Rachel Corrie, Nuha Sweidan and Israeli war crimes 
By Steve Niva, Alternative Information Center, March 17, 2003 
The Israeli bulldozer that ran over and killed American peace activist Rachel Corrie, 23, in the Gaza Strip today had killed before. A few weeks ago, on March 3, an Israeli bulldozer killed a nine-month pregnant Palestinian woman, Nuha Sweidan, while destroying the house next door in a dilapidated Gaza refugee camp. Palestinian witnesses said that Mrs. Sweidan, 33, bled to death under the rubble as she cradled her 18-month-old daughter. Her unborn baby also died. Rachel Corrie and Nuha Sweidan probably never met, but they will forever be linked as victims of Israel's 35-year occupation of Palestinian lands in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. They are both victims of Israeli war crimes. The Geneva Conventions expressly prohibits attacks on civilian populations regardless of the motivation, even if in retaliation for attacks on its own civilians. To attack civilian populations intentionally is a war crime. Both Rachel Corrie and Nuha Sweidan were killed during military actions against a civilian population, in this case, during a house demolition. Since June 2002, the Israeli army has destroyed more than 150 houses belonging to Palestinians allegedly involved in attacks, a policy human rights groups describe as collective punishment and which has drawn US criticism in the past. This past month, Israel nearly set a record for killing Palestinians, mostly civilians, in a single month. According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, Israeli assaults killed 82 Palestinians, of them 50 in the Gaza Strip and 32 in the West Bank, wounding an additional 616 persons. Israeli soldiers also killed several Palestinian children and 3 medical staff as they sought to attend to wounded. Now, they have killed an American peace activist. In this same period, only six Israeli's were killed, all of them soldiers.

Karmi: Anguished Cry of a Palestinian Exile
By Neil Berry, Arab News, March 17, 2003
A long-standing student of Western attitudes toward the Arab world, the British writer Ghada Karmi is curious to know why the United States and its allies discuss Iraq in such crudely personalized terms. Obsessively vilifying Saddam Hussein, they seem barely aware of the existence of Iraq’s 22 million inhabitants. In a Guardian article published at the close of last year, Karmi raised the question whether it was mere accident that the 1991 military campaign against Iraq was christened “Operation Desert Storm”, a name calculated to call up images of an essentially empty land. Karmi’s conviction is that a “deep and unconscious” racism informs every aspect of Western conduct toward Iraq, and that Saddam Hussein has become the perfect Western surrogate for anti-Arab abuse. Consider the way Tony Blair used to speak of “putting Saddam back in his cage.” Such demonization of the Iraqi leader by Blair and Bush has, in Karmi’s view, obscured the fact that, for all his brutality and ruthlessness, he is not much more than “a petty local chieftain,” a “Third World dictator in the mold of many others before him.” Karmi’s acute sensitivity to neo-colonialist Western perceptions of the Arab world springs from traumatic personal experience. At an early age she became caught up in the Palestinian diaspora precipitated by the creation of Israel in 1948. Born in Jerusalem in 1939, she was a child of nine when her family fled the Middle East for Britain, forced into exile by the turmoil and blood-letting that accompanied the creation of the Jewish state.

UN resolution to eject the United States from the United Nations
Editorial, Arabic News, March 17, 2003
In its effort to gain support for war against Iraq, the US has failed to make a convincing case and failed in its effort to gain the support of the UN Security Council. Having failed, the US is threatening to act alone and outside the framework of the United Nations. This is the ultimate threat the US is using to intimidate and coerce world countries to gain their support. The tactics the US is using are those of despots, and dictatorships that always go beyond the law and will use any means to achieve their interests -- bribe, lie, intimidate, and if all else fails, use force. That is the state of affairs the world is in today. The US is the dominant power in political, economic, and military affairs and holds a choke hold on many of the international institutions. As such, this political, economic and military monopoly is causing great damage to world development -- as should be expected from a monopoly. But the extent of damage has become so great that this state of affair should no longer be tolerated....So the world is before a choice: to cower and give in to the USA and let things proceed as they have in the past -- with much greater potential of degeneration as the US becomes even much more dominant, or the world can very simply and calmly reply to the US ultimatum with one of its own: If you will not respect the UN decisions and will, then get out of the UN or we will kick you out. This message should be acted on Monday, even if only symbolically as a quick start, toward achieving this goal.

Jim Moran and the Dixie Chicks: Never Say "Sorry," It Only Makes Things Worse...
By Alexander Cockburn, CounterPunch, March 15, 2003
At last the leaders of the Democratic Party have moved decisively, hauling out their ripest comminations and hurling them at-no, not at George Bush. The man at whom they've been leveling their fire this past week is 7-term US Rep James Moran of Virginia. Moran, a former mayor of Alexandria, Va., is in hot water over his head for having remarked in a March 3 town hall session with his constituents that, as quoted in the Virginia-area Connection newspapers, "if it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war with Iraq, we would not be doing this The leaders of the Jewish community are influential enough that they could change the direction of where this is going, and I think they should." The House and Senate Democratic leaders, Nancy Pelosi and Tom Daschle, promptly denounced Moran's remarks, and six Jewish House Democrats have taken it upon themselves to advise Moran that he not seek re-election in 2004. Should he do so, "we cannot and will not support his candidacy." Moran has been forced to give up on his positions as Democratic Party leader in the mid-Atlantic region, though not as yet his committee posts on the Hill. The game plan is clearly what it was with Hilliard of Alabama and McKinney of Georgia, both evicted from Congress last year as conspicuous acts of retribution against critics of Israel: Breathe a word about justice for Palestinians, and you'll lose your seat. Moran says he'll certainly run again, and the decision will belong to the voters of his district.

Anger and Tears at Israel's Wall of Apartheid
By Anne Gwynne, CounterPunch, March 15, 2003
The Wound Which Has Slashed Palestine to the Bone-- Nablus. Today the attempt to murder, destroy and to break the will of the people of this Mountain of Fire--Jabal An'nar--has escalated to an intolerable level, though we expect it to get much worse. Our lovely mountains are ringed with fire as in the past millennia, but now it is the bright searchlights and floods of the Israeli illegal settlements and their military camps which light up the night sky. We are completely encircled by them, and with their powerful American weapons they can see any one of us at any time and shoot us dead. And they do. My intention today was to go to Jenin with Munt'ser, who has had to wait nearly two weeks to start his new job there as the UPMRC Ambulance driver. The income is badly needed because their father was murdered by the Israelis in April so Munt'ser is alone, responsible for the four younger brothers and sisters in Jenin. He has never had a job--the unemployment here is over 80%--and it will take him one year to pay the rent, electricity and water owing since the Israeli destruction in April 2002. The sum is not great, some 700 US dollars, but it is more than his salary for a year. The closures have now intensified and the roads are closed to EVERYONE, not just men and women under 35 years. So we wait.

Endgame in Baghdad: Human Shields Go Home to Fight
By John Ross, CounterPunch, March 15, 2003
AMMAN, JORDAN (March 11th). This past Friday (March 7th), the day the fatal Blix report would be broadcast to an expectant universe, my Turkish comrade, ex-Greenpeace Mediterranean campaigner and Elvis Presley lookalike Tolga Temuge and I were perched upon the rickety roof of the engine house at the Daura oil refinery in west Baghdad, marking the site with industrial black paint, when the Human Shield action finally fell irrevocably apart. We had already filled in the six-meter-long H-U and were outlining the M in the words that, when spelled out completely, would signal George Bush's death-dealing missiles that the refinery was a United Nations-certitified civilian site that provides fuel and home heating oil to the residents of Baghdad and beyond, and that by blasting the plant off the face of the earth, the U.S. president would also be endangering the lives of his own citizens and those of many other nations, when a delegation from the Organization of Peace and Friendship, our hosts in Iraq, summoned us down to the ground floor to read us the riot act. Under a fatwa issued by Dr. Abdul Al-Hasimi, the 'non-governmental' group's director, we were ordered to leave Iraq immediately, banished from this beleaguered land because we had usurped the function of an existing NGO by facilitating the deployment of over 100 Shields to five key infrastructure sites in and around Baghdad.

Rachel Corrie: In her own words
By Rachel Corrie, The Electronic Intifada, March 17, 2003
Excerpts from an e-mail from Rachel Corrie to her family on February 7, 2003 -- I have been in Palestine for two weeks and one hour now, and I still have very few words to describe what I see. It is most difficult for me to think about what's going on here when I sit down to write back to the United States--something about the virtual portal into luxury. I don't know if many of the children here have ever existed without tank-shell holes in their walls and the towers of an occupying army surveying them constantly from the near horizons. I think, although I'm not entirely sure, that even the smallest of these children understand that life is not like this everywhere. An eight-year-old was shot and killed by an Israeli tank two days before I got here, and many of the children murmur his name to me, “Ali”--or point at the posters of him on the walls. The children also love to get me to practice my limited Arabic by asking me "Kaif Sharon?" "Kaif Bush?" and they laugh when I say "Bush Majnoon" "Sharon Majnoon" back in my limited Arabic. (How is Sharon? How is Bush? Bush is crazy. Sharon is crazy.) Of course this isn't quite what I believe, and some of the adults who have the English correct me: Bush mish Majnoon... Bush is a businessman. Today I tried to learn to say "Bush is a tool", but I don't think it translated quite right. But anyway, there are eight-year-olds here much more aware of the workings of the global power structure than I was just a few years ago--at least regarding Israel.

The War of Misinformation has Begun
By Robert Fisk, Dissident Voice, March 15, 2003
All across the Middle East, they are deploying by the thousand. In the deserts of Kuwait, in Amman, in northern Iraq, in Turkey, in Israel and in Baghdad itself. There must be 7,000 journalists and crews "in theatre", as the more jingoistic of them like to say. In Qatar, a massive press centre has been erected for journalists who will not see the war. How many times General Tommy Franks will spin his story to the press at the nine o'clock follies, no one knows. He doesn't even like talking to journalists. But the journalistic resources being laid down in the region are enormous. The BBC alone has 35 reporters in the Middle East, 17 of them "embedded" – along with hundreds of reporters from the American networks and other channels – in military units. Once the invasion starts, they will lose their freedom to write what they want. There will be censorship. And, I'll hazard a guess right now, we shall see many of the British and American journalists back to their old trick of playing toy soldiers, dressing themselves up in military costumes for their nightly theatrical performances on television. Incredibly, several of the American networks have set up shop in the Kurdish north of Iraq with orders not to file a single story until war begins – in case this provokes the Iraqis to expel their network reporters from Baghdad.

Dual Loyalty?
By Rebecca Phillips, Palestine Media Center, March 17, 2003
Are Israeli Interests ‘The Elephant in the Room’ in the Conflict With Iraq? -- A joke currently circulating around the Internet tells the story of Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush sharing their dreams with each other. Saddam Hussein phoned President Bush. "I had a dream about the United States," he said. "I could see the whole country, and over every building and home was a banner.""What was on the banner?" asked Bush. "LONG LIVE SADDAM!" answered the dictator. "I'm so glad that you called," said President Bush, "because I too had a dream. In my dream, I saw Iraq and it was more beautiful than ever; totally rebuilt with many tall, gleaming office buildings, large residential subdivisions with swimming pools in every yard; and over every building and home was a big, beautiful banner." "What did the banner say?" asked Saddam. I don't know," answered President Bush, "I can't read Hebrew." The joke may offend some, but it underscores a growing debate over the role of Israel — and American Jews supportive of Israel — as the United States moves further toward war with Iraq.