The Anti-War Movement and Its Critics: Merle Haggard Locates Osama; General Hitchens, Hie Thee to Fort Bragg; Whose Left Is It Anyway?
By Alexander Cockburn, Dissident Voice, November 16, 2002
Do we have an antiwar movement? We're getting there. We must be, because we're catching flak from the anti-anti war movement, Light Infantry division, staffed by Marc Cooper, Todd Gitlin, David Corn, and Christopher Hitchens. Marc Cooper, like Gitlin, has carved out a pleasant niche for himself, belaboring various left causes from a position purporting to represent robust common sense. It's a posture endearing to op-ed editors, particularly if there's an insinuation that somewhere, way back, the author had left credentials. It's fair to raise the issue of credentials, since the prime line of attack by the Light Infantry is to belabor the credentials of the antiwar left, as dumbos, catspaws, dictator-lovers, cultists, practitioners of unmentionable vices. Back of the start of 2000 Cooper publicly prayed to God to make that same year "free of Mumia". How precisely the year would be liberated from this man on Death Row he tastefully left unstated. In the jibes at the Mumia cult that followed Cooper hiccupped bashfully that Mumia "probably" didn't get a fair trial, then suppressed important facts about the fatal encounter between and the police officer, or even that the Mumia "cult" probably saved his life by drawing attention to Mumia's situation in the mid-80s when no one cared a whit.

Bush now seems to accept that this must be a UN war
By Hugo Young (New York), The Guardian, November 19, 2002
An attack on Iraq is likely, but may still be months away:  Some people here think war with Iraq is close. They range beyond the civilians at the top of the Pentagon. They want a war, and they have a case. Saddam Hussein is already in breach of numerous UN demands, and is certain, they believe, to multiply his breaches, starting on December 8, when he is required to produce a full declaration of his mass-destruction assets and will certainly not do so. At the next stage, when inspections get fully under way, there will be more breaches. The war party envisages an early hearing at the White House, at which President Bush is persuaded, over the head of Secretary of State Powell, that the US cannot afford to be jerked around for further weeks by Russians, French and Mexicans at the UN, and must not wait to attack.

Checkpoints
By Giulia El Dardiry, The Electronic Intifada, November 18, 2002
No one writes about the checkpoints nowadays. They have become a permanent, almost "normal", fixture of Palestine. Soldiers with guns, old women turned away, ambulances stopped for hours, hundreds of shoes covered in mud, a row of young men standing by the side of the road as their IDs are supposedly checked. All this is apparently normal now. Or perhaps written about, talked about, debated about too often. So people have decided that the checkpoints are old news. Particularly now that they are "better". Far less shooting, less teargas, less screaming plague Qalandya these days. So it is alright. It is no longer worthy of attention. It is no longer an affront to human dignity. That's what the media silence on these structures of oppression would have us believe, leniency becoming synonymous with right.

Arab-Americans In Israel: What ‘Special Relationship’?
By Jerri Byrd, Partners for Peace (from:  Foreign Service Journal, June, 2002)
The Department of State’s annual human rights reports have documented for many years a depressing litany of extra-legal human rights abuses perpetrated against the Palestinian people by Israel: countless home demolitions, land confiscations, arbitrary arrests, and widespread torture. Similar practices have also been reported in detail by numerous Israeli, Palestinian and international human rights organizations for years. But it may come as an unpleasant surprise for the American public to learn that for over 30 years, Israel has also repeatedly detained, tortured and incarcerated Americans of Arab origin, without suffering any sanctions or even a public reprimand from Washington. Responding to a question in the April 2, 2002, press briefing, a State Department spokesman confirmed that Israel was holding at least 18 American citizens on "security" charges, and had detained at least 22 more since "the current violence began last fall." He also noted that "we have no way of knowing for certain the numbers of American citizens who may have been detained for short periods and released." Since it is a legal obligation of every host government to notify the local diplomatic mission within 48 hours of the detention of a foreign national, this is an alarming admission.

Partners for Peace—Jerusalem Women Speak Tour: A Case Study in Generating Media Coverage
By Peter Wirth, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May/June 1998
Activists who despair of getting mainstream media coverage of even-handed efforts to acquaint Americans with Middle Eastern realities can take heart from a recent highly successful coast-to-coast tour of three women from Jerusalem. Nahla Asali, a Muslim Palestinian, Michal Shohat, a Jewish Israeli, and Claudette Habesch, a Christian Palestinian, visited 10 U.S. cities in 17 days between Jan. 6 and Jan. 24. Habesch is secretary-general of the Jerusalem Holy Land office for the Catholic relief organization Caritas. Shohat is a three-term member of Jerusalem’s municipal council from Israel’s Meretz Party. Asali is an instructor in English literature at Birzeit University on the West Bank and co-founder and chair of the Saraya Center for Community Services in Jerusalem. The cities were: Minneapolis/St.Paul, St. Louis, Seattle, San Francisco, Atlanta, Roanoke, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Princeton and Washington, DC. The goal of the tour was to expose U.S. audiences to the hopes, fears and frustrations of three wives and mothers who are active in their communities and who are personally distraught over the current statemate in the peace process.

Israel spins "massacre" of "worshippers" to grab land in Hebron
By Nigel Parry and Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, November 19, 2002
On 15 November 2002, shooting rang out in the center of Hebron. Within minutes local residents began to pick up telephones and reports began to filter out to the world. Shortly after, Yoni Peled, deputy spokesman of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, had titled the attack the "Sabbath massacre" for the convenience of foreign journalists, and Israel's distortion of the events began. The earliest reports reflected the minimal information available while the events were still in progress but the tale was quickly spun. CNN's Breaking News e-mail arrived in the thick of the events and was brief, a product of its culling information from the breaking news on Israeli radio and television broadcasts: "Six killed after Palestinian gunmen open fire in Hebron, Israeli media report." A few minutes later, a similar electronic alert from MSNBC offered more detail, already incorporating the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs' story: "Palestinian gunmen fired at Jewish settlers on their way to Sabbath eve prayers in the West Bank city of Hebron Friday, killing at least six people and wounding an estimated 30 others, Israeli security sources said." And so it went. The wire services similarly and carelessly asserted an attack against "worshippers".

Terror votes Likud
By Yoel Marcus, Ha'aretz, November 19, 2002
Never have we had general elections so pointless and unnecessary as the surprise ballot scheduled for January 28. For starters, the government didn't fall because it lost majority support. It was toppled by Sharon for tactical reasons: to get rid of Bibi, who was breathing down his neck, and to keep himself in office until the end of 2007. With a submissive partner like Labor, the elections weren't pushed up because of some political row which could only be settled by asking the public. The long and the short of it is that elections are a way of reshuffling the deck in the two big parties: who goes up, who goes down, who disappears. Judging by the babbling and backbiting of the five contenders of Labor and Likud as they gear up for the primaries, none of them really deserve to win. Sharon and Bibi in this corner, and Fuad, Mitzna and Ramon in the other, did their best to drag each other through the mud.