in a corner of Cuba but not about those thousands in the rest of the island (some of them recently executed, by the way), well, maybe if, instead of all this, “war critics and left-leaning polemicists ” concentrate on getting their message through in a less bombastic way to the US voters, then they’ll achieve the unimaginable and wil make “the Bush administration and its coalition of corporate power and nascent brownshirtism” “go away” through the ballot box. Did you ever give this idea a thought?

By: Alexander

Alexander — Fri, 21 Nov 2003 22:46:10 +0000

I agree with Barry’s ideas above. There are certainly much better ways of winning “TWAT” than what we’re doing now. Also, finding Osama bin Laden would be nice.

By: David W.

David W. — Fri, 21 Nov 2003 21:30:25 +0000

What puzzles me is how upset some get over the ’s’ in Bush being a swastika while not getting at all upset about the fact that the U.S. started a war in Iraq for fictitious reasons. (And no, that Weekly Standard report on the leaked intel memo on supposed Iraqi-Al Qaeda connections from Douglas Feith simply does not cut it as proof Iraq was a threat to us. Nor does the report from David Kay about those alledged WMDs.)

By: nick

nick — Fri, 21 Nov 2003 19:46:56 +0000

their philosophy comes down to “When in doubt, Blame America (or Israel) Spoken like a representative for ‘HonestReporting’.com

By: Jack

Jack — Fri, 21 Nov 2003 19:31:22 +0000

In theory and in relation to many blog posts I see the point of the argument but as applied to these articles it seems misplaced. Only a very facetious reading of either of these articles would make the criticism address the main thrust of these articles. In particular I can’t see that either author claims “that the bombings are a direct consequence of US and British policy since September 11th”. Toynbee is talking about Blair’s mid term blues while the leader quite carefully does not make the consequence direct. It merely claims that you might expect this sort of behaviour as a result of going to war with Iraq and that the policy doesn’t appear very effective. Debatable but not outrageous by any means. In any case we would give short shrift to a parent who threw their child into a pool of crocodiles and then blamed the crocodiles for eating it. Of course the crocodiles shouldn’t have killed the child but what should the parent have done? In any case why should critics of the government have to pass tests that the government won’t. Surely we deserve better than “What is responsible for that terrorist attack is terrorism”, the oficial explanation.

By: nelson ascher

nelson ascher — Fri, 21 Nov 2003 19:09:09 +0000

Just sent this to Melanie Phillips blog, but might be pertinent here too: “During WW2, many Jews in Europe thought that if they did nothing, didn’t react to nazi “provocations” and obeyed their orders, they’d survive. The nazis were clever. They never told the Jews they would be all exterminated (“well, folks, what about a bath now?). They used the “salami tactics”, telling the Jews that if only they’d deliver, for instance, the leftist militants among them, or the elderly, or the unemployed, or, in France, Holland and elsewhere, the foreign or non-local Jews, then everything would be fine: the rest of them would be spared. Seems this is working again, this time with the Europeans in general. Give them Israel, and France will be safe, give them America and the UK will be OK, give them Cashemere and Germany will be fine, give’em back Afghanistan or Iraq and there will be no more troubles in the streets of Istanbul. Simple, isn’t it? Thus, go ahead, make THEIR day.”

By: nelson ascher

nelson ascher — Fri, 21 Nov 2003 19:03:09 +0000

Patrick talks about the “Bush administration and its coalition of corporate power and nascent brownshirtism”. (Strange, were I to believe in Chomsky, brownshirtism is not nascent, but has actually dominated America for the last thousand years or so.) Maybe he could tell me what’s the exact colour of Osama’s, Arafat’s, Saddam’s, Mahattir’s, Ghaddaffi’s shirts? They cannot but be left-of-the-center post Aufklärung multiculti freedom fighters with a deep attachment to human rights, environmentalism (hey, green is their colour too), caring, diverse communities, tolerance and so on, can they? Osama, the Baath Party and the Taleban are obviously to the left of the Bush-Blair corporate brownshirts and, thus, they’re our natural allies, aren’t they? Let’s say they are Muslim Socialists (“socialist” used, in this case, as in the expression National Socialist). My question is pretty simple: are the Muslim fundamentalists, for instance, the Salafists in Algeria, the lesser evil? Reaching that other world that, according to the altermondialistes, is possible will be helped by them? Will you allow them, for the sake of diversity, to be judged in special shariah courts in Britain whenever they commit honour killings? Why not?