The
day that didn't change a
thing By Michael Robeson
Are Norwegians weird, or what?
Seventy-seven of them get massacred by a killer
who gets a prison term of only 21 years and they
don't take to the streets in protest, even when
their president, without a drop of machismo, says:
"The bomb and bullets were aimed at changing
Norway. The Norwegian people responded by
embracing our values. The killer failed, the people
won." What kind of boring
values do Norwegians share? And what do they have
against change?
Seventy-seven Norwegians
may sound like chump change compared with the
almost 3,000 Americans that died on the day that
changed everything forever and ever Amen. But for
Norway's 7 million people, last year's attacks
killed proportionately more of them than the
number of Americans killed on September 11, 2001.
Norwegian politicians are not climbing over
themselves demanding stricter national-security
measures and citizens have not been Tea Partying
in the streets crying for vengeance and clamoring
for the death penalty. Those long winters must
bleed the hot-bloodedness out of them.
In
the US, "change" was the codeword of that day in
2001 and has become a political mantra ever since.
Ehud Barak, former prime minister of Israel and
now defense minister, got the ball rolling that
morning when, interviewed on the British
Broadcasting Corp, he announced: "The world will
not be the same from today on ... This is the time
to deploy a globally concerted effort ... against
all sources of terror, consistently along six or
10 years ... Iran, Iraq, Libya."
It is not
for us to discuss whether Barak was an all-seeing
prophet or an all-powerful proponent. US president
George W Bush, with his ear to the ground,
followed up on his advice and kept to the message
of "change is good", apart from encouraging
Americans not to lose sight of their values, which
involved his telling them to keep shopping. Some
things just can't be changed; and Barack Obama's
presidency, promoted by his catchy campaign
slogan, shows that the more things change, the
more they remain insane.
Though apparently
not in Norway. Anders Breivik, the terrorist
killer of 77 people, 69 of them teenagers, was
found by court physicians to be legally sane, a
title that Bush and Obama can also give claim to.
Unlike them, Breivik was given by his captors his
day in court, something the citadel of democratic
values did not see fit to give Osama bin Laden and
his alleged associates. Unlike bin Laden, though,
Breivik is a citizen of Norway and retains certain
rights despite being an enemy of its values. One
cannot expect all Western nations to accord such
niceties to citizens considered to be enemies,
such as the Muslim American teenage who was droned
by President Obama in Pakistan this year. But we
are not here concerned about things like values in
the context of politics, especially not in an
election year when Americans have so much to worry
about with the decline of their property values.
A few days after the Breivik verdict, an
Israeli religious leader arrived at his own
verdict regarding his nation's "Islamofascist"
enemies. Shas party Rabbi Ovadia Yosef called on
Jews to pray for the destruction of Iran - "When
we say 'may our enemies be struck down' on Rosh
Hashana, it shall be directed at Iran, the evil
ones who threaten Israel. God shall strike them
down and kill them." Haaretz reports that the
rabbi had earlier been visited by senior Israeli
defense officials, persuading him to support a
possible attack on Iran.
No verdict has
yet been reached by the rabbi, though, on that
week's attack by a gang of more than a hundred
Israelis on four Arab youths in broad daylight in
downtown Jerusalem. The Jewish media strangely
referred to it as an "attempted lynching",
anything to avoid a more fitting term - "pogrom" -
and this in a country that has seen scores of
"settler" attacks on Palestinians in the past year
and calling them "payback", payback against them
in retaliation for Israeli government actions
against the "settlers". Can anyone say
"Ebreofascism"?
Considering that Israel's
is about 30% larger than Norway's and that no
Israelis have yet been killed by Iranians, should
one wonder why Norwegian leaders have not
requested that their religious colleagues pray
that God should strike down Breivik? Yet that
would not be a fair analogy, for Norwegians are
famously non-churchgoing and obviously do not
worship the same god. But would an American
political leader have stood up a year after
September 11 and proclaimed that America's
response to the attack would be "more democracy,
more openness and more humanity, but never
naivety"? Well, that is what the Norwegian
president did on the anniversary of the Oslo
massacre. How weird is that?
Flushed down
the memory hole is the fact that immediately after
Breivik's Oslo attack, the media, as well as
President Obama, blamed the massacre on
"terrorists" with all of that word's cultural
connotations and with headlines blaring the event
as "Norway's 9/11". When it emerged that the
terrorist was no Arab, the spin machine whirred
into high gear. Stealing from the media playbook
for Timothy McVeigh, the ever-useful word
"terrorism" was suddenly found politically
inappropriate. Other nomenclature was utilized -
"far right", "white supremacist", "madman" - to
explain to sensitive ears a bombing and mass
killing perpetrated by a white male (whose
appearance is not terribly dissimilar to many
fine, young American servicemen) and aimed
primarily at a white youth group that is famously
supportive of Palestinian rights.
Terrorism, after all, can only involve
acts of violence committed by people who don't
look and dress the way we do and be committed
against people whose ideologies are friendly to
the US government and its friends, no matter how
unfriendly they might often be.
But the
biggest wrinkle in the Breivik saga involved his
pro-Zionist, pro-Israel beliefs. In his online
manifesto he revealingly wrote, "So let us fight
together with Israel, with our Zionist brothers
against all anti-Zionists."
Considering
that he bombed the center of Norway's government,
which has been highly critical of the Israeli
occupation, and that he targeted for his massacre
a political youth group that actively promotes an
economic boycott of Israel and that was, on the
day of the massacre, hosting the nation's foreign
minister to persuade him of their views, should
raise red flags when looking for Breivik's
ideological motives. Mad it may be, but it is
hardly white supremacy; otherwise he would have
simply killed lots of the dark-skinned immigrants
he claims to despise. This is a feeling, by the
way, that he shares with all too many Israeli
"settlers" who are inspired, in part, by the early
Zionist theoretician Vladimir Jabotinsky.
Breivik's manifesto was littered with
quotations from respectable hardline pro-Israelis,
including one who was a foreign-policy adviser to
a US presidential candidate at the time, the
obsequiously pro-Israel Michele Bachmann. So the
wrinkle of Breivik's allegiance to the very
principle of the existence of the Zionist state of
Israel, something that George W Bush and Barack
Obama along with the majority of the US Congress
and Senate have pledged allegiance to, was never
ironed out, it was simply ignored. If that
allegiance includes a US military performing daily
acts of violence in non-white nations (that are
not fighting together for Israel) and doing so if
without Breivik's single-minded purpose, then with
no less a systematic result, it would be best to
ignore that too.
The two words strenuously
avoided in media discussion about Breivik are
"Christian Zionism", with the emphasis not on the
adjective but on the noun. Breivik, in his
single-mindedness, represents a very awkward
honesty rarely found among those he counts himself
to stand shoulder to shoulder with. From the
hardline pro-Israeli columnists like Daniel Pipes
and Frank Gaffney whom he favorably quoted in his
manifesto, to the Republican and Democratic
politicians regularly pledging militant fealty to
the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and
Israel, to the tens of millions of Bible-thumping
Americans sending their dollars to James Hagee and
the other televangelists, to the Likudniks in
Israel who invite them to Tel Aviv and gleefully
accept those dollars, the cement that binds them
together is a biblical belief that the Land of
Israel belongs to the Jews and not to anyone else.
None of them, of course, would publicly
espouse Breivik's method to achieve their ends and
only the least educated of them would admit to
being a fundamentalist with all that entails. But
their overall support of the US and North Atlantic
Treaty Organization and Israeli militancy of the
past 11 years shows that, like Breivik, they are
fundamentally at one in promoting a Zionist
expansionist agenda, justified by Old Testament
scripture. All of their "humanitarian" posturing
about spreading democracy in the Middle East and
protecting civilians from medieval tyrants is the
tallith for promoting a highly
Neanderthalic agenda, one that Breivik, with his
knuckles dragging only slightly more on the ground
than his mentors', disputes merely in terms of
tactics.
September 11 was, perhaps,
America's last chance for a political discourse
involving the question: What have we done to them
that they would do this to us? Breivik's attacks
may be the world community's first opportunity to
ask an altogether different question: If he did
this to them, what are those he is fighting for
planning to do to us?
Many observers
believe that the American character has
dramatically changed since September 11, 2001.
They are wrong; it has simply evolved: Victories
in two World Wars solidified US leaders' hunger
for world dominance - an appetite acquired during
a century of land thefts of the indigenous tribes
and the theft of the old Spanish Empire.
Fear and hatred of communism, decades of
living under the threat of nuclear war, living in
the shadow of the Cold War spy scandals,
imaginations filled with the violent imagery of
film and television, all accentuated Americans'
Westward Ho insolence toward "the other" and
exacerbated the historical racism that the
civil-rights movement failed to eradicate, as
shown by the upside-down racism of Obama
supporters who label even serious criticism of him
as racist/hate speech.
The scourge of
AIDS, the cycles of sexual-abuse scandals - a
large proportion of them hoaxes or bizarre
exaggerations - made Americans more gullible,
believing all sorts of media-spun horror stories,
and far more worried about the value of engaging
in emotional, interpersonal relationships. With
the ratcheting up of fears, it is little wonder
that Americans are highly susceptible to believing
in the myth of personal victimhood and its
accompanying faith in personal innocence, this
while demanding zero tolerance for all wrongdoers,
except their exceptional selves.
Decades
before September 11, the conviction "There is
nothing to fear but fear itself" morphed into the
maxim "You can never be too safe." Liberals and
conservatives, rich and poor, the length and
breadth of American society instinctively believes
that they are somehow always in danger.
Psychologists would label this paranoia;
theologians would call it a guilty conscience.
Regardless, this general sense of personal
insecurity, something that only a Big Brother or a
Sugar Daddy could offer protection from, is
fertile ground for the general acceptance of
ham-fisted Homeland Security actions and legalized
Patriot Act tyrannies.
The fall of the
Twin Towers didn't collapse Americans into
themselves and dramatically change them any more
than Breivik dramatically changed the Norwegians.
Both events brought out the best and the darkest
of both societies. But in one of them, the latter
was already winning out.
Yet let us not be
too harsh in light of what harshness has passed.
In admiration for America's collective genius in
being able to make lemonade when given a lemon, we
offer here a September 11 factoid that has never
before been mentioned.
Three months after
the attacks, during the Super Bowl halftime-show
commemoration of them, the rock group U2 performed
before two tower-like curtains inscribed with the
names of those killed. At the act's finale, as the
stadium rocked with applause, the curtains were
made suddenly to crash to the ground. A
heart-rending spectacle. With just one glitch,
apart from the ill-timed applause: On the curtains
were inscribed 6,000 names, one for each of the
6,000 people who had been murdered that day by
Osama bin Laden. Six thousand, not three.
There is no need to wonder if the
producers of the show ever corrected their mistake
or apologized to the 3,000 Americans whose names
were exploited for the purposes of show business.
Like those names, most Americans understand very
well that winning and losing are only the measure
of having played the game, of being in the show.
We know what counts and we are in this together.
Just don't ask us what kind of show we've
gotten ourselves into. Especially not in an
election year.
Michael
Robeson
is a middle-age American ex-pat living in
Rome.
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