My Perspective
By Shamir Patel
Generalization, I see, as of right now, to be a methodology of a few confused Americans.
Someone said to me, after the beheading of a US citizen in SAUDI:
“Bomb them all, Kill them all in Iraq and the Middle East – they’re jealous of us.”
And after I conferred with her that she also meant to kill every innocent man, woman, and child, I thought to myself,
“How Ignorant?” and then I replied, “No, that’s wrong. You can’t kill off an entire country, an entire region; that’s
just wrong”
And she said, knowing I am Muslim, “So you think it’s OK for two planes to hit the world trade and not do nothing.”
And I thought to myself, where did she make the connection that I think it was justifiable for a plane to hit us. All I
said was vying for genocide is simply wrong. No jargon of words. No clever rhetoric. I said what I said.
I was shocked. See, what I did not comprehend is that people’s level of ignorance is so high, so off beat, off point and
misguided, that they might be too far gone to bring back to reality.
And later on what I realized is if situations keep escalating over seas, and these completely illegitimate, poorly
construed, media generated opinions, like the one aforementioned, keep formulating, then we Muslim people, and
non-Muslim humanitarians, might be, more often than ever, placed in positions to reason with the unreasonable – to bring
logic to the illogical. Nuke the hell out of them bastards. Mutilate them. Butcher them. Eradicate them from there
homes; have them running for their lives. Exterminate them like cockroaches.
I wonder if these thoughts run carelessly free in her mind. I wonder if what she said to me was just the G-rated version
of her thoughts. I wonder what she teachers her children.
And later on, on my car ride home, I wondered how she ever made the connection that what happened in Saudi should
constitute the savage annihilation of an entire region. That what happened to us, as Americans, on September 11th, 2001,
condones the obliteration of an entire country, like Iraq, of faceless people, whose goals in life are not politically
or religiously motivated, but instead, their motivations derive from where to find that next piece of bread or that
bucket of fresh drinking water, or milk for the newborn, Abdullah, because he’s not developing at the rate normal
American children do, and his bones look fragile – his dark brown eyes look as desolate as the desert they live on.
Abdullah’s parents are not home parading around in scarves that hide their faces and shawls that cover their body,
waving a machete carelessly in the air, and wishing death upon America. No, their goals are not to find the next
Westernized head to put on a platter to deliver back to us, but their goal, is to find that next meal on a platter.
There are 4.6 million more of these situations of chronic poverty in Iraq. And it is them who you(coworker) want to
exterminate.
These are a people still suffering the aftershocks, not only of Bush Junior’s attacks, or Bush Senior’s attacks, but
they still feel the reverberation of the Iraq-Iran war, where nearly hundreds of thousands Iraqi men died.
Iraq is a nation of war-torn and war-raised children, but why do they not receive any sympathy? Bombs that wipe out
wedding ceremonies, one of the most tragic and ironic ways to die, but yet, no sympathy goes out to these people. No
confirmation of the amount of people dead. No gruesome visuals to bring the other side of the war home to us.
Why is their pain not visualized by the media? Why do we never mention how many Iraqi fathers, mothers, sisters,
brothers, uncles, aunts, have died due to the “war on terror?” I mean the war to bring “liberation” to the Iraqi people.
In my humble opinion, I believe the administration is fully aware that, for this war to thrive economically, for profit
to made by those in powerful positions in the government and corporate America, that Americans needs to be left ignorant
and vengeful. We need our craving for blood and death to remain unsatisfied.
That’s why we are deliberately brainwashed to believe that this war is for the “liberation” of Iraq, but then
sidetracked to believe we are in Iraq because it is the “war on terror.” Confuse us. Keep us in fear with the “terror
alert”. Make us believe this is a moral war. Make us believe Al Qaeda lives and breathes in Iraq. Make us believe that
there are WMD.
And DO NOT forget, we are losing young American Soldiers for a war with no clear thesis.
WMD? Liberation? September 11th? Al Qaeda?
Or Oil? Or to wipe them off the face of the Earth?
Does not violence just breed violence?