Swept Clean
By Annie C. Higgins, CounterPunch, January 20, 2003
The idea of Sharon with broom in hand is comical enough, but the suggestion that he sweep the rooms of the Islamic Center that his soldiers left in shambles made me laugh. My friend, who conducts Qur'anic study sessions, always manages to find humor in the midst of the bleakest conditions. Her laughter itself is a resistance against the gravity of oppression. The Center's rooms have chairs, a cabinet with copies of the Qur'an, and floors full of dust. The Army appropriated the computers that had been donated for the advancement of the Refugee Camp community. Still the ladies come to learn, to consider new ideas, compare interpretations, and especially to address issues relating to martyrdom, remarriage of young widows, visiting graves, handling grief, ! and pondering heaven. I take my turn with an infant who is energetically doing calisthenics on my lap, and I comment on his strength. "That's because he is from the Camp," beams his mother, articulating the resiliency of Camp identity. At home, the Qur'an teacher laughs as a sock attacks us when a coil of wire it is caught in springs out of reach. "Sharon doesn't want us to go visiting on the holiday/eid; he just wants us to work at home." Later, neighbors chide me for not visiting during the three-day holiday of Eid al-Fitr, but how could I abandon my friend whose house was raided as soldiers searched for a "wanted" family member? Instead of holiday baking, we face oil in the salt and sugar, and the pantry's many treasures mixed with pots, pans, lamps and implements. The kitchen is picture-perfect compared with the bedrooms knee deep in clothes, clothespins, dismembered notebook pages, shoes, jewelry, framed pictures, manicure sets, and artificial flowers all swirled together in hea! ps. We concentrate on the kitchen, with her daughter Maryam expelling us to do the final clean sweep, swooshing plenty of water with a fan-shaped hand-held broom.

Don't count on the UN to save us from going to war
By Simon Tisdall, The Guardian, January 20, 2003
A second resolution is irrelevant to America's pursuit of Saddam -- Within the cabinet, the Labour party and in the country at large, a touching faith is increasingly placed in the ability of the UN to extricate us from the Iraq mess. This sentiment, broadly shared across western Europe, was summed up last week by a British minister: "Stick to the UN and there will be infinitely less trouble and even no trouble at all." Some people, including leftish MPs and bishops, seem to hope that, in effect, the UN will save us not from our avowed enemy, Iraq, but from our main ally, America. Many others, motivated by a wide range of different concerns, also focus on demands for a second UN security council debate and/or resolution that, unlike last autumn's resolution 1441, would specifically authorise, or block, military action. Such hopes of salvation or absolution are woefully misplaced from almost every point of view. Those opposed to war have little reason to believe that the security council, having voted unanimously for 1441, will thwart the US now. Although the council's composition has changed since then, political considerations, rather than considerations of justice, remain uppermost for the four other permanent members.

Portentous signs
Editorial, Arab News, January 20, 2003
Unless there is a cataclysmic development around the corner, Ariel Sharon will remain prime minister when Israelis go to the polls in less than a week. And perhaps not even a cataclysmic event will remove him from power. So far nothing has worked. Neither a cash-for-votes scandal within his own party nor corruption allegations have hurt Sharon nearly as much as was expected. Three polls published last week by the Haaretz, Yediot Aharonot and Maariv dailies credited Sharon with 30 to 34 seats in the next Knesset, while Labour leader Amram Mitzna will have to content with a meager 19 or 20. While Mitzna looked in a good position to make a serious challenge to Sharon’s re-election bid — it was 27 seats for Likud to 26 for Labour just two weeks ago — he failed to take his campaign off the ground while Sharon confirmed his “Teflon” reputation of a politician who survives any scandal. Mitzna had tried to breathe fresh impetus into his campaign by pledging to stay out of an alliance with Sharon. But the latest surveys prove once again that national unity is a popular option with most Israelis and Mitzna’s new stance has failed to boost his chances of winning on Jan. 28.

Israeli plan to weaken Egypt
By Hassan Tahsin, Arab News, January 20, 2003
Many people believe that the Camp David accords ended the confrontation between Egypt and Israel forever. The reality of the situation though is that the war is continuing but in the form of a Cold War between the US and then Soviet Union. Egypt viewed the peace treaty as a civilized way of ending military confrontation and for the return of Egyptian land occupied by Israel without the need for any more bloodshed. On the other hand, Israel views the treaty as an effective means of marginalizing Egypt’s role in the Arab-Israeli conflict. The treaty also gives Israel the right to impose a geographical siege of Egypt by influencing the political systems of the African countries especially those that lie in the Great Lakes area. This would eventually enable Israel to control the sources of the Nile River and to pressure Egypt into delivering water from the Nile to Israel through the Suez Canal. However Egypt’s considerable political weight and history has dashed the first hope. But Israel, by taking advantage of political turmoil and border conflicts between African nations has managed to infiltrate some African countries and besiege Egypt from the south.

Fifteen kilos of radishes in the Galilee and a vote
By Diaa Hadid, The Electronic Intifada, January 19, 2003
I met up with a group of friends, including a few of my favourite village boys. These boys are not a politically minded bunch. They don’t know the difference between the leftist democratic front (Jabha), the lefty-ethnic nationalist democratic assembly (Tajamu), the United Arab List, and so on. They don’t spend their nights over steamy Arabic coffees after trips to the theater discussing the latest election news. I’ve pretty much had the impression that these guys are village boys. They think politicians talk out of their asses while fingering the change in their pockets; they’ve seen enough local council leaders hire all their relatives once they get into power. The West Bank is as distant as New Zealand to these boys. Forget they used to have wild nights in Ramallah and cheap shopping in Jenin, that their parents built their homes with Gazan labor. These boys now shop in Egypt, take their holidays in Eilat; work their asses off to build a house, when they find work. I once asked a few of these guys what their identity was. They kind of laughed uncomfortably. “Why are you asking?” “Do you want me to go to jail?” “Hey, Israel and I are best friends” were the responses I got…and they know I’m ‘clean,’ not a collaborator. So it kind of surprised me – threw me off – to hear these boys talking about a middle-aged lady in their village and her husband, accused of smuggling weapons from Hizbollah.

Why Arabs are angry with America
By Fahed Fanek, Jordan Times, January 20, 2003
AMERICA'S NEW programme for the Middle East, launched on Dec. 12 by US Secretary of State Colin Powell, makes it seem, through the use of the term Middle East, as if it includes Iran, Israel and Turkey, as well as the Arab world. The stated objective of the so-called US-Middle East Partnership Initiative is to improve America's image in the Arab world. This is meant to be done through “sustained” support for political reform (i.e., democracy), economic reform (free markets), social reform (women's liberation) and educational reform (through a comprehensive overhaul of educational curricula). At first, many people thought Powell was about to launch an initiative similar to the post-World War II Marshall Plan, which turned a hostile Germany into an ally of the US through economic aid. Far from pouring billions of dollars into the new initiative, however, Powell said that it would only involve a paltry $29 million, to be shared by 25 different countries. Consequently, the new plan will prove to be nothing more than a public relations campaign designed to convince Arab public opinion that America is on their side.

No Evidence is Evidence: Rumsfeld’s Paradigm Shift
By Carol Norris, Dissident Voice, January 19, 2003
Up is down, red is green, yes means no, and no evidence is evidence.  Rumsfeld, that loveable lug, is at it again.  When Saddam Hussein agreed to weapons inspectors, the Bush Cartel found it almost impossible to take yes for an answer.  Holy cow, they said amongst themselves, he’s going to let them in.  What are we going to do now?  We are readying our troops as we speak.  We promised our friends at the Carlyle group and Halliburton (among others) big contracts and big bucks from this one. What they decided to do was discredit the weapons inspectors.  That way, if the inspectors never find anything, people will think it is because Blix and his team are incompetent, not that there aren’t weapons.  And the possibility of war remains a go. But, despite their best public relations efforts, the discrediting didn’t play as well as they hoped.  So they searched and searched, trying to find a scrap of something they could pass off as plausible evidence.  But, nothing appeared.  We’ve got to come up with another plan, they said. So, Rumsfeld, the master mind of the Pentagon’s now defunct “Office of Strategic Influence,” whose stated mission was to generate disinformation and propaganda, was quoted as saying Iraq is “skilled at denial and deception” and “the fact that the inspectors have not yet come up with new evidence of Iraq’s WMD program could be evidence, in and of itself, of Iraq’s non cooperation. “And, by the way, now the burden of proof of innocence is on Iraq. The entire world ought to have stood up and shouted a collective:  “You’ve got to be kidding!”

Decoding some of America's top buzz words
By Norman Solomon, Jordan Times, January 20, 2003
HOW WORDS are used can be crucial to understanding and misunderstanding the world. The US media lexicon is saturated with certain buzz phrases. They're popular — but what do they mean? "The use of words is to express ideas,” the American leader James Madison wrote in the late 1700s. “Perspicuity, therefore, requires not only that the ideas should be distinctly formed, but that they should be expressed by words distinctly and exclusively appropriate to them.” More than two centuries later, surveying the wreckage of public language in political spheres, media consumers might be tempted to murmur: “Dream on, James.” In the midst of great international tension, here's a sampling of some top media jargon: — Preemptive. This adjective represents a kind of inversion of the Golden Rule: “Do violence onto others just in case they might otherwise do violence onto you.” Brandished by Uncle Sam, we're led to believe that's a noble concept. — Weapons of mass destruction. They're bad unless they're good. Globally, the US government leads the way with thousands of unfathomably apocalyptic nuclear weapons. (Cue the media cheers.) Regionally, in the Middle East, only Israel has a nuclear arsenal — estimated at 200 atomic warheads — currently under the control of Ariel Sharon, who has proven to be lethally out of control on a number of occasions. (Cue the media shrugs.) Meanwhile, the possibility that Saddam Hussein might someday develop any such weapons is deemed to be sufficient reason to launch a war. (Cue the Pentagon missiles.)