For a number of reasons which I won't go into, the reckoning, and the fact that "what goes around, comes around", have been on my mind in recent days.
Ever since the London suicide bombings of 7 July 2005, the native Britons have been pondering why a handful of British Muslims, who were born and bred in the UK, decided to blow themselves up and kill innocent people in the centre of London.
Every reason under the sun has been pondered and dwelled upon at great lengths – brainwashing by extremist preachers and by Al-Qaeda, irrational hatred of Christians and everything Western, envy of Western "freedom" and "democracy" – every reason, that is, except the one that I think really drove those young men to commit mass murder.
The reason why I think the London suicide bombers – and others after them that failed – did what they did is none other than the one they said, on a video that was intended for broadcast post mortem, drove them to kill themselves and innocent civilians. That is the seemingly unending chain of crimes and injustices perpetrated by Britain against Muslims, from the collusion with Zionist snakeheads that led to the imposition of the Jews-only state of Israel in Palestine, to the lies that culminated in the Anglo-American aggression against Iraq. And in between you have Suez, Yemen and Afghanistan, to name but a few.
Although I do not believe in iron laws outside the realms of mathematics and the physical sciences, there is a logic to the sayings that "what goes around, comes around" or "you reap what you sow". There is nothing superstitious about believing in this logic; it's just that if you commit gross injustices and keep on committing them without contrition, then the probability is that someone who identifies with your victims will, at one time or another, acting alone or in collusion with others, take matters into their own hands and give you some of your own medicine.
That was the case in the London blasts and it was also the case in the suicide bombings of the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon in the US on 11 September 2001. Unfortunately, the recipients of the "medicine" in New York and London were civilians who bore no direct responsibility for the crimes committed by the US and the British state.
There is also another kind of reckoning, collective reckoning by one people, or a significant proportion of one people, against another who have, or are perceived to have, committed injustice against them, actively or by aquiescence. The reasons for this kind of reckoning can be cumulative and blended with other real or perceived grievances, as was the case with the Hutus' attempted genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda in the mid-1990s, where resentment against the Tutsis had been festering for a long time because the Tutsis had historically collaborated with the Belgian colonizers and, after decolonization, became the dominant ethnic group in Rwanda.
However, the worst kind of collective reckoning is that whose reasons are more direct. This is where one group of people is identified clearly and unequivocally as the perpetrators, proponents or direct beneficiaries of a specific, catastrophic injustice against another people. The Versailles treaty of 1919 between Germany and the Entente powers, which officially ended World War I, comes to mind. It imposed such humiliating terms on Germany that it can be considered as an example of a catastrophic injustice. It also bore the seeds of a terrible reckoning: Adolf Hitler and World War II.
Other reckonings are waiting in the wings. I doubt very much that the terrible lies that led to the Anglo-American aggression against Iraq and its consequent human calamity will be forgotten in the mists of time. I dread to think what the reckoning for this will visit upon the guilty and innocent alike.
But worse of all will be the reckoning for the crimes and injustices that have been, and continue to be, committed by Israel against the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine – the dispossession of an entire people, the daily murder of innocent men, women and children, the relentless theft of land and property, the deliberate flooding of Palestinian farms with sewage from Jewish settlements built on stolen land, the constant, daily humiliation. Because these crimes are being committed with the support or aquiescence of virtually all Israelis and world Jewry, I fear that, when the reckoning finally comes, it will be on a truly horrendous scale.
To warn of the terrible fate that awaits the perpetrators of injustice in not, repeat not, to condone retribution against non-combatants, even if, through their silence or aquiescence, these non-combatants bear indirect responsibility for the injustice. However, to warn of the inevitability of a day of reckoning for every injustice should serve as a warning to the doers of injustice and those behind them that it is in their enlightened self-interest to right their wrongs before it's too late.
