Mick Hartley

Here, from the Syrian government daily Teshreen, is what they’re reading in Damascus nowadays:

“It is not our intention to list the numerous crimes [perpetrated by] the U.S., beginning with Japan and Latin America… and ending with Europe, Africa, and Asia… However, on the occasion of the anniversary of the massacre in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we must ask: Isn’t the government of the current U.S. president, George Bush, identical to that of Harry Truman?..

“Today’s Iraq is the Hiroshima of the Arab [world]; Afghanistan is the Hiroshima of Asia; the rest, the American gentleman already knows – he is using state-of-the-art inventions devised by the cruel human mind in order to sow death, without differentiating between men and women, young and old. The only thing that matters is: The slightest shadow of defeat must not touch that American ‘Yankee’ thirsting for blood and murder.

And again:

“If we add up the crimes perpetrated by Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, and Stalin, the toll of the victims they left behind will be lower than that of the successive American administrations, beginning with the Hiroshima [and Nagasaki] bombs and ending with the ongoing massacre in Iraq. If we consider the [total] number of victims of the successive American administrations – [victims] who live thousands of miles away from the U.S., [e.g.] in Japan, (North and South) Vietnam, Cambodia, Nicaragua, the Philippines, El Salvador, Panama, Lebanon, Iraq, Iraq, and [again] Iraq – we will find that they are the product of war crimes committed without restraint or compunction.

“If we compile all the declarations, announcements, and government [plans of the U.S. administrations] on peace and on attempts to attain it, [we will discover] that we are faced with human slaughter and genocide [being perpetrated] on a daily basis…

It sounds like they’ve been reading Chomsky again.