Responding to Mr. Barbo’s article “Evil”: NAIVE [Archives:2001/43/Focus]
Amned Albageeri
I have had the opportunity to go through Mr. Rod Barbo’s letter titled “Evil” in October 15th issue of the Yemen Times. His words gave me an impression of an honest person who spoke from his heart, but with naivete.
Mr. Barbo raised several issues, which I would like to address here as honestly as he did:
1- He wrote: there was no open condemnation of hijackings, bombings or calls for jihad.
Our Arab and Muslim leaders being hypocrites, I would like to clarify here that we have no reason to condemn these because they are according to our beliefs, i.e. legitimate actions being counterattacks against a vicious aggressor nation that has waged war against Arabs for a long time; an enemy which took advantage of the Arabs’ economic and military weakness, which was due to the poverty, ignorance and backwardness that were imposed on the Arabs by the enemy’s imperialist policies.
-The support of the United States and its allies for the Iraqi war against Iran. The U.S. did not stop the Iraqi aggressor, which had claimed more than 4 million Irani and Iraqi lives.
-The ten year long blockade against Iraq has claimed the lives of more than 1 million Iraqi children, let alone the elderly and the victims of the continuous bombing by Anglo-American war planes. Israel has committed dozens of massacres against the Palestinian civilians since 1948, and it occupied Arab territories by military aggression in 1976. During that war it killed more than fifty thousand prisoners of war in Sinai. It occupied Lebanon in 1982, and still it kills the Palestinians, demolishes their houses, assassinates their leaders, chops off their fruit trees scrapping, takes away the soil over their agricultural lands,, demolishes and confiscates their mosques, and tortures those it abducts as prisoners daily. All these evils were supported, rewarded, and protected by the US and its western allies. We have never heard any condemnation from you for all these atrocities. Your country was always blaming the victims. If we stacked the bodies of the United States’ and its western and Jew allies’ victims one over the other it would reach to the moon.
If each victims body has a height of 30cm. the stack of a million Arab victims will have a height of one million meters. That equals the height of 2500 towers like the WTC, made of our flesh instead of steel and concrete.
2- Mr. Barbo wrote that Arabs are racists because they will never allow him to be a citizen, etc.
No sir, your so called western civilized countries occupied the Muslim Empire and divided it into 50 states. They brought us nationalism, which is against our Quranic teachings, and imposed it on us. Go back and read history and you will find that the Muslim land was always the refuge of every asylum seeker, especially the Jews who were constantly massacred by the Christian nations.
Nowadays, Israel denies the Arab Palestinians their rights in their homeland and provides Israeli citizenship based on religion, for Jews who go to Israel from around the world. Four million Palestinian refugees are being denied the right to return to their own homeland from which they were driven out by the Israeli Army in 1948, with the full consent and support of the US and its Western allies.
No sir, no nation has done this to a whole population except your nation, which committed genocide against the Native Americans. So both were rightly labeled as racists by 4000 NGOs from all over the world in Durban.
The Muslim and Arab people have reached a point where they cannot take it or tolerate any more. Every one of them, male or female, feels that death by bombs or even nuclear weapons is much better than living this miserable life which your country designed for us, and in which we have no hope for a decent life or education for our children – a life in which you rob us of our wealth and come back to us with wheat charity.
3- I really sympathize with Mr. Barbo for the unfair treatment that he is receiving from Yemenis here all the time, as he explained. But I want to explain that I am also ill-treated every day by my fellow Yemenis. That is what you should expect from poor, ignorant and illiterate people. Why are Yemenis so? It is again because of the US and its allies who exploited our national resources and caused us all the misery from which we are suffering. Back in the mid-seventies a barrel of Arab oil was sold for US$32 and a Chevrolet Caprice car was sold here for US$3500. Nowadays oil is sold at US$25, and the same car is priced at US$20,000. Can this simple example show you the robbery and the injustice, Mr. Barbo?
Furthermore, the US and its Western allies have always supported bad and corrupt Arab and Muslim regimes just because they are their puppets and help them in exploiting our national resources. The majority of the leftovers go into the accounts of corrupt officials in American and other Western banks under the pretext of bank account secrecy, which is lifted this days when the mujahideen’s accounts are concerned. So who are the hypocrites Mr. Barbo?
4- Our friend continues, “Let us openly call the attacks and their perpetrators what they are, an evil.”
No sir, we have been very patient; for 80 years we received daily the injustice imposed on us, the ill treatment, the killing, the torture, the ousting from our own lands and houses, the air raids and the robbery of our national wealth. We appealed to the United Nations, to the superpowers, and got nothing. The General Assembly passed 100 resolutions during the last 50 years calling for the implementation of UN Security Council resolution No. 193, which calls for the return of the Palestinian refugees to their houses and their lands, but in vain. So we, the Arabs and Muslims, feel that what happened to the US should have happened a long time ago and we neither feel guilty or ashamed. Rather, we are pleased.
As Dr. Abubaker Al-Saqqaf said long ago: “No one can live while defeated and consider himself a human being. And living with a divided conscience is a source of endless conflict with oneself and the other. All conflicts, wars and social earthquakes brew in the human brains before they happen. Explodes in the form of blood and insanity and the real cost of peace is by regaining self respect in front of the other.
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