By Latheef Farook

Ignorance of international affairs or indifference towards Island’s Muslims sentiments?

A Daily Mirror report on 12 August 2015 stated that former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his family arrived in Sri Lanka previous day on a two week holiday on an invitation by Foreign Minister Mangala Samarwaeera.

Allowing war criminal Tony Blair to step in to the soil of Sri Lanka, dismissing the sentiments of the island’s Muslim community and all other right thinking people, is not only shocking and insulting but disgraceful.

The question is whether this is due to ignorance on international affairs or indifference towards sentiments of Muslims here and abroad.

This demonstrates Foreign Minister Samaraweera has opted to be with the neo con United States led European war mongers who, implementing the Zionist Jewish agenda, has turned the Muslim Middle East into a killing field and destroyed Muslim societies.

Minister Samaraweera’s and his UNP leadership’s special love for Israel, United states, UK and European war mongers is not unknown to people here. However what one cannot understand  is the wisdom behind inviting a war criminal, despised by even the British public, on a government invitation almost a week before the parliamentary  elections.

The question is that if this is how Muslim sentiments were dismissed when they   plan to vote for UNP one could imagine what is in store for them after the elections.

Though mainstream media played down the invitation, Muslims take serious note of this   in view of this especially ever increasing Israeli presence, with the full support of   the previous and present governments, with its global agenda to destroy Muslim societies worldwide.

Mainstream Sri Lankan media depends on the   pro Jewish western media which remains integral part of US led western war machine for its international coverage.

Thus most people in the island perhaps may be not aware of the magnitude of the barbarity perpetrated on Iraq and its innocent people by US led war mongers.

Thus this article for those interested.

Iraq is an ancient country   where many great ancient civilisations such as Mesopotamia, Sumer, Akkad, Mesopotamian, Babylonian and Assyria flourished between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers for more than 7,000 years.

Today’s Iraqi is the creation of western colonial powers in the aftermath of World War 1. 

In the 1960s Iraqi President Hassan Al Bakr nationalized the country’s oil resources plundered by Western oil companies. However United States recruited Saddam Hussein to assassinate President Bakr and install him as Iraq’s   dictator.  With oil wealth Iraq was turned into an almost developed country where people enjoyed   best of comforts.

In the early 1980s Saddam Hussein was manipulated by US,UK,Europe,Israel ,Saudi Arabia and the other Guff countries to declare war on Iran which, under  the new revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini, was trying to export Islam to the Gulf.

The result was the eight year Iraq- Iran war destroying both countries, killing almost a million Muslims to the benefit of Israel and the weapons manufacturers in US, UK and Europe.

Iraq emerged victorious in the war alarming Israel and Saudi Arabia which were all out to destroy Iraq’s battle hardened war machine.

US President George Bush Sr tricked Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait and triggered the Gulf war in 1990. Later under   the guise of liberating Kuwait   George Bush Sr, unleashed a ferocious bombing campaigns in known history and pushed Iraq to its pre-historic age.

Bush used cluster bombs to rip bodies apart, napalm and white phosphorous to cling and burn skin and small nuclear bomb type fuel air explosives to cause other damage.  The total amount of bombs dropped on Iraq was far more than the bombs dropped by the allies in the entire World War II. The military campaign, financed by the Gulf States led by Saudi Arabia, incinerated around 130,000 Iraqi civilians. The western weapons industry flourished as they sold a staggering $ 157 billion worth of armaments.

Battered by aerial bombardments and crippled by UN sanctions that killed more than 500,000 children, Iraq was virtually an occupied country. Since 1991 Iraqis were subjected to untold misery, hardships, and more than one-third of the population were exposed to malnutrition, epidemics, miscarriages and declining life expectancy.

Once again implementing the Zionist design to destroy Iraq George Bush Jr and Tony Blair unlashed a fierce media campaign, selling lies and deception, to indiscriminately bomb Iraqi cities in 2003 with unprecedented intensity.  Day in and day out the skies over Iraq rained bombs which shook the earth and relegated once thriving cities into bloody human abattoirs.  Child survivors, many of them maimed for life,   remain haunted by the nightmare of the gruesome catastrophe. Screaming in fear and panic, they simply could not comprehend why they were being subjected to such horror and heartlessness.

Then there emerged shocking pictures of American troops’ gang-raping Iraqi women.  These hapless women were forcibly dragged out of their homes, screaming in terror, stripped naked and gang-raped by the very people who had ostensibly been there to protect them. Nonetheless, such criminal depravity had been committed by so-called civilised uniformed personnel of Bush and Blair representing the most powerful military nation on earth.

  

Among the victims, were ordinary housewives, mothers and daughters – all brought up in a decently conservative society and whose religious traditions have always valued feminine purity as a prerequisite for a happily wedded life? Did Bush and Blair who perpetrated these appalling crimes ever stop to wonder that their victims were the same kind of women as their mothers and sisters at home?

Hundreds of thousands of innocent men and women were arbitrarily arrested and   subjected to the most sadistic and savage forms of torture, which brought swift condemnation from all over the world.

The invading forces used the most vicious interrogation techniques including hooding, stripping detainees naked, subjecting them to extremes of heat, cold, noise and light, and depriving them of sleep – in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. This heartless routine that included infliction of pain, discomfort and humiliation has expanded in all too many cases into vicious beatings, sexual degradation, sodomy, electrocution, near drowning, and near asphyxiation. Several detainees had died under questionable circumstances while in incarceration.

Obviously, these bestial crimes were kept under wraps until Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published a series of exposé articles illustrated by damning photos of the torture by US military police of prisoners in the Iraqi prison of Abu Ghraib near Baghdad.

The photographs included images of a hooded prisoner with wires fixed to his body, nude inmates piled in a human pyramid – a lewd type of Karma Sutra circus where the performers were forced into simulating mass sexual techniques. The harrowing pictures also showed a dog savagely attacking a prisoner and other inmates being forced to masturbate or simulate sex with each other.

The destruction of Iraq had been so meticulously planned, embracing every aspect that one of their main aims was to physically eliminate academics, professionals and other intellectuals from the society for generations to come. There were reports that Israel’s secret service Mossad arrived with a list of names and addresses of professionals such as university lecturers, professors, scientists, doctors, lawyers, engineers and other intellectuals, and went from house to house, killing them in their sleep.

According to many latest reports, 2,000 doctors, killed, and 5,500 academics and intellectuals assassinated or imprisoned.

In many cases, they used sharp weapons to cut the throats of husband in the presence of wives who were killed later. American forces looted the museums and robbed very valuable historic artefacts. .They armed Shiites and Sunnis and provoked civil war.

Besides massacring innocent civilians, the US troops mercilessly slaughtered Iraqi soldiers who had surrendered,   but unfortunately, for the world, no one will know exactly how many Iraqis perished in this carnage as it happened during the 1991 Kuwaiti crisis and in the Bush war against Muslim Afghanistan.

They even burnt birth, marriage, death, land, company, industrial and vehicle registration offices and all other such places to create chaos.

In Fallujah, a city of 300,000 people, they dropped even cluster bombs and used phosphorous weapons that caused severe burns in the military’s most intense urban fighting since the days of Vietnam. Within ten days Fallujah has been laid waste, a hell on earth of shattered bodies and destroyed buildings while the city entered history as the place where US imperialism carried out a crime of immense proportions.

The head of Turkey’s Parliamentary Human Rights Committee said this genocide surpassed those of Pharaoh, Hitler and Mussolini.

The carnage was very well planned and timed. Bush and his neo con team of war mongers did not want the world to know about their murderous holocaust in Fallujah.

Later reports emerged of the US military using banned napalm, poison gas and other outlawed weapons to kill innocent civilians. Hundreds of melted” bodies proved that the napalm gas had been used. Residents said invading troops used everything – tanks, artillery, infantry, poisonous gas and other non-conventional weapons to raze Fallujah to the ground. They used these weird bombs that put up smoke like a mushroom cloud. Then small pieces fell from the air with long tails of smoke behind them. Pieces of these bombs exploded into large fires that burnt the skin even when water was thrown on the burns. Phosphorous weapons as well as napalm are known to cause such effects and people suffered so much from these.

There has been nothing like the attack on Fallujah since the Nazi invasion and occupation of much of the European continent—the shelling and bombing of Warsaw in September 1939 and the terror bombing of Rotterdam in May 1940. All the talk about precision bombing in Iraq is dust thrown in the public’s eyes.

Twelve years   later today Bush and Blair   have killed almost two million Iraqi men, women, children and the aged,   driven almost five million Iraqis into refugee camps in neighbouring countries, four million Iraqis are refugees in their own country while more than half the population suffer from starvation.

Iraq today is a country of two million widows and five million orphans many of whom are homeless .Almost a third of Iraq’s children suffer from malnutrition. Some 70 per cent of Iraqi girls no longer go to school. Medical services, once the best in the region, have totally collapsed: 75 per cent of medical staff has left their jobs, half of them have fled the country, and after six years of reconstruction” health services in Iraq still do not meet minimum standards.

Iraq’s infrastructure is in ruins. There is lawlessness everywhere with sectarian thugs and gangs   virtually running the show, driving terror among people already subjected to unbearable sufferings.

Today the entire Iraqi population remains traumatised and these are the obscene images of crimes that cry out to the Heavens for vengeance.

Describing the barbarity in Iraq British Nobel laureate Playwright Harold Pinter had this to say;

THE invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate the American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading – as a last resort – all other justifications having failed to justify themselves – as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people.

We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it ‘bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East’. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice.

These are the crime records of Bush and Blair.

And our Foreign Minister Samaraweera invites Tony Blair, one of the two main architects of this genocide and destruction,   on a two week holiday.

This is the lowest depth to which Sri Lanka, once a proud and inspiring third world country loved by the entire Arab world with great affection, has descended to. Ends