Political Violence

New York’s mayor Rudolf Giuliani, former secretary of homeland security Tom Ridge, former White House homeland security adviser Frances Townsend and former attorney general Michael Mukasey Traveled to Paris to endorse the Mojahedin-e-Khalgh (MKO Peoples’ Mujahideen), an organization characterized as a Terrorist group by the US State Department. MKO has attacked US military and diplomatic personnel during the Shah era, and has been described by former members as a cult. Ideologically, the MKO started out as a Marxist group with an Islamic cover flavor to address the Iranian society,(former regime of Shah called them Islamic Marxists and after the revolution they were seen as Marxists selling their world viewing in the form of Islamic pills) but the neocons who have taken up its cause, had them moved to the other end of the political spectrum, they (MKO) offered itself up to the US government in much the same way as Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress (INC) did. MKO’s American supporters want to use it as a propaganda and battering tool against Iran. But, this exiled group of 3000 bitter old men and women in their late fifties and early sixties, have even less credibility than the Chalabi organization did: what support the MKO might have had before the Iranian revolution inside Iran, evaporated when they used Bombs to forward their causes and their leaders fled dressed as women, and the rest of them left Iran and moved to Iraq and joined Saddam Hussein of Iraq in attacking Iran. Iraq succored and armed them. MKO fought in the Iran-Iraq war – on the Iraqi side. This level of betrayal ,no matter from what side in history is not only a disgrace but a reason to commit suicide to clear ones name, but that hasn’t stopped American neocons from declaring: “ For your organization to be described a terrorist organization is just really a disgrace,” bloviated Giuliani at the Paris confab – although the families of those Americans murdered in cold blood by MKO not to mention the thousands of of Iranian families might disagree. That a former US Attorney General would endorse a group with “American” blood on its hands is what ‘s really disgraceful, but Mukasey shamelessly declared that the US ought to provide “all possible technical and covert support to those fighting to end oppression in Iran,” i.e. put the MKO on the CIA payroll. Townsend, too, made no bones about her support for the group and its terroristic mission: “If the United States truly wants to put pressure on the Iranian regime, it takes more than talk and it takes more than sanctions,” she said that to the assembled terrorists.

If terrorists can be utilized as an instrument of US foreign policy, then they become “freedom-fighters,” as Ronald Reagan dubbed the Afghan forebears of the Taliban during the 1980s, when they were fighting the Soviets with American help. This attitude is shared by the Obama administration, which has not only stood by while prominent Americans have rallied to MKO’s cause, but has also failed to distance Washington from other US-linked groups engaged in terrorist activities against Iran, such as Jundollah, a Wahabi extremist sect carrying out attacks in Iranian Baluchistan.

It must be mentioned, that there appears to be two sets of laws in latter-day America: one set for the powerful, and another for the powerless. Political violence is something that the US empire encourages when it is in its interests to do so, and condemns when its interests are threatened by unauthorized free-lancers. In every case, todays rulers seek to use this kind of violence as their instrument. One tends to want to ignore certain everyday facts of the Middle east, for instance, when nuclear scientists in Iran are blown away by obscure terrorists with guidance technologies only available to three countries in the world, and nobody even as much as bothers to condemn it in the West to at least pretend civility . When we keep being confronted by such operating principles as solutions, then it would not take long and it would come back and haunt those tolerating such political violence right where it was not even remotely suspected, namely the attempted assassination of the US Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.
The who did this and why it was done, the tea party and what Sarah Palin did or did not say prior or after the shooting is not only irrelevant, but diverts the attention from where I think it should be on, namely political violence has come to the US, the ease with which political violence is committed and selectively tolerate is the very reason to why such an act did again happen in the USA after such a long time. It has not gone good in the past and it shall not go good in the future, I am afraid the psychopathology of this modus operandi can only go in one direction.

The solution however, is to pacify the American politics and that is the sole responsibility of the American nation. But the world has an important duty too, the duty to pressure the USA into civility by ignoring their pleas for enforcing any embargoes on Iran or any other unfair and one sided policies for that matter, thus forcing the USA to find other ways to promote its agenda than assassinating, boycotting, starving, kidnapping, bombing and destroying its political opponents.