The Double Standards, Dubious Morality and Duplicity of this Fight Against Terror
By Robert Fisk, Dissident Voice, January 4, 2003
I think I'm getting the picture. North Korea breaks all its nuclear agreements with the United States, throws out UN inspectors and sets off to make a bomb a year, and President Bush says it's "a diplomatic issue". Iraq hands over a 12,000-page account of its weapons production and allows UN inspectors to roam all over the country, and – after they've found not a jam-jar of dangerous chemicals in 230 raids – President Bush announces that Iraq is a threat to America, has not disarmed and may have to be invaded. So that's it, then. How, readers keep asking me in the most eloquent of letters, does he get away with it? Indeed, how does Tony Blair get away with it? Not long ago in the House of Commons, our dear Prime Minister was announcing in his usual schoolmasterly tones – the ones used on particularly inattentive or dim boys in class – that Saddam's factories of mass destruction were "up [pause] and running [pause] now." But the Dear Leader in Pyongyang does have factories that are "up [pause] and running [pause] now". And Tony Blair is silent. Why do we tolerate this? Why do Americans? Over the past few days, there has been just the smallest of hints that the American media – the biggest and most culpable backer of the White House's campaign of mendacity – has been, ever so timidly, asking a few questions.

Things to come
By Graham Usher, Al-Ahram Weekly On-Line, 2 - 8 January 2003
Israel's probable next government is already flexing its muscles. And it is ringing alarms across the region. -- With polls showing the Israeli electorate poised to return a Likud-led coalition for the Israeli elections on 28 January, several decisions this week have underscored its emerging political culture: aggressively nationalist, occasionally messianic and exclusively Zionist. Coupled with the threat of a US-led war on Iraq, it will cast the darkest of shadows across the region. The culture can be gauged from the verdicts so far delivered by Israel's Central Elections Committee, a cross-party panel currently sitting to hear 13 requests to disqualify candidates and parties running for the 16th Knesset, including Israel's three main Arab lists: Hadash-Ta'al, the United Arab List and Azmi Bishara's Balad Party.

Re-election tactics
By Khaled Amayreh, Al-Ahram Weekly On-Line, 2 - 8 January 2003
The Israeli prime minister is intent on killing and repressing more Palestinians to secure a re-election victory.  -- Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has given his occupation army a free hand to step up the killing of Palestinians -- activists as well as innocent men, women and children -- under the pretext of fighting "terror". Sharon gave the instructions on the weekend after two Islamic Jihad fighters attacked a Jewish colonial outpost south-west of Hebron, killing four Israeli soldiers and settlers and injuring six other soldiers. The two Islamist guerrillas were subsequently killed in gun-battle with Israeli troop reinforcements. The attack on the ultra-Orthodox settlement of Otnael was carried out in retaliation for the extra-judicial execution by undercover Israeli forces of Yousuf Abu-Rub, an Islamic Jihad activist, on 26 December in Qabatya in the northern West Bank. According to eyewitnesses and information gathered by the Ramallah- based human rights group, LAW, Israeli soldiers shot and killed Abu- Rub after he surrendered. On the same day, Israeli troops murdered at least nine other Palestinians in Nablus, Tulkarm and Ramallah. The victims included a schoolboy and two activists in Nablus, a schoolboy and an activist in Ramallah, two activists in Tulkarm and two civilians in Gaza.

Crossing which borders?
By Jonathan Cook, Al-Ahram Weekly On-Line, 2 - 8 January 2003
Highways, settlements, fences: Examining Israel's coded demarcation. -- Earlier this year the Israeli novelist A B Yehoshua wrote at length about Zionism, the Jewish nation- building ideology formulated by Theodor Herzl, explaining that at its core lay the concept of a border. Jewish identity in the diaspora, he observed, inherently lacked borders: "It wanders around the world, a traveller between hotels. A Jew can change countries and languages without losing his Jewishness." The Jewish state, on the other hand, required territorial limits, it needed to define the extent of the sanctuary it provides to Jews. "Borders are like doors in a house which claim everything inside as the responsibility of the master. That is what Zionism means: realising Jewish sovereignty within defined borders."

Six Soldiers
By Annie Higgins, Electronic Intifada, January 3, 2003
[Occupied Palestine] - The Israeli Army reported that two soldiers were injured as they attacked Palestinian members of the resistance in Gaza (BBC, 2 January 2003). The reality could be far more severe than they admit. When the Army killed Hamza Abu al-Rubb in Qabatiya, Jenin district, on 26 December 2002, they said the wanted man injured three of their soldiers when he fought back. His wife adds to the account. When the soldiers ordered the family outside, making them remove their warm clothes on that rainy day, they apparently expected Hamza to surrender himself. They were surprised that he came to the door fighting and throwing grenades. He went back inside and got more grenades to pitch at them. The Army killed him but they also took losses. His wife reports that they put at least six dead Israeli soldiers in black plastic body bags in her front yard. A black flag outside the house of mourning is inscribed with the statement witnessing to the faith, There is no god but God and Muhammad is the prophet of God. The women mourners sitting with the widow have no doubt as to why the Army lightened the news. They know that soldiers who know what really happened will be afraid to come to Jenin, or to the Occupied Territories at all, in spite of their superior might.

Humiliation is more than a sum of incidents
By Danny Rubinstein, Ha'aretz, January 4, 2003
Daily pictures in the Palestinian press tell more than thousands of words. -- For half a decade, Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington's book, "The Clash of Civilizations," has been stirring debate. Since it was published in 1996, and especially since the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, the book has been used to explain that it is Islamic zealotry's war on Western culture, not rational interests, that are driving global conflict. Osama bin Laden did not complain about the U.S. taking over Saudi Arabia's oil fields, but about uniformed American Army women driving jeeps during the Gulf War - "whores near the mosques," he called them. One leading critic of Huntington's approach is Columbia professor Edward Said, the Palestinian-American literary doyen and academic, whose articles are frequently published in the Palestinian press. Last week the Jerusalem Times quoted him as saying he doesn't believe there is a clash of civilizations. Instead, said Said, there is a struggle between interests. "There's an impression in the U.S. that the conflict is between Americans and Islam, but truthfully, it is a conflict with a limited number of extremists, and that's the administration's view in Washington, as well."

Bush the gunslinger
By Arie Caspi, Ha'aretz, January 4, 2003 
In the movie "Witness," shown last week on Channel Ten, Harrison Ford plays a police detective fighting corrupt cops who want to kill him. Ford identifies the bad apples with the help of a little Amish boy who witnessed a murder they committed. The wounded detective flees with the boy and his mother to their farm in the Amish community, a pacifist Christian sect whose members avoid violence even when attacked. The corrupt cops come to the farm and try to kill Ford; unlike his hosts, who turn the other cheek when street bullies harass them, Ford fights back. As usual, might and right win. Without violence, the movie tells us, you just can't beat the bad guys. Its conclusion is shared by thousands of other American movies. George W. Bush was raised to believe in their simplistic values. Villains are villainous to the core. They have horns and a tail, so that anyone can tell them apart from the good guys. Using force against the bad guys is moral, and the good guys usually win. Bush is now trying to implement this philosophy in Iraq using hundreds of thousands of American soldiers and millions of tons of metal and explosives. For him, the world is a Hollywood movie. Bad guys come and go - sometimes they are the Taliban, sometimes Saddam Hussein - but the hero is always George W.

The Making of Iraq - Acrobat version
The Making of Iraq - Web version
By Geoff Simons,  The Link, December - December   2002
The geographical region that the ancient Greeks called Mesopotamia (“land between the rivers”) and that we know today as Iraq was a fount of civilization. Historians search for original metaphors — a womb, cradle, crucible — as they try to convey the scale of the contribution that the people of the region made to the development of human society. The ancient Iraqis built the first cities on earth, created writing, and devised the first codified legal systems. Here — through such ancient lands as Sumer, Akkad, Babylonia, and Assyria — the cultural brew was stirred from which Western civilization would emerge.

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