I tend to agree with these Iraqi exiles...
....................
February 26, 2003, 10:00 a.m.
Voice of Iraqis
Why don't antiwar types want to hear them?
Could I have the microphone for one minute to tell the
people about my life?" asked the Iraqi grandmother.
I spent part of a recent Saturday with the so-called
"antiwar" marchers in London in the company of some
Iraqi friends. Our aim had been to persuade the
organizers to let at least one Iraqi voice to be
heard. Soon, however, it became clear that the
organizers were as anxious to stifle the voice of the
Iraqis in exile as was Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
The Iraqis had come with placards reading "Freedom for
Iraq" and "American rule, a hundred thousand times
better than Takriti tyranny!"
But the tough guys who supervised the march would have
none of that. Only official placards, manufactured in
thousands and distributed among the "spontaneous"
marchers, were allowed. These read "Bush and Blair,
baby-killers," " Not in my name," "Freedom for
Palestine," and "Indict Bush and Sharon."
Not one placard demanded that Saddam should disarm to
avoid war.
The goons also confiscated photographs showing the
tragedy of Halabja, the Kurdish town where Saddam's
forces gassed 5,000 people to death in 1988.
We managed to reach some of the stars of the show,
including Reverend Jesse Jackson, the self-styled
champion of American civil rights. One of our group,
Salima Kazim, an Iraqi grandmother, managed to attract
the reverend's attention and told him how Saddam
Hussein had murdered her three sons because they had
been dissidents in the Baath Party; and how one of her
grandsons had died in the war Saddam had launched
against Kuwait in 1990.
"Could I have the microphone for one minute to tell
the people about my life?" 78-year-old Salima
demanded.
The reverend was not pleased.
"Today is not about Saddam Hussein," he snapped.
"Today is about Bush and Blair and the massacre they
plan in Iraq." Salima had to beat a retreat, with all
of us following, as the reverend's gorillas closed in
to protect his holiness.
We next spotted former film star Glenda Jackson,
apparently manning a stand where "antiwar" characters
could sign up to become "human shields" to protect
Saddam's military installations against American air
attacks.
"These people are mad," said Awad Nasser, one of
Iraq's most famous modernist poets. "They are actually
signing up to sacrifice their lives to protect a
tyrant's death machine."
The former film star, now a Labor party member of
parliament, had no time for "side issues" such as the
1.2 million Iraqis, Iranians, and Kuwaitis who have
died as a result of Saddam's various wars.
We thought we might have a better chance with Charles
Kennedy, a boyish-looking, red-headed Scot who leads
the misnamed Liberal Democrat party. But he, too, had
no time for "complex issues" that could not be raised
at a mass rally.
"The point of what we are doing here is to tell the
American and British governments that we are against
war," he pontificated. "There will be ample time for
other issues."
But was it not amazing that there could be a rally
about Iraq without any mention of what Saddam and his
regime have done over almost three decades? Just a
little hint, perhaps, that Saddam was still murdering
people in his Qasr al-Nayhayah (Palace of the End)
prison, and that as the Westerners marched, Iraqis
continued to die?
Not a chance.
We then ran into Tony Benn, a leftist septuagenarian
who has recycled himself as a television reporter to
interview Saddam in Baghdad.
But we knew there was no point in talking to him. The
previous night he had appeared on TV to tell the Brits
that his friend Saddam was standing for "the little
people" against "hegemonistic America."
"Are these people ignorant, or are they blinded by
hatred of the United States?" Nasser the poet
demanded.
The Iraqis would had much to tell the "antiwar"
marchers, had they had a chance to speak. Fadel
Sultani, president of the National Association of
Iraqi authors, would have told the marchers that their
action would encourage Saddam to intensify his
repression.
"I had a few questions for the marchers," Sultani
said. "Did they not realize that oppression, torture
and massacre of innocent civilians are also forms of
war? Are the antiwar marchers only against a war that
would liberate Iraq, or do they also oppose the war
Saddam has been waging against our people for a
generation?"
Sultani could have told the peaceniks how Saddam's
henchmen killed dissident poets and writers by pushing
page after page of forbidden books down their throats
until they choked.
Hashem al-Iqabi, one of Iraq's leading writers and
intellectuals, had hoped the marchers would mention
the fact that Saddam had driven almost four million
Iraqis out of their homes and razed more than 6,000
villages to the ground.
"The death and destruction caused by Saddam in our
land is the worst since Nebuchadnezzar," he said.
"These prosperous, peaceful, and fat Europeans are
marching in support of evil incarnate." He said that,
watching the march, he felt Nazism was "alive and well
and flexing its muscles in Hyde Park."
Abdel-Majid Khoi, son of the late Grand Ayatollah
Khoi, Iraq's foremost religious leader for almost 40
years, spoke of the "deep moral pain" he feels when
hearing the so-called " antiwar" discourse.
"The Iraqi nation is like a man who is kept captive
and tortured by a gang of thugs," Khoi said. "The
proper moral position is to fly to help that man
liberate himself and bring the torturers to book. But
what we witness in the West is the opposite: support
for the torturers and total contempt for the victim."
Khoi said he would say ahlan wasahlan (welcome) to
anyone who would liberate Iraq.
"When you are being tortured to death you are not
fussy about who will save you," he said.
Ismail Qaderi, a former Baathist official but now a
dissident, wanted to tell the marchers how Saddam
systematically destroyed even his own party, starting
by murdering all but one of its 16 original leaders.
"Those who see Saddam as a symbol of socialism,
progress, and secularism in the Arab world must be
mad," he said.
Khalid Kishtaini, Iraq's most famous satirical writer,
added his complaint.
"Don't these marchers know that the only march
possible in Iraq under Saddam Hussein is from the
prison to the firing-squad?" he asked. "The Western
marchers behave as if the US wanted to invade
Switzerland, not Iraq under Saddam Hussein."
With all doors shutting in our faces we decided to
drop out of the show and watch the political zoology
of the march from the sidelines.
Who were these people who felt such hatred of their
democratic governments and such intense self-loathing?
There were the usual suspects: the remnants of the
Left, from Stalinists and Trotskyites to caviar
socialists. There were the pro-abortionists, the
anti-GM food crowd, the anti-capital-punishment
militants, the black-rights gurus, the anti-Semites,
the "burn Israel" lobby, the "Bush-didn't-win-Florida"
zealots, the unilateral disarmers, the anti-Hollywood
"cultural exception" merchants, and the guilt-ridden
postmodernist "everything is equal to everything else"
philosophers.
But the bulk of the crowd consisted of fellow
travelers, those innocent citizens who, prompted by
idealism or boredom, are always prepared to play the
role of "useful idiots," as Lenin used to call them.
They ignored the fact that the peoples of Iraq are
unanimous in their prayers for the war of liberation
to come as quickly as possible.
The number of marchers did not impress Salima, the
grandmother.
"What is wrong does not become right because many
people say it," she asserted, bidding us farewell
while the marchers shouted "Not in my name!"
Let us hope that when Iraq is liberated, as it soon
will be, the world will remember that it was not done
in the name of Rev. Jackson, Charles Kennedy, Glenda
Jackson, Tony Benn, and their companions in a march of
shame.
- Amir Taheri is author of The Cauldron: The Middle
East behind the headlines. Taheri is reachable through
www.benadorassociates.com.
From National Review Online
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