Lashing out against the West
By Dr. Ghulam M. Haniff
St. Cloud , MN
At the recent annual conference of the United Nations Human Rights Commission held in Geneva President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gave an extremely powerful speech critical of the West for the plight of the Palestinians. Most of the Western nations, almost all of them former colonial powers with minor exceptions, did not like it and staged a walkout.
The Western world is very sensitive for the mess they have created in the world pursuing five hundred years of colonial plunder. They are loath to accept the responsibility for the political, economic, cultural and ethnic chaos left behind as a result of their oppressive and exploitative colonial policies.
However, they are ever ready to show disrespect to any representative of the Third World who dares to show the connection between their demented and wholly self-serving actions and the turmoil in the contemporary world. The issue of Palestine is a classical example of the colonial action taken even as the empires were dying out.
During and after the struggle for liberation almost every leader of the independence movement was subjected to name-calling and even branded “terrorist.” Mahatma Gandhi was called “that naked fakir” by the British and imprisoned as a “terrorist” while advocating peaceful resistance to colonial rule.
In recent years Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, was branded a “terrorist” by those colonial settlers who stole his land and are still busy doing so today.
The West sees Palestinians as an “inferior race,” second class human beings, colored natives of a backward society, not worthy of a state of their own. However, the rhetoric of a two-state solution is occasionally mouthed while more and more of the Palestinian land is gobbled up. Benjamin Netanyahu just announced the expansion of settlements in the West Bank even though Obama considered such an action unhelpful in their meeting at the White House.
The West still asks the Bushian question: why do they hate us? The answer couldn’t be more obvious.
The colonized world began to lash out at the West during the second half of the twentieth century. Each succeeding incident became more and more lethal. Although uprisings like the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 in Mughal India or the Mahdi Movement in Sudan were not common, they were actually resistance uprisings meant to defeat the colonizer. However, the resistance battle almost always ended in defeat for the victims with fierce colonial reaction. The World Trade Center incident was in a class by itself and of course it too invited fierce reaction.
The five hundred years of colonial over-lordship have been punctuated by the natives striking back though often losing. But today some of the natives have climbed up the power ladder with China, India, Brazil and perhaps Iran in the forefront. However, the Western world is still trying to control them, certainly to dominate them.
What is labeled in the West as terrorism does not consist of irrational actions by a few evil men. The actions they undertake is calculated and preplanned designed to humiliate the West as the colonized had been humiliated. These actions have deep foundation in the collective rage of the natives, and the centuries of physical, psychological and emotional torture inflicted on them by the colonial powers. They have known enslavement, starvation, displacement, dehumanization, oppression, exploitation and so forth to the point that they are willing to strike back at the master at the cost of their own death.
In the words of Frantz Fanon they are confronting the white-man, adult to adult, ready to inflict pain and death directed against them previously.
Ahmedinejad has chosen the strategy to engage the West through a provocative debate openly in an international forum. However, the West does not like any discourse conducted in an open atmosphere because they cannot control such an event. Thus, they will not listen, pretending to occupy a higher moral ground, though their colonial atrocities are well recorded in history and known to serious students.
Consequently, their only response was to demonize the Iranian leader and that too through the mass media (the semi-official voice of the West). They heaped contempt on him in the manner of other Third World leaders who refused to buckle under. Of course they want to show the world that the white man is still in-charge running the world at its own discretion.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
