Peter Beinart on why it happened
Coming home last Friday night, I stumbled upon a candlelight vigil.
Hundreds of my Dupont Circle neighbors were walking gravely down Q
Street, holding signs and dispensing leaflets. As I stopped to watch, a
man pulled up on his bicycle, surveyed the scene, and began to scream.
"Why don't you just commit suicide?" he yelled at the marchers. A
policeman rushed over and tried to quiet him down: "None of that," he
said, "this is a vigil. No politics." "My brother died in New York,"
the man answered, "and these fuckers..." And then he sped off.
But the policeman was wrong. What the bicyclist had noticed was that
the placards all said things like, "No Eye for an Eye," and "No More
War." A leaflet demanded "No further U.S. violence." ("Further," a nice
touch.) The cop's "no politics" plea was wishful thinking. In fact,
this country's days-long hiatus from politics is already over. And the
political debate that will frame the coming weeks is clear: Has America
oppressed the Muslim world? Or, stated differently, does America have
the moral authority to go to war?
The Nation answered almost immediately. "
his is not really the war
of democracy versus terror that the world will be asked to believe in
the coming days," wrote Robert Fisk in the magazine's October 1 issue.
"It is also about US missiles smashing into Palestinian homes and US
helicopters firing missiles into a Lebanese ambulance in 1996 and
American shells crashing into a village called Qana and about a
Lebanese militia--paid and uniformed by America's Israeli ally--hacking
and raping and murdering their way through refugee camps." In other
words, it's about America's support for Israel.
The left has proved remarkably creative over the years at blaming
virtually any Middle Eastern malfeasance--from Iraq's invasion of
Kuwait to repression in the Arab world--on the Jewish State. And Fisk
continues that tradition, suggesting that the "hacking and raping and
murdering" at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps helped provoke last
week's attacks--even though Sabra and Shatila took place in 1982, when
Osama bin Laden had not yet turned against the U.S. and was actually
fighting side by side with the CIA in Afghanistan. (Fisk further
illustrates his idiosyncratic theory of history when he writes, "Our
broken promises, perhaps even our destruction of the Ottoman Empire,
led inevitably to this tragedy.")
more....................
http://csf.colorado.edu/pen-l/2001III/msg03270.html
Here's a better quote about his views on the Left and War.
If Fisk and The Nation really want to argue that America brought the
World Trade Center attack on itself, they shouldn't delude themselves.
They are not defending the Palestinians' right to a state or the
Iraqis' right to medicine. They are defending a Muslim's right not to
live with a non-Muslim. And in so doing they are renouncing this
country's most sacred principles--principles that saved countless
Muslim lives in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s. When the left assembles
at its candlelight vigils and peace marches in the coming weeks, let it
proclaim this honestly. And other Americans will survey the scene, and
scream.