Western Nation Have Sponsored State Terror That Has Killed Millions Around The World!
Letter to the Editor:
I love Paris and am as distressed as anyone over the terrorist attacks of last Friday. But I am tired of the proclamations by western leaders like Obama’s: “This is an attack on all of humanity and the universal values that we share.”
Comments like this are intended to portray the West as innocent victims of people determined to destroy honourable values. In truth, western nations have been the perpetrators of state-sponsored terror that has been destroying country after country and the lives of millions of people.
In 1999, I witnessed firsthand the anguish, death and squalor brought on by the 1991 Gulf War and years of crushing sanctions that killed more than 500,000 Iraqi children under the age of 5. In my diary I prophetically wrote: “What kind of future relationship will we have with an entire generation of Iraqis who have suffered such brutality at our hand? Iraq is not a nation of terrorists but through our actions, we have planted the seeds of extremism and hatred that could make it such in the future. Terrorism is not about unfounded hatred of freedom and democracy or religious extremism, it is about repression and exploitation of the powerless by the powerful. It is about pain and anguish on a scale rarely, if ever, seen by most of us.”
France has already responded to last Friday’s terror attacks with a retaliatory reign of terror that will only result in a further escalation of the violence. It is time for western leaders to admit that their policies are bankrupt and have been for decades. You cannot brutalize people and then expect them to engage with you as global partners. I am no fan of Putin but a recent comment to the US aptly summed it up, “How can you even now fail to understand what a mess you have made?
Jillian Skeet
Vancouver
Jillian Skeet is a national and international affairs consultant who has worked with organizations at the UN in Geneva and New York, and also worked in the Canadian Parliament in Ottawa. She participated in a fact-finding and humanitarian mission to Iraq in the Spring of 1999.
