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War and Terror: Advocating Mass Murder
Posted on Tuesday, January 16 @ 07:18:24 UTC
Topic: War Analysis
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 by Stephen Gowans, gowans.blogspot.com
January 11, 2007
Last September, Michael Coren, a newspaper columnist for the Toronto Sun, made the case for mass murder by calling upon the US to nuke Iran ("We should nuke Iran," The Toronto Sun, September 2, 2006).
No one can produce a shred of evidence to show Iran has built, is building, or wants to build nuclear weapons, but that doesn't deter the nuclear war-mongers.
Still, even if there were evidence Iran was secretly working on a bomb, would a nuclear strike be justified? If Israel, India, Pakistan – to say nothing of the US, Russia, Britain, France and China – can have nukes, why not Iran?
According to The New York Times (January 7, 2007), the United States is planning to spend a king's ransom to replace the warheads in its vast arsenal of nuclear WMD, despite a study that says the country's existing warheads can be expected to work reliably for a century or more.
The effort "to replace the nation's existing arsenal of aging warheads" has an "overall bill estimated at more than $100 billion."
Ever since the Great Depression a mountain of surplus capital has had to be plowed into military spending to help keep the US economy afloat.
That's probably why when the "main justification for the program vanished in November when a secretive federal panel known as Jason found that… many nuclear warheads aged far better than expected, with some able to work reliably for a century or more" Washington decided to go ahead with the replacement project anyway.
The Bush administration simply invented new reasons to justify the Brobdingnagian expenditure, an echo of its past practice of inventing new reasons to launch a land invasion of Iraq just as soon as the old reasons were refuted as nonsense.
Russia and China are also said to be working on new warheads to replace their existing arsenals.
Clearly, none of the big powers is planning on disarming, even gradually, although they're obligated to under the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, which India, Pakistan and Israel, unlike Iran, refuse to sign onto.
Coren hasn't paid a penalty for advocating mass murder. Instead, he continues unhindered in his mission to poison public opinion, secure in the conviction that respect for press freedoms and the voicing of opinions that mesh nicely with the current zeitgeist of overt US military imperialism will reap the reward of approbation in high places.
Had he advocated the bombing of the US, matters would have been very different. Consider the case of Umran Javed, "a British Muslim who led a crowd in chants of ‘Bomb, bomb Denmark, bomb, bomb USA'" after the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published cartoons offensive to Muslims. Presumably, the chant "Bomb, bomb" alluded to small-scale terrorist bombings, which, while capable of producing considerable carnage, would not be as nearly devastating as nuclear strikes. Yet for the crime of advocating a nuclear strike on Iran in a newspaper with a circulation of tens of thousands, Coren was found guilty of nothing. Umran Jayed, on the other hand, is paying a heavy price. For the crime of advocating the bombing of Denmark and the US at a rally of a few hundred people, Jayed was found guilty by a British court of incitement to murder (Los Angeles Times, January 6, 2007.)
Reprinted from:
http://gowans.blogspot.com/2007/01/advocating-mass-murder.html
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