The Road To Nowhere

Scott Birchill:

The habit of imagining monolithic anti-Western conspiracies is apparently hard to break. By presenting a range of separate contemporary conflicts as aspects of a "global struggle against terrorism", Western governments have again misled their populations by deliberately conflating several unique and largely disconnected events.

The strategy isn't new. Immediately after the 2001 attacks, the Turks (against the Kurds), Israelis (the Palestinians), Russians (the Chechens), Colombians (rebels), and Chinese (the Uyghur) intensified their domestic conflicts on the retrospective pretext that they too were prosecuting the global war on terror. They weren't, but 9/11 gave them a licence to repress without uncomfortable questions being asked in the West.

Here is a brief sample of what is called the "war on terror", as if the West faces a common unified enemy:

In Palestine, the democratically elected Islamic Hamas Government resists Israel's illegal occupation of the West Bank and regular incursions into Gaza. Canberra and Washington condemn the means of resistance, including suicide bombings, but not the expanding Jewish settlements on Arab lands that prompt the resistance. The "road map" to peace has collapsed and Washington's credibility as an honest broker is in tatters. The wrong guys won the election.