From Beirut to Paris - your wars are our dead: Socialist Alliance statement on terror attacks

From Beirut to Paris - your wars are our dead: Socialist Alliance statement on terror attacks.

These latest acts of terror must not be allowed to justify ongoing and new imperial wars, tougher anti-refugee and anti-immigrant laws and anti-democratic “security” laws and repression of democratic rights.

In response to the attacks in Paris, people opened their homes to the traumatised and wounded. Taxi drivers ferried people home for free. People queued to donate blood. There has been international condemnation, statements from Western leaders, including Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and a global outpouring of sympathy and symbolic acts of solidarity across the globe.

The same level of response from the West did not follow the immediate aftermath of the bombings in Beirut (often called the 'Paris of the middle east'). But people's lives matter as much in Paris as they do in Beirut or Syria or Iraq. Perhaps this latest attack in the heart of Europe has, at least, made the horror inflicted on the people of Beirut and the Middle East more difficult to ignore.

Terrorist forces such as ISIS and Al Qaeda are the products of decades of Western imperialist intervention and occupation in the Middle East. These same Western governments have been responsible for more bloodshed across the region than ISIS. In Iraq, for example, where more than half a million have been killed since the 2003 invasion and the society largely destroyed, the kind of extreme fundamentalist terror represented by ISIS was unknown prior to the invasion and occupation by the US and its allies.

At the time of the invasion of Iraq, both Western intelligence agencies and the millions of people who marched against war warned that this military intervention would only create more terror. They have been proven correct and it is the people of Paris, Beirut, Syria and Iraq who are paying the price.

Emphasis Mine

Elie Fares makes the same point in From Beirut, this is Paris: in a world that doesn’t care about Arab lives:

When my people died, no country bothered to light up its landmarks in the colors of our flag. Even Facebook didn’t bother with making sure my people were “marked safe”, trivial as it may be. So here’s your Facebook safety check: we’ve, as of now, survived all of Beirut’s terrorist attacks.

When my people died, the world was not in mourning. Their death was but an irrelevant fleck on the international news cycle, something that happens in those parts of the world.

And you know what, I’m fine with all of it. Over the past year or so, I’ve come to terms with being one of those whose lives don’t matter. I’ve come to accept it and live with it.

Emphasis Mine

The world forgets that its is the Arabs, Kurds, and Iranians who are fighting the ISIS, and who are being killed by them.

No wonder people in the Middle East have such a cynical attitude to the values espoused by the West. They think, as Gandhi did, that Western Civilization is a good idea — not a reality.