Saturday, August 12, 2006
CHARADE SUSPECTED
Writing in the Age, Gwynne Dyer drags that wreck of a newspaper ever closer to pure Indymedia:
Hundreds of flights delayed or cancelled. Twenty-four alleged conspirators arrested in East London, Thames Valley towns and Birmingham, many of them described by neighbours as bearded Muslims wearing traditional dress. Shocking revelations that they had a new technique for blowing up to 10 aircraft on the heavily travelled London-US routes out of the sky simultaneously by smuggling explosive liquids aboard. All cabin baggage banned on flights out of Britain. And in a classic case of panic envy, the US Department of Homeland Security declares a red alert in the United States, too.
That should scare the public into supporting the “war on terror” a bit longer ...
It’s as though the London transport bombings, the blasts in Spain, the attacks in Bali, and 9/11 itself never happened. Memo to Gwynne: governments don’t need to scare people with fake threats. The real deaths take care of that.
Terrorists of various sorts have been in business for about 40 years, and the present crop of Islamist terrorists are especially dangerous since they are willing to kill themselves along with their victims. But in the United States more people die on the roads every single month than Islamist terrorists have killed since the year 2000, and in Britain it’s more people every week. Yet neither country has tried to restrict access to cars.
But they have restricted access to unsafe cars. Check your design rules, pal. (By the way, is it in fact true that more people die in road accidents every week in Britain than die in the US every month? Something for readers to look up.)
Maybe it’s cynical, but there are strong grounds for suspecting that this is all a charade.
Maybe he’s referring to his column. Dyer quickly moves on from mere suspicion:
This is all hype, designed to frighten the British and American publics into supporting the wars of their deeply unpopular governments (and the war of their Israeli ally as well).
Reeling in confusion, Gwynne Dyer—an apparent hair dyer—next returns to puzzling over his own mind:
Or am I being too cynical? Maybe they’re just stupid. I really don’t know any more.
So quit pretending that you do.