[Nasional-m] Mumia Abu-Jamal Live from death row: 9-11 Remembered

[Ambon]

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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Sept. 19, 2002
issue of Workers World newspaper
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Mumia Abu-Jamal Live from death row: 9-11 Remembered

Forever in the American mind, 9-11 will be a day of shock, 
of disbelief, of sorrow and of loss. Like a flash photo 
image superimposed on the retina, the specter of planes 
circling like metal vultures the twin towers of midtown 
Manhattan repeats itself in the mind's eye, revealing itself 
over and over again. What American political, media and 
economic elites have done with 9-11, however, should be 
cause for concern to all of us. For the shock and sorrow and 
yes, the rage borne from the flames of 9-11 have been used 
by these elites to reward the very culprits who brought 9-11 
into being. Those elites have bequeathed billions if not 
trillions more to the military industrial complex that 
armed, trained and justified the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 
in the first place. The late Pakistani scholar Eqbal Ahmad, 
in his last book, "Terrorism: Theirs and Ours," points out 
that the entire Muslim world was mobilized to fight the 
"evil empire," as Reagan called the former Soviet Union. 
Ahmad wrote:

"I've seen planeloads of them arriving from Algeria, Sudan, 
Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, even from Palestine where at 
that time Israel was supporting Hamas against Alshata(sp), 
Yassar Arafat's faction of the PLO. These people were 
brought in, given an ideology and told that armed struggle 
is virtuous, when the whole notion of Jihad as an 
international Pan-Islamic terrorist movement was born. The 
U.S. has spent billions in producing the Bin Ladens of our 
time. In 1986 I visited the camp they hit in Zahowar 
Afghanistan. It was a CIA-sponsored camp," Ahmad writes.

There, in the poverty-stricken, dusty mountains of 
Afghanistan, the beginnings of 9-11 were born. What we saw 
in the second week of September 2001 was merely what the 
late Malcolm X called the "chickens coming home to roost." 
Deep down, in our hearts, away from the polls, away from the 
politicians, we know this. We really do. Then along come the 
oil barons, the Rumsfelds, Cheneys and the boy King, Bush. 
"Bomb Iraq," they say.

Americans are looking at a new colonialism that will leave a 
taste as foul in their mouths as the last one. Vicious, 
rapacious greed priming the pump of war--a war that will 
enrich the few by raising oil prices, impoverish the many 
and sow the seeds of Islamic and Arab hatred that will last 
until the next century. If you're against the empire of war, 
hatred, greed and new colonialism: Join us. We are growing. 
I thank you all.

Ona Move,

Long Live John Africa

Free the MOVE 9

Free the Angola 3

To Freedom for us all

This is Mumia Abu-Jamal

- END -

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