Sophisticated Transfer
By Tanya Reinhart, Dissident Voice, April 10, 2003
On the eve of the Iraq war, fears were expressed in different circles that under the cover of war, Israel may attempt a transfer of Palestinians in the “seam line” area of the northern West Bank (Kalkilya, Tulkarem). Last week, the army produced a scene from this scenario. On April 2 at 3am, a large force raided the refugee camp of Tulkarem, blocked all the roads and paths with barbed wires and announced on loudspeakers that all males aged 15 to 40 must go to a certain compound at the center of the camp. At 9 in the morning, the army began to transport the gathered males to a nearby refugee camp. This time it was only a staged scene, and the residents were allowed to return after a few days. But the producers of this show made sure that its significance would not escape the participants and the audience. They took special care that evacuation be done with trucks - an exact re-enactment of the 1948 trauma. As one of the residents described his feelings when he got on the truck, "all the memories and childhood stories of my father and grandfather about the Nakba came back” (Regular, Ha’aretz, March 4, 2003, included below). Many interpret this show as a “general rehearsal” for the possibility of a future transfer. There is no doubt that the current government is mentally prepared for transfer, but it is not certain that the “international conditions” are ripe for executing this in the way that was staged. The war in Iraq has become too entangled for the U.S. to risk opening another flashpoint. But transfer is not just trucks. In the Israeli history of “land redemption” there is also another model, more hidden and sophisticated. In the framework of the “Judaization of the Galilee” project, which had begun in the 1950s, the Palestinians that remained in Israel were robbed of half their lands, isolated in small enclaves, surrounded by Israeli settlements, and gradually lost the bonds that held them together as a nation. Such an internal transfer is occurring now in the occupied territories, and it has been escalated during the war.

Descent into a charnel-house hospital hell
By Paul McGeough, The Sidney Morning Herald, April 10 2003
There's a man who goes up to his roof terrace every time the fighting starts. Often in his underwear, he watches with his hands spread nonchalantly on the parapet wall. In a vegetable patch down by the Tigris River, a family of gardeners always crane their necks to see what is happening as the F/A-18s, usually in pairs, wheel in from the south. And now, a Vespa motor scooter is careering erratically down Abu Nuwas Street - its rider with his face turned to the sky as an Iraqi surface-to-air missile whistles off in pursuit of a United States fighter jet. The plane is so low I can count the missiles clipped to its wings - five. The SAM seems to be catching up; the jet does an evasive belly roll, clears the area, takes a new bead on the high-rise that the pilot and his colleagues are trying to demolish, and fires. It's a direct hit. Baghdad is gripped by a fatalism about life and death. People can't run, so sometimes they don't even bother to hide as the world's most ferocious firepower is turned on a sprawling city with a defenceless civilian population of five million. The instinctive reaction of parents is to get their children out of the city. Some are even making them walk to the country. But Wael Sabah was stuck in Baladiyat, on the city's far eastern flank where, neighbours say, she thought her children were out of harm's way. But their descent deep into hell starts the second the pilot in a low-flying F/A-18 pulled the trigger, unleashing a missile that rips apart their home and their lives. Tiny 12-year-old Noor, her long black plait a tangle of blood and dust, is dead; in the next cubicle in the Kindi Hospital trauma ward, her younger brother, Abdel Khader, is dead; and across the way, their mother is dying in a sea of her own blood. If it is possible to have a nightmare within a nightmare, Kindi Hospital is it. The horror of war in Baghdad is distressing, but it is not possible to walk into this hospital without questioning the very essence of humanity as we think we know it.

A Lethal Way to "Dispatch" the News
By Norman Solomon, FAIR, April 10, 2003 
In times of war, journalists can serve as vital witnesses for the people of the world. So it's especially sinister when governments take aim at reporters and photographers. A few weeks ago, when I was talking with a CNN cameraman, he recalled an overseas stint to cover events in the West Bank. Anger was evident in his voice: "The Israelis were shooting at us." When military forces are assaulting civilians, commanders often try to prevent media from telling true stories with pictures and words. Governments that maim and kill civilians are routinely eager to stop journalists from getting too close to the action. Those who persist are vulnerable to retribution. For a long time now, the U.S. government has been hostile toward the Al-Jazeera television network. Widely watched in the Arab world, Al-Jazeera's coverage of the war on Iraq has been in sharp contrast to the coverage on American television. As Time magazine observed: "On U.S. TV it means press conferences with soldiers who have hand and foot injuries and interviews with POWs' families, but little blood. On Arab and Muslim TV it means dead bodies and mourning." Back in 2001, with the United States at war in Afghanistan, the Pentagon bombed Al-Jazeera's bureau in Kabul. This year, during the lead-up to the war in Iraq, Al-Jazeera repeatedly informed the U.S. military of the exact coordinates of the network's office in downtown Baghdad. On April 8, a U.S. missile hit that Al-Jazeera office, taking the life of Tareq Ayub, a 34-year-old Jordanian journalist. A coincidence? A mere accident? I don't think so. The same day, a U.S. tank fired a shell at the Palestine Hotel, where most foreign journalists have been based lately in Baghdad. The assault killed Taras Protsyuk of the Reuters news agency and Jose Couso of the Spanish network Telecinco.

Friedman’s Fairy Tales
By Talal ibn Abdul Aziz, Arab News, April 11, 2003
Thomas Friedman wrote an article in the Arabic newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat, on March 10 titled “How the Americans Will Use Their Huge Power.” The following paragraph in the article caught my attention: “I recall the following story: In 1945 King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, founder of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, met with President Franklin Roosevelt at the Suez Canal. But King Abdul Aziz, in the Bedouin spirit, asked his advisers two questions about the president before meeting him: ‘Tell me, does he believe in God? Do they (the Americans) have colonies?’” Since we could not find anything to confirm it after going through the sources of Saudi-American history, we sent an e-mail to Friedman asking him to reveal the source of his story. We waited for several days. But as usual with Friedman, he neither acknowledged his sources nor would he answer queries about them. We fear that the writer, who is known for his Zionist leanings, may be relying on the kind of wrong information that some Arab and foreign writers regrettably like to peddle. The following are the reasons we do not find Friedman’s story credible...

Depression -- And Its Activism Antidote --Will Lead to Bush's Downfall
By Bernard Weiner, Dissident Voice, April 10, 2003
Let's talk about a subject that remains mostly hidden in American social discourse: depression. And, in particular, where personal depression meets economic and political depression -- and, even more specifically right now, when all these states meet at the nexus of the U.S. war on Iraq. Depression is a sane, normal way of dealing with overwhelming grief, loss, confusion, shame -- in this instance cluster-bombs, depleted uranium weapons, children being slaughtered as "collateral damage," and all in our name. Because depression shakes us up, it provides opportunities, once we regain our energy and focus, for effective political action. All three depressions can be agents of powerful change.  The economic depression that likely will follow our current economic doldrums; the society-wide depressive anxiety that keeps the citizenry from turning on the rulers responsible for the current economic/political mess we're in; the personal depression affecting so many, resulting from heightened fear and uncertainty. Add all those together and you get a populace that is in a condition of numbed stasis -- a state that suits Bush & Co. just fine. In fact, in many ways they helped engineer such a state, and are planning on its continued operation in order to run their agenda without too much opposition.

How Neoconservatives Conquered Washington – and Launched a War
By Michael Lind, IndyMedia, April 11, 2003
Baghdad is now under US control. But where are Iraq's weapons of mass destruction which justified the war on Iraq? America's allies and enemies alike are baffled. What is going on in the United States? Who is making foreign policy? And what are they trying to achieve? Quasi-Marxist explanations involving big oil or American capitalism are mistaken. Yes, American oil companies and contractors will accept the spoils of the kill in Iraq. But the oil business, with its Arabist bias, did not push for this war any more than it supports the Bush administration's close alliance with Ariel Sharon. Further, President Bush and Vice President Cheney are not genuine "Texas oil men" but career politicians who, in between stints in public life, would have used their connections to enrich themselves as figureheads in the wheat business, if they had been residents of Kansas, or in tech companies, had they been Californians. Equally wrong is the theory that the American and European civilizations are evolving in opposite directions. The thesis of Robert Kagan, the neoconservative propagandist, that Americans are martial and Europeans pacifist, is complete nonsense. A majority of Americans voted for either Al Gore or Ralph Nader in 2000. Were it not for the overrepresentation of sparsely populated, right-wing states in both the presidential electoral college and the Senate, the White House and the Senate today would be controlled by Democrats, whose views and values, on everything from war to the welfare state, are very close to those of western Europeans. Both the economic-determinist theory and the clash-of-cultures theory are reassuring: They assume that the recent revolution in U.S. foreign policy is the result of obscure but understandable forces in an orderly world. The truth is more alarming. As a result of several bizarre and unforeseeable contingencies – such as the selection rather than election of George W. Bush, and Sept. 11 – the foreign policy of the world's only global power is being made by a small clique that is unrepresentative of either the U.S. population or the mainstream foreign policy0 establishment.

Might As Well Get To Know It
Khilafah, April 11, 2003
Now that our president has embedded us in the Middle East for an indefinite future, you might as well start trying to educate yourself about the area and its conflicts. As one can say about so many problems in this world, it all began with the British Empire. When you look at a map of the Middle East, you are looking at a map drawn by two Europeans by the names of Sykes and Picot. This map represents the betrayal of the Arabs and the Kurds. Before this map was drawn, the area had been part of the Ottoman Empire. (That's Turkey, for those of you who hate history and geography.) The British, with their usual perfidy, had promised everything to everybody. Help us overthrow the Turks, they said to the Arabs, and you can have an independent Arab nation afterward. Help us overthrow the Turks, they said to the Kurds, and you will get an independent Kurdistan. And for some reason historians still argue about, they also promised European Zionists that they (the Brits) would establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. They betrayed them, too, because what they did was establish the Palestine mandate — or, in plain language, British occupation of Palestine. Britain and France divided the Middle East between themselves, and this basic fact set off the conflicts we are still dealing with. The problem with establishing a Jewish state was that Arabs already occupied the area chosen. While they initially had no quarrel with Jews who wanted to immigrate to Palestine (the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has nothing to do with religion and never has), as soon as they figured out that European Jews were not coming to be Palestinians but to take their land away from them, the Arabs revolted. The British crushed this.

'We're here to fight the regime, not civilians, but I had to save my men'
By Robert Fisk, The Independent, April 11, 2003
Something terrible happened on Highway 8. Some say a hundred civilians died there. Others believe that only 40 or 50 men, women and children were cut to pieces by American tank fire when members of the 3rd Infantry Division's Task Force 315 were ambushed by the Republican Guard. Many of their corpses still lie rotting in their incinerated cars, a young woman, burnt naked, slumped face down over the rear seat on the Hillah flyover bridge next to half of a male corpse that is hanging out of the driver's door. Blankets cover a pile of civilian dead, including a cremated child, a few metres away. A red car, shot in half by an American tank shell, lies on its side with the lower half of a human leg, still in a black shoe, beside the left front wheel. No one disputes that the American troops were ambushed here – or that the battle only ended late on Wednesday afternoon. On the flyover, I found a dead Iraqi Republican Guard in uniform, his blood draining into the gutter, one foot over the other, shot in the head. A hundred metres away lay a car with an elderly civilian man dead under the chassis. Two fuel trucks – one of them still burning – lay in a field. An incinerated passenger bus stood beside the motorway.

Nine Theses on Moving the Peace Movement Forward
By Betsy Hartmann, Foreign Policy In Focus, April 7, 2003
As the U.S. army occupies Baghdad, the peace movement is faced with a series of strategic challenges, challenges we must face openly, and challenges for which there are no easy answers. We must develop political strategies that draw on solidarity and information from activists and analysts in diverse social movements and incorporate those into our own work. The following reflections are offered as a contribution to the ongoing strategic debates within the peace movement. They are based upon my own ongoing involvement in the peace movement and informed by my own thinking over the past several years about how to build a broad-based progressive social justice movement in this country, a movement that sees the connections between national and international policies and a movement that, while respecting difference, moves beyond the narrow confines of identity and single-issue politics.

The forgotten inheritance
By Ziauddin Sardar, Salaam/New Statesman, April 7, 2003
Book Reviews: The Cross and the Crescent: Christianity and Islam, from Muhammad to the Reformation, by Richard Fletcher Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 183pp, £14.99 / Infidels: the conflict between Christendom and Islam, by Andrew Wheatcroft, Viking, 443pp, £20 -- There is another way of looking at the relationship between Islam and the west. The west's hatred of Islam stems from, more than anything else, the denial of its true lineage. The western world as we understand it is a child of Islam. Without Islam, the west - however we conceive it today - would not exist. And, without the west, Islam is incomplete and cannot survive the future. -- I listened to an interview with Pat Robertson, the American televangelist and founder of the Christian Coalition. The Prophet Muhammad, he said, "was an absolute wide-eyed fanatic. He was a robber and a brigand. And to say that these terrorists distort Islam . . . they're carrying out Islam." Like most Muslims, I have become immune to such abuse. But I expected the interviewer, Sean Hannity, to challenge the good Reverend. Instead, he inquired: "Do you think it's the majority of Muslims?" Robertson replied by calling Islam "a monumental scam". This prompted Hannity to conclude: "It's inevitable then that the world is going to be in conflict with Islam for many decades to come." The world, that is the western world, has been at war with Islam since its inception. The views of Robertson and Hannity have had common currency for more than 1,400 years. Western hatred of Islam, as both Richard Fletcher and Andrew Wheatcroft show in their new books, dates to the beginning of Islam. As early as 638, Wheatcroft notes, the Christian Patriarch of Jerusalem publicly called the Muslim Caliph's presence in the city "an abomination". In the early eighth century, John of Damascus, an Arab monk, characterised Muslims as fanatical infidels. This image remains with us today. The protracted era, over 250 years, of the Crusades constructed the image of the violent "Saracen", whose very existence was a threat to Christendom. With the emergence of the Ottoman empire, the Ottomans became, to use Wheatcroft's words, "the fons et origo of all evil". Colonialism sealed these images in concrete.