Were the Paris Killings a Threat to Our Freedoms?

The interpretations that neocons are peddling are the same as they’ve been peddling for years, namely, “they hate our freedoms”, “Islam is opposed to the West”, “they are religious fanatics”, “there is no use talking to them”, “they are extremists”, “they are unreasoning terrorists”, and “there is a clash of civilizations”. In this instance, the idea being asserted is that they are opposed to freedom of the press. All of this is the biggest bunch of nonsense imaginable. It is complete baloney. Why now? Why after hundreds of years of peaceful relations? The answer is that it’s only in the last 65 years or so that the U.S. has meddled seriously in a bunch of Muslim nations. The U.S. crossed one Rubicon when FDR made Saudi Arabia a protectorate and then it kept crossing one after another: recognizing Israel, overturning Mossadegh in Iran, entering Lebanon with armed forces, etc. See here.

The neocons use these lines (lies) so as to produce a warrior attitude against the countries they wish to invade. They want us to think that when there is retaliation against U.S. and western political and military policies, that it’s not retaliation, not blowback, not provoked by what the U.S. has done, but instead stems from a hatred of the west at a religious level or ideological level.

The necons are completely wrong about this. All this uproar about a world-defining event in Paris is total hokum. It’s Barnum & Bailey time. The neocons want to use it to peddle their warmongering. The truth stares us in the face. Attacks on the West are retaliation for real wrongdoing in a number of Muslim countries that the West has inflicted on them for decades on end. The wonder of it is that there hasn’t been even more such retaliation and anger.

I say emphatically: The Paris killings were not a threat to our freedoms. The neocon ideas that are being implemented in Washington’s foreign policies are not just threats to our freedoms, they have brought very real inroads into our freedoms. They have decimated certain of them. The administration of justice in the U.S. has effectively become non-functional in many important respects.

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6:41 pm on January 16, 2015