THE MOST IMPORTANT BLOG ON THE INTERNET

Orwellian_Ghost

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Mon Jan-14-08 10:13 PM
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THE MOST IMPORTANT BLOG ON THE INTERNET

http://arabwomanblues.blogspot.com/">Layla Anwar

Indicting the Reader

By Garda Ghista

Her blogs are a blunt description of life in Baghdad in the time of war - a war of American imperialism in its endless quest for natural resources. But then again, this war is not limited to oil. War makes a handful of people extremely rich and renders millions destitute or dead. The rich elite are the scores of corporations and sub-contractors who receive lavish contracts from the U.S. government – companies like Halliburton, Blackwater, Monsanto, Citibank, Chase Morgan, AT&T and Bechtel - who have all gone to Iraq to make millions in the work of "reconstruction", that is, reconstructing everything the U.S. bombed to the ground. So this is an illegal war of aggression for the sake of plunder and profit. The Nuremberg Trials called such wars the "supreme international crime."

On July 5, 2007, Layla sends the readers "A Postcard from Iraq." It is the height of irony. Her words, while describing the tyranny and agony of war, are riddled with sarcasm. She outdoes the entire world in sarcasm to make her point, to get it into the heads of the readers what is happening in Iraq. First she reminds us of her two relatives, Kamal and Omar, who were kidnapped and imprisoned in "detention centers." Then she tells us about Salam, another relative, who was kidnapped and beaten to a pulp. And a few days before writing this entry, it happened to Raouf. Raouf is not his real name. But she gives him the name "Raouf" because in Arabic it means "kind spirited, gentle." She tells us that Raouf is a gentle soul who loves "poetry, arts, animals, the land… which he cultivated with great care and love." One day he leaves Baghdad to check on his small plot of land an hour's drive away in the country. He wants to check if his fruit trees, birds and chickens are all right. But, just a few hours after reaching there, men come and take him away. They keep him for three days and torture him non-stop. Layla writes, "They used iron rods, chains, rubber hoses, sticks… Sometimes the three pounded him in unison. Sometimes they would take turns. The only respite he had is when they stopped for 'prayers'!" Due perhaps to the constant phone contact between his torturers and Raouf's wife, they finally drop him on the road. They do not kill him. He walks for miles until he reaches home. Externally he lives. But internally he has died. Layla sends us all a "Postcard from Iraq" to tell us his story, to tell us the reality that is Iraq.

On August 7, 2007, Layla writes another blog entry called "Why is Half of Iraq in Absolute Poverty?" From the very beginning, she indicts the reader, that is, the American people. She says, "What does it say about you? What does it say about your countries? What does it say about your institutions? What does it say about your governments, your 'culture', your 'civilization', your history, your 'progress', your 'values', your concepts … ?" She just keeps asking the reader, why? The reader is caught. She says, if only 5 million of you had protested in front of the White House or 10 Downing Street, the war could have been stopped. The context, the raison d'etre for all her blogs, is the war, the horrors of war. The intended audience is not other Arabs. The intended audience is the perpetrators of war, that is, the Americans. It is either the men in blue suits who give the orders for soldiers to go to Iraq and rape, torture, sodomize and kill the simple civilians of Iraq, or the soldiers who carry out these crimes, or the entire nation of 301 million Americans, who by their silence are as guilty as the soldiers who slaughter, and as guilty as the men in blue suits and black hearts sitting in the White House, giving the orders to kill while having coffee and donuts. Saddam Hussein gave speeches, but they were to his own people and the people of neighboring countries. Layla Anwar takes on a far more difficult task, a far more hostile audience. She directs her blog at the enemy, the occupier, the torturer, the rapist, the destroyer of her motherland. The difference is that she is using the internet, which means her potential audience is the entire world. Second, her rhetoric remains uploaded. It is not a speech that is heard one evening on the news and then gone forever. Her blog entries are all there staring us in the face. Her unbounded rage, her seething and swearing, is right in our face whenever we visit her blog.

In each and every blog entry, Layla Anwar wants desperately for us, the reader, the American, and whoever else collaborates with us, to grasp the horror that is Iraq. We cannot grasp it from Fox News. Fox News will prefer to report on Paris Hilton's release from jail or Britney Spears' latest custody hearing, or worse yet, Barack and Hillary. We cannot grasp it from Senate hearings on C-span because it is unbearably intellectualized, complexitized, and justified, with terms like "collateral damage" not even mentioned or, if at all mentioned, never clearly defined as drill holes in the bodies of young men, burned up corpses of beautiful 14-year-old girls by US soldiers to destroy the evidence of rape, or sodomization of 12 year old boys by US soldiers in Abu Ghraib and twenty other prisons throughout Iraq. We never hear about those twenty other prisons, do we. In fact, today there is complete silence of goings on in Abu Ghraib. Some say that nothing has changed; the torture, the rapes, the sodomizing continue. The only difference today is that no cameras are allowed. It is a policy of "hide the evidence of U.S. war crimes." So with no cameras, no pictures, complete censorship of the reality of war, and instead constant TV coverage of American Idol (70 million Americans watched the finals in 2007), how then will the American people grasp the utter brutality of war, particularly when the present generation never went through a war and their great great grandfathers are not here to tell them the horrors that took place in the American Civil War? The final proof of that brutality is 120 suicides per week by returning veterans. They cannot cope with the guilt.

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19072.htm