Sharon is now a danger to US troops and hopes in Iraq
By Martin Woollacott, The Guardian 8/22/2003
Lack of progress in the Holy Land will feed the growth of terrorism -- The crisis of American power that has been building since the Twin Towers attacks is close to a point of no return. The bombs which brought havoc to Baghdad and Jerusalem this week and the likely collapse of the ceasefire in the Holy Land illustrate how unsteady is the American hand in the Middle East. Great enterprises demand great qualities. While the US has certainly not yet failed in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Holy Land, and has some achievements, ultimate success depends on it showing a new determination and clarity. The Americans have been slow - slow to act and slow witted; slow to discard the assumption that Iraq and Afghanistan could easily be restored to normality after their regimes were destroyed; slow to set aside ideological preconceptions; and slow to grasp, if they have grasped at all, the deviousness of their Israeli ally. That slowness has allowed Islamic extremists to move into Iraq, in what force it is not yet known, but it would be prudent to assume it is substantial. That slowness has allowed Afghanistan to slip into a political limbo, half a real state and half a collection of dubious chieftaincies, in which, again, extremists can not only survive but pose a real threat to the country's future. That slowness has given the Sharon government in Israel room to manipulate the "road map", a plan for peace which took an unconscionably long time to emerge. The fact that the bombs came on the same day, and shortly after serious Taliban attacks in Afghanistan, was fortuitous. But it is a reminder of how closely events in these three places are linked, much more closely than when the US used to make play with "arcs of crisis" running from the Horn of Africa to Pakistan.
The Imperial Bluster of Tom Delay
By Edward Said, CounterPunch 8/20/2003
Dreams and Delusions -- During the last days of July, Representative Tom Delay (Republican) of Texas, the House majority leader and described routinely as one of the three or four most powerful men in Washington, delivered himself of his opinions regarding the roadmap and the future of peace in the Middle East. What he had to say was meant as an announcement for a trip he subsequently took to Israel and several Arab countries where, it is reported, he articulated the same message. In no uncertain terms, Delay declared himself opposed to the Bush Administration's support for the roadmap, especially the provision in it for a Palestinian state. "It would be a terrorist state" he said emphatically, using the word "terrorist" as has become habitual in official American discourse without regard for circumstance, definition, or concrete characteristics. He went on to add that he came by his ideas concerning Israel by virtue of what he described as his convictions as a "Christian Zionist," a phrase synonymous not only with support for everything Israel does, but also for the Jewish state's theological right to go on doing what it does regardless whether or not a few million "terrorist" Palestinians get hurt in the process.The sheer number of people in the southwestern United States who think like Delay is an imposing 60-70 million and, it should be noted, included among them is none other than George W. Bush, who is also an inspired born-again Christian for whom everything in the Bible is meant to be taken literally. Bush is their leader and surely depends on their votes for the 2004 election which, in my opinion, he will not win. And because his presidency is threatened by his ruinous policies at home and abroad, he and his campaign strategists are trying to attract more Christian right-wingers from other parts of the country, the Middle West especially. Altogether then, the views of the Christian Right (allied with the ideas and lobbying power of the rabidly pro-Israeli neo-conservative movement) constitute a formidable force in domestic American politics, which is the domain where, alas, the debate about the Middle East takes place in America. One must always remember that in America, Palestine and Israel are regarded as local, not foreign policy, matters.
Israel's Detention of Palestinian Minors Criticized
By Henry Chu, Alternative Information Center/Los Angeles Times 8/17/2003
Sleep can be fleeting in this dusty Palestinian hamlet. The families here know that they might be jolted awake in the dead of night by a pounding at the door, the prelude to a search or the arrest of someone in the household by Israeli soldiers. But Hakmeh Barghouti, who had seen three of her five sons hauled off on prior occasions, wasn't prepared when the army came for her youngest. Blindfolded, his hands tied behind his back, 14-year-old Mohammed was led away in the wee hours this spring after his mother frantically helped him get dressed. "I never thought they would come for him," she said. "I thought they would take one of the older ones." Thus began a frightening experience for Mohammed, marked by what he described as interrogations, beatings and squalid conditions inside an Israeli detention center for Palestinians accused of security offenses. In Mohammed's case, that meant throwing rocks at soldiers and armored vehicles that rumbled through his village. The teenager appeared before a military judge and spent two weeks in custody - without a visit from his parents or a lawyer - before being released. His situation is not unique. Human rights activists are alarmed by the number of Palestinians younger than 18 who are being locked up by the Israeli government as part of its crackdown on the nearly 3-year-old Palestinian uprising, or intifada.
Thy fearful symmetry
Editorial, The Guardian 8/22/2003
Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, severed limbs for severed limbs and other lethal exchanges of body parts too grim to be enumerated. That was the deadly symmetry, once again, behind yesterday's revenge killing of Hamas leader Abu Shanab, by which Israel sought to settle its blood debt - or perhaps just exacted the first instalment - for the massacre of 20 Israeli civilians in Tuesday's bus blast. Never mind that it led so quickly and predictably to a declaration by Hamas and Islamic Jihad that the three month ceasefire was at an end. Israeli officials had already disavowed the ceasefire, arguing that the suicide bombing changed "the rules of the game" and that the ceasefire was dead. No one should be surprised either that the target of the Israeli attack was a relative moderate who played an active role in negotiating the ceasefire. ("If the occupation stops," Abu Shanab had said, shortly before it was declared, "I think Palestinians are willing to live in peace and stop all kinds of violence.") An Israeli spokesman merely argued that there was a direct link between Abu Shanab and "the terrorists on the ground". Never mind too that the Palestinian Authority seemed at last to be edging towards a commitment to dismantle the armed wings of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Predictably, that planned crackdown is also now on hold and the tenuous grip of prime minister Mahmoud Abbas is thus further weakened.
Preserve history, then manipulate it
By Charles Paul Freund, Daily Star 8/22/2003
Earlier this month, just as the American authorities in Iraq were finally releasing photographs of 30 major treasures missing from Iraq’s National Museum, a different controversy erupted in New York over the looted history of the Middle East. New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art opened a major exhibit, Art of the First Cities, containing artifacts from ancient Mesopotamia. Many had a shadowy provenance and had probably been looted years before. With the thefts in Iraq still fresh in everyone’s mind, questions naturally arose: Didn’t handsome museum displays of such artifacts encourage plundering? Weren’t such exhibits ultimately immoral?Western curators have long justified their holdings Nineveh’s winged bulls, Babylon’s Gate of Ishtar, the Parthenon marbles, etc. on such grounds as superior preservation and security. But listen to this defense offered by David Owen, an archaeologist who oversees a large Mesopotamian collection at Cornell University: “The fault (of looting) is not ours,” Owen recently told a New York newspaper; “These (Middle Eastern) countries are in their infancy when it comes to teaching people to respect their past.” That’s a large accusation. It implies that the value of “the past” is a known and agreed-upon constant, and that Middle Easterners have been ignorant of it. In fact, the peoples of the Middle East have always protected the past that they deemed important, though it is also true that the region has not always agreed with the West on which aspects of antiquity deserved respect. But then, the West has repeatedly changed its own views on precisely the same issue.
The beginning of the end for Sharon?
By Gideon Samet, Ha'aretz 8/22/2003
Bigger men than Ariel Sharon have fallen for less than this. They fell for much less than the national imbroglio that ensnares Israel, largely on account of Sharon's policies. Does it really suffice to pin all responsibility for the crisis on gangs of Palestinian terrorists and a frail Mahmoud Abbas, while absolving Israel's prime minister? Quite possibly, Ehud Barak got a bit carried away by his own rhetoric this week when he said in a private conversation that Sharon and the Likud's strategy of "playing around" in the diplomatic arena "threatens the Zionist enterprise on a historical level." Nonetheless, taking a broad view of the matter, Barak's comment is not necessarily a hyperbole. No less threatening to Israel than external events is the fact that something very bad has happened to its own political framework and response mechanisms: the notion that the failed leader ought to pack up and go home is not part of the public discourse. Like a serialized exhibition of horrors, the heap of his blunders and failures, along with suspicions of wrongdoing, is exposed repeatedly to millions of readers and viewers in the country. There is no need to revisit this ugly pile for Sharon to be asked to draw political conclusions about his own future. But like no other prime minister before him, Sharon has insulated himself against challenges to his post. The Likud chides him only for his political moderation. Without breaking a sweat, he refutes his detractors, securing constant impunity from that charge.
Eyes wide open
By Jonathan Cook, Al-Ahram Weekly on-line 21 - 27 August 2003
It is not ignorance that keeps the Israeli public from decrying their state's atrocities against the Palestinians. There are different kinds of blindness. A reply to Ran HaCohen -- In these pages recently (Al-Ahram Weekly, 7 - 13 August) the left-wing Israeli academic and journalist Ran HaCohen argued that most Israelis had almost no idea what their government and army were doing in their name in the occupied Palestinian territories. "The Israeli public is kept in the dark about what is happening just a 20-minute drive from Tel-Aviv, or just across (and even within) the municipal borders of Jerusalem," he wrote in an article headlined "Eyes Wide Shut". HaCohen's usually admirable qualities as an analyst of the situation inside Israel and in the West Bank and Gaza appear to have deserted him on this occasion. Let us examine how plausible the assumptions he is making about the "Israeli public" really are. For he writes as though Israel's occupation of the territories is being carried out by Martians rather than by tens of thousands of Israeli teenagers. Military service is compulsory for most Israeli Jews, men and women, for the first two to three years of their adult lives, when they leave school at 18. More than 30,000 young Israelis are conscripted into the army each year. Alongside them are thousands more men in their 20s, 30s and 40s who are required by law to complete 39 days reserve duty each year. Some of them have been enforcing the occupation since well before the first Intifada.
Investigation reveals why America is hated
By Billy I Ahmed, The New Nation 8/20/2003
According to investigations carried out at the end of 2002 by the PEW Research Centre, dislike of the USA has risen in the last year in Latin American countries as well as in Middle Eastern nations. Around 81% of Pakistanis expressed aversion to US foreign policy. In Argentina loathing of America reaches 73% and just 6% of the Egyptian public has a favourable view of the United States. The report in general states that the spread of U.S. ideas and customs is disliked by majorities in almost every country included in this survey. This sentiment is even prevalent in friendly nations, such as Canada (54%) and Britain (50%), and even more so in countries where America is broadly disliked. The PEW global attitudes survey interviewed more than 38,000 people in 44 nations between July and October 2002. A sampling of the questions was as follows. Is the spread of American ideas good or bad? Britain, 50% say bad, 67% in Germany, 68% in Russia, 71% in France, Turkey at 78%, Pakistan at 81% and Egypt at 84%. Does the US "consider others: not much/not at all?" 52 % in Britain agree, 73% in Canada, 73% in South Korea, 74% in Japan, 76% in France.
Israeli Roots of Hamas are being exposed
By Dean Andromidas, Centre for Research on Globalisation 4/12/2002
Speaking in Jerusalem Dec. 20, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzer made the connection between the growth of the Islamic fundamentalist groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and Israel's promotion of the Islamic movement as a counter to the Palestinian nationalist movement. Kurtzer's comments come very close to EIR's own presentation of the evidence of Israel's instrumental role in establishing Hamas, and its ongoing control of that organization.Kurtzer said that the growth of the Islamic movement in the Palestinian territories in recent decades—"with the tacit support of Israel"—was "not totally unrelated" to the emergence of Hamas and Islamic Jihad and their terrorist attacks against Israel. Kurtzer explained that during the 1980s, when the Islamic movement began to flourish in the West Bank and Gaza, "Israel perceived it to be better to have people turning toward religion rather than toward a nationalistic cause [the Palestinian Liberation Organization—ed.]." It therefore did little to stop the flow of money to mosques and other religious institutions, rather than to schools.According to the Dec. 21 Israeli daily Ha'aretz, Kurtzer made these extraordinary statements at a seminar on religion and politics sponsored by Oz V'Shalom-Netivot Shalom, a largely Anglo-American organization that promotes peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Rabbi Dr. Aharon Lichtenstein, the head of Har Etzion Yeshiva in Alon Shvut, who is an active advocate of a just regional peace, also spoke. Kurtzer said that as a result of the growth of Islam at the expense of education, there are now Palestinians who are "determined terrorists that use religious beliefs in a perverted way to appeal to the masses."
Standing Against The Fear
By William Rivers Pitt, Dissident Voice 8/18/2003
These are men and women who have known fear, true fear, the fear with the big teeth and roaring snarl that rips the skin from your body before reducing you to ash. What they see happening in America today, the manner in which their government is actively trying to terrify the populace for their own purposes, disgusts them. They stand against it without fear. -- "But as I drove toward Key Biscayne with the top down, squinting into the sun, I saw the Vets. They were moving up Collins Avenue in dead silence; twelve hundred of them dressed in full battle fatigues, helmets, combat boots...I left my car at a parking meter in front of the Cadillac Hotel and joined the march. No, `joined' is the wrong word; that was not the kind of procession you just walked up and `joined.' Not without paying some very heavy dues: an arm gone here, a leg there, paralysis, a face full of lumpy scar tissue, all staring straight ahead as the long silent column moved between rows of hotel porches full of tight-lipped Senior Citizens, through the heart of Miami Beach." -- Hunter S. Thompson, upon encountering a Veterans protest of the Republican National Convention, `Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, 1972.' ....The other group that comes to mind when considering Kennedy's fight for induction is a group called Veterans for Peace. VFP was founded in 1985, in their words, "by ex-service members committed to sharing the horrors they experienced. We know the consequences of American foreign policy because once, at a time in our lives, so many of us carried it out. We find it sad that war seems so delightful, so often, to those that have no knowledge of it. We will proudly, and patriotically, continue to denounce war despite whatever misguided sense of euphoria supports it."
A land without Arabs
By Jerry Levin, Al-Ahram Weekly on-line 21 - 27 August 2003
Israel's policy of land grab turns viable neighbourhoods into ghost towns. - [Hebron] -- Every time my wife and I leave Palestine and Israel and head for home -- when our visas are about to run out -- we hope that things won't get worse here while we are back in the United States; but sadly we know they will. And, sure enough, they do. Similarly, when we come back from the US after travelling to cities and towns talking and writing about the seriously deteriorating security situation in Palestine, we hope that things won't get worse once we get back to the territories; but sadly we know they will. And they do. Trying to characterise what happened here this past winter and spring, a Palestinian friend said, "While you were gone, this was a time of sadness." We were surprised that she could term the situation in such a relatively mild fashion. That's because despite "roadmap" calls for ending provocative settlement bud-up and other confiscatory activities in the West Bank, there have been a glut of discouraging events. They indicate that what has actually been happening is the acceleration of a non-stop, decades-long Israeli coercive campaign to convince Arab residents that Palestine is no longer a safe or welcome place for them to live.From afar, we knew that while we were gone, Palestinian patience, as always, had been sorely tried. Now in just one tiny but typical portion of the West Bank -- Hebron's Old City -- I was experiencing once again first hand the many manifestations of this colossal truth.
Who Violated the Hudna?
By Gideon Levy, Dissident Voice 8/19/2003
The next terror strike is on its way. You don't need to be an expert on terror, or a compulsive gambler, to foresee that Islamic Jihad will try very soon to avenge the death of Mohammed Sider, the head of the organization's military wing in Hebron. Experience teaches that virtually every such assassination breeds a terror attack. This week, in response to the slaying of Hamas men Hamis Abu-Salam and Faiz A-Sadar at Nablus' Askar refugee camp - assassinations accompanied by the killing of two innocent men, Fazi Al-Alami and Mahmoud a-Tak - reprisals were not long in coming. These came as two suicide attacks, at Ariel and at Rosh Ha'ayin. Much as Israel claims that the Palestinians are violating the truce and regrouping in order to perpetrate savage acts of terror, its pleading can't alter the facts: up until Israel renewed its assassinations campaign, there were no suicide bombings, and the two attacks last week were direct responses to the Askar refugee camp slayings. Is this fact on the minds of the assassinations' planners each time they plot another operation? How can anyone seriously contend that the assassinations contribute to Israeli security since each one leads directly to the killing of Israeli civilians? Since 2000, Israel has in such operations liquidated 136 Palestinians, along with dozens of innocent victims, and terror has yet to be extinguished. Dozens of Israelis have been killed in retaliation, and yet Israel continues to wield this dubious weapon, which abrogates international law and is ineffective.
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