if you won't publish it in your paper, i'll publish it in my blog

another unpublished letter to the editor...i guess i should've known better with this one, but i'm a slow learner...

i think, having been out of the country for so long, i have forgotten what is and what is not permissable to say here....unfortunately, i am being reminded...

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jan. 19

It strikes me as strange and fittingly Orwellian that the lives of civilians, the protection of which is, ostensibly, the primary objective of the “War on Terror,” are also the most dispensable component of that war. Nowhere is this more clear than in the recent US airstrike in Pakistan. While the submissive and spineless US media continue to toot their own government’s horn, pronouncing that 3 al-Qaeda operatives were killed in the attack, the 18 nameless and faceless civilians, women and children amongst them, who were also killed in the attack are relegated to the periphery, business as usual. The Pakistani protests of the foreign attack within their ostensibly sovereign nation’s borders are treated as dubious, painted as extremist, and somehow equated with support for al-Qaeda. Imagine if Britain had launched an airstrike in Boston during the IRA’s heyday, targeting IRA funders and supporters, as well as killing a dozen or so civilians. Would Americans protesting the loss of innocent lives in a foreign attack on their own soil be branded as IRA supporters? No, they would not, and the hypothetical British attack never occurred for the same reason the “War on Terror,” as it is currently administered, will never succeed: we have respect for our own lives, while we treat those of the Third World with contempt.