Dismissing the Good Deeds of 'Terrorists'

You've heard of African-Americans playing the 'race card', this is about warmonger states pulling the 'Terrorist Card'.

Not always what it seems...

(SALEM) - 'Terrorist' - the word brings a vision to the American mind, one crafted by news reports and comedians and movies and TV shows. It is always an Arab guy with a turban. But the truth in many cases is very different from most believe.

Nelson Mandela of the African National Congress - was considered a terrorist by the U.S. and British governments all the way into the 1990's.

Nelson Mandela

He is the ultimate victim/survivor of those who use the 'terrorist' label as a tool of war.

In this case the designation was assigned to a man who had been imprisoned for two decades, fighting bitter, hardcore racism that was as bold and blatant as any that ever came before it.

Mandela raised his arms and refused to relent to the terror inflicted on the Black population of South Africa. He fought back and the resistance claimed lives, as it should have. The South African apartheid government's treatment of Blacks was based on a system where people were considered 'separate but equal' and it is amazing that such a blatantly racial system, with separate facilities for races lasted until just a few years ago.

The president of the U.S. branded this unrelenting champion for his own people as a terrorist, when Mandela is ten times the man Ronald Reagan was, even in the movie actor's best moments of self-deceiving white bread illusion.

The 'Terrorist Card'

We all know the saying, "Playing the race card". Reagan loved to play the 'terrorist card'. After all, he was a raucous bigot... a race war moron whose IQ must have been very low. His life goals beyond 'fighting Communism' were boosting power and putting on a good show. He was elected because he breathed a fiery hate and his legacy as a warmongering U.S. leader is a shameful part of our past.

As a side note, it is worth realizing that the year Nancy Reagan launched her 'war on drugs', is the same year the clandestine drugs-for-weapons program in Nicaragua was launched by Ronald Reagan to raise money for a war between U.S. ally Iraq, and Iran. The drugs flown into the U.S. flooded our streets and soon came the 'crack epidemic'. So the Reagan family is therefore responsible for both the drug war, and the need for a drug war. I guess that's business in America.

And this man called Mandela, who brought real and true liberty to the indigenous people of South Africa... was the terrorist? It was inevitable that another dog was yapping "terrorist" around this time too, echoing the same comments about the great leader Mandela, this was the Prime Minister of Great Britain, Margaret Thatcher. That windbag's country was squarely behind the whole damned colonial problem in the first place. England is responsible for all of the world's most disastrous politics that are the result of a centuries-long orgy of power, all of it.

Sands of Time

Bobby Sands, hero of the IRA

England played the terrorist card because it didn't understand why the people of Belfast and Northern Ireland were sick of hundreds of years of brutal military occupation; having their government run by the British, always being second-best as Irish Catholics next to their English oppressors.

And Thatcher's own suffered greatly too, I have a hard time imagining that it was easy for British soldiers to open fire on people who were practically their neighbors. Our Photojournalist Dexter Phoenix who grew up in South London, recalls his friend's fathers being on duty in Northern Ireland and some didn't return. Oppression and occupation are bad business.

Everyone has heard of the 'Great Potato Famine' of Ireland, and I suppose people just figure it was some type of natural occurrence, but that is not the case at all. As a land under British military occupation, the fields of Northern Ireland were all very hearty during these years, the reason there was a potato famine is because the British were harvesting all of the food products for their colonial wars in other parts of the world. That is how much value the redcoats had for their Irish neighbors. How wrong the Brits were to assume there would not someday be recourse.

Courtesy: sinnfeinbookshop.com

A proud member of the Irish Republican Army, Bobby Sands had to give his life in a hunger strike (some form of terrorism that was) before Thatcher would relent or offer anything. Her heart was as cold as a dripping block of ice, just like the lead of the bullets fired into crowds of civilians in the 'troubled' area.

How any man or woman could not admire the acts of a battered few like Sands and those men of the IRA who were imprisoned at the end for so long, is beyond me.

At the end of the day you have two types of human beings in this world: those who will follow orders telling them to kill and maim the innocent; they're the same as those who hide their faces while their families and homes are destroyed, and the hearty few who will never go down without a fight, never let you or anyone else harm the women and the children as long as they have an ounce of blood coursing through their veins.

Just like Reagan's words against the students in Berkley who were fighting racism in San Francisco businesses in the early 1960's when Reagan was the governor of California, Thatcher's cruel statements about this brave hero of Belfast, Bobby Sands of the IRA, were not missed and have not been forgotten.

The Balfour Burn

TE Lawrence

England is 100% behind the problems in Palestine today with a 63-year old Zionist occupation (Israel) - it is totally illegal under international law and nothing but a western-backed land grab. Just EXACTLY like South Africa, Israel maintains an apartheid system with different laws for Jews and non-Jews, and even 'Jewish-only' roads that all Christians and Muslims are banned from driving on.

A promise made to the Palestinians during World War One by T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) guaranteed the native Palestinian Arabs 'autonomy' forever from English colonialism, if they would fight with the British forces and defeat the Turkish forces, allies of Germany, who occupied Jerusalem. They did, and yet within one year the Balfour Declaration was drawn up in England officially serving as a road map for the implementation of Israel on Palestinian land.

The people of Palestine, who live on land and in homes that their families have owned for hundreds of consecutive years in some cases, are still being pushed out, forced into homelessness by the Israeli government. They have an assortment of excuses, none of which are valid. In the end the Palestinians pay the price for the deeds of Hitler, and yet they didn't have a single thing to do with the demise of the Jews during the Holocaust.

The whole idea of Israel could have worked, but there were too many Jewish terrorist groups like the Irgun and the Stern Gang murdering Palestinians and routing them from their homes, creating the world's largest Diaspora ever, creating a form of almost permanent resentment.

To this day, those in Palestine who fight back against this onslaught of military and political treachery are deemed 'terrorists' and it is a false label.

Tamil Tigers

Genocide of Tamil civilians- 2009

How about Sri Lanka? This is the land of the so-called 'terrorist' LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) or 'Tamil Tigers' who frankly, were well-trained military fighters who time and time again, gave the Sri Lankan Army a run for its money. Most of Sri Lanka is Sinhalese Buddhist, whereas about 15% is Tamil. Tamils live in the northern region of this island nation and are mostly Hindu, and partly Christian.

Occupied by the British until 1948 just like Palestine, The English during their occupation 'preferred' the Tamil people and as a result, more Tamils held government jobs; they had better lives in many cases. (This is the exact same problem that ultimately befell Rwanda, where Hutus and Tutsis had major resentments over preferential treatment that had been afforded during the British Colonial years.)

When the English pulled out of 'Ceylon' as Lanka was called, the problems began. When Tamils watched the government slowly, piece by piece, unweave the meaning of their culture, they objected.

For 30 years the Tamils followed a Gandhi-style non-violent resistance which had worked (again against the British!) in nearby India, but three decades of talk brought them nothing, so the LTTE was formed and their main stated goal was the establishment of a separate state for Tamils called Tamil Eelam. Is this such an unreasonable demand? Their language had been removed from their own school books, one law after another was eliminating their culture, it was a tragedy worth avoiding.

When the Tamil Tigers became organized, some of their elements did carry out suicide bomb attacks. This is the tool of the poor militant, it is what people do when they can't afford jet fighters to drop the bombs on the heads of people like the U.S., Israel, etc.

Of course to Americans and Brits and Israelis it is apparently perfectly OK to kill innocent people via fighter jet bomb, just not by suicide bomb. That is a preposterous way of thinking and it has never gotten a society anywhere. Every type of occupier and oppressor has been killed and suffered just like the people they victimize, and they always will be as long as they are allowed to be oppressors and occupiers in the first place. They often deserve what they get, sooner or later man must realize that we are all equal and all deserving of the same basic things required to live and remain safe within our own communities and homes. Anyone who opposes this ideology is part of the problem and the sooner their types are no longer taking up space on this planet, the better.

Iran

Image by Carlos Latuff

Let's stay with that late 40's period for just a moment and visit a particular white elephant in the room, a peanut snorter named 'greed'. This post-war period is when the British were ripping off the Iranian government for oil, after WWII the British Anglo Iranian Oil Company (BP today) refused to work with the people the oil belonged to, year after year the Iranian government was unable to make the British pay the agreed upon price for oil

When Iran talked about nationalizing its oil, its Prime Minister was taken out in a coup by the CIA and British SAS and a puppet leader, the Shah, was installed to serve U.S. and British oil needs. It lasted until the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

Today the peaceful, advanced society existing in ancient Persia, known as 'Iranians', are some of the world's brightest minds; art science, history, Iran is a mecca. Yet the leaders are considered 'terrorists' when in fact their country is nothing of the sort, with no recent history of military aggression.

In my opinion religious government is a non-functional idea. One of the only places it seems to work is Iran, an Islamic Republic that has laws protecting its Jewish population. If that type of thing can exist in reality, then I don't see it as a religious government. I guess it just depends on how you look at it. Tolerance and respect and equal rights are the key elements.

Hamas

Image by Carlos Latuff

Hamas is the elected political party in Gaza, and they run the police, they carry out the region's politics, and they protect Gazans as well as they can from Israeli attacks. Many of these are not anything a person can avoid, and Israel regularly kills innocent people when attacking "suspected terrorists" and yet if one single Israeli were killed by Hamas in a reverse scenario, they would immediately cry "terrorists" and the western media would become like a submarine crew in WWII, "terrorist"... "terrorist".

What nobody ever talks about, is how Hamas halted all suicide bombing. The current media and press in the U.S. convinces people that bombs are exploding all over Israel when in fact there isn't a single one and rarely if ever, is.

Each time some rogue militant with an unguided rocket fires toward Israel, it brings a reprisal that is unimaginable. Israel always hits back more than a hundred times harder than it was hit.

Don't get me wrong, the bus bombs and suicide bombs used to go off with regularity in Israel, but the trends have been toward peaceful protest in recent years and that is 99% of the 'Palestinian Resistance' today, yet Israel offers no quarter, regularly attacking peaceful, non-violent protests that take place on Friday always in places like Bil'in. Israeli soldiers kill people for standing in a protest, it is God-awful stuff.

Hamas is just as respectable as any government in the Middle east and just as imperfect, the hate this group receives is a mixed product, born in Israel from fear and racism, cowardice and hate. Many Israelis, Zionists in particular, think they are more entitled to life than other people, this isn't so.

Hez

Hezbollah poster photographed during the 2006 Israeli attack in Beirut. Salem-News.com photo by Dexter Phoenix

We just had the anniversary of the Sabra-Shatila Refugee Camp massacre past this week, our writer, Dr. Franklin Lamb wrote about it from the very place that it happened, where he has lived for many years off and on.

A Salem, Oregon lawyer who became an international attorney, Franklin has worked on behalf of this battered population for many years. This is where Hezbollah flag fly, it is Beirut, Lebanon.

The massacre of the Palestinians at Sabra-Shatila was carried out by Lebanese Christian Druze militias, while the Israeli forces who were working in cooperation with them, stood by and watched. Truckloads of people, families, little kids; the Christians killed them without a hint of mercy while their Jewish brethren stood by.

I know many Israeli soldiers were traumatized by this terrible event, many didn't know or even believe what was taking place, yet they too were part of it. There is an incredible animated film from Israel called 'Waltz with Bashir' that tells the story from an Israeli veteran's perspective. All the while, the Palestinians are the 'terrorists' while the Israeli Defence Forces and Druze soldiers were the 'good guys'- A-OK by American standards.

It makes me want to violently throw up in a bag. All people who back Israel's violence make me sick, they are the devil's servants and they only have dark wishes, nothing good at all that they will ever spare for one not cut from the came racial and/or religious cloth as them.

Conclusion

Ken, after he was cuffed, and cowardly Israeli soldiers beat him. He and another activist, Cormac O'Daley, were beaten repeatedly.

Ken during an attempt to reach Gaza by sea

Part of what incenses me about this 'terrorism' madness is the way both Israel and the United States have used this label on a dear friend of ours, Ken O'Keefe. A powerful activist and Salem-News.com writer, Ken is the former U.S. Marine who was a key part of the human shield missions during the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

He and other western people traveled overland from London to Iraq, and placed their bodies at key points in the threatened country, defending Iraq's infrastructure in many cases. Power plants and water facilities vital to the survival of the Iraqi people were avoided, because George W. Bush didn't want to see western blood mingling with Arab blood in his 'war against terror'.

Then in 2010, Ken was one of many journalists aboard the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara that was attacked in open ocean waters by Israeli government terrorists who murdered nine unarmed activists and journalists, wounding scores. Ken personally disarmed two of the Israeli 'commandos' who attacked his ship and then gave them medical treatment, and released the Israelis unharmed.

For this act Ken (sparing the lives of Israeli soldiers who were killing his friends) was called a "terrorist" and Israel, which took Ken and all others aboard the ship as prisoners, and beat Ken severely as the cowards they are, stated that Ken was going to "train Hamas" which is absolutely bullshit. The game is so stupid, so lame.

The U.S. and its lap dog England have a well-deserved terrible reputation in the world, both. I do believe that the UK is faring better than the U.S. today by a long shot. There are realities that England had been forced to realize and while the country is still full of bad apples, it isn't an outright joke and nightmare like the U.S. and Israel.

Don't get me wrong, all of the western countries are operating like terrorists, they all practice state terrorism. I just think that the blokes in the U.K. are figuring it out rapidly right now and their proximity to the Middle east is a big influence.

Terrorists, they aren't necessarily who you think they are.

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Tim King, summer 2008, covering the Iraq War

Tim King: Salem-News.com Editor and Writer

Tim King has more than twenty years of experience on the west coast as a television news producer, photojournalist, reporter and assignment editor. In addition to his role as a war correspondent, this Los Angeles native serves as Salem-News.com's Executive News Editor. Tim spent the winter of 2006/07 covering the war in Afghanistan, and he was in Iraq over the summer of 2008, reporting from the war while embedded with both the U.S. Army and the Marines. Tim is a former U.S. Marine.

Tim holds awards for reporting, photography, writing and editing, including the Silver Spoke Award by the National Coalition of Motorcyclists (2011), Excellence in Journalism Award by the Oregon Confederation of Motorcycle Clubs (2010), Oregon AP Award for Spot News Photographer of the Year (2004), First-place Electronic Media Award in Spot News, Las Vegas, (1998), Oregon AP Cooperation Award (1991); and several others including the 2005 Red Cross Good Neighborhood Award for reporting. Tim has several years of experience in network affiliate news TV stations, having worked as a reporter and photographer at NBC, ABC and FOX stations in Arizona, Nevada and Oregon. Tim was a member of the National Press Photographer's Association for several years and is a current member of the Orange County Press Club.

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