The tip of the iceberg

The tip of the iceberg
by Gabriele Zamparini

"All science requires mathematics. The knowledge of mathematical things is almost innate in us. . . . This is the easiest of sciences, a fact which is obvious in that no one's brain rejects it; for laymen and people who are utterly illiterate know how to count and reckon." - Roger Bacon (c. 1214-c. 1294), English philosopher, scientist. Opus Maius, pt. 4, ch. 1 (1267)

Part One - The two important questions Znet’s Michael Albert refuses to respond

Once again, and in spite of all my numerous, kind invitations to keep this debate public, ZNet’s co-founder and co-editor Michael Albert chose to reply to my piece, Alice in Wonderland – ZNet and the art of numbers, privately and again kept defending ZNet’s political-editorial line while refusing to answer my two simple questions.

I have presented what I believe are two very serious cases of propaganda. They are not about opinions or little importance issues. These two cases are about the most objective facts human beings can understand: numbers.

But Albert seems not to get the difference between numbers and opinions and in his view a debate on these issues is just “silliness”, “desire to disagree, and nothing more”, therefore he invites me to “step back”, whatever that means.

Michael Albert is a well-known and well-respected activist and intellectual with much power within the alternative, leftist scene. I am nobody. Is that enough for him to be right no matter what and treat others with much arrogance and contempt? With the due respect for Albert and his history, that's not enough for me to “step back”.

Albert writes me that he doesn’t “want to criticize [me] publicly” and that this “controversy… is only in [my] mind”. From the many comments I got both in private and in public, it seems more a devastating pandemic.

Once again, I encourage Michael Albert to publicly criticize me, my silliness and my mind and in doing so, I invite him once more to answer the following two questions, which is all I wanted from the beginning. In extreme synthesis and having in mind my previous articles available on this blog:

1) Since the total lack of IBC’s scientific credibility and IBC’s frenetic activism in discrediting the Lancet’s, why does ZNet keep considering IBC, its figures and the whole operation a credible humanitarian project? Why couldn’t ZNet even publish a decent, fair correction instead of that insulting farce that once again has hidden the real extent of the horror inflicted upon the Iraqi people?

2) Since the total lack of credible sources in ZNet’s frequent contributor Munir Chalabi’s article, Political Observations on Sectarianism in Iraq, published originally on ZNet on 24 January 2007, why don’t both Chalabi and ZNet provide some reliable sources for those Chalabi’s number claims that, at the present, appear to be just sectarian propaganda?

Part Two - Meanwhile in the New Iraq...

While ZNet’s frequent contributor Munir Chalabi was giving those numbers without any serious, reliable source, and so helping and justifying that very same propaganda that permitted the war of aggression against a defenseless country, and while he was making parallels between Hitler’s Germany and Saddam’s Iraq, portraying the Baathists as the incarnation of Evil, those Baathists, Sunni and Shia alike, Muslim and Christian alike, were hunt, tortured and killed by the US Occupation, its puppet government of sectarian warlords taking orders from their Iranian masters, the sectarian pro-Iranian militias, especially the Badr Brigades and the Mahdi Army, and yes, with the help of Iran as well.

This Baathist-hunt in occupied Iraq has been part of a ferocious ethnic cleansing against Sunni, and a vicious, systematic mass murder campaign against nationalists, the Iraqi resistance and its sympathizers (or those perceived as such), Palestinians (while IRAN claims to be seriously concerned for the faith of the Palestinian People, the backed Iranian militias operating in Iraq have been hunting and killing the Palestinians of Iraq. Read also here), against gay… and whoever doesn’t conform to the “New Iraq”.

Just a few weeks before the Chalabi’s article appeared on ZNet, one could read “90% of Iraqis feel the situation in the country was better under Saddam Hussein”. And we shall not forget that those 90% of Iraqis were using as a comparison a country already devastated by the criminal first Gulf War, a 13 year long genocidal embargo and the longest aerial bombardment since WWII. The fair comparison of course should be between today’s New Iraq and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1990.

Part Three – Selling the New Iraq to the Western progressive public opinion

In these four years, many alternative media, anti-war activists and organizations, influential leftist intellectuals and Orientalism experts have been siding with that sectarian faction put in power by the Occupation and supported by Iran, helping to sell to the Western progressive public opinion the “New Iraq” and its so-called political process, that sectarian Trojan horse used by the Anglo-America-Iranian occupation to transform Iraq into a wilderness.

The disgracefully opportunistic United for Peace and Justice got to the point to welcome criminal Puppet Maliki, the head of a sectarian, death squad government of traitors, war lords and psychopaths.

Much of the so-called “anti-war” movement and many among its intellectuals had been discrediting the Iraqi resistance to the US occupation long before Phyllis Bennis came out with that Orwellian masterpiece of racism, arrogance and ignorance, helping to dehumanize and demonize the enemy and making it a fair target.

But of course, if one supports the so-called “political process” and the criminal puppets of the so-called “Iraqi government”, it becomes then impossible “making sympathy with resistance fighters a demand of our movement”, as Bennis et al. know perfectly well.

And while the Iraqi fighting in their own country against the vicious violence of the Anglo-American occupation are depicted as terrorists by opportunists who use the words “peace and justice” to have a career in the anti-war business, the mamma mia anti-war movement never stopped praising, justifying, protecting, excusing the mass rapists, mass torturers, mass murderers – in other words, our boys and girls in uniform.

While hiding and ignoring facts, reports and the many requests for help coming from inside Iraq, too many subjects have been spreading sectarian propaganda that helped to reduce Iraq in the state it is today. Too many have been in the forefront in supporting the infamous "political process", its criminal puppets and psychopaths while ignoring or downplaying the role that those puppets and psychopaths were having in the ethnic cleansing and sectarian mass murder campaigns.

Part four – Iraq for dummies

Just a few more words on that so-called "political process". Not only were those celebrated “free elections” - sold as a milestone on the road of the Western way of freedom and democracy - an obscene farce in a country occupied by foreign powers and whose population has been terrified by foreign troops and sectarian militias. Those were not even political elections but an extraordinary and very successful mean to generate sectarian and ethnic divisions by stressing sectarian and ethnic lines and make them the bases for the “New Iraq”. The results followed consequently.

If you have some trouble to figure out what really happened in Iraq with that “political process”, just imagine China invading and occupying the USA with the help of North Korea. After bombing and destroying the US and its infrastructures from New York to Los Angeles and making millions of deaths, the Chinese and North Korean Occupation forced the Americans to vote on the following "political" lines: Protestants, Catholics and African-Americans.

Meanwhile powerful sectarian armies led by religious figures, the K.K.K. and some other white supremacist militias take care of the American security together with the Chinese and North Korean armies.

Meanwhile, back in China and North Korea, the anti-war movement supports that political process, is silent on – when not clapping to – the lynching of the legitimate US President and the US government and welcome the new puppet American President installed by China.

Meanwhile those Americans fighting the Chineese and North Korean occupation of their own country without the help of anybody - because obviously the abominable UN had already recognized the new US puppet government installed by China and North Korea - those Americans are imprisoned in concentration camps, tortured, raped, sodomised (even American children) and accused to be terrorists by China, North Korea, their mainstream media and much part of the Chinese and North Korean anti-war movement.

[My apologies to the Peoples and the Governments of China and North Korea]

Conclusions

Iraq has become a complicated puzzle whose many, bloody pieces are all linked together. Those numbers at the center of my two simple questions to ZNet and Michael Albert are just the tip of the iceberg. The whole story is hidden under an ocean of lies and propaganda.

Once again, people are entitled to their own opinions but not their own facts. I look forward to receiving precise answers to those two precise questions. Iraq is no more, the winners are engaged in the usual business of re-writing history but thank God numbers are still numbers.


References

Dissent this! - Part 1: ZNet between numbers and parallels, Gabriele Zamparini, The Cat’s Blog, 30 January 2007

Once upon a time in Iraq… A Nobel Peace Prize for the Anglo-American Peacekeepers?, Gabriele Zamparini, The Cat’s Blog, 17 July 2007

Once upon a time in Iraq… Money makes the world go around, Gabriele Zamparini, The Cat’s Blog, 23 July 2007

The Guardian vs. ZNet – a case study for Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, Gabriele Zamparini, The Cat’s Blog, 14 August 2007

Alice in Wonderland – ZNet and the art of numbers, Gabriele Zamparini, The Cat’s Blog, 20 August 2007