Thursday, October 12, 2006

Busy Fondling Their Self-Esteem

By John Pilger

"On Sept. 27, the Guardian published a front-page photograph of Tony Blair, a prima facie war criminal, his arms outstretched, his grin fixed. Beside this was a headline, "Charm and eloquence. But a missed chance." Beneath this, Polly Toynbee wrote: "There were some damp eyes dabbed with hankies and men blowing noses. 'Don't go,' someone said."

Consider such vomit against the facts of Blair's actual crime – the unprovoked invasion of a defenseless country, justified by lies now voluminously documented, and causing the violent deaths of tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children. Indeed, according to a study published in The Lancet, the British medical journal, 655,000 civilians have died as a result of the Anglo-American invasion.

Half a million infants lie dead, according to UNICEF, as a result of the Anglo-American siege of Iraq during the 1990s. For Blair and his rational, liberal, neither-fish-nor-fowl court, these children never lived and never died. Clearly, the Emperor Tony was a leader for his time and, above all, clubbable, whatever the "mistakes" he had made in Iraq.

A parallel world of truth and lies, morality and immorality dominates how the crime in Iraq is presented to us. In recent months, the invaders have vanished. The U.S., having murdered and cluster-bombed and napalmed and phosphorus-bombed, is now a wise referee between, even a protector of, "warring tribes." The buzzword is "sectarianism," blurring the truth that most of the attacks by the resistance are against the foreign military occupiers: on average, one every 15 minutes. That the majority of Iraqis, Sunni and Shia, are united in their demand that U.S. and British forces get out of their country now is of no interest. Has journalism ever been so voluntarily appropriated by black propaganda?"

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