MONTREAL, Canada, July 18 (IPS) – Osama bin Laden once claimed that the seeds of 9/11 were sown in 1982, when he witnessed the massacres in Beirut’s Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps. It was the bloody end to the US-backed Israeli invasion of Lebanon that summer.
Either bin Laden’s statement was correct, or he realized that playing on the widespread outrage generated by Western support for Israel’s series of atrocities was the most effective way to generate popular and organizational support for his extremist project.
Bin Laden’s successors are undoubtedly doing everything they can to capture similar outrage in the region over Israel’s genocidal assault on the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip. But they will face considerably greater challenges if they want to use it for their own ends.
The difference between 2024 and 1982 is overwhelming evidence of popular Western rejection of their governments’ policies. In opinion polls, in mass demonstrations that easily rival those organized against the illegal Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003, in the numerous campus camps, and, as the recent Letter of Dissent shows, even extended to government bureaucracies and political appointees.
The distinction between ruler and ruled, government and ruled, has rarely been made clearer.
The Letter of Dissent makes it clear beyond any doubt that US policy in dealing with the current crisis has been an abject failure at virtually every level. Not only has it failed to achieve any of its objectives and further consolidate Western hegemony in the Middle East, it has also made the US government directly and actively complicit in the genocide currently before the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
As the signatories note, the US is not only “willfully” violating international law binding on Washington, but is also willfully violating US domestic law in its fanatical determination to continue Israel’s mass atrocities to the bitter end.
Tellingly, and rightly, they also point out that the Biden administration’s determination to stand shoulder to shoulder with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and his far-right, annexationist government has led to the suppression of fundamental constitutional freedoms in the United States.
That campaign, which included forcing Ivy League presidents to resign, punishing students and faculty for condemning a foreign state, losing journalists their jobs, and much more, surpasses anything that happened during America’s wars on Vietnam, Afghanistan, or Iraq.
Calling for the destruction of the United States is, it seems, a constitutionally protected right to free speech. However, that right does not extend to calling for the dismantling of a genocidal, supremacist regime thousands of miles away.
Civil servants, even senior ones, generally have at best marginal influence on policy, especially in a plutocracy like the United States. In the current context, where US Middle East policy is the personal domain of Biden, Blinken, Sullivan, McGurk and very few others, their influence is nil.
This explains why the signatories felt they had no choice but to resign. To do so would have made them complicit in their government’s policies, including participation in Israeli crimes and the continued efforts to ensure Israeli impunity for atrocities against the Palestinian people.
The moral and political choice they made, which must have been as painfully difficult as it was exceptionally simple, is admirable.
Mouin Rabbani is co-editor of Jadaliyya, non-resident fellow at the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies (CHS), and non-resident fellow at Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN).
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© Inter Press Service (2024) — All rights reservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service
