Thursday, August 26, 2004

The New Crusades

In a high-profile atrocity in May, a bunch of trigger-happy fly-boys shot up a village wedding in western Iraq, killing 45 guests including many children, and a Baghdad singer loved by millions, but these things happen almost daily in towns like Najaf, Samarra and Fallujah, and in other places too far from public gaze to warrant media attention.

...The explanations don’t play well on Arab Street where they’re received as confirmation of the persistent anti-Arab bias of the West - a view that is essentially correct.

Before you scoff, try this general knowledge test on a few well-read, politically literate friends: Ask them to name the first town in the world where civilians were indiscriminately bombed from the air.

More likely than not, they’ll cite Guernica, the Basque town reduced to rubble by aircraft of the German Condor Legion during the Spanish Civil War. If they’re really up on their history, they’ll know it happened in 1937 and they’ll mention Picasso’s famous painting of the atrocity.

That answer is wrong, and symptomatic of a Euro-centric view of history that’s led western politicians to gravely underestimate the nationalist feeling and visceral distrust of the West that now has the US-led coalition bogged down in Iraq.
  Bellaciao article

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