In The Aftermath Of Brussels - World Needs Peace And Global Justice; Not More Militarism

By Ranjan Solomon

28 March, 2016
Countercurrents.org

The first thing that hit my mind when news on the so-called terrorist attack in Belgium broke out was that there would be several countries who would now seek to squeeze maximum advantage from the horrific episode. The military-industrial-complex/counter-terrorism establishments must be cynically licking their lips and celebrating with glee!

As in the case of France and Ankara, not too long ago, it was to be expected that European powers would adopt a skewed black-and-white analysis (Muslim terror is the cause) while concealing the real political facts with insinuations and even false propaganda against the community. That has happened time and time out with western media outlets.

Having said this, the killings were an outrage and must be condemned; never mind the origins or reasons. Killing is inhumane and barbaric and whoever committed the act deserves to be handed tough penalization.

The fact, however, remains that investigations must seek the real truth and not merely point fingers at the ‘usual suspects’. Propagandists will surely want to heighten Islamafobia. That is a pathway filled with risk. After all, what else is Islamafobia but misguided racism with a strong dose of colonialism? Islamafobists have succeeded in developing the language of hate and prejudice only to hide the fault lines in the systems of injustice and corruption in their own countries. It is a subtle tool of domination that uses the media to instill fear in ‘the other’ while the real machines of hate are not the so-called Islamists; rather they are those who use dubious reasoning to create a slur about Muslims and Islam and project, what is otherwise a religion of peace, into a group who believe in the ideology of violence. These cynical manipulations have only succeeded in turning the world into two camps- the good guys and the bad guys. The good guys are usually Christian or Jewish while the bad guys are Muslim. Its Hollywood on the streets.

Seema Mustapha, writing in India’s first online newspaper, The Citizen, puts it succinctly when she analyzes the bombing in Belgium. She says: “It was the al Qaeda earlier. It is the Islamic State now, an amorphous yet vicious entity that has spread out into the world with sophisticated weaponry and a deadly reach that clearly now extends outside West Asia into Europe as the deadly attacks in Brussels have so tragically demonstrated. It was, as security experts across the world have been warning, just a matter of time before this amorphous, vicious, entity crossed international borders and hit vulnerable civilian targets to strike terror at a time and place of its choice.

This has happened with Brussels taking the toll for what the Americans and the NATO members have been doing in West Asia since 2001 when US planes pounded Iraq and its tanks and soldiers marched in for a war that might have shifted targets, but has shown no signs of ending. In the process Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen have all been virtually destroyed, with large tracts of territory now occupied by the Islamic State, an army of Salafists, smugglers, mercenaries, victims of the US war like members of the Baath party from Iraq, remnants of the al Qaeda, al Nusra, all woven into a vicious fighting machine. The weapons have come in large numbers, and sufficient quantity and quality, from the war supported by the US and its western allies on Syria, with Turkey and Saudi Arabia ensuring the supply line”.

These are times when staunch European loyalists will reject any questions raised as sheer counter-propaganda – the stuff from which conspiracy theories emanate. But, facts come out thick and fast in this day and age of social media. The truth cannot be permanently suppressed. Is it mere coincidence that the EU was about to meet with a Palestinian delegation the same day this happened? The question is asked: Was it a diversionary tactic that had the infamous touch of Mossad? Indeed it is time to dismiss any news or analysis from the mainstream media. It can be read out of curiosity but not in the search for facts and truth. The Israeli Minister of Science, Technology and Space, Ofir Akunis, said Europeans had lost sight of “terrorism of extremist Islam” by focusing on boycotting Israeli goods instead allowing the attacks to take place. So, was there a plot behind the attacks? Is this a copycat attack from 9/11, France, Ankara?

Patrick Cockburn writing in The Independent points to how “There has always been a disconnect in the minds of people in Europe between the wars in Iraq and Syria and terrorist attacks against Europeans. This is in part because Baghdad and Damascus are exotic and frightening places, and pictures of the aftermath of bombings have been the norm since the US invasion of 2003. But there is a more insidious reason why Europeans do not sufficiently take on board the connection between the wars in the Middle East and the threat to their own security. Separating the two is much in the interests of Western political leaders, because it means that the public does not see that their disastrous policies in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and beyond created the conditions for the rise of and for terrorist gangs such as that to which Salah Abdeslam (thought to be the sole surviving planner of the Paris massacre) belonged”.

Terror strikes such as the one in Brussels, or the carnage in Paris last year never led to questions about what France did in Syria and Libya. Europe has sat glibly thinking there would never be a price to pay for their egotistic, self-centered policies. Isis would not even be around had David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy kept out of their meddling ways and left Libya to itself under Gaddafi in 2011 or Sadaam Hussein in 2003. Al-Qaeda is expanding in Yemen, where Western leaders have given a free pass to Saudi Arabia to launch a bombing campaign that has wrecked the country. The Taliban was a creation of short-sighted American policies. Yes, it all comes back to haunt you. This is what one would term as ‘Karma’ – introduce an evil into society and it comes back to haunt you, sometimes with alacrity which surprises. These cruel attacks that kill innocent people are ones framed by rulers who have their loyalty to two main sources- the military-industrial complex and the Zionist lobbies. The rulers go unscathed but the people pay. And there is money- business, for example, from the Saudis for a free hand in Yemen and dabbling in Syria too. And, of course, the sell-out of Palestine to the Zionists!

Feredica Mogherini, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, is said to have broken down in tears breaks down in tears during a speech alongside Jordan’s foreign minister Nasser Judeh after what happened in Brussels. She offered lip-service to Islam in an act of patronage: Islam is religion of peace and dialogue and co-operation. The world was not waiting for her to enlighten us all about this. Such barefaced show of angst makes good media coverage but does little to uncover the truth of western brutality and neo-colonial practices. One asks: Do those who feign sorrow at the killings in France or Brussels have any thought for the everyday massacres in Palestine, for the millions killed in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, and Yemen? It is they who are tormented; not the leaders who hold hands and put on sad faces for the media to report.

Feredica Mogherini can easily be accused of shedding crocodile tears – maybe she was really saddened. But whither those tears when it came to Libyans, Iraqis, Yemenese, Syrians, Palestinians, Afghans, and tens and thousand others who came into the cross fire in the killing fields; or in the way of the many miscalculations of the drones?

Peace is not on its way for as long as arrogant colonial/racist leaders drive the way the world is run. The UN is long reduced to impotence by the very powers that now engage in direct rule through cross border wars and intervene internally through civil wars.

Peace will come when nations are allowed to take sovereign decisions- regardless of whether those on the outside like the decisions or not. Citizens will turn things around when the time comes as history attests to. Political meddlers are added trouble and, more so, when their interests are self-directed.

Paris taught the world nothing. Brussels will be a repeat of Paris. Ankara is erased from media memory and, by extension, public recall. For peace to come neo-colonialism must be dismantled, and eradicated. Citizens of the self-proclaimed western democracies must stand tall, be better informed, stop believing in the fairy tales their media offers them, and seek alternative view points, engage in critical thinking and analysis. Its time, as Karl Marx called on us, to “question everything”.

A peace activist/political commentator remarked: “The fear factor is being ramped up across Europe and we’ll soon be clamoring for an armed presence on the streets of the Europe, a precursor for martial law, once that happens there will be little chance of going back”. Terror attacks are often false flag operations and security experts have claimed this with hard evidence. The mainstream gives such information a pass. But there is a terror and counter-terror industry which has cultivated a method of keeping itself alive. In the meantime, Muslims in Belgium are asserting to their loyalty to their state. They resent the terror tag attached to them and ask, instead, that their governments go after the real causes of terror in the world rather mystify attacks such as this as Islamic in origin. Already, a media report has suggested that one of the two bombers wrote a desperate suicide note which was found in a trash can! Now, we do need to sift out facts from myths before the seeds of hatred grow to abominable proportions.

If anything can change the world, it will not be the politicians - clean or dirty- too few are without self-interest. It will not be military analysts or defense strategists. Not more weapons. More dialogue. The world needs an alert and agile civil society that will persistently put the political class and lobbies under scrutiny. For which group of ordinary people are not peace loving? There are examples of people taking peaceful protest in large numbers to force a reversal of policies. Some five decades ago, it was the Vietnam War. Two decades ago, it was apartheid that came crumbling down. Dictatorships, always propped up by the US and western allies for mere commercial gain, have been brought down.

So, there is hope and that hope must be built around a vision for a peace rooted in justice. It’s also about claiming the right to say “NO” to war and injustice. It is about asserting: “Another world is possible… because this brave new world is in the womb of her mother waiting to be born”.

Ranjan Solomon has worked on International Affairs for many years beginning 1982 at the Asia Pacific level in 1982. Currently he serves as Consultant to the Palestine Israel Ecumenical Forum of the World Council of Churches. The views in this article are his own and do not represent those of any organization.