racism and sanctions
from vietnam to iraq [excerpt]
Sharon Black Ceci
*****
The U.S. government is the only one to ever use nuclear bombs—on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Aren’t the sanctions themselves a weapon of mass destruction? Over 1.5 million people—one out of every twenty-two Iraqis—have perished slowly and insidiously. The Washington metro area numbers 1.5 million people. It’s the equivalent of wiping that entire population off the map.
The truth has been manipulated and obscured by a bought and paid for press—a press that is big business itself—and racism is the biggest weapon in pulling the wool over our eyes. Just before my meeting in D.C., James Byrd, an African American man from Jasper, Texas, was abducted and viciously murdered by white supremacists. It was not an isolated incident. We live in a society riddled with racism. Because racism is so pervasive, the people of the Middle East can be portrayed in the media here as less than human, thus allowing the crime of sanctions to continue. Arabs and other peoples in the region are presented as bomb-throwing fanatics without human qualities.
But when you stand on the other side of the globe, you begin to cast off some of the distortions so common in this country. You meet workers and poor people in Iraq and Jordan who have many of the same aspirations and hopes we all have.
excerpt from CHALLENGE TO GENOCIDE
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