THE RISE OF THE DEMOCRATIC POLICE STATE

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Fri, 19 Aug 2005 10:13:14 -0700 (PDT)

THE RISE OF THE DEMOCRATIC POLICE STATE

 

 

 

http://www.pilger.carlton.com/print/133475

 

 

THE RISE OF THE DEMOCRATIC POLICE STATE

John Pilger

 

August 18, 2005

 

Thomas Friedman is a famous columnist on the New York Times. He has

been described as " a guard dog of US foreign policy " . Whatever

America's warlords have in mind for the rest of humanity, Friedman

will bark it. He boasts that " the hidden hand of the market will never

work without a hidden fist " . He promotes bombing countries and says

world war three has begun.

 

 

 

Friedman's latest bark is about free speech, which his country's

constitution is said to safeguard. He wants the State Department to

draw up a blacklist of those who make " wrong " political statements. He

is referring not only to those who advocate violence, but those who

believe American actions are the root cause of the current terrorism.

The latter group, which he describes as " just one notch less

despicable than the terrorists " , includes most Americans and Britons,

according to the latest polls.

 

 

 

Friedman wants a " War of Ideas report " which names those who try to

understand and explain, for example, why London was bombed. These are

" excuse makers " who " deserve to be exposed " . He borrows the term

" excuse makers " from James Rubin, who was Madeleine Albright's chief

apologist at the State Department. Albright, who rose to secretary of

state under President Clinton, said that the death of half a million

Iraqi infants as a result of an American-driven blockade was a " price "

that was " worth it " . Of all the interviews I have filmed in official

Washington, Rubin's defence of this mass killing is unforgettable.

 

 

 

Farce is never far away in these matters. The " excuse makers " would

also include the CIA, which has warned that " Iraq [since the invasion]

has replaced Afghanistan as the training ground for the next

generation of 'professionalised? terrorists'. " On to the

Friedman/Rubin blacklist go the spooks!

 

 

 

Like so much else during the Blair era, this McCarthyite rubbish has

floated across the Atlantic and is now being recycled by the prime

minister as proposed police-state legislation, little different from

the fascist yearnings of Friedman and other extremists. For Friedman's

blacklist, read Tony Blair's proposed database of proscribed opinions,

bookshops, websites.

 

 

 

The British human rights lawyer Linda Christian asks: " Are those who

feel a huge sense of injustice about the same causes as the terrorists

- Iraq, Afghanistan, the war on terrorism, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib

- to be stopped from speaking forthrightly about their anger? Because

terrorism is now defined in our law as actions abroad, will those who

support liberation movements in, for example, Kashmir or Chechnya be

denied freedom of _expression? " Any definition of terrorism, she

points out, should " encompass the actions of terrorist states engaged

in unlawful wars. "

 

 

 

Of course, Blair is silent on western state terrorism in the Middle

East and elsewhere; and for him to moralise about " our values " insults

the fact of his blood-crime in Iraq. His budding police state will, he

hopes, have the totalitarian powers he has longed for since 2001 when

he suspended habeas corpus and introduced unlimited house arrest

without trial. The Law Lords, Britain's highest judiciary, have tried

to stop this. Last December, Lord Hoffmann said that Blair's attacks

on human rights were a greater threat to freedom than terrorism. On 26

July, Blair emoted that the entire British nation was under threat and

abused the judiciary in terms, as Simon Jenkins noted, " that would do

credit to his friend Vladimir Putin " . What we are seeing in Britain is

the rise of the democratic police state.

 

 

 

Should you be tempted to dismiss all this as esoteric or merely mad,

travel to any Muslim community in Britain, especially in the north

west and sense the state of siege and fear. On 15 July, Blair's

Britain of the future was glimpsed when the police raided the Iqra

Learning Centre and book store near Leeds. The Iqra Trust is a

well-known charity that promotes Islam worldwide as " a peaceful

religion which covers every walk of life. " The police smashed down the

door, wrecked the shop and took away anti-war literature which they

described as " anti-western " .

 

 

 

Among this was, reportedly, a DVD of the Respect Party MP George

Galloway addressing the US Senate and a New Statesman article of mine

illustrated by a much-published photograph of a Palestinian man in

Gaza attempting to shield his son from Israeli bullets before the boy

was shot to death. The photograph was said to be " working people up " ,

meaning Muslim people. Clearly, David Gibbons, this journal's esteemed

art director, who chose this illustration, will be called before the

Blair Incitement Tribunal. One of my books, The New Rulers of the

World, was also apparently confiscated. It is not known whether the

police have yet read the chapter that documents how the Americans,

with help from MI6 and the SAS, created, armed and bankrolled the

terrorists of the Islamic Mujahideen, not least Osama Bin Laden.

 

 

 

The raid was deliberately theatrical, with the media tipped off. Two

of the alleged 7 July bombers had been volunteers in the shop almost

four years ago. " When they became hardliners " , said a community youth

worker. " They left and have never been back and they?ve had nothing to

do with the shop. " The raid was watched by horrified local people. who

are now scared, angry and bitter. I spoke to Muserat Sujawal, who has

lived in the area for 31 years and is respected widely for her

management of the nearby Hamara Community Centre. She told me, " There

was no justification for the raid. The whole point of the shop is to

teach how Islam is a community-based religion. My family has used the

shop for years, buying, for example, the Arabic equivalent of Sesame

Street. They did it to put fear in our hearts. " James Dean, a Bradford

secondary school teacher, said, " I am teaching myself Urdu because I

have multi-ethnic classes, and the shop has been very helpful with tapes. "

 

 

 

The police have the right to pursue every lead in their hunt for

bombers, but scaremongering is not their right. Sir Ian Blair, the

Metropolitan Police Commissioner who understands how the media can be

used and spends a lot of time in television studios, has yet to

explain why he announced that the killing in the London Underground of

the Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes was " directly linked " to

terrorism, when he must have known the truth. Muslim people all over

Britain report the presence of police " video vans " cruising their

streets, filming everyone. " We have become like ghettoes under siege, "

said one man too frightened to be named. " Do they know what this is

doing to our young people? "

 

 

The other day Blair said, " We are not having any of this nonsense

about [the bombings having anything] to do with what the British are

doing in Iraq or Afghanistan, or support for Israel, or support for

America, or any of the rest of it. It is nonsense and we have to

confront it as that. " This " raving " , as the American writer Mike

Whitney observed, " is part of a broader strategy to dismiss the

obvious facts about terror and blame the victims of American-British

aggression. It's a tactic that was minted in Tel Aviv and perfected

over 37 years of occupation. It is predicated on the assumption that

terrorism emerges from an amorphous, religious-based ideology that

transforms its adherents into ruthless butchers. "

 

 

 

Professor Robert Pape of the University of Chicago has examined every

act of suicide terrorism over the past 25 years. He refutes the

assumption that suicide bombers are mainly driven by " an evil ideology

independent of other circumstances. " He said, " The facts are that

since 1980, half the attacks have been secular. Few of the terrorists

fit the standard stereotype... Half of them are not religious fanatics

at all. In fact, over 95 per cent of suicide attacks around the world

[are not about] religion, but a specific strategic purpose - to compel

the United States and other western countries to abandon military

commitments on the Arabian Peninsula and in countries they view as

their homeland or prize greatly... The link between anger over

American, British and western military [action] and al-Qaeda's ability

to recruit suicide terrorists to kill us could not be tighter. "

 

 

 

So we have been warned, yet again. Terrorism is the logical consquence

of American and British " foreign policy " whose infinitely greater

terrorism we need to recognise, and debate, as a matter of urgency.

 

First published in the New Statesman - www.newstatesman.co.uk