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| quote: | | as if this isnt totally typical... a random thread started up about people in afghanistan killing animals with terrible methods... STILL manages to turn into america bashing. |
You're a very smart individual, and I agree with you most of the time, but here you seem to speaking more here as an American than as a human being.
I'll give you all my perspective:
Here, in my comfy, middle-class lounge room I watched 09/11 happen. I didn't watch it live, as it happened in the middle of the Australian night, but I watched it nonetheless. I saw the second plane fly into the second WTC tower. I saw people jump from the building as they tried to escape the flames. I saw people run as they tried to escape the collapsing towers. I saw George Bush speak, from an unspecified location, about the tragedy that had unfolded in New York and Washington. I had seen images of people crying, in Melbourne, as they left flowers at the American Embassy.
And I hope everyone understands this: what happened on the 11th September touched us all. I have never been closer to tears over the past few years than I have been watching what unfolded in the US during the time when I was asleep in my nice, comfy bed on - what was for us on the east coast of Australia - the early morning of the 12th of September, 2001.
And when I woke up, I wasn't just filled with pity, I was filled with rage. I wished revenge on whoever orchestrated the attacks. No justice would be too harsh for them. I had seen the tragedy that had befallen the innocent people of New York, and, at this early stage, I was prepared to justify any action that brought the people responsible to justice. I was moved, deeply moved, and would have been prepared to advocate any military move that George Bush proposed. You may argue that I as too removed from the incident to be properly moved by it, but I can only say, how many of you were in the towers when they collapsed? How many of you had the right to be moved by the situation?
So this was how it was. For about 3-4 days, I was in a mood. While people got on with their lives (though, on September 12th - the first day the people of Melbourne were aware of what happened - I heard nothing but muted conversation about the events in New York) I was still deeply troubled by it. I kept seeing the people jumping from the towers in a desperate bid to escape the flames. I kept seeing the desperate family members posting pictures of their loved ones on nearby walls, in the hope that they were still alive. This wasn't just some "event" - watching it all unfold, I can honestly say that the few days after the attacks were amonsgt the most emotional in my life. And that would be no exaggeration.
However, after the initial "shock" disipated, I remembered thinking about the American reaction. I can remember comparing the sorrow the Americans felt, to the sorrow that the Afghan people would soon be feeling (seeing as how, even at this early stage, the US were linking the attacks to the Afghan based Bin Laden). I can remember hoping that the Americans would use the attacks as an opportunity to review their forgeirn policy: yet, somehow, I knew, that a war would be fought over the attacks. I knew that my hopes for peace were doomed to failure.
Bin Laden attacked the US over crimes commited in his own region. I'm not sugggesting he was right - far from it, the man is a bastard who deserves to die - but how many crimes have been commited in his region since? I'm not a Bin Laden sympathiser, but the longer the US-led anti-Arab-world crusade continues, the more I can see his perspective. Everyone (including me) is quick to jump on the sympathy bandwagon when we see the deaths of 6,000 Americans broadcast into out livingrooms, but when we hear about the deaths of Afghans and Iraqis (just to mention two countries) brought about by the American military and economic sanctions (which the rest of the world - baring Russia and one or two countries in Europe - seem to blindly follow) we seem to take little notice. The position that states that seeing as the events of Sepetember 11th were broadcast to us so vividly, that those who perished in these attacks are much more important in those in the Arab world are today seems ludicrous to me. As JohnSmith said, you may die in an "unprovoked" attack, or you may die in a miliary retaliation, but we all bleed the same blood.
Please, for the sake of humanity, realise, that even those who are born into an Arab dictatorship are still human. The US are not representatives of global morality.
The fact the the average person, in any country worldwide, opposes US foreign policy, should be clue enough.
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