Friday 19 October 2007

This is what terrorism is

I'd like people, especially the mad people at IMC (1), to think about what happened in Pakistan today (2), when people who might call themselves freedom fighters or insurgents or whatever murdered at least 130 people in a failed attempt to assassinate Benazir Bhutto.

There is a lot of talk about police oppression, even - heaven help us all - a wave of "Masonic/Illuminati suppression of the native populations of the world" (3). But though paranoia is almost papable, it is only directed outwards, away from the network of activists and radicals.

But if the police and the government are agents of an secret international capitalist conspiracy, is it so far fetched to suggest a few Seperatist radicals might have secrets of their own? How can the naive but genuine people currently calling for the release of the arrestedf radicals be so certain that maybe the so-called activists were not entirely honest about their goals and plans? People who Mohammed Sidque Khan didn't think he was a radical, until he blew himself up on the London Underground. How many suicide bombers in Palestine didn't appear anything out of the ordinary, until too late? On a more mundane level, how many people are betrayed romantically, financially or in other ways, by people they trust unthinkingly?

If (and it is a big if, I admit) the claims made about Tame Iti and his band of seperatist dead-enders are true, at least as much as they were preparing to use violence against the people of New Zealand, then the difference between them and the people behind the mass murder in Pakistan, or whoever dropped Pam AM Flight 103 on Lockerbie in 1988, diminishes to the width of a cigarette paper. There is nothing brave or noble about planting bombs or shooting people, and it is especially contemptible if it is in the name of racial seperatism.

1 - And they really are mad: http://indymedia.org.nz/feature/display/71721/index.php
2 - "Attack on Bhutto convoy kills 130 ," unattributed BBC story, 19th of October, 2007. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/7051804.stm)
3 - I swear I am not making it up. It is one of the comments on IMC. Follow the link above.

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