Iraqis Call Shuttle Disaster God's Vengeance

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February 1, 2003
Iraqis Call Shuttle Disaster God's Vengeance
By REUTERS

Filed at 3:23 p.m. ET

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Immediate popular reaction in Baghdad on Saturday to the loss of the U.S. space shuttle Columbia and its seven-member crew -- including the first Israeli in space -- was that it was God's retribution.

``We are happy that it broke up,'' government employee Abdul Jabbar al-Quraishi said.

``God wants to show that his might is greater than the Americans. They have encroached on our country. God is avenging us,'' he said.

Iraqis are braced for a possible U.S.-led war to rid their country of any chemical, biological or nuclear weapons it may possess. Iraq denies it has such weapons.

Car mechanic Mohammed Jaber al-Tamini noted Israeli air force Colonel Ilan Ramon was among the dead when the shuttle broke up over the southwestern United States 16 minutes before its scheduled landing.

The 48-year-old Israeli astronaut was a fighter pilot in the Israeli air force. He was the youngest pilot in a team that bombed Iraq's nuclear reactor in 1981. Israel said the reactor was intended to develop nuclear weapons.

``Israel launched an aggression on us when it raided our nuclear reactor without any reason, now time has come and God has retaliated to their aggression,'' Tamini said.

There were no such signs of jubilation over the shuttle disaster in any of the Palestinian territories. The official response from the Palestinians was one of condolence.

``President (Yasser) Arafat and the Palestinian Authority offer their condolences to the six American families and the Israeli family who lost their loved ones in the catastrophe,'' Saeb Erekat, a senior Palestinian official and spokesman, told Reuters.

Erekat said Arafat had sent President Bush a message of condolences over the loss of the NASA space agency's shuttle. The United States, Israel's closest ally, is the chief Middle East peace broker.

― Doesn't Know How to React, Saturday, 1 February 2003 23:39 (twenty-two years ago)

well, they're sure in for it now.

― jess (dubplatestyle), Saturday, 1 February 2003 23:41 (twenty-two years ago)

(like they weren't before. but salt to wound, etc etc.)

― jess (dubplatestyle), Saturday, 1 February 2003 23:42 (twenty-two years ago)

I hope no one will take this the wrong way, but I have to say I'm endlessly entertained by the ability of "rogue nations" to just talk endless shit about everything and anything: I suppose once you're in such a situation there's just no reason to bother with the normal tact and protocol of international relations. The Taliban and the Hussein sons in particular were/are great at this: I almost wished they'd spoken English as a first language and listened to lots of hip-hop, because some of their choicest rhetoric really would translate almost as "all you bitches can lick my ass."

(The other great bit is the really duplicitous spokesmanship where a representative gets to come on U.S. news shows and just be unspeakably smug, in that way that runs "of course we don't believe that, but if we did" kind of way.)

― nabisco (nabisco), Saturday, 1 February 2003 23:51 (twenty-two years ago)

nothing that comes out of baghdad as spoken to foreign reporters is real, the reporters are trailed by govt handlers to be certain nothing the government finds objectionable is uttered.

― keith (keithmcl), Sunday, 2 February 2003 04:45 (twenty-two years ago)

Nabisco: I understand what you mean. Pyongyang's "sea of fire" rhetoric (which I imagine is potentially more amusing to us than to those in Seoul) is similarly over-the-top.

A few months ago, I found a book in Northwestern's Chinese-language library (this particular title was in English) put out by the Chinese government in the mid-1970s, called Our Noble Korean Allies. Inside there is a picture of a North Korean soldier near the North-South border, with a rocket laucher on his shoulder. The capiton reads something like, "This brave Korean* soldier aims his weapon across the border in hatred for the American imperialists." I had a brief moment of nostalgia for Cold War rhetoric.

*Note that at that point, China recognized North Korea as the true Korea (much as they refuse to acknowledge the independent existence of Taiwan), so "Korea" sufficed as a description.

― Amateurist (amateurist), Sunday, 2 February 2003 05:05 (twenty-two years ago)

when i was an undergrad, i was studying for an accounting exam in the main library. i got bored, started walking around and came upon the section where they kept all the books relating to Asian history and politics. i saw these spiffy-looking, bright red books that looked like they'd never been cracked open by human hands. so i took them off the shelf, opened them -- confirmed that at the very least that they'd never been checked out of the library -- and discovered that they were North Korean propaganda books. lots of pictures and drawings of Kim Il Sung doing any of a number of "heroic" things, with suitably ridiculous captions (like "the great and glorious Comrade Kim Il Sung valiantly vanquishes the evil imperialist Japanese from Korean soil!" stuff like that). or my personal favorite -- a picture of an American soldier in the DMZ sometime during the Seventies chopping down a tree, with this caption: "the U.S. imperialist troops of aggression committed a grave provocation, cutting down a tree." it was some of the funniest shit i'd ever read in my life -- and no, i didn't check the books out.

― Tad (llamasfur), Sunday, 2 February 2003 09:32 (twenty-two years ago)

Even if the thing above is true, all they're saying is that it happened because Allah/God/Jehovah/Santa willed it - which is what all people who believe in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic god say when anything good or bad happens.

I thinks it's ridiculous that even Australian newpapers are giving the space shuttle thing such big headlines when both us and Zimbabwe have had big train crashes and there was the Russian plane crash in East Timor. It's almost like they are saying that astronauts are more important than your average commuter in Sydney or Victoria Falls. Fucking ridiculous.

How any country that is as eager for massacre and slaughter as America is could be so hypocritical as to mourn the death of seven people in a high risk profession I will never understand.

― toraneko (toraneko), Sunday, 2 February 2003 10:42 (twenty-two years ago)

perhaps the people who are eager for massace and the people who are mourning are not the same people?

― gareth (gareth), Sunday, 2 February 2003 10:47 (twenty-two years ago)

I agree totally with toraneko. I tuned into the news tonight to hear the latest on the train derailment at waterfall and was bombarded with at least ten minutes of space shuttle stuff. I agree it is newsworthy, but in Australia it was given way too much coverage, I want to know about a variety of issues, not just what's the latest in the USA.
On a side note, how about those poor Australian spiders that were killed in the space shuttles? Seven news reported that 8 Australian spiders were killed, should we have a national day of mourning? I actually felt reporting on the tragedy of losing scientific information about spiders being able to adapt in space was in poor taste. (One wonders about the applicability of such research, it sure will come in handed if we ever need to establish a colony of spiders in space. Perhaps NASA are planning on having highly trained spiders man future missions?)

― Anna., Sunday, 2 February 2003 12:12 (twenty-two years ago)

There's something slightly poignant about the idea of people siezing on six American people getting killed as some kind of retribution from God as if that's anywhere near the scale of the number of Iraqis that are gonna die. Same thing with the September 11th attacks. It's like ten minutes of 'haha, see, that's from God, that is, that's shown you' and then several years of 'ah, the country I live in has been reduced to a pile of rubble. Damn.'

― Ferg (Ferg), Sunday, 2 February 2003 18:47 (twenty-two years ago)

I think we went over this on the other thread: this is a dumb thing to politicize because (a) seven people died in a vehicle, which is as inherently unpolitical as a train derailment or a minivan crash, and (b) it becomes news because the people were in space, which I don't think we should be so jaded not to see as still some sort of noteworthy event for humankind.

Tad, the tree thing was actually a HUGE deal! Two soldiers were cutting it down to improve their sight lines on the North Korean troops; they were approached by several North Koreans, and in the ensuing scuffle they were killed using the very axe they were taking to the tree. The axe is on display in a little museum on the other side of the border, which caused a big flap a few years ago. (The flap was a little silly: some Americans seemed all offended that they'd proudly display it, which seems to ignore the whole point that they don't really like us and have every right to consider killing our soldiers a proud moment if they really feel like it: you don't see the Japanese complaining about our preserving the Enola Gay.)

― nabisco (nabisco), Sunday, 2 February 2003 20:37 (twenty-two years ago)

told you so

― James Blount (James Blount), Sunday, 2 February 2003 21:47 (twenty-two years ago)

"Iraquis" = two people the reporter managed to interview.

This is like the footage ove some palestinians after 9/11 turned into "all palestinians are evil and hate us"

― Sterling Clover (s_clover), Sunday, 2 February 2003 23:16 (twenty-two years ago)

Arafat handled this with grace (unlike certain ILxers)

― James Blount (James Blount), Sunday, 2 February 2003 23:38 (twenty-two years ago)

I'm endlessly entertained by the ability of "rogue nations" to just talk endless shit about everything and anything

Agreed with one modification. Delete "rouge nations;" insert "national leaders" in its place. I kind of question the diplomacy of labeling other sovereign nations as "evil."

― M, Monday, 3 February 2003 02:01 (twenty-two years ago)

ilx in rude, crude, and dangerous to know shocker there, james

― jess (dubplatestyle), Monday, 3 February 2003 02:03 (twenty-two years ago)

yeah, this story = blatantly obvious fear-baiting; talking to those "sources" is roughly equiv to talking to my fucking landlord about Vietnam - it's not hard to find someone with virulently stupid opinions about a country who hates his with a passion

Tad u will love this - http://www.kcna.co.jp/index-e.htm the news archive is a goldmine of stories like "US Urged Not to Run Amuck"

― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Monday, 3 February 2003 02:20 (twenty-two years ago)

mr. blount was right -- can't certain people [you know who you are] separate this disaster from their views on American foreign policy? it's very tasteless and insensitive to not do so, to say the least.

tracer -- thankee for the link. somewhere i still have kept a copy of some full-fledged ad that the North Koreans ran in 1998 in the New York Times that's just like this stuff. do they have any idea how ridiculous they sound to non-North Koreans?

― Tad (llamasfur), Monday, 3 February 2003 03:11 (twenty-two years ago)

Tad: no. It's almost cute: they've been fed a completely unreal version of the world for so long that the less-worldly among them would happily laugh in the face of reality.

NB: my comment about "rogue nations" talking shit wasn't in reference to citizens (as Tracer says, citizens anywhere will talk shit) but to comments from guys like Uday Hussein on issues like this, which aren't so far off from the material in the header.

― nabisco (nabisco), Monday, 3 February 2003 18:28 (twenty-two years ago)

They were talking about this in my office this AM, and I had to ignore them because of the idiotic comments being made:

"I don't understand, we're not that mean to them [the Iragis]!" (Yeah, we're just getting ready to BOMB THE SHIT OUT OF THEM!).

"Well, they won't be laughing when we bomb them!" (this from one of the supposed 'Christians' in the office).

"They're just SAVAGES!" (no comment).

― Nick A. (Nick A.), Monday, 3 February 2003 19:25 (twenty-two years ago)

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