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March
3, 2003, 9:20 a.m.
Human
Shield
Everything you’d
expect and more.
By Mark Goldblatt
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ranted, there is a certain entertainment value in the merry band of "human
shields" now scurrying around the Iraqi countryside, trying to deter
the United States from bombing strategic targets by parking directly in
the line of fire — it is, after all, the ultimate Jackass
stunt. Saying that, however, it's still worth knowing a little something
about their leader, a former Marine and Gulf War Veteran named Ken Nichols
O'Keefe.
In his
website's mission statement, which reads like a first draft the Unabomber
might have written and discarded as too delusional, O'Keefe declares, "I
have announced plans to bring serious charges against the United States.
. . . You and your government are vile disgusting killers and people like
myself have been and will continue to be attacked because we refuse to acquiesce
or participate in your wretched policies."
Like many paranoids,
O'Keefe — who has the word "ex-patriot" etched into his
right hand and who claims "Hawaii" as "the nation of my
allegiance" — is afflicted by an overriding sense of his own
significance: "Your 'intelligence services,' primarily the FBI, have
for years had every incentive to monitor me. I have absolutely no doubt
whatsoever that the FBI does have quite a lengthy file on me. . . . I
am what you call an 'enemy of the state,' and indeed, I am an enemy of
any state that puts power and greed above all else, even human life. Naturally,
it was merely a matter of time before I would become a political target."
Despite such persecution,
O'Keefe won't be discouraged, for his mission is, in a larger sense, messianic:
"Fight I will, and my greatest weapon? The Truth. Indeed it is the
truth that has set me free, and I will till my death and beyond continue
to help free others."
And what is O'Keefe's
Truth? "What I am ultimately stating . . . is already known to thinking
people (not 'educated') around the world, and the people on the receiving
end of your bombs or economic oppression are difficult to brainwash, so
it is that these people know the truth I speak. Aside from the comparatively
wealthy Western societies of America and Western Europe, whose populations
(to a great degree) have been lulled into a morally comatose state of
existence, the United States is regarded as a hypocritical rouge nation
that is tolerated only out of fear of reprisal. A rouge that is completely
out of control. Drunk on its own Power. A rouge that seriously threatens
to destroy all life as we know it through its global rape of the natural
world and sheer insanity in developing weapons of mass destruction."
America . . . the
nation that gave us the nightmare of Maybelline!
All right, one last
quote from the site: "Dear Ken, I'm very impressed to find out about
what you are doing, and would like to express my strongest support and
encouragement for these brave actions." — Noam Chomsky, January
5, 2003.
Enough said.
—
Mark Goldblatt, a writer in New York, is author of the novel Africa
Speaks, now available in paperback.
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