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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: rich4eagle who wrote (189358)	10/4/2001 10:12:28 PM
From: gao seng	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 769670

This is a condensed version of Sunera Thobani [aka rich4eachle]'s speech to the Women's Resistance Conference in Ottawa on Monday. - - - There will be no emancipation for women anywhere on this planet until the Western domination of this planet is ended. And more than ever, more than ever, we need to heed those words. Especially as all of us are being herded into the possibility of a massive war at the behest of the United States. We need to hear those words even more clearly today. We have seen and all of us have felt the traumatic pain of watching those attacks and trying to grasp the facts of the numbers of peoples who died. We feel the pain of that every day we have been watching it on television. But do we feel any pain for the victims of U.S. aggression? Two-hundred thousand people killed only in the initial war on Iraq. That bombing of Iraq has continued for 10 years now. Do we feel the pain of all the children in Iraq who are dying from the sanctions that were imposed by the United States? Do we feel that pain on an everyday level? Share it with our families and our communities and talk about it on every platform that is available to us? Do we feel the pain of Palestinians who now for 50 years have been living in refugee camps? This new war against terrorism that's being launched, it's very old. And it's a very old fight of the West against the rest. Consider the language which is being used to mobilize people: calling the perpetrators evil doers, irrational, calling them the forces of darkness, uncivilized, intent on destroying civilization, intent on destroying democracy. They hate freedoms, we are told. Every person of colour, and I would want to say also, every aboriginal person, will recognize that language. It was used to justify our colonialization by Europe. We were colonized in the name of the West bringing civilization, democracy, freedom to us. All of us recognize who is being talked about when that language is being used. The terms crusade, infinite justice, cowboy imagery of Dead or Alive posters. We all know what they mean. People in the West also recognize who this fight is against. Cries heard all over the Western world: We're all Americans now. People who are saying that recognize who this fight is against. People who are attacking Muslims or any person of colour who looks like they could be from the Middle East, without distinguishing, recognizes who this fight is against. These are not just slips of the tongue that Bush quickly tries to reject. They reveal a thinking, a mindset. And it's horrific to think that the fate of the world hangs on the plans of people like that. This will be a big mistake for us, if we just accept that these are just slips of the tongue. They are not. They reveal the thinking, and the thinking is based on dominating the rest of the world in the name of bringing freedom and civilization to it. Reject this kind of jingoistic militarism and recognize that as the most heinous form of patriarchal racist violence that we're seeing on the globe today. The women's movement has to stand up to this. There is no option for us. We have to fight back against this militarization. We have to break the support that is being built in our countries for this kind of attack. The lesson we have learned and the lesson that our politicians should have learned is that you cannot slaughter the people into submission. For 500 years they have tried that strategy. The West for 500 years has believed that it can slaughter people into submission and it has not been able to do so. And it will not be able to do so this time, either.