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Today's
Stories
November 12, 2003
Elaine Cassel
The
Supremes and Guantanamo: a Glimmer of Hope?
Col. Dan Smith
Unsolicited
Advice: a Reply to Rumsfeld's Memo
Jonathan Cook
Facility
1391: Israel's Guantanamo
Robert Fisk
Osama Phones Home
Michael Schwartz
The Wal-Mart Distraction and the California Grocery Workers Strike
John Chuckman
Forty
Years of Lies
Doug Giebel
Jessica Lynch and Saving American Decency
Uri Avnery
Wanted: a Sharon of the Left
November 11, 2003
David Lindorff
Bush's
War on Veterans
Stan Goff
Honoring
Real Vets; Remembering Real War
Earnest McBride
"His
Feet Were on the Ground": Was Steve McNair's Cousin Lynched?
Derek Seidman
Imperialism
Begins at Home: an Interview with Stan Goff
David Krieger
Mr. President, You Can Run But You Can't Hide
Sen. Ernest Hollings
My Cambodian Moment on the Iraq War
Dan Bacher
The Invisible Man Resigns
Kam Zarrabi
Hypocrisy at the Top
John Eskow
Born on Veteran's Day
Website of the Day
Left Hook
November 10, 2003
Robert Fisk
Looney
Toons in Rummyworld: How We Denied Democracy to the Middle East
Elaine Cassel
Papa's Gotta Brand New Bag (of Tricks): Patriot Act Spawns Similar
Laws Across Globe
James Brooks
Israel's New War Machine Opens the Abyss
Thom Rutledge
The Lost Gospel of Rummy
Stew Albert
Call Him Al
Gary Leupp
"They
Were All Non-Starters": On the Thwarted Peace Proposals
November 8/9, 2003
Kathleen and Bill Christison
Zionism
as Racist Ideology
Gabriel Kolko
Intelligence
for What?
The Vietnam War Reconsidered
Saul Landau
The
Bride Wore Black: the Policy Nuptials of Boykin and Wolfowitz
Brian Cloughley
Speeding Up to Nowhere: Training the New Iraqi Police
William Blum
The Anti-Empire Report:
A Permanent Occupation?
David Lindorff
A New Kind of Dancing in Iraq: from Occupation to Guerrilla War
Elaine Cassel
Bush's War on Non-Citizens
Tim Wise
Persecuting the Truth: Claims of Christian Victimization Ring
Hollow
Toni Solo
Robert Zoellick and "Wise Blood"
Michael Donnelly
Will the Real Ron Wyden Please Stand Up?
Mark Hand
Building a Vanguard Movement: a Review of Stan Goff's Full Spectrum
Disorder
Norman Solomon
War, Social Justice, Media and Democracy
Norman Madarasz
American Neocons and the Jerusalem Post
Adam Engel
Raising JonBenet
Dave Zirin
An Interview with George Foreman
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Albert and Greeder
November 7, 2003
Nelson Valdes
Latin
America in Crisis and Cuba's Self-Reliance
David Vest
Surely
It Can't Get Any Worse?
Chris Floyd
An Inspector
Calls: The Kay Report as War Crime Indictment
William S. Lind
Indicators:
Where This War is Headed
Elaine Cassel
FBI to Cryptome: "We Are Watching You"
Maria Tomchick
When Public Transit Gets Privatized
Uri Avnery
Israeli
Roulette
November 6, 2003
Ron Jacobs
With
a Peace Like This...
Conn Hallinan
Rumsfeld's
New Model Army
Maher Arar
This
is What They Did to Me
Elaine Cassel
A Bad
Day for Civil Liberties: the Case of Maher Arar
Neve Gordon
Captives
Behind Sharon's Wall
Ralph Nader and Lee Drutman
An Open Letter to John Ashcroft on Corporate Crime
November 5, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Just
a Match Away:
Fire Sale in So Cal
Dave Lindorff
A Draft in the Forecast?
Robert Jensen
How I Ended Up on the Professor Watch List
Joanne Mariner
Prisons as Mental Institutions
Patrick Cockburn
Saddam Not Organizing Iraqi Resistance
Simon Helweg-Larsen
Centaurs
from Dusk to Dawn: Remilitarization and the Guatemalan Elections
Josh Frank
Silencing "the Reagans"
Website of the Day
Everything You Wanted to Know About Howard Dean But Were Afraid
to Ask
November 4, 2003
Robert Fisk
Smearing
Said and Ashrawi: When Did "Arab" Become a Dirty Word?
Ray McGovern
Chinook Down: It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Vietnam
Woodruff / Wypijewski
Debating
the New Unity Partnership
Karyn Strickler
When
Opponents of Abortion Dream
Norman Solomon
The
Steady Theft of Our Time
Tariq Ali
Resistance
and Independence in Iraq
November 3, 2003
Patrick Cockburn
The
Bloodiest Day Yet for Americans in Iraq: Report from Fallujah
Dave Lindorff
Philly's
Buggy Election
Janine Pommy Vega
Sarajevo Hands 2003
Bernie Dwyer
An
Interview with Chomsky on Cuba
November 1 / 2,
2003
Saul Landau
Cui
Bono? The Cuba Embargo as Rip Off
Noam Chomsky
Empire of the Men of Best Quality
Bruce Jackson
Midge Decter and the Taxi Driver
Brian Cloughley
"Mow the Whole Place Down"
John Stanton
The Pentagon's Love Affair with Land Mines
William S. Lind
Bush's Bizarre Korean Gambit
Ben Tripp
The Brown Paste on Bush's Shoes
Christopher Brauchli
Divine Hatred
Dave Zirin
An Interview with John Carlos
Agustin Velloso
Oil in Equatorial Guinea: Where Trickle Down Doesn't Trickle
Josh Frank
Howard Dean and Affirmative Action
Ron Jacobs
Standing Up to El Diablo: the 1981 Blockade of Diablo Canyon
Strickler / Hermach
Liar, Liar Forests on Fire
David Vest
Jimmy T99 Nelson, a Blues Legend and the Songs that Made Him
Famous
Adam Engel
America, What It Is
Dr. Susan Block
Christy Canyon, a Life in Porn
Poets' Basement
Greeder, Albert & Guthrie
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher David Vest: Winner of 2 Muddy Awards for Best
Blues Pianist in the Pacific Northwest!
October 31, 2003
Lee Ballinger
Making
a Dollar Out of 15 Cents: The Sweatshops of Sean "P. Diddy"
Combs
Wayne Madsen
The
GOP's Racist Trifecta
Michael Donnelly
Settling for Peanuts: Democrats Trick the Greens, Treat Big Timber
Patrick Cockburn
Baghdad
Diary: Iraqis are Naming Their New Babies "Saddam"
Elaine Cassel
Coming
to a State Near You: The Matrix (Interstate Snoops, Not the Movie)
Linda Heard
An Arab View of Masonry
October 30, 2003
Forrest Hylton
Popular
Insurrection and National Revolution in Bolivia
Eric Ruder
"We Have to Speak Out!": Marching with the Military
Families
Dave Lindorff
Big
Lies and Little Lies: The Meaning of "Mission Accomplished"
Philip Adams
"Everyone is Running Scared": Denigrating Critics of
Israel
Sean Donahue
Howard Dean: a Hawk in a Dove's Cloak
Robert Jensen
Big Houses & Global Justice: A Moral Level of Consumption?
Alexander Cockburn
Paul
Krugman: Part of the Problem
October 29, 2003
Chris Floyd
Thieves
Like Us: Cheney's Backdoor to Halliburton
Robert Fisk
Iraq Guerrillas Adopt a New Strategy: Copy the Americans
Rick Giombetti
Let
Them Eat Prozac: an Interview with David Healy
The Intelligence Squad
Dark
Forces? The Military Steps Up Recruiting of Blacks
Elaine Cassel
Prosecutors
as Therapists, Phantoms as Terrorists
Marie Trigona
Argentina's War on the Unemployed Workers Movement
Gary Leupp
Every
Day, One KIA: On the Iraq War Casualty Figures
October 28, 2003
Rich Gibson
The
Politics of an Inferno: Notes on Hellfire 2003
Uri Avnery
Incident
in Gaza
Diane Christian
Wishing
Death
Robert Fisk
Eyewitness
in Iraq: "They're Getting Better"
Toni Solo
Authentic Americans and John Negroponte
Jason Leopold
Halliburton in Iran
Shrireen Parsons
When T-shirts are Verboten
Chris White
9/11
in Context: a Marine Veteran's Perspective
October 27,
2003
William A. Cook
Ministers
of War: Criminals of the Cloth
David Lindorff
The
Times, Dupes and the Pulitzer
Elaine Cassel
Antonin
Scalia's Contemptus Mundi
Robert Fisk
Occupational Schizophrenia
John Chuckman
Banging Your Head into Walls
Seth Sandronsky
Snoops R Us
Bill Kauffman
George
Bush, the Anti-Family President
October 25 / 26,
2003
Robert Pollin
The
US Economy: Another Path is Possible
Jeffrey St. Clair
Outsourcing US Guided Missile Technology to China
James Bunn
Plotting
Pre-emptive Strikes
Saul Landau
Should Limbaugh Do Time?
Ted Honderich
Palestinian Terrorism, Morality & Germany
Thomas Nagy
Saving the Army of Peace
Christopher Brauchli
Between Bush and a Lobotomy: Killing Endangered Species for Profit
Laura Carlsen
Latin America's Archives of Terror
Diane Christian
Evil Acts & Evil Actors
Muqtedar Khan
Lessons from the Imperial Adventure in Iraq
John Feffer
The Tug of War on the Korea Peninsula
Brian Cloughley
Iraq War Memories are Made of Lies
Benjamin Dangl
and Kathryn Ledebur
An Uneasy Peace in Bolivia
Karyn Strickler
Down
with Big Brother's Spying Eyes
Noah Leavitt
Legal Globalization
John Stanton
Hitler's Ghost Haunts America
Mickey Z.
War of the Words
Adam Engel
Tractatus Ridiculous
Poets' Basement
Curtis, Subiet and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Project Last Stand
October 24, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
Ashcroft's
War on Greenpeace
Lenni Brenner
The Demographics of American Jews
Jeffrey St. Clair
Rockets,
Napalm, Torpedoes and Lies: the Attack on the USS Liberty Revisited
Sarah Weir
Cover-up of the Israeli Attack on the US Liberty
David Krieger
WMD Found in DC: Bush is the Button
Mohammed Hakki
It's Palestine, Stupid!: Americans and the Middle East
Harry Browne
Northern
Ireland: the Agreement that Wasn't
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
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
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
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November
12, 2003
The State of Israel
Needs a Change
Wanted:
a Sharon of the Left
By URI AVNERY
Immediately after leaving the army, Ariel Sharon
created the Likud. It was 1973, when he realized that the army
top brass would never tolerate his appointment as Chief-of-Staff.
For the creation of the Likud, he had
a simple recipe: to unify all the four factions of the Right:
Begin's Herut ("freedom") movement, the Liberal Party,
the "Free Center" and the "State List".
That was quite ridiculous. Herut and
the Liberals had already formed a joint bloc. The two other factions
were insignificant little groups. The "State List"
was a remnant of the party founded by Ben-Gurion after Moshe
Dayan and Shimon Peres had deserted him and rejoined the Labor
party. The "Free Center" was splinter party led by
Shmuel Tamir. The big unification was a sham. Indeed, none of
the factions' leaders liked it. Sharon imposed it by creating
public pressure.
At the time, I asked him about the sense
of this maneuver. He explained the logic: the public must be
given the impression that the entire Right Wing is coming together
and creating a big political force. Nobody should be left out.
Therefore, even the two small factions had to be included. There
was an added value to the inclusion of the "State List",
which originated in the Labor movement: it could provide an alibi
for former left-wingers ready to join the Right.
The trick was successful. Only four years
later, the Right came to power--for the first time since the
establishment of the State of Israel, 19 years earlier.
Unfortunately, today there is nobody
on the Left with a comparable recipe. In the Israeli political
system, there is a gaping hole where the Left should have been.
The future of Israel may be sucked into this black hole.
What we see is a terrible imbalance.
All the signs indicate that the Israeli Left is beginning to
wake up after three years of stupor and hopelessness. There are
dozens of little indications that the peace camp is recovering.
In the social field, too, leftist tendencies are raising their
head. The resistance to Sharon's policy of oppression and settlement
is gathering momentum along with resistance to Netanyahu's attack
on the welfare state. There is a chance--slight but real, nevertheless
- for a historic change.
But this chance cannot become reality
if there is no political force capable of realizing it. The Labor
Party remains a wasteland, with alley cats squabbling among the
ruins. Even the effort to bring Amir Peretz, the Trade Union
leader, back into the fold is meeting desperate resistance from
party hacks afraid of losing their place at the empty bowl.
Since the elections, the Meretz party
has been vegetating in a mood of depression and self-pity, reflected
in the tortured face of Yossi Sarid. The other Yossi (Beilin),
the moving spirit of the "Geneva Understandings", dreams
about a new "Social Democratic Party" that would consist
of the elitist Ashkenazy group in another guise. It seems that
among its potential founders there is agreement on one thing
only: who not to allow in.
That is the great difference between
the Right and the Left. The power-hungry Right understands the
importance of unity. Even when its factions hate each other,
they are ready to cooperate. In order to hold on to power, "moderate"
rightists are quite prepared to march together with the fascist
fringe.
On the left, the opposite is true. Every
group is mortally afraid of the faction on its left. The right
wing of the Labor Party is afraid of the party's left wing. The
left wing is afraid of Meretz. Meretz is afraid of Yossi Beilin,
who was pushed out of the Labor party by Amram Mitzna and his
fellow leftists, but was not offered a safe place on the Meretz
list. Meretz is afraid of Peace Now. Peace Now is afraid of Gush
Shalom and the Israeli Arab factions.
What is the fear all about? It's quite
simple. Every leftist grouping is afraid of not looking patriotic
enough. Each of them says: "Look at us! We are nationalists!
We are Zionists! We are patriots! We are not like those guys
next to us, who are not nationalists, not Zionists, unpatriotic!"
After the murder of Yitzhak Rabin, a
new leftist movement was born. It called itself "A Whole
Generation Demands Peace" and was led by the dead man's
son, Yuval Rabin. It devoted much of its energy to the task of
preventing people from confusing it with Peace Now.
I remember the following situation: Peace
Now had set up some tents in Ras-al-Amud in order to protest
against the creation of a new Jewish neighborhood in the middle
of an Arab neighborhood in East Jerusalem. A few meters away,
Gush Shalom had set up its tents. The Peace Now people simply
ignored the Gush activists. On the second day, Yuval Rabin appeared
at the head of a Whole Generation parade. They looked through
the Peace Now people as if they were thin air. (The Whole Generation
has since disappeared.)
If the Left does not overcome its complexes,
there is no chance of changing the government. A disunited Left,
lacking leadership, self-confidence and a clear national and
social program will not attract the support of the majority on
election day, even if the public mood changes for the better.
There is a need for one big leftist party,
in which all the political and ideological groupings will find
a place, from the admirers (if any) of Ehud Barak to the admirers
of Yossi Beilin, from moderate Social-Democrats to the radical
left, based on a minimum common denominator ("Two States
for Two Peoples"). Let a hundred ideological flowers bloom.
Let there be a lively debate, but let there be one political
action force capable of assuming power. If the Labor Party can
still fulfil this mission--so much the better. The merger with
the trade unionist "One People" party could be a first
step. If not, a new party must be founded, in line with Sharon's
1973 recipe.
It would be wonderful if the left had
a charismatic political personality capable of leading this process.
Alas, for the time being, there is none. Failing this, a collective
leadership must be set up.
There is not much time left. The leftist
public, and some rightists too, are waking up from the torpor
of despair and are ready to follow whoever calls them to the
colors. The state needs a change before disaster strikes. If
the Left misses this opportunity, history will not forgive it.
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. He is also
a contributor to CounterPunch's hot new book The
Politics of Anti-Semitism. He can be reached at: avnery@counterpunch.org.
Weekend
Edition Features for Nov. 8 / 9, 2003
Kathleen and Bill Christison
Zionism
as Racist Ideology
Gabriel Kolko
Intelligence
for What?
The Vietnam War Reconsidered
Saul Landau
The
Bride Wore Black: the Policy Nuptials of Boykin and Wolfowitz
Brian Cloughley
Speeding Up to Nowhere: Training the New Iraqi Police
William Blum
The Anti-Empire Report:
A Permanent Occupation?
David Lindorff
A New Kind of Dancing in Iraq: from Occupation to Guerrilla War
Elaine Cassel
Bush's War on Non-Citizens
Tim Wise
Persecuting the Truth: Claims of Christian Victimization Ring
Hollow
Toni Solo
Robert Zoellick and "Wise Blood"
Michael Donnelly
Will the Real Ron Wyden Please Stand Up?
Mark Hand
Building a Vanguard Movement: a Review of Stan Goff's Full Spectrum
Disorder
Norman Solomon
War, Social Justice, Media and Democracy
Norman Madarasz
American Neocons and the Jerusalem Post
Adam Engel
Raising JonBenet
Dave Zirin
An Interview with George Foreman
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Albert and Greeder
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