As far as terrorist states go, the US, UK, Israel and Australia shit on ISIS by a long shot.

By E.F Nicholson

ISIS terrorism makes for great news. It’s fucked up, don’t get me wrong. Burning people alive is a gruesome and abhorrent crime that the perpetrators of can rightfully be labelled “wicked” or “evil,” and other types of despicable nouns. Yet let’s not forget the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. ISIS is the angry bastard child of western intervention. As William Blum rightfully points out in his anti-empire report, if the west had just keep their greedy and sociopathic hands out of the Middle East, many countries there would moderate Islamic left-leaning nations. Iran is a very clear example of how our post-1950s installing and propping up of the Shah’s murderous regime fermented and created the kind of extremism we are dealing with today. In the Middle East, nationalism has always been more feared than religious extremism. By nationalism, I mean that pesky idea of a nation’s people thinking their country’s resources somehow belong to them.

So the mainstream media reports these horrors of ISIS as if history started two years ago. They report on their barbarity with a gravity and solemnity with which only the enemies of our state are vested. How do people think the 500 plus children murdered in Israel’s recent attacks upon the illegally imprisoned population of Gaza died? What do you think a US hellfire missile, sent from a US Apache helicopter, then fired by the Israeli military, does to a family once it is shot into their house? Burnt alive? Probably. An eight-year-old boy’s head decapitated in front of his 15-year-old brother? That, too. What do we think the violent deaths of 300,000 innocent Iraqi children looked like during the illegal war we waged there? Dismembered? Disembowelled? Skin burn off the entire bodies? All that and more. Why were the horrific and ghastly details of these children’s deaths not reported by Sky and Fox News with same lurid details as ISIS victims are? The lives of those killed by the enemy of our state have value. The lives of those killed by ourselves or our allies have none. The cowardliness, wilful ignorance, and hypocrisy of our political class is just so fucked and reprehensible it is honestly beyond me.

The children our bombs kill have parents to.

What makes our crimes even more disgraceful is how we conduct them with an air of self-righteous entitlement. ISIS barbarism is naked and unapologetic, while ours is warped and wrapped in patois, jingoism and flag waving. We water down (or just blatantly lie about) the horror of our crimes. When we read a headline such as, “Collation forces drop bombs on ISIS targets in Syria,” who is being burnt alive as these bombs hit their targets? When drones from silent skies drop bombs on blips on screens, who are these people sentenced to death from above? Nameless militants? Or just poor “unpeople” and their children? Because they are the supposed enemy, we never get to find out. During the whole Iraq war, the US decided counting the lives of those it murdered wasn’t worth the bother. Counting the lost lives of those there to murder, well, we know each and every one exactly, and we called them our fallen war heroes. Numberless and nameless deaths are so much easier to forget, and forget we do.

So ISIS, no doubt, is a cancer and a scourge. Yet let’s not forget what is the carcinogen. Who is dumping their radiation of murder, mayhem, theft, and devastation, giving birth to such cancer cells as ISIS? Yes, let’s fight the cancer of ISIS, but more importantly, let’s address the cause of that cancer that brings about its existence in the first place: the hazardous waste sitting in parliament, playing golf and discussing the sale of the NHS and further contracting of weapon contractors. Those who send other people’s children to kill other people’s children. ISIS is the poor, angry and narcissistic child of the abusive violent father. We can’t deal with one, unless we deal with the other.