Friday, November 02, 2007

IGNORANCE, EXCEPTIONALISM, HYPOCRISY

“Hypocrites kick with their hind feet while licking with their tongues."
~ Russian proverb.


We all know that in the last few weeks there has been much propaganda spread throughout the media, and picked up in the blogosphere, against the Kurdish people and particularly with regard to Turkey's most recent war-mongering. We also know that Turkish anti-Kurdish propaganda has been fairly intense since the Amed Serhildan at the end of March 2006 and that both the Right and the Left in the West have assisted with the propagation of these lies for their own political purposes. While the same sources on both ends of the political spectrum regularly condemn the US and Israel for their war crimes and repression, they do not condemn Turkey for its own war crimes and repression against the Kurdish people.

An example of this can be found here on Rastî from earlier this week, in a post titled "So Many Tools, So Little Time", in which I countered the latest anti-Kurdish harangue from Kurd-hater Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com.

I had seen the article at The Vineyard of the Saker, and knowing that the Saker is open to hearing the Kurdish side of the long-standing conflict in North Kurdistan, I made a reply of the facts of the situation in the comments section of the post.

Today I noticed that the Saker has been sent an email by Blogger.com, as a result of a complaint by Antiwar.com, for his posting of Raimondo's anti-Kurdish rant under the fascist American law known as the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). Apparently, the Saker has received a second complaint under the same fascist law and from the same source, Antiwar.com.

I am absolutely certain that the Saker received these notifications because Antiwar.com, and specifically the Kurd-hating Justin Raimondo, cannot present any argument against the facts of the Kurdish situation under Turkish repression.

Raimondo has written Kurd-hating screed before in order to attack the American administration and not because he has any concern for the Kurdish people or the gross injustices suffered by them as a result of the Ankara regime's racist policies, policies which were aided and abetted by the US with full US knowledge of the crimes being committed.

Go to Antiwar.com, search the site, and you will find no articles discussing the brutality that the Ankara regime has inflicted on the Kurdish people. What you will find, in contrast, are hundreds of articles condemning Israel for similar actions against the Palestinians.

Why is it that similar actions of brutality by Israel are condemned by Antiwar.com while Turkey gets a free ride for its brutality? Remember, Turkey's brutality has been conducted for a longer period of time than has Israeli brutality. What could explain such gross oversight, except, perhaps, anti-semitism? Or perhaps the explanation lies in an internalized American exceptionalism? Maybe it's a blend of the two.

In either case, it is an exercise in racism.

There is another point to keep in mind: Antiwar.com and Justin Raimondo are incapable of responding to the facts of American-backed Turkish brutality.

Let me also point out the hypocrisy of, on one hand, being anti-state and anti-corporation--which those at Antiwar.com claim to be--while on the other using a state law to make a corporation censure a private individual who may disagree about their interpretation of the "fair use" clause of the law.

That's the very clear view from here, hevals.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Fucking western leftist morons. Always hypocrites.

Martin Zehr said...

The attempt by Justin Raimondo to portray the Kurdish national movement as simply an arm of US foreign policy is dishonest, deceitful and reactionary. He negates the mass murders, forced relocations, emergency rule and torture of Kurds by the governments of Iran, Iraq and Turkey. He attempts to portray the US as the only force within the region and slanders anyone that unites with the Kurdish nation and peoples. It is reactionary because it opposes the liberation of Kurdistan and presumes to speak for Kurds.

There remains much work to be done within the US in educating the American public to get the government to increase its support to southern Kurdistan and to increase its pressure on Turkey to end their anti-Kurdish attacks. As a Green, I have worked to educate the Green Party of the United States on the issues and background regarding the mass murders and oppression of Kurds. People like Justin Raimondo only aid the current Turkish military maneuvers against the Kurdish Autonomous Region and the representatives of the Kurdistan Regional Government and help them to try and prevent the Kirkuk referendum.

Mizgîn said...

Mato Ska, you have encapsulated my whole point, that those who condemn the Kurdish freedom movement as an operation of the US government cannot do so unless they purposely ignore the atrocities carried out against the Kurdish people by the Ankara regime with US backing.

In fact, Ankara's policies of "pacification" go much farther back than 1980. They go all the way back to the very founding of the Turkish Republic.

If Kurds were Palestinians, what would they say? If the oppressor were Israel, what would they say? They shed crocodile tears for the oppressed only when it serves their domestic political agenda and that points to a complete lack of sincerity for what actually happens to people on the ground.

Most Kurds are not fooled by this hypocrisy.