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Oil, Turmoil, Under the Shadow of God
By Carl Muller August, 2006
Man had raised hackles, shown utter contempt and hatred for man. This has been the sorry story of the world and history is counted in the battles, slaughter and distrust of nations. It is the greatest horror story of all and yet this seemingly endless saga, has intensified and is beyond control .Though the message is for the entire humankind in Islam, Muslims, Christians and Jews, were called the ‘People of the Book’. All people – for it is the contention of the religions of the world, the isms, the cults, even the fanatic and those of the lunatic fringe that there will always be the ‘Book’: the Book that tells them what is expected of them, of the races, communities, societies. Each of us have our own approach to the dictates of the ‘Book’ we claim to be our guide… and the Books, too, have been doctored and re-written and reshaped as the centuries come and go. Every millennium comes, goes, bringing with it tidal waves of deceit, falsehood, spreading more hatred. It has happened time and again and the shores become sand sponges of blood and the guns roar in the mountains.
Latheef Farook’s book, “War on Terrorism-The Untold Truths”, is a grim record of it all and he brings the reader, with urgency, into today’s hideous landscape of oil and turmoil and the wars we wage because of the incalculable greed that envelopes the regimes of today.
This is a drama in which divinity plays no part. The ‘Book’ is no longer centre stage. What nations carry in their souls are the tattered pages. Evil masterminds the Acts and Scenes and every approaching year brings more savagery. Annus terribilis is no longer worth consideration. Now it is annus horibilis for all the years henceforth. In the dark parlours, some there are that speak their minds.
Farook opens his record with the forceful accusations of Nobel Laureate and British Playwright Harold Pinter. What sanity brands him? Harold Pinter says: “The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law… we have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people… It is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice… At least 100,000 Iraqis were killed by American bombs and missiles before the Iraq insurgency began… What has happened to our moral sensibility?”
As well known British columnist on Middle Eastern Affairs Linda S. Heard says in a hard-hitting comment, this book is a devastating catalogue of “The West’s expansionist will to power and unfettered greed.” Oh, there is no doubt about that. The West wants its “Gospel” to swamp the world – control of all the
energy and oil (that has been aptly called ‘the droppings of the devil’) and crushing all that tells of other testaments, other “Books”.
Today, Blair’s head may be on the chopping block and a shrub may replace a bush, but as we see, what is good for the West is certainly not good for any other nation. The West wants world-wide control, and, as Linda S. Heard says, it is a big hateful picture.
Farook does not mince his words. He argues and reasons with equal vehemence. How has violence become the only solution to grievance? Taking the Muslim community, he tells how, for centuries, it lived in peace, even with Jews and Christians. Never was the concept of fundamentalism recognised. Ah, but when there is a flourishing of faith that makes of a people a great civilisation, these same people became the victims of Western conspiracy, oppression and injustice. Farook tells of the Western Putsch into Turkey, the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the agenda now being adhered to destabilise the Middle East.
No one gainsays the massacres of Palestinians in their villages – the horrors of Shabra and Shatila. Somewhere, at some time, the worm had to turn… and violence became the answer to violence, terror machines set up to meet the terror machines of the other.
What has been the sum total of this unrelenting war? Farook makes some points:
• Israel’s crime record that is common knowledge “though no one dare speak of it for fear of…
devastating response from International Jewry who, in fact, rule the world.”
• The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 that “turned the country into a wasteland”.
• The Iraqi invasion of Iran – and the eight-year war that killed more than a million people.
• The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and Western intervention “that succeeded in destabilising the region”.
• The collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the USA “as the sole super power,
unprecedented in known history”.
• The forces, invisible, under this carpet: “weapons manufacturers, oil companies, corporate conglomerates, financial oligarchy which ruthlessly rule the world” with their own engineering of conflicts, thriving on human misery.
We see how blue-eyed near-European Bosnians and Kosovos were tortured, raped, slaughtered for years simply because they were Muslim. It is true to this day that Europe would never tolerate a Muslim entity – as was seen in Albania, Bosnia,,Kosovo and even Chechnya. Who is a terrorist? As Farook says: “One thing is certain… both Bush and Blair have sown the seeds of discord and bloodshed and made the world unsafe for generations to come.” There is also “the tragedy of the Western Media that has become an integral, part of the war machine, feeding the world with lies and nothing but lies…”
Farook has been a journalist for as long as I know. In fact, we worked together in newspapers in the Middle East, which only serves to voice my admiration for this monumental work. He has put down the utter brutality that Man has begun to resort to. What have we known of in Iraq? Torture of civilians, gang-raping of women by American troops, the Ramadan massacre in Fallujah where napalm bombs melted the bodies of victims. Even American singer Harry Belafonte, whose calypso’s were enjoyed in dance halls in Sri Lanka in the sixties, has called Bush “the greatest terrorist in the world, who, to gain his own ends, also sacrificed over 2,000 young American soldiers and brought home some 16,000 with life-time disabilities.”
The real beneficiaries are, of course, the Anglo-American oil giants, Wall Street, and naturally, Israel. Even Ralph Nader had once accused the Republicans and Democrats of being “puppets of Israel”. Farook quotes American evangelist Billy Graham, who said: “The Jewish stranglehold has got to be broken or this country’s going down the drain.”
What is the real prize? Oil! The US extracted US$ 21 billion worth of oil from Iraq in the first year of occupation. This was the real reason for the occupation – oil for the trans-national companies! Today, Western oil firms and others are robbing Iraq of billions. Will Bush ever leave Iraq? Even former US President Carter says it’s unlikely!
All it needed was the 9/11 excuse. Communism, as a threat, has given way to Islam. 9/11 saw the launching of an anti-Muslim crusade and the massive publicity distortions were put into place, and Farook also accuses the rulers of the Middle East of also siding with the West if only to ensure their own seats of power.
Is the Western was against terrorism nothing but a global crusade against Islam and the Muslims? Why doesn’t the West go to war against the Tigers? Are they not terrorists? What about the Basques in Spain? Or the Bader Meinhof in Germany or the Irish Republican Army or the Shining Path guerrillas? Is
terrorism only a Muslim preserve? So Osama bin Laden killed 2,800 people in 9/11. Bush and Blair killed 50,000 in Afghanistan and more than 130,000, some reports estimate at more than 300,000, in Iraq. Who is the greater terrorist?
Farook moves from the Middle East to Bosnia, Kosovo, Serbia, Albania, Algeria, the Horn of Africa, Chechnya, Gujarat, Kashmir, Palestine, Southern Philippines, Thailand, Jakarta, Landon. Readers will surely pale at the revelations. He deals with the massive manufacture of weapons and the one great knee-jerker: oil wealth control. Even Bush Snr once declared that war “ensured free flow of oil and Israel’s safety in the Middle East”.
If I were to take chapter by chapter of this book, it will need as detailed and monstrous a review but we see here what must inevitably come – that fearsome clash of Western and Muslim civilisations that will tear the world apart. Every chapter expands on the other ad the source material is both exhaustive and makes compelling reading. It also makes for that queasy pit-of-stomach feeling that Iran is next on the agenda, nuclear weapons will do their fiery work, and the Third World will reel out of orbit as the giants grapple in a ring with no boundaries.
What fate awaits the Western cabal and the Muslim world? Farook insists that the truth must be said NOW! These are what have been left unsaid – part of the cover-up that wears a heavy cloak of deceit. When all the mad dogs of war are unleashed, where do we stand? What roles will Japan, North Korea and China play in this?
Farook wants a right-mindedness to surface, even now. He says “It is not that it will be too late for the West or the Muslims but too late for the whole world.” How true this is, considering how dogged we are in our own dealings with the North where we give no quarter. Man has thrown aside the ‘Book’. The shadow of his many Gods may lie over him but shadows are no longer as impressive as the substance of his killing machines. It is now time that the ‘Book’ is put into its rightful place and the heart of man is changed. This book is one of the greatest weapons we now have, something we can read and then understand what abyss yawns before us. Pardon me if I were to say it, but suddenly I have before me another ‘Book’ – not the writings of the sages or the prophets, not bursting with the psalms and canticles of the saints, but a ‘Book’ to accuse, censure and tell us what we have become!
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