The Truth About Terror Isn’t That Complicated. “Our Governments do not want us to Understand”
By Jillian Skeet
Global Research
December 02, 2015
Like all westerners, I watched in horror at the terror that was unleashed across Paris. But my horror quickly turned to frustration when, immediately in the aftermath, western leaders took advantage of the situation to reinforce a false narrative, and to justify the very policies that have brought us to such a crisis.
Within hours of the attacks, United States President, Barack Obama proclaimed: “This is an attack on all of humanity and the universal values that we share.” Comments like this are intended to portray those in 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 travelled to Baghdad and 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 five. Walking the streets of Baghdad, seeing malnourished children begging in the streets, and visiting hospitals with no medicine and water contaminated with raw sewage, I was overwhelmed by the cruelty deliberately inflicted upon innocent people. For the first time in my life I understood the rage, the helplessness and hopelessness that fuels terrorism. Iraq would endure four more years of sanctions and a second disastrous war. Yet, in my 1999 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.
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