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08/06/2005:

"Citizens in democracies will be held to account for what is done in their name"

by Peter Wilby
08/05/06 "The Guardian" -- -- Shortly after September 11 2001, I was widely denounced for implying, in a New Statesman editorial, that by electing George Bush - who was known to be indifferent to anything but the interests of US capital - Americans had helped to bring the New York and Washington attacks on themselves. Now Omar Bakri Mohammed and other Muslim clerics blame Britons for the London bombings because they re-elected Tony Blair. Do I, as one who voted for Blair and travel regularly on the tube, agree with them?

Let me first explain what I was trying to say (perhaps clumsily) four years ago. When America goes to war - in Vietnam or the Middle East, for example - it kills many people who have had no chance to influence their rulers. Americans, however, claim their government is "of the people, by the people, for the people". America, on its own estimation, is a superpower which wishes to spread liberal capitalism.

The large majority of Americans (including migrants) have bought into this project and benefit from it - through cheap oil, for example, or through profits of US-based multinationals, which are often derived from expropriation of other countries' resources. Any president who fails to protect these benefits risks himself or his party losing office. So if they are serious about democracy, Americans should accept a share of responsibility for what is done in their name. And so should we, whose country is America's closest ally and accomplice.

None of this is to deny that indiscriminate murder is wrong or to support either the gang that attacked America in 2001 or the ones that attacked London last month. It is merely to observe that we should all take responsibility for our actions or inactions. This is what we now demand of Muslims. Is there something wrong with their religion? Have they given their young people the right values? Many Muslims are asking exactly these questions. For example, Bushra Nasir, head of a comprehensive and one of the Muslim delegation that met Tony Blair after the bombings, says that "now is the time for us Muslims to put our house in order" and "to look at what is going wrong with Muslim families and education". The least we can do is ask a few questions of ourselves.

...A section of the Islamic world believes the west is waging war on it, that this war has intensified with the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, and that it could intensify further with an invasion of Iran. It's no use saying the 2001 attack preceded those invasions. As far as many Muslims are concerned, it went on for most of the 20th century. Arabs were expelled from Israel in the 1940s; Israel occupied the West Bank from 1967; the first Gulf war took place in 1991 and, to Bin Laden's rage, led to US troops polluting sacred Saudi soil. The US has propped up corrupt, secular, pro-western tyrannies throughout the Islamic world - and then blamed and even bombed Muslims for their failure to embrace democracy.

...How do you prosecute a war against the US and Britain? Muslims fight us on their own soil, but why should they not carry the fight to our homelands as we carry it to theirs?
Full: informationclearinghouse.info

If people are unable to entertain the idea that with 7-7 and 9-11 we are looking at state terrorism, the least they can do is understand arguments like this one...