Just Saying | Terror alert: Hongkongers are no longer safe, thanks to America and its allies
Yonden Lhatoo warns that innocent Hongkongers are starting to pay in blood for the distant follies of Western governments in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and elsewhere
What goes around, comes around. This adage is the simple answer to the bewildered “why?” that I hear people asking all the time when they talk about the recent wave of terrorist attacks in Europe.
What we are seeing is the bloody blowback from decades of Western powers’ disastrous policies of intervention in the Middle East.
In a sense, terror has come home to roost. For decades, the US and its Western allies have bombed and bullied the Middle East without considering the long-term consequences of destabilising or destroying entire nations.
The last substantial count by a group of major human rights organisations put the total body tally from the war zones of Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan during 12 years of America’s so-called “war on terror” at about 1.3 million. That was a conservative estimate – the actual death toll could be more than two million.
Think about it. You can’t kill or directly cause the deaths of two million people and expect no karmic retribution. The renowned American intellectual and apostle of conscientious dissent, Noam Chomsky, summed it up perfectly: “Everyone’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s a really easy way: stop participating in it.”
