"Why?"
By distilling her message down to a one-word question Cindy Sheehan has accomplished her mission.No one in an official position has the integrity, or the freedom, to answer her .
There are people around now answering the question in their various ways, but they're all either marginal or marginalized. Everyone else is afraid to.
The answer is taboo, proscribed, forbidden. You can hint at it, but if you get too close and your audience is too large, you'll pay.
In other news:
The President of Iran is threatening Israel with annihilation.
Israel is targeting terrorists and killing them daily, while Palestinians sporadically kill innocent Israelis.
Never mind that both Israel and the U.S. have threatened to invade Iran, because it may have nuclear weapons which pose a threat to Israel - which has nuclear weapons already, many of them.
Never mind that the Palestinians would be targeting the specific Israeli military officials responsible for the deaths of their own innocents, if they had the technology to do so and an economy to support it.
Never mind that the hatred of Israel in the Islamic world isn't springing full-grown from the hearts of sick men, but is a fire that Israel itself feeds every day, and gloats as it does so.
The news reminds us that Khomeini, when he took power in the 70's after the Shah was deposed and had fled to the U.S., threatened Israel with annihilation also.
But it doesn't remind us that the Shah was placed on the throne of Iran after the overthrow of a democratically elected government, in a coup planned and implemented by the C.I.A., because the Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, had - among other things - nationalized the Iranian oil industry.
Mossadegh was sentenced to three years in prison followed by house arrest for life.
Never mind that Iraq, right next door to Iran, has been invaded and occupied with immense bloodshed and devastation, in a move that much of the world sees as a joint effort by Israel and the U.S. to dominate the region.
It has to appear that Iran has become belligerent and must be put in its place. And it has to appear that there is no cause for that belligerence.
Aggravate the victim until he explodes, then punish him. This is the technique. Because the permission of the public is still necessary, there's still enough opportunity for things to shift away from the planned sequence.
I had a kind of vision the other day, that there would be nuclear war in December, or at least that nuclear weapons would be detonated somewhere.
I've been mulling it over since. It didn't have that "I can predict the weather!" "Look ma! Prophecy-man!" reaching behind it. Just a flag, or a warning light.
And the idea, that there would be something I could do about it, and what would that be?
This.
