The common denominator: violation of the sanctity of life

Dr. Bouthaina Shaaban

As expected, the seventh anniversary of the fall of Baghdad was marked with silence by the Arab media. The shame of the official Arab failure to protect Arabs from foreign invasion, which let an Arab capital like Baghdad fall under the occupation of racist Zionist forces hostile to Arabs and represented by George W. Bush is still haunting us. Part of Arab officialdom even felt a sense of revenge while watching the enemy bombard civilians of an Arab capital like Beirut in 2006 and part of took part in blockading an Arab city like Gaza in 2009. That is why Arab media evades such anniversaries in shame and frustration

Yet, on April 9 newspapers and websites on the internet carried three leaks which point to one fact: when Westerners kill Arabs, whether in Iraq , Palestine or Lebanon , they do that with intent and based on racist convictions. Thus, it is part of the joint American-Israeli strategy to achieve political objectives like imposing overwhelming Israeli hegemony over all Arabs, compliant or non-compliant with American dictates.

The video posted on WikiLeakes did not surprise anyone in the Middle East . The premeditated killing of unarmed Iraqi civilians, the laughing and mocking of the Apache crew who were hunting unarmed civilians for no reason showed that training American soldiers included filling them with hatred against Arabs. One crew member was saying: “Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards”. When they fired at the children who rushed with their parents to help the wounded, another crew member commented: “Well it's their fault for bringing kids in to a battle”. This videotape refuted all the claims of the occupation army that the victims had opened fire or that they carried weapons. All the Reuters journalist Namir Noor-Eldeen, killed in the attack, was carrying was his camera.

Maybe that was the most important target of the attack, because the pictures he was taking showed the brutal war the US troops were launching against children, women and unarmed civilians: a child who lost an eye, an old woman who lost an arm, a crying child who lost her pregnant mother, a murdered Iraqi scientist, a journalist trying to show what is happening on the ground. It does not matter if scores of civilian passers-by are killed in the process.

Between 2003 and 2009, 139 journalists were killed in Iraq while doing their job. The significance of this videotape is that it shows that none of the victims was killed by chance. They paid the price of trying to reveal the crimes committed in Iraq . They were all among the best journalist and photographers trying to show the truth, while American occupation troops were trying to hide and falsify it. They do not want the world to know that the war cost Iraq over a million of its children, devastated family life and brought poverty, disease and sectarian war to the country which was the cradle of Mesopotamian civilization.

At the same time this war crime, one of thousands, was uncovered, the Israeli army revealed that murdering the 18 year old Muhammad and Salah Qawariq in the village of Orata in the West Bank was “unnecessary and could have been avoided”. The two young men were simply going to work in their fields carrying a plastic water bottle when they were murdered by Israeli occupation troops. The same fate met Mohammad Qadous, 16, and Aseed Qadous, 20, in the village of Araq Burein in the West Bank . And the same fate met the child Mohammad al-Durrah, whose delicate body was riddled with 36 vengeful Israeli bullets.

Four young Palestinians were killed in Nablus last month in what occupation authorities considered “a tactical error resulting from lack of preparation”. On March 16, occupation troops threw young Abdullah Abu Latifah from the fourth floor after beating and kicking him dead. All these crimes are only a small part of what Palestinians have been suffering at the hands of the Zionist Apartheid for over sixty years.

The Israeli Anat Kam leaked confidential military documents which included orders to kill Palestinians. She handed them to Haaretz journalist Uri Blau, well known for uncovering the crimes of the Israeli army, and who is hiding now in Britain in fear of Israeli death squads. Anat Kam worked at the office of the commander of the central front in the Israeli army which includes the West Bank under General Yair Naveh. She obtained about two thousand documents classified as “highly confidential” which included military information about the period 2005-2007.

One of the issues revealed was military orders about shirts worn by soldiers of the Jebati brigade carrying a picture of a Palestinian pregnant woman with the caption: “one bullet kills two”. The report reveals that Generals Naveh and Ashkenazi approved the assassination of the two young men Mohammd Malaysha and Ibrahim Abdul Latif Abed near the village of Dan north of Jenin in the West Bank .

The remarkable thing is that the debate in the United Sates about the leaked video about killing journalist Namir Noor-Eldeen and his 12 colleagues in Iraq and the discussion about Anat Kam and Yuri Blau revolve around how the information was leaked to the press not about the sanctity of the life of Arab civilians and the crimes committed against them.

At the same time, The Times published a document which says that President George W. Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld knew that hundreds of prisoners in Guantanamo were innocent but were held there for political reasons, in order to provide the necessary propaganda to launch the war on Iraq .

The officially endorsed American crimes of torture in Abu Ghreib prison and the revelations about long-held innocent prisoners in Guantanamo, the videos on WikiLeakes, the revelations of Anat Kam and Yair Blau are only a simple indicator of the racist Zionist crimes which reveal the essence of Israeli and American policies and which have brought the shame of war crimes into their history, regardless of how much they boast about democracy, freedom and human rights.

What is strange indeed is that the West receives the news of killing two hundred Iraqis and fourteen hundred Palestinians in Gaza as ordinary news despite the use of Phosphorus bombs and the latest torture and killing techniques on the pretext of fighting terrorism.

Are not we entitled to conclude that the plans to murder, officially endorsed by the highest levels in Israel and the United States is the real motivator of terrorism; and that we the Arabs are the victims of deliberate, systematic and racist terrorism?

On the seventh anniversary of the fall of Baghdad, the world needs to re-read what happened during the first decade of this century which opened a Pandora box which spread evils associated with democracy all over the world; with all that done in order to protect “Israel’s security”. This re-reading is the least that should be done so that the blood of millions of innocent orphans and widows in Iraq , Palestine and Lebanon is not lost in vain.