911 REMEMBERED

From: "Noelle Hanrahan" prisonradio@hotmail.com . This was written to be read at Michael Franti's Power to the Peaceful Demonstration 9/7/02 in San Francisco and Mumia recorded it on 8/31/02

commentary by Mumia Abu-Jamal

Forever in the American mind, 9-11 will be a day of shock, of disbelief, of sorrow and of loss. Like a flash photo image superimposed on the retina, the specter of planes circling like metal vultures, the twin towers of mid-town Manhattan, repeats itself in the mind's eye, revealing itself over and over again. What American political, media and economic elites have done with 9-11, however, should be cause for concern to all of us. For the shock and sorrow and yes, the rage borne from the flames of 9-11, have been used by these elites to reward the very culprits who brought 9-11 into being. Those elites have bequeathed billions if not trillions more to the military industrial complex that armed, trained and justified the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan in the first place. The late Pakistani scholar Eqbal Ahmad in his last book "Terrorism: Theirs and Ours" points out that the entire Muslim world was mobilized to fight the "evil empire," as Reagan called the former Soviet Union. Ahmad wrote:

I’ve seen planeloads of them arriving from Algeria, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, even from Palestine where at that time Israel was supporting Hamas against Alshata(sp), Yassar Arafat’s faction of the PLO. These people were brought in, given an ideology and told that armed struggle is virtuous, when the whole notion of Jihad as an international Pan-Islamic terrorist movement was born. The U.S. has spent billions in producing the Bin Ladens of our time. In 1986 I visited the camp they hit in Zahowar Afghanistan. It was a CIA sponsored camp, Ahmad writes.

There, in the poverty stricken dusty mountains of Afghanistan, the beginnings of 9-11 were born. What we saw in the second week of September 2001 was merely what the late Malcolm X called the "chickens coming home to roost." Deep down, in our hearts, away from the polls, away from the politicians, we know this. We really do. Then along come the oil barons, the Rumsfelds, Cheneys and the boy King, Bush. "Bomb Iraq", they say.

Americans are looking at a new colonialism that will leave a taste as foul in their mouth as the last one. Vicious, rapacious greed priming the pump of war ~ a war that will enrich the few by raising oil prices, impoverish the many and sow the seeds of Islamic and Arab hatred that will last until the next century. If you’re against the empire of war, hatred, greed and new colonialism: Join us. We are growing. I thank you all.

Ona Move,
Long Live John Africa
Free the MOVE 9
Free the Angola 3
To Freedom for us all
This is Mumia Abu-Jamal

© copyright 2002 by Mumia Abu-Jamal.
All rights reserved.
Reprinted by permission of the author.

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