THE REVISIONIST

Why do Islamic Radicals Want to Kill Americans?

By Bradley R. Smith

Why do Islamic radicals want to kill innocent Americans? I’m not certain that I know, but I have a novel idea. Let’s listen to what they say.

For example, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef is the guy who helped organize the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. Yousef was sentenced to life imprisonment for his role in the bombing. In January 1998 the New York Times published excerpts from his statement to the court.

You keep [saying] collective punishment and killing innocent people to force governments to change their policies [is wrong and] you call this terrorism …. You … introduced this type of terrorism to the history of mankind when you dropped an atomic bomb which killed tens of thousands of women and children in Japan and when you killed over a hundred thousand people, most of them civilians, in Tokyo with fire bombings. You killed them by burning them to death. And you killed civilians in Vietnam with chemicals as with the so-called Orange agent…. You went to wars more than any other country in this century, and then you have the nerve to talk about killing innocent people. And now you have invented new ways to kill innocent people. You have so-called economic embargo [against Iraq] which kills nobody other than children and elderly people ….

Yes, I am a terrorist and I am proud of it. And I support terrorism so long as it [is] against the United States Government and against Israel, because you are more than terrorists…. You are butchers, liars and hypocrites.

Rings a bell for me. But then I’ve been working with revisionist theory for the last twenty years. Revisionism prepares you to view American foreign policy, and terrorism, from a perspective that is not insular in its Americanism. For the last three or four decades revisionist theory has been absorbed with addressing issues about the intentional killing of German and Japanese civilians during World War II, the allegedly unique monstrosity of (particularly) the Germans, and the lying and hypocrisy that has been employed by our cultural elites, including the professorial class, to cover up the real history of that time and to marginalize what they cannot bury.

When Ramzi Ahmed Yousef accuses American of being “butchers,” he refers to the intentional killing of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians in mass fire bombings, which was American policy, and the nuclear destruction of the civilian populations of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. In the New York Times excerpt Yousef does not mention the intentional slaughter of hundreds of thousands of German civilians in mass terror bombings – but then this is the New York Times and the Times does not specialize in viewing Germans of that period as, well – human beings.

When Ramzi Ahmed Yousef argues that Americans are “hypocrites” he refers to the fact that at the very time when he was convicted of the intentional killing of seven or eight civilians at the World Trade Center, the US was enforcing an economic blockade on Iraq that had resulted in the deaths of tens, if not hundreds of thousands of Iraqi (Arab) children. That is, the American government was pursuing a policy of “collective punishment and killing innocent people to force governments to change their policies ….” Hypocrisy in spades.

“Lying?” Those in the US Government? No need to go into it.

Presently the Bush people, backed by the US Congress, are busy making plans to rid the world of “terrorists” once and for all. They are preparing to “hunt them down,” “smoke” them out of their hiding places, and bring them to justice “dead or alive.” If we ever lay our hands on Osama Bin Laden, for example, and he lives through it, I suppose he will be put on trial and after he is convicted (let’s not kid ourselves here) he will be allowed to make his own statement to the court. What will he say about terrorism? Here are a few lines culled from a long interview he gave to ABC’s John Miller.

Your situation with Muslims in Palestine is shameful, if there is any shame left in America. … American history does not distinguish between civilians and military, and not even women and children. [Americans] are the ones who used the {nuclear] bomb against Nagasaki. …

We do not differentiate between those dressed in military uniforms and civilians; they are all targets in this fatwa. …The fatwa includes all that share or take part in [the] killing of Muslims, assaulting holy places, or those who help the Jews occupy Muslim land. … The American government … has no choice but to pull its sons from the Holy Land especially and the Muslim land in general. And to refrain from supporting in any way the Israeli government and Jews who occupy our land.

In short, Osama will say about what Ramzi Ahmed Yousef said three years ago. He will say that the second – final -- attack on the World Trade Center was the result of American foreign policy which, among other things, is a witch’s brew of butchery, lies, and hypocrisy.