This is the sort of discrimination, not to say racism, that recognizes the attacks on Americans as atrocities but doesn't notice the destruction of other peoples (which "was carried out at a time and in a way designed to minimize human casualties" -- as if there was any concern about "human casualties" in Clinton's launching of more than a dozen million-dollar cruise missiles at Sudan). As Chomsky wrote at the time, "I suppose that terrorist destruction of half of the medical supplies and fertilizers in the United States might be taken a shade more seriously."
In fact, the victims of the Sudanese bombing are probably more numerous than those of the attacks on New York. Not an "aspirin factory" (as Christopher Hitchens writes rather dismissively in today's Guardian), the pharmaceutical plant that Clinton destroyed (perhaps to keep M. Lewinsky off the front page) "manufactured much of the antibiotics, malaria and tuberculosis drugs sold in Sudan" [Time].
"...the El Shifa plant produced 60 to 70% of the pharmaceutical drugs used to combat the most deadly diseases facing the Sudanese, including malaria, tuberculosis, and cholera. It also produced almost all the veterinary medicine, in a country where much of the economy is dependent on animal husbandry. The plant made vital medicines available to the Sudanese at 20% of world market prices, a matter of life and death in a country with a per capita GNP of roughly $300 per year. Exact figures are not available, but it is fair to estimate that at least thousands of people have died as a result of the attack, not by fire and explosion, but by slowly, painfully wasting away without the medicine that could save them" [nowarcollective.com].
And Chomsky points out why exact figures are not available. --CGE
On Thu, 13 Sep 2001 LeoCasey at aol.com wrote:
> ...And what, may I ask, are we supposed to make of Chomsky, when we
> read, as the first words out of his keyboard on this topic, that this
> crime -- with uncounted thousands dead -- does not carry the weight of
> the bombing of the pharmaceutical factory in the Sudan, which left one
> person dead [and was carried out at a time and in a way designed to
> minimize human casualties]? If this some sort of parody, somebody's
> idea of how to make Chomsky look like a complete and utter ideological
> fool, ready to go to any absurd length to make an argument minimizing
> the gravity of the thousands of bodies of innocent men, women and
> children which are entombed in a 10 square block grave in lower
> Manhattan? Who needs to discuss what he said about the Khymer Rouge or
> the holocaust deniers any more; this piece of blind ideological
> "reasoning" by itself makes him a figure lacking all credibility...