Fueling Terrorism

Anwar Awlaki was once such a moderate that he vehemently denounced the 9/11 attacks, got invited to the Pentagon to speak, and hosted a column in The Washington Post on Islam — but then became radicalized by the constant post-9/11 killing of Muslims by his country (the U.S.).

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Najibullah Zazi, one of the first Afghans ever to be accused of Terrorism on U.S. soil when he plotted to detonate bombs in the New York subway system, was radicalized by the U.S. occupation of his country (“This is the payback for the atrocities that you do,” he said).

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The Times Square bomber, the Pakistani-American Faisal Shahzad, said this:

As soon as he was taken into custody May 3 at John F. Kennedy International Airport, onboard a flight to Dubai, the Pakistani-born Shahzad told agents that he was motivated by opposition to U.S. policy in the Muslim world, officials said. “One of the first things he said was, ‘How would you feel if people attacked the United States? You are attacking a sovereign Pakistan’,”

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David Rodhe, the former New York Times reporter who was held hostage by the Taliban for nine months, said after he was released that Taliban “commanders fixated on the deaths of Afghan, Iraqi and Palestinian civilians in military airstrikes, as well as the American detention of Muslim prisoners who had been held for years without being charged.”

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Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) expressly said that the Christmas Day bomb attempt by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was in retaliation for the Obama cluster-bomb airstrike in Yemen that killed dozens of women and children along with U.S. support for the Yemeni dictator.

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Even The Washington Post just two weeks ago pointed out that the primary source of strength for AQAP — the Terror group which the U.S. Government insists is the greatest threat to the U.S. — are repeated U.S. drone strikes in Yemen; said The Post: “An escalating campaign of U.S. drone strikes is stirring increasing sympathy for al-Qaeda-linked militants and driving tribesmen to join a network linked to terrorist plots against the United States.”

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Prior to 9/11, of course, the U.S. spent decades propping up dictators in that part of that world, overthrowing their democratically elected leaders, imposing devastating sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands of Muslim children — literally — and then blithely justifying it like it was the most insignificant problem in the world, arming, funding and diplomatically protecting continuous Israeli aggression, and otherwise interfering in and dominating their countries. There’s a reason they decided to attack the U.S. as opposed to, say, Peru, or South Africa, or Finland, or Brazil, or Japan, or Portugal, or China.

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I can’t even conceive of the uncontrolled rage, righteous fury and insatiable desire for violence in which [Americans] would be drowning if those attacks lasted not a single day but a full decade, if it involved constant video imagery on American television of dead American children and charred American wedding parties and thousands of Americans imprisoned for years in cages in a distant ocean prison without charges and surveillance and weaponized drones flying constantly over American soil and unignited cluster bombs left on American soil that explode when American children find them.

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It isn’t those of us who oppose American aggression in the Muslim world who need manipulative, exploitative reminders about 9/11; it’s those who cheer for these policies who are making a follow-up attack ever more likely.

  Glenn Greenwald

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.