Deep Blade Journal

“Excuse makers”: New York Times propagandist turns a useful phrase


Image of US Department of Defense propaganda brochure used in Afghan war, depicts the evil ones as less than human (reads, “They’re about to fall!” Names: Haqqani, Bin Laden, Mutawakkil) — Domestic reflection: Anyone concerned about US-UK brutality in Muslim lands is just making excuses for the subhuman killers.

In the wake of the terrible London bombing incidents, there has been a raft of official squirms from Tony Blair and US officials against the notion that insistent war policies pursued by the US and UK are one root cause of backlash terrorism. Use of an effective public relations phrase — “stop making excuses” for the animals who commit terrorism — is helping prevent principled public discourse on the extreme violence that emanates from the US-run Terror War itself.

This debate-quenching rhetoric seems to have sprung from a toxic column written by Thomas Friedman for the July 22 edition of the New York Times. In it, Friedman calls out all of us who would examine the relationship to backlash terrorism of US support for brutal hereditary monarchies in the Middle East, US-insisted-upon devastation of Iraq during the 12-year period of economic sanctions, US occupation strategies in Afghanistan, Iraq, and, through Israel, in Palestine (all these including much deadly aerial bombardment), and indeed US foreign policy in general.

Friedman writes,

We also need to spotlight the “excuse makers,” the former State Department spokesman James Rubin said [note Democratic pedigree of this remark]. After every major terrorist incident, the excuse makers come out to tell us why imperialism, Zionism, colonialism or Iraq explains why the terrorists acted. These excuse makers are just one notch less despicable than the terrorists and also deserve to be exposed.

Officials in the powerful Terror War states have followed Friedman’s lead. US lieutenant and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair in a Tuesday July 26 press conference said that while he has not stated that the London bombs have “nothing to do with Iraq”, and that, “They [Islamic terrorists] will use Iraq and Afghanistan to try and recruit”, he emphasizes, “Whatever excuse these people use, I don’t think we should give one inch to them, September 11 for me was a wake-up call — a lot of the world woke up for a short time, then turned over and went back to sleep again”.

Blair continued, “It’s an obscenity to say it’s concern for Iraq [that] drives these people to terrorism. We shouldn’t allow them a vestige of an excuse”.

Then on Thursday we had the spectacle of US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice reading the same chapter by fantasy writer Friedman to Jim Lehrer on the PBS Newshour for Thursday July 28. A full transcript of the interview is here, while Crooks and Liars has a video clip here.

JIM LEHRER: What about the additional element here that, increasingly, terrorism experts and Muslim experts are saying that the combination of Iraq and other foreign policy decisions by the United States are actually creating more terrorists every day than they are eliminating them.

CONDOLEEZZA RICE: When we are going to stop making excuses for the terrorists? The terrorists on Sept. 11 attacked the United States. We weren’t in Iraq. We weren’t even in Afghanistan on Sept. 11.

They have attacked in places that had no forces in either place. They’ve attacked all over the world. They’ve attacked in Morocco and in Bali and in Egypt and in London and in Madrid.

When are we going to stop making excuses for the terrorists and saying that somebody is making them do it? No, these are simply evil people who want to kill. And they want to kill in the name of a perverted ideology that really is not Islam, but they somehow want to claim that mantle to say that this is about some kind of grievance. This isn’t about some kind of grievance. This is an effort to destroy, rather than to build.

And until everybody in the world calls it by name — the evil that it is — stops making excuses for them, then I think we’re going to have a problem. And I hope that after the bombings of innocent people in London, innocent people at Sharm el-Sheikh, innocent children in Iraq, that people will call this by name and stop making excuses for these people.

No one is making them do it. They’re doing it because they want to create chaos and to undermine our way to life.

An email from FAIR that came out in the last week addresses the course Friedman’s tacit charaterizations of anti-war sentiment appear to be taking.

According to this Action Alert, Friedman “urged the U.S. government to create blacklists of condemned political speech — not only by those who advocate violence, but also by those who believe that U.S. government actions may encourage violent reprisals”.

This is a strange way to treat the opinions of a majority of Americans who now question the wisdom of the war.

Also unleashed have been the hard right mouthpieces who are really starting to dig in with the nastiness they feel necessary to bury rational discussion and bring the population back into the proper reactive mode. FAIR recalls the distasteful O’Reilly issuing a “chilling call for the criminalization of war opponents” on his June 20 Radio Factor,

O’Reilly: Dissent, fine; undermining, you’re a traitor. Got it?

Meanwhile, issues of US war conduct about which dissent is entirely appropriate — in fact the responsibility of a courageous, moral, patriotic citizen in a free society — cannot get media traction. In just one of the misdirected targets of the Terror War, the rush to bomb and kill has not stopped attacks in Western capitals or brought in bin Laden for a fair trial. But it has buried tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis.

This last point is amply illustrated in a new report from Iraq Body Count. As with my last post on this subject I again draw what I think is the obvious conclusion — going to war while killing tens of thousands of civilians in aerial bombardments in order to occupy South Asian countries has been an utter failure with respect to the merits of stopping attacks. In the contest of ruthlessness and barbarity, the superpower always has and always will issue its punishments more frequently and with more devastating effect than the terribly violent minority who unfortunately respond in kind, albeit on a much smaller scale.

So no, what you are reading here is not a call to excuse or justify the actions of people who bomb. All such terror should be treated as criminality, including the illegal invasion, conquest, and occupation of Iraq that our own country has conducted in our name. It is my responsibility as a citizen of the United States to oppose these policies. I am convinced that if we opposed to war are taken seriously and our own government stops its foreign aggressions, a great side benefit will be reduced likelihood that terror will be served back to us.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 30th, 2005 at 11:20 and is filed under commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.