In London Town Part 2

I don't think Osama bin Laden sent those planes to attack us because he hated our freedom. I think he did it because of our support for Israel, our ties with the Saudi family and our military bases in Saudi Arabia. You know why I think that? Because that's what he fucking said.—David Cross It’s been fascinating in the aftermath of what’s been transpiring in England these past few weeks to compare and contrast former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s comments about September 11 with recent reactions from London Mayor Ken Livingstone. During the 2004 election campaign, Giuliani was addressed the Republican National Convention, saying: “Terrorism did not start on September 11, 2001. It started a long time ago. And it had been festering for many years. And the world had created a response to it that allowed it to succeed. The attack on the Israeli team at the Munich Olympics was in 1972. That's a long time ago. That's not yesterday. And the pattern began early. The three surviving terrorists were arrested. And then within just three months, the terrorists who slaughtered the Israeli athletes were released by the German government -- set free. Action like this became the rule, not the exception. Terrorists came to learn time after time that they could attack, that they could slaughter innocent people and not face any consequences…. Terrorist acts became like a ticket to the international bargaining table. How else to explain Yasser Arafat winning the Nobel Peace Prize while he was supporting a plague of terrorism in the Middle East and undermining any chance of peace? Before September 11, we were living with an unrealistic view of our world, much like observing Europe appease Hitler or trying to accommodate the Soviet Union through the use of mutually assured destruction. President Bush decided that we could no longer be just on defense against global terrorism, we must also be on offense. Now compare that with the words of Livingstone: “I think you've just had 80 years of Western intervention into predominantly Arab lands because of the Western need for oil. We've propped up unsavoury governments, we've overthrown ones we didn't consider sympathetic. And I think the particular problem we have at the moment is that in the 1980s... the Americans recruited and trained Osama Bin Laden, taught him how to kill, to make bombs, and set him off to kill the Russians and drive them out of Afghanistan. They didn't give any thought to the fact that once he'd done that he might turn on his creators…. If at the end of the First World War we had done what we promised the Arabs, which was to let them be free and have their own governments, and kept out of Arab affairs, and just bought their oil, rather than feeling we had to control the flow of oil, I suspect this wouldn't have arisen….A lot of young people see the double standards, they see what happens in Guantanamo Bay, and they just think that there isn't a just foreign policy.” The difference here could not be greater. Giuliani follows the same line of reasoning as the Bush administration. For them terrorism is about people who hate freedom. It’s about evildoers. It’s about the good guys and the bad guys. And, naturally, we’re the good guys. That the United States might be sowing the harvest that they have reaped through their corrupt actions and policies abroad is unthinkable. That anyone could be justified in despising the United States is unthinkable. That there could be a historical context for this seething hatred is unthinkable. Our leaders are narcissists, spoiled children who think the world revolves completely around them, who see the world in stark black and white. This saddens me. I shouldn't have to worry about suicide bombers just because my president is a bully who does whatever the hell he wants.