...Here is a city, surrounded and cut off, whose male population between the ages of 15 and 50 faces being "put to the sword" by the US military, and no one in the media can stir himself to raise an objection.
The deliberate demolition of a major urban center by a great power is unlike anything since World War II. The phrases used by the media - warplanes and tanks are "softening the defenses;" the city of 300,000 is being "cleansed" of insurgents - are meant to conceal from the American public the true character of the assault: a homicidal operation aimed at destroying a major source of opposition to the colonialist US occupation and its puppet regime.
What is the crime of the resistance forces in Fallujah - even if one accepts the unproven and dubious claims about the presence of alleged arch-terrorist Abu Musab Zarqawi? That they resist by force of arms a foreign occupier, who has designs on the country's territory and natural resources.
If this is a crime, then so was the resistance to the Hitler regime’s occupation of much of Europe. Why not retroactively endorse the repression meted out by the Nazis to the French or Italian resistance? Perhaps it is time to recognize the essential wisdom and maturity of German policy during World War II. After all, the Nazis too claimed that their opponents were "terrorists" and "criminals."
There is no serious examination in the American media of the opposition in Iraq. Who are these people? Why are they fighting? Who is dying at the hands of the American military? These questions interest the embedded journalists and their superiors at home almost as little as they interest the Pentagon.
...No editorialist at a major newspaper or television news commentator has even hinted at moral qualms over the American onslaught. Not one columnist at the New York Times or Washington Post thinks Fallujah worth mentioning. Last week's Democratic Party presidential hopeful hasn't a word to say.
...This disgusting blood lust dominates official America, under conditions in which tens of millions have registered their opposition to the war through protests, polls and in the recent elections. Some 80 percent of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry's 55 million voters "or 44 million people" oppose the Iraq war. This sentiment is being systematically excluded and suppressed.
All of which leads us straight to the question on the world's mind: Where are the anti-war, protesting Americans? Where is the march on Washington?
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