Fueling Hatred and Revenge
The Assassination of Osama Bin Laden
By FIDEL CASTRO
Those persons who deal
with these issues know that on September 11 of 2001 our people expressed
its solidarity to the US people and offered the modest cooperation that
in the area of health we could have offered to the victims of the
brutal attack against the Twin Towers in New York.
We also immediately opened our country’s airports to
the American airplanes that were unable to land anywhere, given the
chaos that came about soon after the strike.
The traditional stand adopted by the Cuban
Revolution, which was always opposed to any action that could jeopardize
the life of civilians, is well known.
Although we resolutely supported the armed struggle
against Batista’s tyranny, we were, on principle, opposed to any
terrorist action that could cause the death of innocent people. Such
behavior, which has been maintained for more than half a century, gives
us the right to express our views about such a sensitive matter.
On that day, at a public gathering that took place at Ciudad Deportiva, I
expressed my conviction that international terrorism could never be erradicated
through violence and war.
By the way, Bin Laden was, for many years, a friend
of the US, a country that gave him military training; he was also an
adversary of the USSR and Socialism. But, whatever the actions
attributed to him, the assassination of an unarmed human being while
surrounded by his own relatives is something abhorrent. Apparently this
is what the government of the most powerful nation that has ever existed
did.
In the carefully drafted speech announcing Bin Laden’s death Obama asserts as
follows:
“…And yet we know that the worst images are those
that were unseen to the world. The empty seat at the dinner table.
Children who were forced to grow up without their mother or their
father. Parents who would never know the feeling of their child's
embrace. Nearly 3,000 citizens taken from us, leaving a gaping hole in
our hearts.”
That paragraph expressed a dramatic truth, but can
not prevent honest persons from remembering the unjust wars unleashed by
the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan, the hundreds of thousands of
children who were forced to grow up without their mothers and fathers
and the parents who would never know the feeling of their child’s
embrace.
Millions of citizens were taken from their villages
in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Cuba and many other
countries of the world.
Still engraved in the minds of hundreds of millions
of persons are also the horrible images of human beings who, in
Guantánamo, a Cuban occupied territory, walk down in silence, being
submitted for months, and even for years, to unbearable and excruciating
tortures. Those are persons who were kidnapped and transferred to
secret prisons with the hypocritical connivance of supposedly civilized
societies.
Obama has no way to conceal that Osama was executed
in front of his children and wives, who are now under the custody of the
authorities of Pakistan, a Muslim country of almost 200 million
inhabitants, whose laws have been violated, its national dignity
offended and its religious traditions desecrated.
How could he now prevent the women and children of
the person who was executed out of the law and without any trial from
explaining what happened? How could he prevent those images from being
broadcast to the world?
Having assassinated him and plunging his corpse into
the bottom of the sea are an expression of fear and insecurity which
turn him into a far more dangerous person.
The US public opinion itself, after the initial
euphoria, will end up by criticizing the methods that, far from
protecting its citizen, will multiply the feelings of hatred and revenge
against them.
http://www.counterpunch.org/
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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