'To reach Mideast peace, avoid public moves'
By Daoud Kuttab, Jordan Times, May 23, 2003
THE SCORES of innocent Israelis killed Saturday and Sunday in a series of Palestinian suicide attacks, and the scores of innocent Palestinians killed before and since in various Israeli operations, point to the need for a new approach to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. This new approach must be based on secrecy and the need to work out a package agreement, away from the pressures and pitfalls of a publicly declared process. Although as a journalist I wholeheartedly support freedom of expression, in this case I believe that lives can be saved by temporarily refraining from the exercise of this right. A clear pattern has been emerging over the years. On the eve of any publicised high-level visit or time-linked arrangements, hardliners seem to get active. A plot of Palestinian land expropriated to build a Jewish settlement here or a Palestinian attack against Israeli settlers there; an Israeli assassination or incursion here or a gruesome Palestinian suicide attack in a major Israeli city there. The situation has become so predictable that Palestinians and Israelis brace themselves every time high-profile visits or crucial target dates for making decisions approach. For the most part, these attacks and counterattacks are meant mostly to send messages to the perpetrators' leaders and public and to sabotage any progress in the peace process. Invariably, these attacks bring about retaliation that is quickly claimed as proof that the other side doesn't want peace. Radical groups should not be allowed to succeed. Not a single Israeli or Palestinian need to perish in this inhuman fashion. The recently publicised US-led roadmap to peace in the Middle East is another such open invitation for any side opposed to the compromises that peace entails. With every publicly declared target date, hardline settlers and hawkish army officers, as well as militant Palestinian groups, see an open invitation to sabotage the peace process.

Who shall we blame it on?
By Yitzhak Laor, London Review of Books, February 20, 2003
Does anybody think that Israel is capable of getting itself out of this mess without outside help? -- Two days before the general election at the end of January, Israel again imposed a full closure on the Occupied Territories. It was done in the name of normality, which in itself has become a national value ('terror shall not prevail'), and in the name of democracy ('we are an integral part of the West'). Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were sealed off in their villages and towns, so that their masters - that is us, the Israelis - would enjoy the freedom to choose. One day we'll think about how many noisy soldiers it took to secure one quiet ballot station. How many arrests, grabs, shoves, slaps, humiliations, curfews, closed schools, blocked streets, emptied clinics, ruined children's playgrounds gave us the satisfaction and pride that 'terror has not prevailed'? How much darkness is needed over there to light our shopping malls (and our cafés, theatres, cinemas, concert halls, wedding halls)? How stringent a military dictatorship does our democracy have to impose on the Palestinians in order to give us the freedom to decide on their fate, while all the time boasting that we are the only democracy in this part of world? This wish for normality is the other side of indifference. Is it possible to vote for parties that offer only military solutions? No, the average reader would reply, yet here normality means indifference and indifference is a shield through which information does not penetrate. Thousands of Israelis have participated in the Occupation, thousands have done their bit to implement the Oslo Accords, have measured out their checkpoint geography. Thousands of Israelis were acquainted with one or two at least of the Palestinians who used to work here as cheap labourers and who have now disappeared into the oblivion of the sealed territories. Yet during the election campaign not one Jewish party dared to speak about Palestinian suffering. Ten settlers were elected to serve in the new Knesset. The Palestinian Authority no longer exists, except as an easy target for all kinds of accusation and sanction. The Occupation seems far away: the settlements seem very near. When the radio reports that 'Israeli citizens were killed near Qiryat Arba' (a big settlement near Hebron), it is reporting on terrorism inside our country, but when the IDF operates within a Palestinian town, it is out there, far away, as if in a distant land across the sea. Or at least that is how the Right has been speaking of it for some time - but so too has the Zionist Left, which for more than two years now has accepted this redesignation of the imaginary borders. The IDF is of course above suspicion. Not only do former generals play a major role on both sides of the political map, but all Jewish parties, including Meretz, the party of the intellectual Left, and the Labour Party, condemn the Refuseniks. Courage to Refuse, the movement of combat soldiers who have declared 'war on the war' and refuse to continue serving in the Occupied Territories, was shocked to discover that Meretz wanted nothing to do with it. Israel is in a state of ideological stasis; the Left has capitulated and the last coalition government was the institutional expression of that fact. Even when the hands were the hands of Esau, i.e. the IDF, the voice was Jacob's voice, i.e. the voice of the Likud. The Zionist Left - Meretz, Labour, Peace Now - should no longer be part of this game, but, alas, nothing will persuade it to distance itself from the military, even when this proximity sends the electorate straight into the arms of the Likud. After all, why should the voters settle for a fake when they can get the real thing?

School Cuts off New York Times Reporter Chris Hedges' Anti-War Commencement Speech
By Amy Goodman and Democracy Now, Dissident Voice, May 22, 2003
This is a rush transcript from Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman, May 21, 2003. Read a transcript of Chris Hedges’ speech, with audio and video links. ''Speaker disrupts RC graduation'' this is the headline in the Rockford Register Star in Illinois. The article describes how a commencement speaker was booed of the stage for making an antiwar speech at the Rockford College graduation on Saturday. The paper reports that two days later, graduates and family members are ''still reeling.'' They had envisioned a ''go out and make your mark send-off.'' The speaker wasn't an antiwar student. It wasn't an antiwar faculty member. It was New York Times reporter and veteran war correspondent Chris Hedges who has reported from war-torn countries for fifteen years. Hedges spent the last year covering Al Qaida cells in Europe and North Africa. He was a member of the New York Times team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for the paper's coverage of global terrorism. He is also the author of the acclaimed "War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning". But this didn't stop Rockford College officials from pulling the plug on his microphone three minutes after he began to speak. The college president told Hedges to wrap it up. He resumed his speech as to the sound of boos and foghorns. Some graduates and audience members turned their backs to Hedges. Others rushed up the aisle to protest the remarks; one student tossed his cap and gown to the stage before leaving. Chris Hedges joined Democracy Now! in our studio on May 21, 2003 to speak with host Amy Goodman. AMY GOODMAN: Just tell us what happened this weekend. Why did you go to Rockford College in Illinois? CHRIS HEDGES: I was invited to give the commencement address. Given that the book is an explication of war and the poison that war is and what it does to individuals and societies and that since the book came out I have spoken extensively about that, that is, of course, what I was prepared to speak about when I got to Rockford. What I was not prepared for was the response. I have certainly spoken at events where people disagreed ­ that is to be expected. But to be silenced and to have people clamber onto the platform with the threat of physical violence was something new, and frightening.

Return to Sender
By Kim Petersen, Dissident Voice, May 22, 2003
Now that things are hunky-dory enough on the Iraqi front, intrepid NY Times writer Thomas Friedman can be chaperoned around the new US “baby,” as Mr. Friedman recently refers to the cradle of civilization.  However, in Mr. Friedman’s first postcard from Iraq he notes how it has been blown back to its Mesopotamian cradle in a “contest [that] was surely one of the most unequal wars in the history of warfare. In socioeconomic terms, we were at war with the Flintstones.” (1) Mr. Friedman gleefully revels that the “Iraqis are so beaten down that a vast majority clearly seem ready to give the Americans a chance to make this a better place.” In fact this is the “best thing” about the poverty of the Iraqis: submission out of penury. It would be interesting to know who is this “vast majority” Mr. Friedman crows about and what is his polling methodology? The "vast majority" couldn’t be the 4,900 to 6,500 civilians killed or their surviving next-of-kin. It certainly can’t be from the thousands of demonstrators asking the US forces to return to where they came from. It got so unsettling for some of the US troops that they gunned down the civilian demonstrators in Mosul and Fallujah. Could it be that the folks still without regular electricity and potable water are still pinning their hopes on Uncle Sam? Or could the support possibly be coming from patients unable to be adequately cared for in the hospitals, since looted of whatever was or wasn’t nailed down? Could it be from the people who have witnessed their country ransacked to the bone, aided by the sometimes participating occupiers? As the insightful Noam Chomsky pointed out, “[T]he United States is now regarded as the greatest threat to peace in the world by probably the vast majority of the population of the world. George Bush has succeeded within a year in converting the United States to a country that is greatly feared, disliked, and even hated.” (2) Yet somehow Mr. Friedman would ask us to believe that a country knocked back to the Stone Age by US-UK sanctions and a barrage of weapons, many illegal, used without regard for the civilian population is willing to give the US the benefit-of-the-doubt whereas the rest of the world’s people won’t. Sounds fanciful. As for the Shiite majority, well Mr Friedman describes a “huge throng of Iraqi Shiites” exuberantly welcoming exiled Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim back to Iraq. He notes a “a similar energy, without the religious fervor” among the Kurdish visitors and Iraqi National Congress aides of convicted criminal Ahmed Chalabi. It is not strange that Israeli inamorato Mr. Friedman would be so appreciative of Zionist-approved Mr. Chalabi. But there was no mention of a “huge throng” for Mr. Chalabi. Sure his few aides show some energy, and why not. They are about to cash in.

Palestinian Suffering Boils Down to Travel Restrictions
By Ramzy Baroud, palestine Chronicle, May 21, 2003
"The pathetic reaction around the world to the killing of Palestinians shows how human life is measured in terms of politics, not by numbers or by the basic principal of the sanctity of human life .." -- I strongly resent those who speak of peace in the Middle East by urging Palestinians to end terrorism and call on Israel to “ease travel restrictions”.  Even Terje Roed-Larsen, the senior United Nations envoy to the region often falls into this trap. Following a suicide bombing in northern Israel, where four Israelis were reportedly killed, Roed-Larsen described suicide bombings, as "senseless acts that are unjustified on any moral or political grounds".  Sure, no one expected the UN Special Coordinator to distance himself from the line of thinking that sees such acts as if they were born in a vacuum, without any relations whatsoever to the desperate, often bloody reality under which Palestinians are forced to live. But why shouldn’t we expect Roed-Larsen, or any other, to speak out with the same clarity against the state-sponsored Israeli terrorism? Once finished outlining his position on the deadly bombings in Israel, Roed-Larsen, ‘turned the heat’ on Israel, but just a little. He said that Israeli roadblocks and checkpoints were "the single largest impediment to the Palestinian economy." To those who most often receive only half of the news from the Middle East, Israel’s checkpoints must make good sense. What else can the violated state of Israel do in the face of these heinous crimes but to restrict the movement of Palestinians with the hope that such limitations on travel reduce the frequency of the bombers’ penetration of the hapless Jewish state? Since the beginning of May, 2003 until the bombing in northern Israel on May 19, 47 Palestinians were killed by the Israeli army, that’s over 10 times the number of Israeli victims in the Palestinian suicide bombing. Few of those Palestinians killed, as we were informed, attacked Israeli army or civilian targets, including my former neighbor in the Nuseirat refugee camp in Gaza, Mahmoud Annani. He was killed on May 08. I hold no expectations on “experts” or “officials” to examine the enduring years suffered by Mahmoud, to study the reasons that led a promising young man to detonate himself, wounding four Israeli soldiers in the Gaza Strip, while he was just stepping into manhood at the age of 21. But it pained me to see that those who felt no hesitation in condemning Mahmoud’s “senseless”, “heinous” and “abhorrent” crime, kept mute while scores of Palestinians were killed, including 8 children, in the first two weeks of May alone.

Apologies - remember to remind me
By William Bowles, Information Clearing House, May 15, 2003
"If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own…. For if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night." -- James Baldwin /  "First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists, but I was neither, so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew so I did not speak out. And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me." -- Martin Niemoller   --- 05/15/03: (Information Clearing House) I think I owe both Pastor Niemoller and James Baldwin an apology (see ‘Knock-Knock’ (http://informationclearinghouse.info/article3321.htm). But events have a strange way of leading one to green pastures. Haunted by my double misquote (both of Niemoller and of not attributing it to Baldwin, though it’s understandable I think), I had to re-buy Angela Davis’s book If they come in the Morning and low and behold, inside Davis’ book there it was, not only Baldwin’s quotation, but waiting to be resurrected as it were, into the night we have once again entered, the following: "Political repression in the United States has reached monstrous proportions. Black and Brown peoples especially – victims of the most vicious and calculated forms of class, national and racial oppression -- bear the brunt of the repression even as it now engulfs the most presumably respectable groups and individuals including members of Congress. Literally tens of thousands of innocent men and women – fill the jails and prisons; hundreds of thousands more are the subject of police, FBI and military intelligence investigations…. It seems to us that the most important fact to be considered in the midst of this repression is that it and its attendant paraphernalia for coercion, manipulation and control reflect serious infirmities in the present social order. That is, while we do not we do not underestimate the coercive resources – available to the state to suppress all forms of opposition (and the centralisation of control over those forces), we think that the necessity to resort to such repression is reflective of profound social crisis, of systemic disintegration." I think you’ll have to agree that it could have been written today, not 32 years ago. Yet who today has read this book? How many of you have even heard of Angela Y Davis or know of her frame-up by the then governor of California, Ronald Reagan? The assault on the Black Panthers during the latter half of the 1960s and into the 70s was accompanied by the same hysteria that surrounds the current ‘terrorist menace’. Surveillance, infiltration, the illegal detention of opponents by the Nixon administration and even cold-blooded murder, were carried out in an atmosphere of paranoia and the demonisation of all opponents, especially the Panthers, who not only dared defend themselves, but more importantly carried their mission into communities, creating schools and breakfast programmes for children, organised communities and defended them against a racist police and racist state institutions. It was for these, practical examples more than their armed defiance, that the wrath and the full force of the state descended on them and destroyed them. But the most important thing they destroyed was our power to remember. In erasingand perverting the memories of the Black Panthers or Angela Davis or for that matter, Paul Robeson, WEB Dubois, Mohammed Ali, not only by turning them into non-people by virtue of their politics but also, because of their colour, they are lost to us as a people and as people.

As British as afternoon tea
By Mark Curtis, The Guardian, May 21, 2003
By imposing regime change in Iraq, Blair is not so much following the US as continuing a national tradition -- Iraqis facing an uncertain future in the wake of forcible "regime change" have every reason to fear not only US but also British policy. While past American behaviour in the region is widely criticised, contributing to fears of real US intentions, Britain's role is often regarded as more benign. The reality is that overthrowing governments and backing repressive regimes is as British as afternoon tea. Fifty years ago, MI6 and the CIA overthrew the popular, nationalist government in Iran, which had threatened British interests by nationalising oil operations. Churchill's government continued covert operations begun by Attlee, to install what foreign secretary Anthony Eden called "a more reliable government". Formerly secret files reveal that our ambassador in Tehran preferred "a dictator" who would "settle the oil question on reasonable terms". The Shah took control and ruled Iran with an iron fist for 25 years, while Britain and the US helped train his secret police. Britain's invasion of British Guiana in the same year is long forgotten. Democratic elections had resulted in victory for a popular, leftist government committed to reducing poverty. Its plans also threatened the British sugar multinational, Bookers, who pleaded with London to intervene. Britain dispatched warships and 700 troops to overthrow the government, and ruled out elections since "the same party would have been elected again", the colonial secretary stated. The files also reveal British support for "regime change" in Indonesia in 1965 - one of the worst bloodbaths of the 20th century. "I have never concealed from you my belief that a little shooting in Indonesia would be an essential preliminary to effective change," the ambassador in Jakarta, Sir Andrew Gilchrist, secretly informed the Foreign Office. A million people were killed when the army exterminated the Indonesian Communist Party, PKI.

Play it again, Uncle Sam
By Yusuf Agha, YellowTimes.org, May 20, 2003
(YellowTimes.org) -- It has been a busy week for human bombers. On three devastating occasions in an equal number of countries, possessed men have driven horrendous fireballs-on-wheels into buildings, claiming over 110 lives, leaving scores of others brutally wounded and property destroyed. It began with the May 12 inferno in Northern Chechnya when a explosive laden truck was driven into a government compound, obliterating eight building and damaging the Federal Security Service building in Northern Chechnya, killing 54 people and injuring 200. The following day, with television screens depicting scenes hauntingly similar to the Oklahoma bombing, four cars loaded with explosives plowed into expatriate housing compounds in the Saudi capital of Riyadh, killing 34 -- including eight Americans and two Britons -- and injuring 200. In the late hours of Friday, human bombers attacked again. This time, five attacks shattered the Moroccan commercial capital of Casablanca killing 24 and wounding 60 at last count. Again, the targets were foreign nationals. The terror threat continues unabated. In Kenya, intelligence reports are predicting an attack on foreign embassies and residences of foreign nationals, leading Britain to suspend flights into that country. In addition, U.S. officials have named Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and the Gulf States as possible future targets. Through wars and attacks, both Uncle Sam and his enemies are playing it again, and -- Chechnya apart -- it is the United States and its allies the world over who are targets of human bombers. Interestingly enough, three of the explosions in Casablanca occurred in Spanish and Jewish properties -- the latter being increasingly identified with Israel in the Muslim world -- both strong supporters of America in the war against Iraq. What a difference a war makes! UPI reports that on the eve of the Iraqi campaign, a group of CIA veterans had warned the Bush administration against going to war. "Doing so," they stated, "would further widen the divide between the Western and Islamic worlds and increase the incidence of terrorism."  In a near prophetic warning, the veterans stated, "with an invasion of Iraq, the world can expect to be swamped with swamps breeding terrorists. In human terms, your daughters are unlikely to be able to travel abroad in future years without a phalanx of security personnel." Furthermore, members of the Defense Science Board, who report directly to the U.S. Secretary of Defense, released a 1997 report stating, "historical data show a strong correlation between U.S. involvement in international situations and an increase in terrorist attacks against the United States." In Riyadh, it was the residential compounds heavily fortified by security personnel that were attacked, prompting the U.S. and several foreign countries to issue travel advisories.