Israel's Threat to World Peace
By James J. David, Miftah 12/24/2003
It seems that the entire world is praising American and British diplomacy for its efforts in convincing Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi in announcing that Libya would cease work on its programs to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. This is quite an accomplishment, considering that Libya has been listed for more than 17years by the U.S. State Department as one of the major countries supporting state terrorism.
As wonderful as this news may be, the United States needs to concentrate its efforts towards the real obstacle to world peace. Libya was no threat to world peace, and neither was Iraq. If the United States devotes as much effort in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as they did with Libya's weapons of mass destruction then maybe the American people could rest a bit easier.
According to a recent poll by the Anti-Defamation League, forty-two percent of the American people consider Israel as a threat to world peace. What's even more astonishing is the result of a recent European poll that found 59 percent of Europeans considered Israel as the major threat to world peace with the United States coming in second. Libya wasn't even mentioned.
Semantics of Empire
By M. Shahid Alam, Dissident Voice 12/24/2003
We might glean a few insights about the semantics of the global order – and the reality it tries to mask – from the way in which the United States has framed the moral case against Saddam.
Saddam’s unspeakable crime is that he has “tortured his own people.” He has “killed his own people.” He has “gassed his own people.” He has “poison-gassed his own people.” In all the accusations, Saddam stands inseparable from his own people.
Rarely do his accusers charge that Saddam “tortured people,” “gassed people,” “gassed Iraqis,” or “killed Iraqis.” A google search for “gassed his own people” and “Saddam” produced 5980 hits. Another search for “gassed people” and Saddam produced only 276 hits.
It would appear that the indictment of Saddam gathers power, conviction, irrefutability, by adding the possessive, proprietary, emphatic ‘own’ to the people tortured, gassed or killed. What does the grammar of accusations say about the metrics of American values?
It is revealing. For a country that claims to speak in the name of man, abstract man, universal man, the charge is not that Saddam has killed people, that he has committed murders, mass murders. Instead, the prosecution indicts him for killing a people who stand in a specific relation to the killer: they are his own people.
This betrays tribalism. It springs from a perception that fractures the indivisibility of mankind. It divides men into tribes. It divides people into “us” and “them:” “ours” and “theirs.” It elevates “us” above “them:” “our” kind above “their” kind. It reveals a sensibility that can feel horror only over the killing of one’s own kind.
Unhappy to be Home for the Holidays
By Molly Moore, Miftah 12/25/2003
Four years ago, Christmas shoppers waited in line to enter the Giacaman family's shop and buy their coveted olive-wood Nativity carvings, family members recall.
Last year, the shop had so few visitors that the Giacamans locked up early on Christmas day and ate their first Christmas dinner at home in decades. For a family that has been carving and selling Bethlehem's famous olive-wood figurines for four generations, it was no cause for celebration.
Today, theirs is one of the few wood carvers' shops still open in a city economically and psychologically devastated by more than three years of conflict between Palestinians and Israelis. With most of their neighbors' stores shuttered and only a handful of browsers during what was once the busiest week of the year, it has been difficult to summon Christmas cheer in the place revered by Christians as the birthplace of Jesus.
"This is the first year we've had a tree since the intifada began," said Joseph Giacaman, a 43-year-old father of three, referring to the three-year-old Palestinian uprising. "We've had to force ourselves to have the Christmas feeling."
Sharon's pattern of provocation
By Scott Weinstein, Electronic Intifada 12/26/2003
Christmas Day, 2003, Jenin, West Bank -- Night has fallen, and I am staring at mounds of rubble. This used to be a neighbourhood in the Jenin Refugee Camp. The Israeli army levelled the houses with people inside, in what is known here as the Jenin Massacre. The rubble mounds are pulverized so fine they appear to be crematory remains.
Abdul Sadie, my host from the Palestine Red Crescent Society (Red Cross) grew up here and explains what happened. The Israeli army invaded the camp in April 2002 from four directions, advancing slowly as they met with fierce resistance from the residents. Entering a narrow ally that used to exist in front of us, 13 soldiers were trapped and killed. Then more invading soldiers were killed. The Israelis made the refugee camp pay -- by obliterating the neighbourhood and burrying all who didn't escape. Fortunately, over 3,000 people did.
For the Jenin survivors, their tragedy is known worldwide. Numerous foreigners like me come to gape at what Abdul calls "Our Ground Zero". The U.N., NGOs and a few Arab states have pledged assistance to rebuild -- a process that is slowly happening. What I find depressing is that almost daily throughout the occupied territories, Palestinian are being killed and their houses demolished in virtual obscurity.
Another kind of terror: Israel grapples with murderous gang wars and corruption
By Ed Blanche, Daily Star 12/27/2003
BEIRUT: Three Israelis were killed and more than 30 wounded on Dec. 11 by a lunchtime bomb explosion at a moneychanger’s office in a seedy district of south Tel Aviv notorious for its prostitutes and illegal gambling dens. But it wasn’t an attack by Palestinian militants. For ordinary Israelis, this was another kind of terror a war in the streets of unprecedented ferocity between the country’s organized crime families who commentators say now control much of the political system.
With Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his two sons currently under suspicion of involvement in illegal financial transactions, including under-the-table funding for political purposes, the degree to which criminal organizations have penetrated Israel’s body politic amid what many see as a worrying deterioration in public morality is becoming a national scandal. High-profile corruption cases involving political figures such as Sharon who could conceivably be pushed out of office by the graft charges and the broad daylight mayhem on the streets of Tel Aviv, Ashkelon, Haifa, Eilat, Hadera and other cities is drawing demands for greater scrutiny and more effective police action.
The underworld’s gang wars, with Israeli killing Israeli, has jolted a nation already traumatized by suicide bombings, forcing Ariel Sharon’s Cabinet to address the problem. But the gangland mayhem appears to be endemic of a deepening malaise in Israeli society on various levels. After monitoring the Israeli press, and the barrage of reports about official corruption and intifada-induced road rage among citizens of all classes and background in recent weeks, one could be forgiven for thinking that Israel was on the verge of social disintegration.
Howard Dean Is Still the Favored Candidate
By Richard H. Curtiss, Arab News 12/27/2003
WASHINGTON, 27 December 2003 — The Arabs call it “Baraka,” meaning blessed or fortunate. It can be used to describe a happy state of somehow coming up with exactly the right words at the right time.
Thus it is with former governor of Vermont Howard Dean. He’s either a master of timing or very, very lucky. He set out to put some gravitas into his views on foreign policy in a Dec. 15 speech at the Regis Hotel in Los Angeles. The setting of the speech was no coincidence because Democrats expect to obtain a lot of money from Hollywood and its environs. A lot of people feared that when Saddam Hussain was caught the electoral dynamics would change immediately against Dean, the Democratic candidate most critical of President George W. Bush’s handling of the war. Dean did make some quick changes, and went ahead with his seminal speech to show that he has thought carefully about what he will do if he wins the 2004 election.
The speech itself was not particularly exciting. It was very clear that Dean’s handlers wanted to demonstrate that he is not anti-Israel, as the Internet gossips have claimed. It was also clear that under no circumstances was he going to use the word “even-handed” or anything like it if he could possibly avoid it. That term, which he used initially many times, got him into trouble with American boosters of Israel. In fact, most Americans then and now, strongly support an even-handed approach to settling the Arab-Israeli problem.
The irrelevant Muslim-Western dialogue
By Abdelwahab El-Affendi, Daily Star 12/27/2003
At the end of a recent conference held to debate the role of Islamic groups in the political process in the Arab world, a leading American participant confided to me that he had been bitterly disappointed by the outcome of what was supposed to be a Muslim-American dialogue on this and related issues. “I cannot say that I have found anyone I could talk to here,” he said. My interlocutor tried to expound on the point, explaining he was a moderate who opposed the current US administration and was sympathetic to Arab concerns. But he regretted that Arabs and Palestinians had missed many opportunities to impress the Americans and accept the favorable deals offered to them. Just then, another participant who was standing nearby and had overheard our conversation joined in and said to my friend how completely mistaken he was about every point. As the futile exchange heated up, I slipped quietly away. It is sometimes good to know when to abandon a dialogue that is really a series of monologues.
...The truth is that such exchanges are an irrelevance, for more than one reason. One participant reminded the audience of a meeting that he and I attended a decade ago in New York to discuss almost the same issue. We were then engaged in what has become known as the “Islamism debate” in Washington namely whether to deal or not with Islamists who were fast becoming the main political force in most Arab countries. The main speaker at that meeting had a categorical answer: “No!” Islamists, whether “moderate” or not, she argued, should be avoided like the plague. Whatever the differences between them, they were united on three points: hostility to Israel, opposition to women’s rights and hostility to American interests.
That, however, was not the main point. In private conversation, a conference organizer explained why our debate was irrelevant. During that period, the US administration would be listening to its allies in the region: Israel and friendly Arab regimes. If there was one point of consensus between the latter two, it was that Islamists represent the most serious threat to the stability of the pro-American order in the region. Our debate was “academic” in the worst sense of the term.
The US is not serious about helping Middle East democracy
By Majid Mohammadi, Daily Star 12/27/2003
Despite the stated desire of US President George W. Bush’s administration to democratize occupied Iraq and other nations in the Middle East, a long-term commitment to transforming the political perspectives of the region and introducing democracy have never been a pillar of US foreign policy, and it is hard to imagine they will become one.
Aside from the fact that democracy has almost never been imposed from outside, the Bush administration does not seek democracy in the Middle East, but rather agreement with its policies. There is a large gap between the rhetoric of democratization to justify American policies and actual US behavior directed at supporting authoritarian regimes. Washington prefers dealing with ruling figures, families or tribes in the region, and the predictability they represent, to getting involved in the domestic and foreign policy complexities inherent in democratic government. One recalls how the US spluttered when Turkey’s Parliament voted to deny American soldiers access to Iraq before the war there.
Supporting democracy requires understanding and dialogue. However, the Bush administration has usually talked the language of power, even with its allies. The establishment of regional democracies must also be linked to fair international trade policies. It is ironic, then, that the most populous Middle Eastern state, Iran, which has made genuine strides toward representative government, is also under the greatest burden of US trade sanctions.
Christianity in the Holy Land
By Floyd J. McKay, International Press Center 12/24/2003
If there were a Christian pilgrimage tradition in the mode of Islam's hajj, Christians would descend in huge crowds today on Bethlehem and the birthplace of Christ.
Instead, those few who make the journey will find again a besieged city, controlled by Israeli soldiers and tanks, major buildings leveled by shelling and very few surviving Palestinian Christians.
Palestinian Christians, descendants of the Apostles and their followers, have nearly vacated the Holy Land. And few American Christians seem to care, or even know about the diaspora.
And others, sometimes described as Christian Zionists, actually contribute to the decline of Christianity in the Holy Land, through their unwavering support of hard-line Israeli policies.
In a land of incredible political and religious complexity, the decline of Christianity is one of the great tragedies.
Palestinian Christians were historically concentrated in Jerusalem and Bethlehem. But the 1947 creation of Israel forced some 50,000 Christians from West Jerusalem and into exile or the West Bank, where they made up 20 percent of the Palestinian population. By 1966, that percentage was down to 13 percent, and it is now only 2.9 percent in the occupied territories. Muslims have a higher birth rate, but the major factor is emigration to America and elsewhere.
Rachel
By Cindy Corrie, The Link - Americans for Middle East Understanding December 2003
Rachel, Brian, and Tom: My daughter, Rachel Corrie, was one of those brave activists, now numbering in the thousands, who have made the journey from the safety of their own countries and homes to the Occupied Palestinian Territories. They come to see for themselves, to join in solidarity with the Palestinian people, and to work for a more peaceful world.
Rachel connected with the International Solidarity Movement (I.S.M.), a group of Palestinian-led international activists who use non-violent methods and strategies to confront the Israeli occupation. According to Huwaida Arraf (one of the co-founders), I.S.M. was formed “to provide the Palestinian people with a resource, international protection and a voice with which to resist, nonviolently, an overwhelming military occupation force.”
In March and April of this year, three I.S.M. activists suffered tragedies at the hands of the Israeli military. On March 16, Rachel, 23 years old and in the spring of her life, died when she was crushed by an Israeli bulldozer while trying to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian home in Rafah near the Egyptian border. On April 5, another U.S. citizen, Brian Avery, 24 years old, from Albuquerque, New Mexico, was shot in the face by a burst of machine-gun fire from an Israeli armored personnel carrier in Jenin. [Also available in Acrobat format: Rachel see: http://www.ameu.org/uploads/vol36_issue5_2003.pdf
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