"The Thunder from Down Under"

September 28, 2001

Sanity prevails so far
by Antonia Feitz

It's very heartening to the world's people that the US Government has not succumbed to the temptation of making a massive retaliatory attack just for the sake of easing domestic pain.

However much such an attack might be balm to the spirits of those Americans calling for revenge, it would be the wrong response. Moreover they'd soon feel ashamed. It's futility itself to inflict grief on more innocent people.

Americans must not be deceived by the global show of support after those appalling attacks on New York and Washington. While governments worldwide have rightly condemned the attacks, many of the world's people are not as enthusiastic as their governments at the prospect of military action.

In fact, while numbed by the attacks many people - even in the West - have been appalled by the rhetoric of revenge emanating from some American people, though they well understand the anger that fuels it. Please remember that we lost people too.

The critics are not your run-of-the-mill, mindless, anti-American protesters. They grieve with Americans and pray for them. I live near a little town of just 2500 souls and we prayed for all the victims and their families. A Uniting Church minister told me that her congregation greatly appreciated her call for restraint as an antidote to the mainstream media's belligerence. What has horrified people are such comments as the following:

Ann Coulter said, "This is no time to be precious about locating the exact individuals directly involved in this particular terrorist attack.... We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity [What sort of 'Christianity' is that!!]. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpetbombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war."

In the New York Post, Steve Dunleavy wrote, "The response to this unimaginable 21st-century Pearl Harbor should be as simple as it is swift - kill the bastards. A gunshot between the eyes, blow them to smithereens, poison them if you have to. As for cities or countries that host these worms, bomb them into basketball courts."

In the Washington Post, Rich Lowry wrote, "If we flatten part of Damascus or Tehran [sic] or whatever it takes, that is part of the solution."

Shortly after the attacks Nicholas Longo, the CEO of CoffeeCup Software, wrote, "... if any country is found responsible for these attacks, we call for that country's complete destruction and annihilation." Later he added, "If a country is responsible in any way. I want that country to become dust. Not a flower growing, not a river moving."

The question facing Western civilisation is: did Coulter and all the others mean what they said? Longo says he does. But whatever happened to the rule of law? Since when has it become acceptable to punish the innocent for the sins of the guilty?

By retaliating in kind - returning terror for terror - the United States would become the moral equivalent of the terrorists. If it's wrong to kill innocent Americans it's equally wrong to kill innocent Iraqis, Afghanistanis, or any other people. Like every one of us, they didn't choose their place of birth.

They are mothers, fathers and babies, children and grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins - the same as you. They are teachers, firemen, doctors, shop-keepers, taxi-drivers, librarians, office workers and newsagents - the same as you. Most of them are probably as apolitical as most Americans: they just want to live in peace and provide for their families.

The current refugee crisis with millions of people on the move has been caused primarily by "UN" - ie, US - sanctions on such countries as Iraq and Afghanistan. Many countries including France and Russia have called for the sanctions to be lifted because they are bringing misery and needless deaths to the Iraqi people.

UNICEF has estimated that 500,000 Iraqi children under the age of five have died as a result of the sanctions. That's a lot of dead children. That's a lot of grief. Yet the US Government remains unmoved even though three top-ranking UN officials working in Iraq have resigned in protest.

In the main, the refugees are the well-educated middle class. They are fleeing the effects of the sanctions more than they're fleeing the Taliban or Saddam Hussein.

Ask yourself this question: Why is American foreign policy forcing those countries' best and brightest to leave? The fleeing middle class professionals are the very people who might have been able to form an opposition to Hussein and the Taliban, but they've been driven out. Why? And more importantly, "Cui bono?" ***

© 2001 Antonia Feitz