Spinners are now out of control
By Peter Preston, The Guardian, December 16, 2002
Our leaders' weapons of mass assertion deny us access to the truth -- "But surely the top sources, the Rumsfelds, the Wolfowitzes, the Tenets of the CIA, wouldn't actually lie?" -- Your first pre-Christmas quiz starts here. Questions: what puts Cherie Blair and Saddam Hussein together in a single bubbling stewpot? Why are Peter Foster and Osama bin Laden peas from the same squishy pod? Answer: sources, sources, sources. Consider the dichotomy and the dislocation here. For over two weeks we've been trying to decide who, around and about No 10, lied to or economically misled the great British press. Alastair, Godric, Mrs B? The usual cover-up carnival. Unless, apparently, we're told the whole truth in every minute detail, Downing Street can never be trusted again: a fount of rancid stories tainted by evasion, duplicity, puppydogs' tails may be solemnly rejected. This could be the end of everything. Moral stomp-out time.

Partnership?
Editorial, Arab News, December 17, 2002
Conspicuously absent from US Secretary of State Colin Powell’s recent Middle East address on a partnership initiative with the United States was the central problem in the region, namely the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Anyone who imagines that he can market a partnership in the region without first ending the conflict needs to think again. Ending the conflict begins with the acknowledgement that there is a problem — an indigenous population and territory under direct occupation by a foreign power. The occupation has not ended. If anything, Israel has dug in as never before. And the United States is playing a supporting role as never before. The newest Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Jimmy Carter, asserts that George W. Bush is not impartial about the issue. “Until President Bush, every president, Democratic or Republican, has in my opinion played a balancing role as a trusted mediator,” Carter said. “Now, though, it seems obvious that the present administration in Washington is completely compatible with the Israeli government and they have completely ignored ... the Palestinian Authority.”

Ariel Sharon, Teflon man
By Yoel Marcus, Ha'aretz, December 17, 2002
Sharon, as we have said so often, is a phenomenon in Israeli politics. No matter how badly he screws up and falls on his face, nothing sticks to him. The media has tried so hard to figure it out, but no one has managed to explain how everything just slides off him. The Sharon we know has spent most of his life being controversial: He has never been fanatical about telling the truth. He was not a disciplined soldier. As defense minister during the Lebanon War, he twisted the Begin administration around his little finger. He is the only defense minister who has ever been sacked. Two or three times already, he's been finished politically. But this guy is a roly-poly: He bounces right back. He has undermined every prime minister under whom he has worked. In 20 years of Likud rule, the Jabotinsky-esque grandeur has disappeared. Sharon, the bullying, microphone-grabbing wheeler-dealer, has made life hard for everyone. But as prime minister, with the country deep in the muck, he only soars higher, as if none of it has anything to do with him.

Washington Post retracts "Holocaust revisionism" claim against Norman Finkelstein
Mark Hand, The Electronic Intifada, 17 December 2002
Washington Post columnist Marc Fisher revealed either simple ignorance of a well-established school of thought or journalistic laziness when he attached the label of 'Holocaust revisionist' to respected author Norman Finkelstein. If Fisher had taken five minutes to read the six-page introduction to Finkelstein's well known book, The Holocaust Industry, he would have learned that Finkelstein's entire family, except his parents, was murdered at the hands of the Nazis, a fact that a Holocaust revisionist would hardly want revealed. But Fisher evidently didn't read the book's intro nor did he seek comment from Finkelstein before writing in a Dec. 3 column that Finkelstein is a "writer celebrated by neo-Nazi groups for his Holocaust revisionism and comparisons of Israel to Nazi Germany." If he had done some homework, Fisher and the Washington Post could have avoided the embarrassment associated with running a retraction five days later. At the bottom of his Dec. 8 column, Fisher conceded that he "did not intend to suggest that" Finkelstein is a writer championed for Holocaust revisionism.

The American obstacle
By Gideon Samet, Ha'aretz, December 18, 2002
The Israeli right has hit the big time: America is on its side. The Bush administration is now the highest barrier to progress - let's say, at least an attempt at progress - toward any form of dialogue with the Palestinians. Instead of the Clinton framework, we now have the Bush hanger: a hook from which Sharon and the right comfortably hang, blocking any movement that would break out of the national cul de sac. Even Sharon has to admit that there's a strong connection between the political impasse and the disintegration of the economy and society. The absurdity of it all is that the U.S., Israel's knight of aid, is thus preventing improvement in the deteriorating Israeli economy. We said that we're referring to at least an attempt to advance negotiations, since the country's been taken over by that decisive argument that there's nobody to talk with on the other side. But alongside that perpetual assumption about Arafat's pathological stubbornness, all the other signs show that Sharon isn't even dreaming of moving toward any attempt at dialogue.

American intervention in Israel's elections
By Akiva Eldar, Ha'aretz, December 18, 2002
The goodies U.S. President George W. Bush is showering on Prime Minister Ariel Sharon are nothing more than a contribution to defrauding the Israeli voter. -- For the opening of the new American operation meant to bring democracy to the Arab world, the Arabs are invited to learn how the West's greatest democracy gets involved in the only democracy in the Middle East. The upcoming elections in Israel are an opportunity for Jordan and Saudi Arabia to learn a lesson in the American game that Washington wants to export to them. Before the Arabs buy the product, they better find out if the United States makes do only with helping dictators who serve Washington's interests. The Israeli case proves that democracy does not make democratic regimes immune to brutal intervention by American politicians in their election campaigns.

54th Anniversary of UN General Assembly Resolution 194(III)
BADIL (Association for the Defense of the Rights of the Internally Displaced in Israel), December 11, 2002 
The Road Map Remains Relevant More than 54 Years Later  -- Today marks the 54th anniversary of UN General Assembly Resolution 194(III) (11 December 1948) affirming the right of Palestinian refugees and displaced persons to return and repossess their homes and property and receive compensation for damages and losses. When members of the United Nations overwhelmingly voted in favor of Resolution 194 more than five decades ago, it not only reflected a truly humanitarian approach towards hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees; it also reflected a well thought out legal approach to the plight of men, women and children, who by no fault of their own, found themselves brutally uprooted from the only place they knew as home.