Tony Rakhal-Fraser
The Government of Trinidad and Tobago is selling the nation’s sovereign, foreign policy-making to the USA for its “war on terror”, in exchange, the expectation is to receive access to Venezuela’s Dragon Gas, now controlled by Washington. This is the context in which last week’s announcement to designate several international organisations as terrorist entities was made.
The objectives of the Euro-American world have always been geared towards the undemocratic, inhumane and exploitative 18th-21st century seizure of the resources of the world outside of their continent, and to subjugate the “natives” of those countries to the will of their captors.
In contradiction to that reality, though, “Terrorists” and “Terrorism” should accurately be applied to those countries and their people who have captured and imposed control over the resources and governance structures of the developing world through terrorist activities.
“Contemporary terrorists utilise many forms of violence, and indiscriminately target civilians, military facilities and State officials among others,” states the UN. Is it most appropriate and accurate a term to be applied to the present invasion and slaughter in the Middle East by the USA and its co-terrorist nation, Israel?
Initially joined by Western European countries, a number of whom are now recoiling from the reality of the plunder and genocide which began over the last two years-plus in Gaza, that has now spread to Iran and Lebanon.
Surely, the parents of the 175 school children and their teachers can testify to the terrorist act which murdered their children, reportedly by the US army, but which will never be considered terrorism.
The slaughter over the three-year period of an estimated 85,000 mainly women, children and non-combatant males in Gaza, now in Iran and Lebanon, in an illegal and completely ill-conceived war, which has not been justified, amounts to no less than pure terror conducted in a sadistic manner.
Here are a few interesting facts about the groups of “terrorists” which the Government of Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar has joined forces with Euro-America to classify as such. Hamas is an organisation formed in Palestine in 1987 after the first intifada against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and which was once supported by the US as opposed to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
Hezbollah was born in 1982 to fight against Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) emerged in May 1979, shortly after the Islamic Revolution took back the country’s hydrocarbon resources from the mainly British corporations.
Those resources had been nationalised by the government of the duly elected Mohammed Mossadegh as Prime Minister of Iran; he was removed from office by the American terrorist groups.
Never once has the term terrorism been applied to such situations and terrorists.
But let’s seek further historical context for this business of terrorism and its selective application by the West. As a prelude to the Zionist-Jewish capture of Palestine, there was the Nakba of 1948, in which a well-equipped and trained Israeli army slaughtered tens of thousands of Palestinians, raided and burnt more than an estimated 500 villages, and drove 750,000 Palestinians from the land which they had lived in for approximately 1000 years.
Was that a mass act of terrorism? A couple Israeli war generals of the 1950s, Ariel Sharon and David Ben-Gurion, responsible for the killings of tens of thousands of Palestinians, have never been referred to as terrorists, unlike the leaders of those Palestinian groups which have sought to respond to the entrenched violence of Israel, ably and fully supported by the USA and, on occasion, by several European countries. Many of those Western terrorist nations have benefited from the resources of the Arab and Muslim countries, whose people have been violated, and have had the terrorist label stamped on their foreheads – the victims of terrorism have been deemed as terrorists.
The above is a mere short summary of terrorism as conducted by Euro-America in one area of the world. Whole societies and civilisations in the industrial world have been established based on the terror imposed on countries outside of Europe, and for the purposes of terrorist exploitation of their resources.
Similar acts of institutional and civilisational terror have been committed on the First Peoples of the American continent – American historian, David Stannard, has estimated in his study, “American Holocaust”, that 100 million first persons were killed by the Europeans who travelled west and occupied the Americas. So too have ancient civilisations such as China and India, Latin American countries, and those in the Caribbean been conquered and pillaged by the terror of the West.
One American diplomat responding to the quest for reparations said that violence against other human beings was not yet a crime during the period of slavery.
None of the above will make the slightest impact on the true terrorists of modern times. If they were previously unaware of the grand anti-terrorist propaganda that the T&T Government has inserted the country into, without a word of explanation, they do not have to believe what has been merely teased out in this column; they should check out the historical accounts for themselves.
Tony Rakhal-Fraser – freelance journalist, former reporter/current affairs programme host, and News Director at TTT; programme producer/current affairs director at Radio Trinidad; correspondent for the BBC Caribbean Service and the Associated Press; graduate of UWI, CARIMAC, Mona, and St Augustine – Institute of International Relations.
