Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - Who are THEY and how do we deal with them?

roachboy · 07-21-2005, 08:57 AM

a remarkably sane intervention from a politico......
somehow this line of interpretation of the phantom "terrorism" has been excluded from the hysteria-based discourse on the topic particular to the states.

Quote:

London Bombings-Livingstone
London Mayor Ken Livingstone Wednesday blamed Western foreign policy in the Middle East for creating the conditions for terrorist attacks such as the 7/7 bombings in the British capital.

Livingstone suggested that Western interventions to maintain control of oil supplies in Arab countries, dating back nearly a century, had produced terrorist organizations, including Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network.

"If at the end of the First World War we had done what we promised the Arabs, which was to let them be free and have their own governments, and kept out of Arab affairs, and just bought their oil, rather than feeling we had to control the flow of oil, I suspect this wouldn't have arisen," he told the BBC.

The criticism comes after the mayor blamed western policies for contributing to the spread of extremism that inspired the London bombings, which killed 56 people.

"We created these people. We built them up. We funded them," he told his weekly press conference. "Osama bin Laden was just another businessman until he was recruited by the CIA," he said.

Asked in his interview with the BBC what he blamed for the rise of terrorism, Livingstone said "we have just had 80 years of Western intervention in predominantly Arab lands because of the Western need for oil."
"We have propped up unsavory governments, we have overthrown ones that we didn't consider sympathetic," Livingstone also said, while adding many young people in the UK were outraged by the double standards in Western foreign policy.

This, he said, was reflected in America's support for Israel and in detention without trial in the Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba.

"I think the particular problem we have at the moment is that in the 1980s the Americans recruited and trained Osama bin Laden, taught him how to kill, to make bombs and sent him off to kill the Russians in Afghanistan," the mayor said.

"They didn't give any thought to the fact that once he had done that, he might turn on his creators," he added.

The mayor said he condemned all suicide bombings, but indicated that he understood why Palestinians may resort to the tactic in Israel.

He denounced "governments which use indiscriminate slaughter to advance their foreign policy, as we have occasionally seen with the Israeli government bombing areas from which a terrorist group will have come, irrespective of the casualties it inflicts, women, children and men."
Livingstone suggested that if British people had been forced to live in the conditions suffered by the Palestinians in the occupied territories, they too might have resorted to suicide attacks.

"Under foreign occupation and denied the right to vote, denied the right to run your own affairs, often denied the right to work for three generations, I suspect that if it had happened here in England, we would have produced a lot of suicide bombers," he said.

The mayor also criticized parts of the media for giving too much publicity to certain extreme Muslim figures. "We have 750,000 Muslims in this city, but the same 3 or 4 totally unrepresentative individuals are always stuck on the front page," he said.