Coming
in October
From AK Press
Today's
Stories
September
20 / 22, 2003
Uri Avnery
The
Silliest Show in Town
Alexander
Cockburn
Lighten
Up, America!
Peter Linebaugh
On the Bicentennial of the Execution of Robert Emmet
Anne Brodsky
Return
to Afghanistan
Saul Landau
Guillermo and Me
Phan Nguyen
Mother Jones Smears Rachel Corrie
Gila Svirsky
Sharon, With Eyes Wide Open
Gary Leupp
On Apache Terrorism
Kurt Nimmo
Colin
Powell: Exploiting the Dead of Halabja
Brian
Cloughley
Colin Powell's Shame
Carol Norris
The Moral Development of George W. Bush
Bill Glahn
The Real Story Behind RIAA Propaganda
Adam Engel
An Interview with Danny Scechter, the News Dissector
Dave Lindorff
Good Morning, Vietnam!
Mark Scaramella
Contracts and Politics in Iraq
John Ross
WTO
Collapses in Cancun: Autopsy of a Fiasco Foretold
Justin Podur
Uribe's Desperate Squeals
Toni Solo
The Colombia Three: an Interview with Caitriona Ruane
Steven Sherman
Workers and Globalization
David
Vest
Masked and Anonymous: Dylan's Elegy for a Lost America
Ron Jacobs
Politics of the Hip-Hop Pimps
Poets
Basement
Krieger, Guthrie and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Ted Honderich:
Terrorism for Humanity?
September
19, 2003
Ilan Pappe
The
Hole in the Road Map
Bill Glahn
RIAA is Full of Bunk, So is the New York Times
Dave Lindorff
General Hysteria: the Clark Bandwagon
Robert Fisk
New Guard is Saddam's Old
Jeff Halper
Preparing
for a Struggle Against Israeli Apartheid
Brian J. Foley
Power to the Purse
Clare
Brandabur
Hitchens
Smears Edward Said
Website of the Day
Live from Palestine
September
18, 2003
Mona Baker
and Lawrence Davidson
In
Defense of the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions
Wayne
Madsen
Wesley
Clark for President? Another Neo-Con Con Job
Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Wesley Clark and Waco
Muqtedar Khan
The Pakistan Squeeze
Dominique
de Villepin
The
Reconstruction of Iraq: This Approach is Leading Nowhere
Angus Wright
Brazilian Land Reform Offers Hope
Elaine
Cassel
Payback is Hell
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Leavitt
for EPA Head? He's Much Worse Than You Thought
Website
of the Day
ALA Responds to Ashcroft's Smear
Recent
Stories
September 17, 2003
Timothy J. Freeman
The
Terrible Truth About Iraq
St. Clair / Cockburn
A
Vain, Pompous Brown-noser:
Meet the Real Wesley Clark
Terry Lodge
An Open Letter to Michael Moore on Gen. Wesley Clark
Mitchel Cohen
Don't Be Fooled Again: Gen. Wesley Clark, War Criminal
Norman Madarasz
Targeting Arafat
Richard Forno
High Tech Heroin
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Website of the Day
The Ultimate Palestine Resource Site!
September 16, 2003
Rosemary and Walt Brasch
An
Ill Wind: Hurricane Isabel and the Lack of Homeland Security
Robert Fisk
Powell
in Baghdad
Kurt Nimmo
Imperial Sociopaths
M. Shahid Alam
The Dialectics
of Terror
Ron Jacobs
Exile at Gunpoint
Christopher Brauchli
Bush's War on Wages
Al Krebs
Stop Calling Them "Farm Subsidies"; It's Corporate
Welfare
Patrick Cockburn
The
Iraq Wreck
Website of the Day
From Occupied Palestine
The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!
September 15, 2003
Stan Goff
It Was
the Oil; It Is Like Vietnam
Robert Fisk
A Hail of Bullets, a Trail of Dead
Writers Bloc
We
Are Winning: a Report from Cancun
James T. Phillips
Does George Bush Cry?
Elaine Cassel
The Troublesome Bill of Rights
Cynthia McKinney
A Message to the People of New York City
Matthew Behrens
Sunday Morning Coming Down: Reflections on Johnny Cash
Uri Avnery
Assassinating
Arafat
Hammond Guthrie
Celling Out the Alarm
Website of the Day
Arnold and the Egg
September 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
September 12, 2003
Writers Block
Todos
Somos Lee: Protest and Death in Cancun
Laura Carlsen
A Knife to the Heart: WTO Kills Farmers
Dave Lindorff
The Meaning of Sept. 11
Elaine Cassel
Bush at Quantico
Linda S. Heard
British
Entrance Exams
John Chuckman
The First Two Years of Insanity
Doug Giebel
Ending America as We Know It
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Blank Check Military
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Website of the Day
A Woman in Baghdad
September 11, 2003
Robert Fisk
A Grandiose
Folly
Roger Burbach
State Terrorism and 9/11: 1973 and 2001
Jonathan Franklin
The Pinochet Files
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Postcards to the President
Norman Solomon
The Political Capital of 9/11
Saul Landau
The Chilean Coup: the Other, Almost Forgotten 9/11
Stew Albert
What Goes Around
Website of the Day
The Sights and Sounds of a Coup
September 10, 2003
John Ross
Cancun
Reality Show: Will It Turn Into a Tropical Seattle?
Zoltan Grossman
The General Who Would be President: Was Wesley Clark Also Unprepared
for the Postwar Bloodbath?
Tim Llewellyn
At the Gates of Hell
Christopher Brauchli
Turn the Paige: the Bush Education Deception
Lee Sustar
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
Elaine Cassel
McCain-Feingold in Trouble: Scalia Hogs the Debate
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Hammond Guthrie
When All Was Said and Done
Website of the Day
Fact Checking Colin Powell
Hot Stories
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
September
22, 2003
Shimon Peres at 80
The Silliest Show in Town
By URI AVNERY
Shimon Peres is celebrating. Shimon Peres? The
whole world is celebrating with him!
What has he got to celebrate?
Well, he has reached the age of 80. A
respectable age. I can't begrudge him. (After all, I myself am
now 80 years old, and I just had a celebration, too.)
When one gets to be 80 years old, it
is customary to invite some friends round. So Peres invited a
few pals, too. Such as Bill Clinton and Mikhail Gorbachev, Frederick
de Klerk and Joschka Fischer, the presidents of Slovenia, Germany
and Malta, not to mention the Ivory Coast, several billionaires,
an assortment of ministers from various countries, some actors
and singers and the holocaustist Claude
Lantzman. Diplomacy, entertainment and the holocaust, a tasteful
mixture.
A whole luxury hotel has been booked
for the 400 exalted guests, 1200 policeman will be mobilized,
streets in two cities will be closed. Excellent. Something like
the triumph of a victorious Roman Imperator coming home from
the wars.
And that is the weird part.
What has he got to celebrate, after all?
He is the chairman of the Labor Party.
The Labor Party lies in ruins. It has ceased to exist as a functioning
party. Its leaders haunt the corridors like ghosts. Its local
branches are in a shambles. It has no program. It has no plan.
Nobody knows what it wants. Nobody knows what it exists for.
If, indeed, it does exist.
True, Peres does not bear the responsibility
for this collapse alone. Its main architect was Ehud Barak, the
champion of disasters, who spread the historic lie that we have
no partner for peace. With this he opened the way for Ariel Sharon's
rise to power. But Shimon Peres joined Sharon's government, served
him loyally, disseminated around the world the myth that Sharon
is a man of peace, paved his way in Washington and lent a willing
hand to all his atrocities--the 'targeted killings", the
wholesale demolition of homes, the enlargement of the settlements
at a frantic pace.
Now the Labor Party has reached such
a miserable state that Sharon is not even interested in having
it as a junior partner in his government. What does he need it
for? He has got Tommy Lapid. There are few sights more pitiful
than a worn-out whore whom nobody wants anymore.
Since Peres was appointed party chairman
by default--with no other credible candidate standing - it has
the atmosphere of a graveyard. No whiff of fresh (or indeed any)
air reaches it. Nothing happens. From time to time some television
channel devotes a few minutes to a party caucus, out of pity
or schadenfreude.
Shimon Peres has no time to deal with
the Party, because he is busy with the party. That is a full-time
job with overtime.
It is also a disaster. The disappearance
of the Labor Party has left a black hole in the political system.
No democracy can function without an efficient and combative
opposition. When the government is headed by a person like Ariel
Sharon, who is leading Israel towards a predictable catastrophe,
the absence of an opposition is a national crime.
Peres does not think so. "What do
we need an opposition for?" he demanded recently in one
of his innumerable interviews in the media. And indeed, what
for? After all, Peres does not hide his longing for a seat in
the government, any government, even (or especially) a government
under Ariel Sharon.
And why not? What is the great difference
between Sharon and Peres, apart from Sharon's charisma and Peres'
record of failures? Is Peres against the assassination of Palestinian
leaders? No. Does he oppose the "removal" of Yasser
Arafat? In one of his interviews, he spoke against it feebly,
but he is not mobilizing his party against the approaching disaster.
Demolition of homes? Uprooting of trees? A thunderous silence,
at best.
In his long career, Peres has been everything.
He has been an extreme hawk and a cooing dove. He is the father
of Israel's nuclear bomb and (after intense lobbying) a Nobel
Peace Prize laureate. One of the main initiators of the 1956
war, in the company of two foul colonialist regimes (France and
Britain, at the time), and a partner to the Oslo agreement. The
father of the West Bank settlements and the creator of the Good
Fence on the Lebanese border. The advocate of the Lebanon invasion
and, just a few days later, the main speaker at the Peace Now
demonstration against it.
He has supported everything. At one time
he declared that Israel is not a Middle Eastern but a "Mediterranean"
country. For years has advocated the "Jordanian Option"
that ignored the existence of the Palestinian people. Then he
shook the hand of Arafat and invented the New Middle East. And
through all these years he has never, never won an election.
What has he got to celebrate?
Shimon Peres bears a major part of the
responsibility for the woeful state that Israel is now in, for
the continuation of conflict with the Palestinians, for destroying
the Israeli peace camp, for strengthening the Likud's hold on
power, for paving the way for Ariel Sharon, who is quite capable
of bringing about the destruction of Israel.
Even in the declining years of the Roman
empire, they did not celebrate a triumph for a defeated and humiliated
general. Only in Israel. Because, in Israel, nothing succeeds
like failure.
Uri Avnery
is an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom. He
is one of the writers featured in The
Other Israel: Voices of Dissent and Refusal. One of his
essays is also included in Cockburn and St. Clair's forthcoming
book: The
Politics of Anti-Semitism. He can be reached at: avnery@counterpunch.org.
Weekend
Edition Features for Sept. 20 / 22, 2003
Uri Avnery
The
Silliest Show in Town
Alexander
Cockburn
Lighten
Up, America!
Peter Linebaugh
On the Bicentennial of the Execution of Robert Emmet
Anne Brodsky
Return
to Afghanistan
Saul Landau
Guillermo and Me
Phan Nguyen
Mother Jones Smears Rachel Corrie
Gila Svirsky
Sharon, With Eyes Wide Open
Gary Leupp
On Apache Terrorism
Kurt Nimmo
Colin
Powell: Exploiting the Dead of Halabja
Brian
Cloughley
Colin Powell's Shame
Carol Norris
The Moral Development of George W. Bush
Bill Glahn
The Real Story Behind RIAA Propaganda
Adam Engel
An Interview with Danny Scechter, the News Dissector
Dave Lindorff
Good Morning, Vietnam!
Mark Scaramella
Contracts and Politics in Iraq
John Ross
WTO
Collapses in Cancun: Autopsy of a Fiasco Foretold
Justin Podur
Uribe's Desperate Squeals
Toni Solo
The Colombia Three: an Interview with Caitriona Ruane
Steven Sherman
Workers and Globalization
David
Vest
Masked and Anonymous: Dylan's Elegy for a Lost America
Ron Jacobs
Politics of the Hip-Hop Pimps
Poets
Basement
Krieger, Guthrie and Albert
Website of the
Weekend
Ted Honderich:
Terrorism for Humanity?
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