Why Does the Leopard Hide his Spots?
Uri Avnery, Gush Shalom, 30 November 2002
I loath Binyamin Netanyahu, and therefore I hoped that he would be elected leader of the Likud. I am sorry that Sharon won the primary election instead. How's that? After all, Netanyahu presented himself as a man of the extreme right and demanded to "expel" (the code-word for "kill") Yasser Arafat. He is ready to fight to the last drop of (our) blood against the creation of a Palestinian state. Unlike Sharon, who says that he is ready to accept a Palestinian state and does not talk anymore about expelling Arafat. So why did I prefer Netanyahu? Because Netanyahu is an unprincipled politician, ready to change his positions any time. He reminds me of Groucho Marx, who once declared: "These are my views. If you don't like them, I have others, too." He could easily exchange his rightist slogan for leftist ones. Sharon is very different: he has a rigid outlook, which he has not changed for decades. He resembles an IDF bulldozer in Jenin, destroying walls on his way and demolishing houses on top of their inhabitants.

Israel's struggle for hearts and minds
By Nathan Guttman, Ha'aretz, December 2, 2002
WASHINGTON - The conventional wisdom among policy-makers in Israel and the United States is that if there is one front on which Israel enjoys a clear advantage in the international arena, it is hasbara - information and public relations - in the United States. Israel's views are accepted by the administration and win support in Congress and American public opinion clearly prefers the Israeli cause to the Palestinian one. However, closer scrutiny of the elements that make up American public opinion will show that Israel has cause for concern. In the duel with the Palestinians over the hearts of average Americans, Israel wins hands down. But when Israel puts itself up for judgment, things look different: Israel is seen as a country that is not pursuing peace, is largely responsible for the violence in the territories and is not morally in the right in the conflict. These positions largely reflect the approach taken by the public at large and to an even greater extent, the views of the most influential groups within American society.

Germany's cast iron chancellor
By Jonathan Steele, The Guardian, December 3, 2002
Pity Germany. Usually caricatured as a country with militarist instincts, for the last few months it has been in the dock on a different charge. The Bush administration accuses it of pacifism. Ever since its chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, announced during his re-election campaign in August that he would not take part in any "adventure" in Iraq, Washington's propaganda machine has been in high gear. Spinners put out the word that its irresponsibility may have lost Germany any chance of getting a permanent seat on the UN security council. Schröder's government was cold-shouldered by senior US officials. The Americans initially hoped Schröder's outburst was merely a ploy to get votes which a cynical chancellor would renounce under the pressure of American wrath once he was safely back in the saddle. But there has been no retreat. Schröder has gone on with his criticisms of US policy and at the recent Nato summit in Prague the Americans tried to corner him by making a big media issue out of whether superpower Bush would even shake the naughty boy's hand.

Wolfowitz lost the UN battle - the war is another matter
Hugo Young, The Guardian, December 3, 2002
This most awesome of hawks has sheathed his talons for the time being  -- In Washington, as well as Europe, Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary at the Pentagon, is regarded as the most awesome of hawks in his appetite for a war to overthrow Saddam Hussein. A Republican senator I interviewed on a recent visit saw him as a weirdo whose views were so dogmatic as to put him outside the realms of normal debate. In Bob Woodward's new book, Bush at War, an essential revelatory text, Wolfowitz is reported as arguing from the start that the right response to 9/11 would be an attack on Iraq - "a brittle, oppressive regime that might break easily" - rather than an invasion of Afghanistan risking 100,000 US troops in unwinnable mountain combat. I asked him about hawkishness in a conversation yesterday in London, and notably his well-known opposition to sending UN inspectors on a futile mission to search out Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. "I'm well known for lots of things," he said drily. He comes over just now as a hawk on his best behaviour. But he doesn't think inspection has a chance of success without a fundamental change of Iraqi attitude. There was no way every computer hard-disc and every home-stored piece of poison could be simply unearthed. "This isn't a country where we've had lots of human intelligence tunnelling like crazy for years and years," he said.

A Non-Story and the US-Saudi Relationship
By Dr. James Zogby, Arab American Institute, December 2, 2002
The US-Saudi relationship, while still strong on the official end, is nevertheless in grave danger. Just how grave was brought home last week by the near hysterical press reaction to what was, in fact, a non-story. The non-story involved Princess Haifa al Faisal, wife of Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan and, daughter of the late King Faisal. It appears that contributions made by the Princess, through an indirect routing, went to an individual who also, at one time, provided some settlement assistance to two of the Saudis who were involved in the September 11, 2001 attacks. The connection was, at best, remote. In fact, there is not even a hint or a suggestion that the Princess was engaged in anything other than an act of legitimate charitable giving. And after investigating the individual who was said to have assisted the two Saudi hijackers, the FBI found him innocent of any wrongdoing. Given the facts, this was a non-story. But precisely because this non-story involved Saudis, it exploded into four days of major news coverage on all the US networks, the newsmagazines and the daily press.

Why war is now on the back burner
By Dan Plesch, The Guardian, December 4, 2002
Bush is waiting until the 2004 elections are nearer to attack Iraq: "With a dispute over evidence and a call for more inspections there may be an effort from Washington to apply more military pressure on Iraq through inspections backed by force, or even by using troops to capture suspected weapons sites. These troops would then be used to secure an airbase or two inside Iraq so that we end up with a gradual occupation backed up by the threat of air strikes if Saddam tries to move his forces." -- President Bush may have put an invasion of Iraq on hold until it can best help his 2004 re-election campaign. The administration would prefer to see change in Iraq by subtler means than 300,000 troops and mass bombing. He does not want to relive his father's experience of winning a war a year too early and finding that come the election the victory was forgotten or, worse, the post-war peace was turning sour. Most observers focus on the perceived role of the Pentagon hawks versus State Department doves in the battle for influence over Bush. But his political advisers in the White House - especially Karl Rove - are far more influential. It was Rove who, in June, gave a presentation explaining that the war should be central to the Republicans' successful campaign to win control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

Fighting terrorism the wrong way
By Muhammad Omar Al-Amoudi, Arab News, December 4, 2002
It is a paradox. The United States condemns a small charitable donation of $10,000 made to a poor Arab family as funds for terrorists; at the same time it provides unlimited military and financial support for Israel’s terrorist acts against the Palestinians. An American described his country’s lopsided policies as political foolishness — against the rules of good diplomacy which characterized US administrators in the past. The Arab people embarked upon a boycott of US goods, not because they thought it would bring the US economy to a standstill. In fact, they knew very well that the boycott would affect only Arab investors in their own countries. Nonetheless, they wanted to use the boycott as a sign of their feelings against the prolonged and protracted Israeli oppression which enjoys full US approval and assistance. Even children in the Arab world share the feelings as they can clearly see the American-made gunships and planes assaulting civilian Palestinian targets.

Israeli Law Mocks Justice, Shatters Decency
By William Hughes, Palestine Chronicle, December 3, 2002
Why haven’t the American legal eagles spoken out about the ongoing human rights abuses in Israel? -- BALTIMORE (PC) - American law schools regularly hold seminars and workshops in Israel. Usually, the subject matters deal with topics like Comparative or International Law. These legal sojourns are generally led by fully tenured professors, who have been able, quite amazingly, to go about their teaching business, in the mother of all colonial police states, without publicly addressing the systematic violations of the legal and human rights of the Palestinians. Now, this is all a mystery to me. Why haven’t the American legal eagles spoken out about the ongoing human rights abuses in Israel? Why don’t they get their noses out of the law books, and tell the world what is really going on in occupied Palestine? It’s nice to visit Haifa and Jerusalem, but why not check in on Jenin and Nablus, too? And what about the legality of the U.S. government funding the state sponsored terrorism of Ariel Sharon’s government? Don’t these kind of important legal and moral questions ever cross their minds? If they haven’t, then it is high time that they did.