BY SEAN HEALY
I knew that sooner or later a right-wing corporate media hack would twig to the "connection", but I thought it would be Paddy McGuinness; he's usually the conspiracy theorist.
But no. It was his loopy side-kick Miranda Devine, writing in the November 15 Sydney Morning Herald, who discovered the link: that the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington were on the same date, September 11, as the giant anti-globalisation protest, S11, which took on the World Economic Forum in Melbourne a year earlier.
She even noted that the November 12 crash of an American Airlines jet in a New York suburb happened during a summit of the World Trade Organisation — the very same organisation which the anti-globalisation movement mounted mass protests against in Seattle in November 1999.
Cue Twilight Zone theme music.
The connections are "probably" coincidences, Devine grudgingly conceded, before launching into a rant about all the other "disturbing similarities" between the global justice movement and Osama bin Laden's terrorists: "They have a shared aim, similar diffuse, global structure, similar methods and a shared vocabulary of extreme violence and holy war".
But wait, it gets better. Her evidence for these wild allegations? A single posting in an anti-corporate chat-room speculating on cooperation with Islamists, a laughably out-of-context quote from Naomi Klein, a single graffitto in Genoa ("Fly Osama Airlines") and a reference in Toni Negri's book Empire to fundamentalism's "post-modernism" — and the stunning revelation that the demonstrations against the US-led war in Afghanistan are being organised by "anti-globalisationists".
The accusations are, of course, absurd. There is no similarity between the global justice movement and bin Laden's group of religious fanatics.
"Similar aims"? Let's see: a world based on a radical, participatory democracy versus stoning women seen in public without a male relative or husband.
"Similar methods"? Yeah, sure: mass actions, sometimes involving non-violent civil disobedience, aimed at summits and targets of elite rule versus flying hundreds of passenger-hostages on commercial airliners into office buildings filled with civilian workers.
There is, however, more than a similarity, but a veritable identity, between bin Laden's terrorists and the rich and powerful elite the global justice movement opposes.
After all, who trained Osama bin Laden as a terrorist? Who, even today, uses violence against civilians to accomplish political goals (the standard definition of "terrorism") around the world? Not the global justice movement, that's for sure.
Devine is not the only one to have tried this comical attempt to tar the global justice movement with bin Laden's brush.
In his October 15 column for the British Observer, entitled "Trade Jihad", Gregory Palast catalogued other attempts to gain mileage from the September 11 tragedies: "Barely had the towers hit the ground when US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick proclaimed the way to defeat Osama bin Laden was to grant George W. Bush extraordinary 'fast-track' trade treaty negotiating authority. Ambassador bin Zoellick, speaking from what looked like a cave on Capitol Hill, surrounded by unidentified Republicans, said Americans had to choose: for free trade or for terrorism."
Zoellick was among the first to make the "connection" between terrorism and opposition to corporate globalisation, telling the Institute for International Economics on September 24: "Terrorists hate the ideas America has championed around the world. It is inevitable that people will wonder if there are intellectual connections with others who have turned to violence to attack international finance, globalization and the United States."
The link between al Qaeda and opponents of corporate globalisation came to him, he said, from New Republic — a magazine which Devine also rests heavily upon.
Notes Palast: "This is the same journal, by the way, whose featured columnist suggested, 'We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity'."
The purpose of these pitiful efforts, whether by Devine or more important people, is clear enough: to smear a movement which has massive popular sympathy, to deny it legitimacy, to scare people away from it.
One quote from Devine brings to mind the efforts of McCarthyite politicians during the Cold War: "Those well-meaning people who swell their numbers [at peace marches] should ensure they are not 'useful fools' for a more sinister cause."
But now, of course, unlike during the Cold War, the scare isn't about "Reds under the beds"; it's about "terrorists on the streets". Get ready for everyone who speaks up, from May Day marchers to sacked workers on a picket-line to mums and dads fighting to save a child-care centre from closure, to be accused of using "similar methods" to Osama bin Laden.
From Green Left Weekly, November 28, 2001.
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