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Tech Central Station
Long Live Free Fallujah!
By Stephen Schwartz
Published
11/19/2004
With the liberation of Fallujah and the fall of the jihadist regime in the
town, it is apparent that American media intend to keep their story on
message: the message being that the U.S. military operation there has
failed and that Fallujans, and Iraqis in general, still hate the
intervention forces.
At the same time, other reports tell a more significant and eloquent
story: the jihadists had set up a Taliban-style dictatorship, in which
women who did not cover their entire bodies, people listening to music, and
members of spiritual Sufi orders -- that is, ordinary Fallujans -- were
subject to torture and execution.
The Fallujans have learned the same lesson the Shias learned before them,
and the Afghans before them: U.S. boots on Muslim soil may be onerous, but
American military action is preferable to the unspeakably vicious
criminality of Islamist extremists financed, recruited, and otherwise
encouraged by Wahhabism, the state religion in Saudi Arabia.
When Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge almost 30 years ago, Western media
reported it as the liberation of a city. Noam Chomsky hailed the forced
evacuation of Cambodian towns as a noble social experiment. But many
journalists were soon forced to record the truth about Khmer Rouge cruelty.
It took longer for Western, and especially American media, to stop
glamorizing the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the Stalinist guerrillas in El
Salvador, and to admit that the masses of people in those countries
rejected their claims to represent them. An editor at the San Francisco
Chronicle, where I worked, on the day after Violeta Chamorro (remember
her?) won election in Managua in 1990, told me, "Nicaragua is no longer a
news story for us." I asked, "is that because there will be no more
violence?" He said, "No, it's because the U.S. is no longer a target." I am
sure he meant "a target of our reporting."
Since the Vietnam era, American journalists seem to operate by an ethic
reversing the infamous slogan of antiwar demonstrators, who chant "media
lies, people die." Much more accurate would be to say "people die, media
lies." American media lied about Vietnam, telling us the Communists won the
Tet offensive when they were defeated -- and when, by the way, the
recapture of the traditional capital city of Hue disclosed that the
Communists had rounded up and executed some 6,000 people. American media
lied about Central America, as noted; American media still lie about Cuba,
portraying the Castro regime, which has driven the average standard of
living of the people drastically down, as the most progressive in Latin
America.
Much of American media lied about the wars in Yugoslavia, depicting
Slobodan Milosevic, early on, as a reformer in the style of Gorbachev. They
continued by "explaining" Serbian aggression against Slovenes, Croats,
Bosnian Muslims, and Albanians by the alleged wholesale collaboration of
the victims' great-grandparents with the Nazis. Presumably, the 1,100
children killed in the siege of Sarajevo were all members of a Bosnian
Waffen SS division about which much propagandistic ink has been spilled
over the years. And they repeated ad nauseam the false charge that equal
atrocities were committed on all sides, when the great majority of mass
murders, rapes, deportations, and expulsions were carried out by the Serbs.
Where the ink of lies is spilled, the blood of victims soon follows. Media
liars are sharks; they gather at the smell of blood. And in this deadly
cycle of untruths, Iraq has set new standards for media mendacity.
President Bush and his team are reviled because the Iraq war was described
by one adviser as a "cakewalk;" well, the conquest of Baghdad was a
cakewalk, remember? Then the administration was defamed because the Iraqis
did not strew roses in the path of our service personnel. Terrorism
suddenly became "insurgency" and "resistance," with the veteran fabricators
of The New York Times -- who lied about Stalin's famine in the 1930s and on
numerous occasions thereafter -- adopting the propaganda vocabulary of
al-Jazeera.
Strangely, throughout the Iraqi struggle, Western media have joined Western
politicians in a reluctance to name the "foreign fighters" in Fallujah as
what they are -- mostly Wahhabis, and mainly Saudis. Those who monitor Arab
media know this to be true because when jihadists die in Fallujah, their
photographs and biographies appeared in newspapers south of the Iraq-Saudi
border. Western media "analysts" added to the fog of disinformation by
alleging that the Shia rebels of Moqtada ul-Sadr would join the Wahhabis in
Fallujah. But Islamic media around the world began to produce curious
items: Moqtada ul-Sadr issued an order for the execution of any Wahhabis
caught infiltrating the Shia holy cities; Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, in turn,
supervised the beheading of an Iraqi Shia accused of spying for the
Americans. Top Shia cleric Ayatollah Ali Sistani issued a fatwa saying that
anybody who obstructed the U.S.-sponsored elections in Iraq is destined for
eternal fire. And the 26 leading Wahhabi radicals in Saudi Arabia published
an open letter to the Iraqis calling for stiffened resistance in Fallujah
and forbidding any cooperation with the U.S. forces. Little of this was
reported in or digested by American media, which stuck to their story:
Americans bad, terrorists in Iraq good.
Most Western journalists seem to have fled Fallujah as the fighting there
heated up. But news is now trickling out of the liberated city, and it is
fascinating to read. The London Times on Monday, November 15, described
Fallujah as "terrorized" by the jihadists, who posted notices ordering
death sentences on walls and poles throughout the streets. "Mutilated
bodies dumped on Fallujah's bombed out streets today painted a harrowing
picture of eight months of rebel rule," it began. The characteristically
arbitrary, if not insane tone of Wahhabi/Taliban "governance" was clearly
in evidence: An order dated November 1 "gives vendors three days to remove
nine market stalls from outside the city's library or face execution. The
pretext given is that the rebels wanted to convert the building into a
headquarters for the 'Mujahidin Advisory Council' through which they ran
the city."
Orders to conform to Wahhabi "virtue" were backed up by graphic examples:
"An Arab woman, in a violet nightdress, lay in a post-mortem embrace with a
male corpse in the middle of the street. Both bodies had died from bullets
to the head Many of the residents who emerged from the ruins welcomed the
U.S. marines, despite the massive destruction their firepower had inflicted
on their city. A man in his sixties, half-naked and his underwear stained
with blood from shrapnel wounds, cursed the insurgents as he greeted the
advancing marines on Saturday night.
"'I wish the Americans had come here the very first day and not waited
eight months,' he said, trembling. Nearby, a mosque courtyard had been used
as a weapons store by the militants. Another elderly man, who did not want
his name used for fear the rebels would one day return and restore their
draconian rule, said he was detained by the militants last Tuesday and held
for four days before being freed 'It was horrible,' he told an Agence
France-Presse reporter. 'We suffered from the bombings. Innocent people
died or were wounded by the bombings. But we were happy you did what you
did because Fallujah had been suffocated by the Mujahidin. Anyone
considered suspicious would be slaughtered. We would see unknown corpses
around the city all the time.'"
The account continues, "Even residents who regard themselves as observant
Muslims lived in fear because they did not share the puritan brand of Sunni
Islam that the insurgents enforced. One devotee of a Sufi sect, followers
of a mystical form of worship deemed heretical by the hardliners, told how
he and other members of his order had lived in terror inside their homes
for fear of retribution.
"'It was a very hard life. We couldn't move. We could not work,' said the
man sporting the white robe and skullcap prescribed by his faith. 'If they
had any issue with a person, they would kill him or throw him in jail.'"
There are, perhaps, some Western Islamophobic ideologues who, from the
safety of their suburban homes, would love to tell these Muslim victims of
terrorism that their torment was their own fault for not changing or
altering their traditional Islamic faith. Some people have no shame. But
sooner or later Americans will understand what Iraqis are learning: that
our troops went there to free Islam, not to destroy it; that in a choice
between American supervision and Taliban atrocities, the ordinary Sunnis
and the mystical Sufis and the majority Shias will opt for our help.
Meanwhile, the body count is encouraging: in Fallujah, 38 Americans and
five Iraqi regulars lost; 1,200 terrorists killed. Long live free Fallujah!
- --
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R. A. Hettinga <mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
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