The events that took place in the United States on September 11, 2001 were real and they were extremely violent. As David Griffin has recently shown in detail, they also had catastrophic real-life consequences for both the United States and the world.1
Tuesday, September 11, 2001, was a non-teaching day for me. I was home when the phone rang at 9 A.M. It was my daughter, who was on a week’s vacation with her future husband. “Turn on the TV,” she said. “Why?” I asked. “Haven’t you heard? A plane hit the World Trade Tower.”
The world vowed never again after the Holocaust, never again after Bosnia, never again after Rwanda and yet in Myanmar it seems that here we are again. Over the last week, violence and ethnic cleansing perpetrated by Myanmar’s army have forced nearly 40,000 Rohingya Muslims to flee the Rakhine State to neighboring Bangladesh, where around 400,000 Rohingyas already live in squalor.
According to the statements of local authorities, Zabadani resort town in Damascus province, which is located 25 kilometers from the Syrian capital, is now fully liberated after fierce clashes between the Syrian Army and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham militants (ex. Al-Nusra front). Residents who left the city more than five years ago began to return to their homes and manage their further life.
Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul, has been reduced to rubble. It has been finally conquered, snatched back from the notorious group, Daesh, after months of merciless bombardment by the US-led war coalition, and a massive ground war.
But ‘victory’ can hardly be the term assigned to this moment. Mosul, once Iraq’s cultural jewel and model of co-existence, is now a ‘city of corpses’, as described by a foreign journalist who walked through the ruins, while shielding his nose from a foul smell.
Whatever the West may think, and no matter what the Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri may say publicly, the Lebanese army, in clear coordination with Hezbollah (which is outlawed in many Western countries) as well as with the Syrian army, is now pounding the positions of deadly ISIS/Daesh, right at the border region.
It has been a week of bollards. And defence barriers. And hedges and vegetation. No, not the radio garden hour, or the herbaceous borders special featured on prime time television, delivered by a bearded man with a facial forest so vast it could regenerate several lost species.
This is the anti-terrorist flick of the week, and given that Australia’s Turnbull government is nearing its next blow, awaiting another stroke in the aftermath of the citizenship crisis, a suitably urgent package filled with alarmist goodies to distract the public was in the offing.
I’m back!!
It has recently been reported that Senator John McCain has an aggressive brain tumor. Not long ago I would have thought: “Good. It’ll be great to be rid of that neanderthal reactionary bastard!”
On August 19, a week after a heavily publicized clash over a statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia, an estimated 8,000 people converged on Boston Common to protest a speaking event organized by a group calling itself the Boston Free Speech Movement. Who are the Boston Free Speech Movement and what do they stand for? We’ll never know because antifascists, leftists, anti-racists, and progressives of Boston prevented them from even speaking.
After WWII, the West had one huge ‘problem’ on its hands: all three most populous Muslim countries on Earth – Egypt, Iran and Indonesia – were clearly moving in one similar direction, joining a group of patriotic, peaceful and tolerant nations. They were deeply concerned about the welfare of their citizens, and by no means were they willing to allow foreign colonialist powers to plunder their resources, or enslave their people.
