Triumph of doublethink in 2003
By Paul Foot, The Guardian, January 1, 2003
Orwell warned against the kind of lies we are being fed about Iraq  -- This year, I suppose, for many of us will be George Orwell year. He was born in 1903, and died in 1950, and has loomed over the British literary scene ever since. This centenary year there is certain to be an entertaining re-run of the arguments on the left between his supporters, including me, and his detractors who hail back to the good old days under comrade Stalin. So I start Orwell year with a reminder that his famous satire 1984, though essentially an attack on Stalin's Russia, is not exclusively so. It foresees a horrific world, divided into three power blocks constantly changing sides in order to continue fighting against each other. The governments of all three keep the allegiance of their citizens by pretending there has only ever been one war, one enemy. "The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. 'Reality control' they called it: in Newspeak, 'doublethink'."

Old and New
Editorial, Arab News, January 1, 2003
Unless you are a Brazilian football fan, there will be few good things to remember about 2002. The new year dawns with speculations of war, world stock markets down for the third year in succession, Palestine prostrate beneath one of Israel’s most hawkish Zionist governments and key OPEC member Venezuela tearing itself apart with a general strike. George W. Bush set the tone for the year with his Jan. 1 State of the Union address, in which he said that Iraq, Iran and North Korea were part of “an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world”. These were, said the president, terrorist states and his war on terror was only just beginning. He spoke truer than he knew. The US forces in Afghanistan, sent to clean up after the overthrow of the Taleban and their Al-Qaeda allies, are still cleaning up 12 months later and seem likely to be at the task in the mountainous region bordering Pakistan for a considerable time to come. Will Bush demonstrate in 2003 that he has learned how much easier it is to initiate a conflict than to finish it?

When silence is not golden
By Khaled Al-Maeena, Arab News, January 1, 2003
The year 2002 has come to a close. It was a year full of news. A great deal of it was of global importance and many of the stories were related to Islam and the Muslim world. There is no longer any serious doubt anywhere that the events of Sept. 11 created a new world order. And in that new order there is no doubt at all that there is now only one superpower: The United States. At present the superpower is behaving like the proverbial bull in a china shop. It is not yet breaking but it is certainly threatening, accusing and blackmailing. It is committing acts that would cause America’s legendary Founding Fathers to turn in their graves if they knew.

Foreign Policy Loses Its Logic
By Robert Scheer, Common Dreams, December 31, 2002 
What is happening here? Certainly not the construction of a coherent foreign policy aimed at increasing the security of the United States or our allies. This is an administration that in two years has so mucked up our approach to the world that merely applying the demands of logic is made to appear unpatriotic. -- Darn, but those weapons of mass destruction keep turning up in the wrong places. Forward air bases, Army infantry units, a hospital ship and docile yet combat-trained reporters are all being readied for a "regime change" war against Iraq promoted as a way to rid the world of an arsenal Saddam Hussein doesn't seem to have. That United Nations inspectors, even after American intelligence briefings, are coming up empty-handed is embarrassing enough, but then North Korea had to steal the show by taking the wraps off its far more advanced nuclear weapons program.

Collective Punishment of Iraq & Palestine: Bush's War is Obscene and Unjustifiable
By Denis J. Halliday, CounterPunch, December 31, 2002
Text of Halliday's remarks at the Cairo Conference Against US Aggression against Iraq, December 19: This is a most knowledgeable assembly on matters relating to Iraq and Palestine. I am following a number of excellent speakers. And the content of my usual talk on the ongoing crisis in Iraq, and the threat of a greater war than the one ongoing, is now somewhat redundant. My views have been expressed more articulately than I normally express them myself! So I plan to raise three questions about the United Nations Charter, democratic responsibilities and the nuclear deterrent related to the crisis we all facing in the Arab world as we meet here in Cairo. But first a word about what is happening around us today: We have a UN Security Council out of control. A Council corrupted by the USA, the sole hyper-power and undermined by the veto power of the five permanent members. We have twelve years of genocidal sanctions sustained on the people of Iraq by the same Council. The ambassadors around that table and their heads of state should all be indicted for crimes against humanity.

Refusing to Fight in Israel
By Joanne Mariner, CounterPunch, December 26, 2002
Benjamin Netanyahu's nephew is in jail. Having refused to serve in the Israeli Defense Forces--an army whose actions, he believes, betray its name--this twenty-year-old relative of Israel's ultra-nationalist foreign minister is currently in detention at Military Prison Number Four. Jonathan Ben-Artzi is against the Israeli army's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, a stance that places him at the opposite end of the political spectrum from his uncle. He is also a pacifist who opposes war as a matter of principle. Ben-Artzi has already spent more than four months behind bars because he is unwilling to compromise his strongly-held political and moral beliefs. Two weeks ago, he was sentenced to a sixth consecutive prison term for refusing to enter the military.

Five rules set by the Kingdom of the Settlements
By Amira Hass, Ha'aretz, January 1, 2003
There is something exciting about those security men at the entrance to shops, cafes and office buildings asking everyone coming in to open their bags; the mother pushing a baby carriage, the blond youth with the kippa, the older man who looks like a moshavnik. Nobody came up with the idea to set a rule that creates two entrances to buildings, one for Jews and the other for Arabs. Despite the ongoing discrimination against Israeli Arabs, that lack of discrimination sends an encouraging message: that we haven't crossed some of the thresholds of shame. Some might say, Jewish thresholds of shame. The lack of selection is particularly encouraging for those who know what happens on the eastern side of the Green Line. Over there, in the Kingdom of the Settlements, the thresholds of shame were crossed long before the suicide bombings.

Political Economy of Occupation: Z Interviews Hasan Barghouthi
By Hasan Barghouthi and Justin Podur, ZNet, December 31, 2002
Hasan Barghouthi is a long time Palestinian activist  in  the field of social and workers' rights. He is well known in Palestine  for his many years of struggle as a trade unionist. He was arrested by Israeli forces and placed under house arrest for several years for organizing unions and strikes and defending the freedom of association of building and restaurant workers. In pursuit of peace between Palestinians and Israelis and for democratic values within Palestinian society, he helped found the Democracy and Workers' Rights Center (DWRC) in Palestine 1993. In November 2002, Hasan was in Boston, giving lectures on the and the situation in Palestine, and was interviewed by phone.