I have refrained from commenting on
the Boston Marathon bombings or bombers until now. Too much gets said and
speculated about too quickly in such cases. But one question, the same one that
emerged after 9/11 (Why Do They Hate Us?),
has continued in the days after the bombings, and today, something else was
added in response. Richard Falk, the Special Rapporteur in the UN Human Rights
Council, with special responsibility for the ongoing Israeli occupation of
Palestine, wrote a piece in Foreign
Policy Journal that has elicited howls of protest—lambasting Falk for
allegedly justifying the bombings, blaming Israel, and calling for him to be
sacked (and drawn and quartered) for his words. I have tried several times to
access Foreign Policy Journal today,
but the site seems to be blocked (I wonder who might have done such a thing?).
From reports, though, it appears that Falk said several things: first, that “the American global domination project is
bound to generate all kinds of resistance in the post-colonial world.” And
second, that “The United States has been fortunate not to experience worse
blowbacks, and these may yet happen, especially if there is no disposition to
rethink U.S. relations to others in the world, starting with the Middle East.”
He also seems to have cited a PBS call-in program shortly after the bombing in
which some callers said the United States was responsible for
“officially-sanctioned torture,” while others implied that the attack was
“retribution for torture inflicted by American security forces.” Falk quoted
another caller as linking the Boston bombing to our drone attacks that have
killed “women and children attending weddings and funerals in Afghanistan and
Pakistan.” Falk himself then allegedly noted that American politicians lack
“the courage to connect some of these dots,” and urged that all of us should be
meditating on W.H. Auden’s line from his poem, “September 1, 1939”: “Those to
whom evil is done/ Do evil in return.” He then made reference to “our
geopolitical fantasy of global domination,” and predicted that more such
attacks would follow from our policies:
“The war
drums are beating at this moment in relation to both North Korea and Iran, and
as long as Tel Aviv has the compliant ear of the American political
establishment, those who wish for peace and justice in the world should not
rest easy.”
Predictably, Susan Rice,
America’s rather belligerent UN Ambassador, tweeted her outrage about Falk’s
“highly offensive Boston comments,” saying it was time for him to go. Israeli
publications and groups lit up the internet demanding Falk’s termination—not
surprising since he’s been one of the few officials willing and able to call
attention to Israel’s illegal policies and actions against the Palestinians.
The question is: What
exactly has Falk said that is objectionable or untrue? Is it not the case that
the United States has attacked both Iraq and Afghanistan (and, by proxy, Libya)
in the past decade, and assassinated by drone countless Pakistanis, Yemenis,
and others in Muslim countries without even a declaration of hostilities? Does it not continue to beat the drums of war
against Iran, North Korea, and now Syria? And when it comes to Israel, was Falk
not being exceedingly muted, even kind in his criticism by saying only that
“Tel Aviv has the compliant ear of the American political establishment?” For
the truth is that U.S. presidents and the U.S. Congress might almost be mistaken
for members of the Israeli Knesset themselves, usually out-shouting Israeli
politicians in their defense of Israel’s violations of international law and
common decency—not to mention sending billions of dollars in aid and weapons
each year to Israel, one of the world’s advanced economies, and blocking with
its veto in the UN sanctions against Israeli violations voted by almost all
other nations.
But even beyond that,
Americans and American officials have expressed outrage over the Boston
bombers’ vicious use of “pressure cooker bombs” that sent nails and ball
bearings blasting into the bodies of innocent bystanders. And it is true: these
were vicious little bombs designed to wound and maim the flesh of innocents. But
has anyone thought to wonder where the bombers might have got the idea for
what, in war, are called “cluster bombs?” Weren’t there reports testifying to
Israel’s use of vicious little “dime” (dense, inert, metal explosives) bombs in
its 2008 invasion of Gaza against a defenseless population? And what about the United States and its use
of cluster bombs? Its refusal, even today, to outlaw the use of land mines?
As it happens, I’m even
now reading Nick Turse’s detailed account of war crimes during the Vietnam War,
Kill Anything That Moves (Holt: 2013).
And what he says about America’s murderous policy against civilians in Vietnam
(leaving out the horror of napalm and white phosphorus and the constant
artillery and naval bombardments) is horrifying. It was, in fact, the American
military that concluded, in the early 1950s, that it had to find weapons that,
without alarming too much the conscience of the world (if the U.S. had used
nuclear weapons, that is), would prove effective in guerilla war by maiming,
not killing, the population in which guerilla warriors “swam.” So our war
geniuses came up with cluster bombs—devilish little anti-personnel weapons that
spread steel pellets far and wide, and that entered flesh in various parts of
the body, thus causing doctors devilish amounts of time and trouble trying to
locate and remove them. According to Turse, the the BLU-3 bomblet (the military
gave these fiendish toys lovely little names like the “pineapple” or the “guava”)
had 250 steel pellets spring-loaded into a small container. Dropped 1000 at a
time from B-52 bombers flying high above the countryside, the pineapples burst
open to blast 250,000 lethal ball bearings into heavily populated areas so that
they could tear through the flesh of women and children and old people (the
young men routinely fled from their villages because any man found in a village
was automatically assumed to be a Vietcong.) Another type, the CBU-24, was packed
with 640 to 670 separate BLU-26 bomblets, each one of those loaded with 300
steel pellets. This meant that just one "guava" could send 200,000 steel
fragments shooting in all directions; while a single B-52 bomber could saturate
an area of about a square mile with more than 7.5 million deadly pellets. From
1964 through 1971, according to Turse, the U.S. military ordered over 300
million pineapples and guavas—“nearly seven for each man, woman and child in
Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.”
Did we hear the howls of
all the millions of Vietnamese children whose flesh was torn apart by these
diabolical devices? Do we hear them today?
Ah no. The howls we hear
are howls of outrage attacking a UN official named Falk who dared to draw
attention to the savagery that we have unleashed, and that our proxy Israel has
unleashed throughout the Middle East.
And the howls of those who
keep asking: “Why? Why do they hate us?”
Lawrence DiStasi
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