Sunday, May 23, 2010

Who's the terrorist?

The term terrorism has become very confusing to me. The U.S. invades a country i.e. Iraq and one million people die. Depleted uranium, a weapon that is banned under international law, is spread in huge quantities across the country ensuring toxicity of soil and water for a million years. I know of not one Iraqi citizen or soldier that has invaded the U.S. and done harm to one American.
If a citizen of Iraq attacks one of our invading troops that is occupying his country and uses a car bomb he is labeled a terrorist. Is this because we don't approve of his primitive weaponry? His weapons certainly do less damage than ours. Why is he just not a warrior defending his country or part of a grassroots civilian militia?
I will take this argument one step further. Not one person from Pakistan has invaded our country and killed an American yet we are bombing their country using remote control devices, and the targets are chosen from the advice given by enemies within this country. This is the same thing that got us into the quandry in Guantanamo. We gave ransoms to people and they turned in their enemies regardless of their crimes against the U.S.
Would it be O.K. if someone who hated my neighbor told me he was planning on doing me harm so I then dropped a bomb on his house and killed his whole family? Who is the terrorist here? A man has his whole family killed by a drone and then walks into a CIA station and blows himself and 7 agents up. Why is this man labeled a terrorist? He is simply fighting back. We invaded his country and killed his family. Would he have still been a terrorist if he used an f16 to drop a bomb on the CIA agents?
Recently a man in NYC failed to detonate a car bomb. Why is he labeled a terrorist? He would be called a freedom fighter if the shoe were on the other foot. He owns no advanced weaponry so he makes do . He invaded our country and tried to kill someone because we invaded his.
Another sad twist in this war of words is that if THEY think about doing us harm or display patterns of movement consistent with terror activities we kill them . U.S. forces kill people who have not attacked them but they are not labeled terrorists. Is it worse to think about doing harm or actually doing it?
War is terrorism. War is murder. No ground rules apply. All participants are warriors and potential muderers. The media and our government has twisted the english language and helped foster the belief in some Americans that our methods of killing are not terrorism. This is false.
Depleted Uranium is worse that a car bomb. Cluster Bombs are worse than rifles. Our invasions have caused the death of over 1 million people. Their invasions of the U.S. have killed not one person. Martin Luther King once said "My country is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." This is even more true today than it was in 1969.

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