The promise of independence that was never kept
By Ze'ev Segal, Haaretz, May 6, 2003
On Israel's 55th Independence Day, in light of the national reality of inequality marked by social gaps, the Declaration of Independence, which speaks of equal social and political rights for all the state's citizens, can be read as a great promise that has not yet been kept. The Supreme Court has based verdicts recognizing the equality of women in various aspects - participation on religious councils, state corporation boards and pilots' training in the air force - on the Declaration of Independence. But in the work place, women are widely discriminated against, both regarding wages and job benefits. The declaration served as the basis for a verdict that required government ministries to allocate equal resources for cemeteries for the Arab population. That's a drop in the ocean. The new ruling that requires road signs in Arabic in mixed cities only highlights the state's indifference to that language as one of its official languages, despite the regulations. Those who want to fulfill the promise of the declaration and anchor the right to equality in a Basic Law that takes precedence over ordinary legislation, find that it is an extremely difficult task. Equality is not mentioned in the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Freedom, which was passed in 1992, mostly because religious parties feared that recognition of equality as a legal right would harm the existing discrimination against women in religious courts. The Supreme Court has so far avoided rulings that would make equality part of Human Dignity in the Basic Law, which would then make it possible to annul or overrule laws that harm it. The court has avoided deliberating on the matter, despite clear statements made by Court President Justice Aharon Barak, who regards equality as inseparable from "Human Dignity" - but it is doubtful whether the court can continue doing so.

The burning of Baghdad
By Anouar Abdel-Malek, Al-Ahram Weekly On-line, 1 - 7 May 2003
The looting of Baghdad was a preview of what's in store for the region. -- Although it is fashionable these days to note the need "to deal with reality", one cannot help wondering how the civilised world would handle the pillage of Baghdad following the collapse of the Iraqi regime and with it law and order. The director of the National Museum in Baghdad, speaking in front of television cameras, said that since her entire family had been killed she had lost the ability to cry. Minutes later, she walked into the museum display halls, under the glare of the cameras, to inspect the damage. Thousands of statues, artefacts, and rare paintings had been destroyed or stolen by marauders who ransacked the museum under the very eyes of US occupation forces. And then the same woman broke down in tears -- her sadness shared by all with a shred of decency left in their hearts. If the criminal aggression was a war for "democracy", why was Baghdad looted? One is tempted to recall the conduct of victorious armies from Ramsis to Hitler, from Alexander the Great to Napoleon, and from Caesar to Stalin. Yes, defeat is a costly affair. But responsible generals know where to stop and how to win a war morally, not just militarily. In World War II, Hitler's armies seized the treasures of West Europe and took them to German museums to store and display them with pride. So did the Red Army, when it overran half the Nazi empire. It seized numerous pieces of art in East and Central Europe -- Germany in particular -- and took them to Soviet museums. Now that peace has prevailed, President Putin and Chancellor Schroeder are discussing the exchange of these treasures -- the war booty having been carefully guarded, preserved for humanity, for decades.

Taking it off the streets
By John Leo, U.S. News & World Report,  May 12, 2003 
If you are worried about the state of free speech in America, consider the case of longtime protester Brett Bursey. Last October the 54-year-old Bursey, carrying an antiwar sign, was arrested at Columbia Metropolitan Airport in South Carolina during a visit by President Bush. He was on public property at the time but was charged with trespassing because he was outside the zone established for demonstrators that day. The zone was on the edge of a highway, a half-mile away from the president, where neither Bush nor the media were likely to notice. The Bursey case contains other oddities. Bursey charges viewpoint discrimination--he says an airport policeman specifically told him his sign ("No war for oil") was a problem for authorities. Local charges were dropped, but Bursey faces federal charges under a rarely used statute that allows the Secret Service to restrict access to areas where the president is visiting. The U.S. attorney's office says the sign and Bursey's protest were not issues: "The problem was where he was doing it." Federal charges against out-of-place but peaceful protesters are unusual, particularly when the charges carry maximum penalties that run to six months in jail and a $5,000 fine. Perhaps when the case comes to trial, we will learn more, including why the feds bothered to file charges five months after a minor and apparently harmless act of defiance. Serious discussion about the rights of protesters is out of fashion right now, partly because the media prefer to focus on the low-level complaints of antiwar celebrities. But there are several troubling trends, among them what seems to be a policy of more and quicker arrests, the practice of banishing protesters to faraway sites, and a tactic that Jonathan Turley of George Washington University's law school calls trap-and-arrest.

Real American agenda now becoming clear
By Haroon Siddiqui, Toronto Star, May 4, 2003
A superpower like the United States does not invade a pipsqueak power like Iraq — outside the framework of international law and against worldwide opposition — only for its publicly stated reasons, in this case, fighting terrorism, liberating Iraq and triggering a domino effect for the democratization of the Middle East. -- The real American agenda is only now becoming clearer. The conquest of Iraq is enabling a new Pax Americana that goes well beyond the much-discussed control of oil, as central as that is to the enterprise. America is redrawing the military map of the region with amazing alacrity. It has pulled its bases out of Saudi Arabia and Turkey in favour of less-demanding hosts. Its relations with Egypt have been placed on the back burner. It is no accident that those three nations are the region's more populous. And that America's newest partners — Qatar, Bahrain, Oman and the United Arab Emirates — are thinly populated and tightly controlled monarchies. People are a problem for America in the Arab and Muslim world. They are bristling with anti-Americanism, principally over the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. The pullout of 10,000 U.S. troops from a Saudi air base was long overdue, not just because it was a favourite target of Osama bin Laden. It so embarrassed he ruling House of Saud that the Americans had to be kept in purdah, away from the public at a remote base in the desert. The base is obviously no longer needed since Saddam Hussein is gone. But its closure, in fact, is America's answer to Saudi resistance to the war and the fact that 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were bin Laden Saudis. As the two nations begin a new chapter in their 50-year relationship, America will be less dependant on, though not free of the need for, Saudi oil. The kingdom with the world's largest oil reserves and the highest output will lose clout as America controls the second-largest reserves in Iraq. Turkey, too, has to renegotiate its relations with Washington. America now has a vise grip on the region, with 14 new post-9/11 bases, from eastern Europe through Iraq, the Persian Gulf, Pakistan and Afghanistan to the two Central Asian republics of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. The singular feature of all those new allies is that they are weak states. Most are undemocratic, if not repressive. So, America is replicating its failed model of using unrepresentative regimes to suppress the people, but doing it on new turf.

Thomas Friedman's life as a pet hamster
By John Chuckman, YellowTimes.org, May 2, 2003
(YellowTimes.org) -- If you ever had a pet hamster when you were young, you know what I mean about hearing its regular scrambling and spinning on the exercise wheel. The squeak-squeak sound becomes an amusing background noise of everyday life. There is a powerful analogy in the life of a pet hamster to the work of mainline American columnists, but I think there are few it better suits than Thomas Friedman, and I am not referring to his pudgy, whiskered looks. Apart from time on the wheel, pet hamsters' lives are pretty well limited to nibbling food pellets and taking refreshment from a water bottle. Thomas receives his pellets and refreshment from the public influence departments of the Pentagon, the White House, and the State Department. Between feedings and rests to digest, you can hear Thomas periodically scamper over to his wheel for a spin. I know, I know, he's a Pulitzer laureate, but people citing this qualification haven't examined the distinction they make. A serious reader of history knows the Pulitzer has gone to mediocre books while wonderful ones were overlooked. In journalism, the Pulitzer is more doubtful, having been awarded for out-and-out fraud. Of course, Americans have an obsession with prizes and lists, as though one could count on them as a way of identifying worth and integrity, but the main purpose most of them serve is juicing-up products. The New York Times spends gobs of money bolstering Thomas the hamster's aura of authority. He is sent regularly to distant points, but if you go somewhere to gather quotes and local color, absorbing little of its truths, the net effect resembles the blow-dried correspondents on network television who use foreign locations for background shots while droning out what might just as easily have been said in the studio.

The world won't forgive or forget
By Peter Preston, The Guardian, May 5, 2003
A vast global majority opposed the war - and nothing has changed -- So that's all right, then? George W proclaims the fighting over; Tony Blair shifts his adjectives of mass persuasion to the home front; house-trained local mandarins begin talking about consensuses restored, bridges rebuilt. Time to move on. We must give a lead. But why is nobody following? The assumption - the American and British governments' assumption - is that, as always, facts have to be faced. It isn't any longer a question of whether Saddam should be deposed. He and his boys are history. Those who doubted or denounced us are therefore living in a particularly futile version of the past. We (famous words) are where we are. But I keep remembering where I was just before the war started and just after it finished. Before was a meeting of editors (not diplomats or politicians) from the 34 Commonwealth countries. After was a meeting in Kazakhstan for 200 or so journalists from all over Europe, Asia and the Middle East. A sampling of Barbadians, Fijians, Zambians, Russians, Pakistanis, Italians, Danes, Azerbaijanis - and many more. Opinion formers, all of them. And the fascinating thing is that nothing has changed. Victory in the desert hasn't made a blind bit of difference. The rest of the world is neither forgiving nor forgetting. Its rulers may, or may not, Mr Putin, be trying to change the record, but the people they rule have elephants' memories and a view which mere outcomes do not affect. They proved nothing down the barrel of their own guns.

Dixie Chicks get last laugh
By Breuse Hickman, Florida Today, May 2, 2003
That breeze you feel is courtesy of a sigh of relief echoed from the handlers of the Dixie Chicks as the "there's-no-such-thing-as-bad-publicity" rule plays out once again. Rest assured that a girl group singer's off-the-cuff remarks and ensuing success will fuel plenty of jingoistic rants to keep group-thinkers' proverbial prayers and guns aimed at anyone who dares utter dissent. Let's see. Tonight's concert at Orlando's T.D. Waterhouse is sold out. Chicks' 6 million-selling CD "Home" only temporarily fell out of the No. 1 position on the country charts, reclaiming the top spot two weeks after Chick Natalie Maines' anti-Bush, anti-war remarks. This week, the CD nestles at No. 2 -- uncomfortably sandwiched between the opportunistic sentiments of Darryl Worley's "Have You Forgotten?" and Toby Keith's call-to-arms "Unleashed," at No. 1 and No. 3 respectively. The Chicks also got on the cover of Entertainment Weekly. Naked, even. So does it really matter that, on Wednesday, Cumulus Broadcasting -- which owns Brevard's country station WHKR (102.7) -- officially lifted the ban that prevented any of its stations in more than 40 markets from playing Dixie Chicks tunes? As far as the Chicks' pocketbooks go, the ban had about the same effect as did country fans who stomped on Dixie Chicks CDs they had already bought. Do country fans know that if you destroy your own property it doesn't hurt anyone, no matter how mad or patriotic you feel? However, such corporate -- and public -- McCarthyism does further expose the limits now placed on certain American freedoms, in this case, freedom of speech. As of Thursday, WHKR still has no plans to play the Chicks' music, despite the ban lift. "We are keeping up with the feedback from listeners," WHKR program director Ted Turner said. "Some have called in with the freedom of speech thing and that they should be forgiven. But this is a military town, and we're simply not going to put on a record that 60 percent of our listeners don't want to hear. We just are following what our listeners are telling us they want to hear. Heck, if they wanted to hear Chinese gong music, that's what we would play." Makes sense. Unless, of course, corporate were to find out and officially ban Chinese music from its airwaves.

Operation Support Garner
By Jonathan Steele, The Guardian, May 6, 2003
The Pentagon's one-size-fits-all 'liberation' is a disaster in Iraq -- American efforts to foist new rulers on the people of Iraq are becoming increasingly grotesque. In some cities US troops have sparked demonstrations by imposing officials from the old Saddam Hussein regime. In others they have evicted new anti-Saddam administrators who have local backing. They have mishandled religious leaders as well as politicians. In the Shia suburbs of Baghdad, they arrested a powerful cleric, Mohammed Fartousi al-Sadr, who had criticised the US presence. In Falluja, an overwhelmingly Sunni town, they detained two popular imams. All three men were released within days, but local people saw the detentions as a warning that Iraqis should submit to the US will. The Pentagon's General Jay Garner has taken an equally biased line in his plans for Iraq's government. He held a conference of 300 Iraqis in Baghdad last week and excluded almost every group which has an organised following. In a Freudian slip at a recent press conference, Donald Rumsfeld smugly explained democracy as a competition in which rival politicians try to "garner support". His message in Iraq looks like the opposite - Operation Support Garner. Otherwise, you are cut out. Washington's failure to hold broad-based consultations at central and local levels is provoking resistance, sometimes armed. In response, US troops have used excessive force, further raising tensions. Ten people died in Mosul when soldiers fired at crowds of protesters on successive days in mid-April. In Falluja the death toll from American shootings over two days last week was at least 16.

Mother's Day: a call for women to demand peace
By Geov Parrish, WorkingForChange.com, May 5, 2003
"In the name of womanhood and humanity..." -- Last year in this space, I took the occasion of Mother's Day weekend to reprint the 1870 call by American poet and women's leader Julia Ward Howe for the establishment of the holiday. The response was astonishing; the awareness by even peace activists was nearly nil that what is now widely viewed as a sentimental tribute to family was originally a call for women to wage a general strike to end war. This year -- after the worldwide staging a few months ago of the ancient Greek anti-war play Lysistrata, which may have helped inspire Howe -- Julia Ward Howe's call for women to not allow their men to constantly play at war is suddenly back in fashion. Around the country, her original Mother's Day Proclamation will be the basis this year for parades, remembrances, and other events that try to reclaim the holiday's original spirit in a year when the United States' (male-dominated) government talks seriously not of avoiding war, but which ones to start next. The radical origins of Mother's Day -- as a powerful feminist call against war, penned in the wake of the U.S. Civil War in 1870 -- are fully compatible with the universal notion of honoring mothers. Women, even more so now, are the primary sufferers of warfare. In the 20th Century, civilian populations bore 90 percent of war's casualties around the world; mass and indiscriminate attacks, popularized in WWII by the Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Allied firebombings in Japan and Germany, and the rape of Nanking, are only the most spectacular examples of a phenomenon in which women become the rape and famine victims, the refugees, the forgotten statistics in what are invariably the wars of men. Here is the original, pre-Hallmark, Mother's Day Proclamation, penned in Boston by Julia Ward Howe in 1870...

So he thinks it’s all over...
By Robert Fisk, Pakistan Daily Times/The Independent, May 6, 2003
George Bush has announced the end of the war. But try telling that to the Shias and the Badr Brigade -- So, it’s the end of the war in Iraq, is it? If anyone thinks George Bush Jnr could pass that one off aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln last week – “major combat operations have ended” was the expression he used on Thursday night – they should take a closer look at Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld’s cosy, sinister little speech to US troops in Baghdad a day earlier. It was filled with all the usual myth-making: the “many” Iraqis who flocked to welcome the Americans on their “liberation” of Baghdad, the “fastest march on a capital in modern military history” (which the Israelis achieved in three days in 1982). But the key line was slipped in at the end. The Americans, he said, still had “to root out the terrorist networks operating in this country”. What? What terrorist networks? And who, one may ask, are behind these mysterious terrorist networks “operating” in Iraq? I have a pretty good idea. They may not actually exist yet. But Donald Rumsfeld knows (and he has been told by US intelligence) that a growing resistance movement to America’s occupation is gestating in Iraq. The Shia Muslim community, now supported by thousands of Badr Brigade Iraqis trained in Iran, believes the US is in Iraq for its oil. It is furious at America’s treatment of Iraq’s citizens; in three days last week at least 17 Sunni demonstrators were killed, two of them less than 11 years old. And it is not impressed by Washington’s attempts to cobble together an “interim” pro-American government. Even during the war, you could hear the same sentiments. Yes, the Shias would tell us, the Americans can get rid of Saddam. No one doubted his viciousness. But, always, this sentiment was followed by a desire to see the back of the Americans. Most of the civilian victims of American and British bombs were Shias, especially around Nasiriyah and Hillah. Which is another reason why the Americans did not arrive in Baghdad – where a US armoured vehicle pulled down the famous statue of Saddam – to be greeted by flowers and music. When Iraqi civilians look into the faces of American troops, President Bush famously told the world on Thursday, “they see strength and kindness and goodwill”. Untrue, Mr Bush. They see occupation.

Misrepresenting Rachel Corrie
By Adam Shapiro, Washington Post, April 26, 2003/IndyMedia, May 6, 2003
Eric Rozenman [Free for Fall, April 19] attempts to recast the perspective on the final e-mails of Rachel Corrie. By his account, she was a misled young woman with "no hint of understanding the violent situation into which she was recruited by a Palestinian 'solidarity' organization." Rozenman carefully avoids addressing the issue that brought Corrie to our attention in the first place. An Israeli bulldozer ran over an unarmed young woman without a moment's pause. No warnings, no efforts to have someone pull her out of the way. Full steam ahead! It is precisely this kind of egregious, callous treatment of Palestinians as garbage to be swept out of the way of Israelis that serves as recruitment material for pro-Palestinian causes. It also explains an increasingly vehement "anti-Israeli policy" camp among those who are otherwise pro-Jewish. While organizations are free to name themselves whatever they want, Rozenman's submission, as a representative of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), reveals the political agenda behind his organization's ostensible accuracy. Eric Rozenman uses isolated words in Rachel Corrie's last e-mails to her family to misrepresent her as an extremist and accuses her of "justify[ing] terrorism," when she did no such thing. Corrie -- according to her own words -- was motivated by an informed and admirable desire to confront Israel's well-documented violence against Palestinian civilians. Rozenman portrays Israel's 1967 military occupation as an act of "self-defense." Thirty-six years into this occupation, one wonders how long it would take for Rozenman to acknowledge it as the means by which Palestinian land continues to be offensively colonized daily -- a coordinated, government-led process that does great violence to land and people and undermines the future livelihood of the Palestinian people. One also wonders why his claims about the "benefits" of this occupation do not accord with statistics compiled by international monitoring organizations. Family, friends and colleagues of Rachel Corrie remember a thoughtful, committed activist who responded admirably to compensate for our failings as a nation to seek justice in this conflict.