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Today's
Stories
September
25, 2003
David
Krieger
The
Second Nuclear Age
September 24, 2003
Stan Goff
Generational
Casualties: the Toxic Legacy of the Iraq War
William
Blum
Grand Illusions About Wesley Clark
David
Vest
Politics
for Bookies
Jon Brown
Stealing Home: The Real Looting is About to Begin
Robert Fisk
Occupation and Censorship
Latino
Military Families
Bring Our Children Home Now!
Neve Gordon
Sharon's
Preemptive Zeal
Website
of the Day
Bands Against Bush
September
23, 2003
Bernardo
Issel
Dancing
with the Diva: Arianna and Streisand
Gary Leupp
To
Kill a Cat: the Unfortunate Incident at the Baghdad Zoo
Gregory
Wilpert
An
Interview with Hugo Chavez on the CIA in Venezuela
Steven
Higgs
Going to Jail for the Cause--Part 2: Charity Ryerson, Young and
Radical
Stan Cox
The Cheney Tapes: Can You Handle the Truth?
Robert
Fisk
Another Bloody Day in the Death of Iraq
William S. Lind
Learning from Uncle Abe: Sacking the Incompetent
Elaine
Cassel
First They Come for the Lawyers, Then the Ministers
Yigal
Bronner
The
Truth About the Wall
Website
of the Day
The
Baghdad Death Count
Recent
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
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.
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September
26, 2003
Edward Said
A
Corporeal Dream Not Yet Realized
By OMAR BARGHOUTI
To me, and to many around the world, I suppose,
Edward Said's name will always be associated --above all other
things -- with beyond-ness ... . He is (past tense can only be
used with those of much humbler legacies) beyond death, as we've
understood it, in the sense that the last tremor of his heart,
normally coupled with cessation of life, or the beginning of
the end of physical existence, failed in his case to introduce
the next stage, the utter nothingness. It is an attribute of
great men and women that their physical demise does not, indeed
can not, entail their end. In our contemporary world, few will
earn such a privilege as Edward Said has.
He is beyond in the expansive reach of
his intellect, from opera to Islam, from literature to philosophy,
and quite a lot in between.
I shall focus here on one particular
domain in Said that usually does not earn headlines in the western
media: the deeply transforming effect of his philosophy of oppression
and resistance. For Palestinians and all the oppressed in the
developing or notworld, Said has been a unique inspiration for
ethical resistance, for struggle against injustice, and for humanism
translated to our respective languages and our idiosyncratic
cultures and modes of thinking. Knowing ourselves, freeing our
minds, taking pride in our culture as well as sharing that of
others were always to Said the keys to emancipation.
Although I was never fortunate enough
to be an actual student of his, I learned quite a lot from him,
nonetheless. Beyond Orientalism and The Question of Palestine,
I learned mostly from his dignifying and humanizing approach
to the dehumanized. The following two personal anecdotes will
reveal a part of this special aspect of Said's beyondness.
Remorse & Inspiration
Back in 1984, when I was president of
what was then the Arab Club of Columbia University, I relentlessly
sought ways to invite Edward Said to our events. He was, after
all, our own, our pride, our celebrity, the unelected voice in
the west of the voiceless Palestinians. I was aware of Said's
persistent refusal to speak at "Arab" events, as he
loathed "speaking to the converted," as he once explained.
I tried to steel a moment from his perpetually busy office schedule
to convince him that our events had attracted 95% Americans,
mostly students who could not exactly be described as in love
with Palestine -- those familiar with Columbia will know exactly
what I am referring to -- but I could never get him to see me,
or any of us, for that matter. And then -- you knew a 'then'
was coming -- on one ordinary day I was leafleting the campus
with a flier for an event we had planned, with a prominent Jewish
American intellectual as keynote. I had a special style of leafleting,
by the way: I taped the fliers in geometric shapes on the beautifully
spacious steps leading to the Alma Mater, on the floors, and
just about everywhere else where average students would not expect
to see any fliers.
Edward Said happened to pass by with
his early morning coffee and bagel. He saw me pacing, arranging
my artwork with precision, symmetry and devotion, to attract
the eyes that were not trained to see anything related to Palestine.
I had a glimpse of him approaching and skimming one of the neatly
arranged fliers, but I continued with my work as if I hadn't.
He came up to me and jokingly asked: "What are you doing
at 6:30 am littering the steps?" Quickly suppresing my overwhelming
joy at having this nothing less than an aloof god speak to me,
I nonchalantly answered: "Leafleting for an event."
"Quite impressive," was his reaction to my cold-shoulder,
which he had rarely experienced, especially coming from a Palestinian
student. "Thanks to your enormous help, professor, we are
doing very well with our information campaign," was my second
verbal missile directed at him. We both knew that he had done
nothing whatsoever until then to help us in any way or form.
But only until then. In an apparent moment of guilt, he extended
to me a warm invitation to meet him in his office -- shrine!
-- that very same day. Thrilled, proud and above all speechlessly
vindicated, I immediately swallowed my pride and accepted.
He had genuinely thought that we were
doing classic anti-Israel events that addressed Arabs and their
close supporters only. When he realized he was wrong, he had
the courage to express it, in his own way. And from that moment
on he played a decisive role in turning the tides at Columbia,
promoting true debate on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, bringing
into campus new perspectives and arguments that most students
and faculty had not been exposed to.
Since then, Edward Said spoke at several
of our events. In his typical charisma and distinguished intellect,
Said always had a extraordinary blend of effects on our overcrowded
audiences: electrifying, educating, charming, provoking, angering,
engaging, and if an arrogant antagonist insisted on trying to
nail him with false premises or warped argumentation (needless
to say, such cases were far from rare at Columbia), he/she deserved
the VIP treatment that was invariably served to them by Said:
intellectual crucifixion, in public! Only one other genius in
my long experience in student activism possessed such potent
weapons of logical devastation: Noam Chomsky.
An unintended result of a series of our
highly successful events, inspired by Said, was the skyrocketing
of our organization's stature. We even used to quip at our new
image as "one of the major organizations on campus,"
as other groups viewed us, not knowing that at best our highly
committed and motivated membership roster hardly ever reached
the two-digit territory!! In retrospect, it wasn't just Said's
prominence that helped us, it was his spirit of resistance against
all odds that profoundly inspired us, and, I must say, transformed
some of us irreversibly. And I thought that only Lenin had the
magic formula for transforming a handful of committed activists
into an able and consequential force of change.
Principles First
After years of excellent relations, a
storm was bound to arrive in our relationship with the Grand
Palestinian. At the height of the first Palestinian intifada
(1987 1993), some of the Zionist organizations on campus (god,
we had too many!) decided to invite the head of the Israeli "legal"
system in the occupied Palestinian territories, a decorated army
general who was/is responsible for too many crimes to enumerate
here. The Arab student association and several other progressive
student organizations decided to campaign to prevent this military
leader, who had "blood on his hands," as our thorough
research had revealed, from speaking at Columbia. We had an intense
internal debate on whether his speech would constitute incitement
to violence, justification of racism, defence of murder committed
by his army almost daily in Palestine, or ... simply an instant
of free speech. We tried to persuade the organizers that such
a speaker carried so much colonial and criminal baggage on his
shoulders that his words were inherently seditious. We drew analogies
to a far-right organization inviting, for instance, a former
SS general. Though they were not amused by the analogy, some
of them admitted that it was "a logically legitimate comparison."
Nevertheless, we miserably failed in selling them the idea of
disinviting him. We shifted to Plan B. We asked for equal representation
on the panel of our side, "the other side" -- as they've
often superciliously demanded in our events. We were rebuffed,
mercilessly, I should add. Why should they feel any pressure
from a tiny coalition of student groups who could not remotely
measure up to the immense power they held and projected on campus?
At that point, we were almost obsessed with trying to answer
that question in a way that would surprise them, if not teach
them a badly needed lesson in humility and moral consistency.
We consulted with our treasured gurus,
Said, Chomsky, and the not-so-famous then, Norman Finkelstein.
We had no idea at the time that the three were first-amendment
aficionados! They replied in unexpected unison: no matter how
criminal this general might be -- they all agreed he was -- his
talk at Columbia could only be construed as a practice of freedom
of speech, which we, the patent victims of censorship, ought
to defend and promote. It was a cold shower to all of us, demoralizing
and shaking. How could they not see the other side, how such
a speech would in all certainty amplify the already hateful atmosphere
around us on campus, how it could breathe new life into the alarming
death threats that some of us had received. To them, the principle
came first, above all other things, beyond emotion and transient
indignation. Said even threatened to publicly criticize us if
we pursued any path of censorship against the bloody general.
Of course we were compelled to change
our tactics to accommodate that advice/obligation. We decided
to picket outside the Law School auditorium, where the general
was to speak, then walk into the hall, listen to him and finally
challenge him head-on. But we decided to do it with style. We
carefully hid our Palestinian flags and anti-occupation banners
under our clothes and went into the hall after it was all full
yes, it was revoltingly full!!and stood at the top level, all
around the auditorium, awaiting the right moment to unfold them.
It was a non-violent form of protest, we thought, that could
not be remotely discerned as censorship. We had no plan, though,
so we improvised.
When the general was finally introduced,
he stood up and, fitting the image of a colonial viceroy, walked
to the podium with deliberation, flanked by two massive bodyguards.
We impulsively opened our banners and held them high. What would
Said think of us now, I wondered. He would be angry, but proud,
I immediately convinced myself. The general was particularly
stung by the site of the large flag in my hands which at the
time was entirely banned in the occupied West Bank and Gaza,
partially due to his rulings. The very use of the combination
of its colors, red, black, green and white, was enough to guarantee
the perpetrator a tough military sentence. I was of course conscious
of that. He nervously stepped back and whispered with the MC,
a gentle rabbi who was more accommodating than the entire leadership
of the Zionist groups on campus. Interpreting the general's retreat
from the podium as a sweet little victory for us, we broke into
chants. He was visibly fuming.
In a daunting development, however, a
small army of the notoriously insensitive New York City police
was in the hall and surrounding each one of us in a flying moment
-- you would wish they reacted to crime with such lightening
efficiency! I openly dared the MC to have us arrested thereby
risking a definite breakdown in our mutual attempts at reconciliation.
That desperate tactic to avoid arrest -- which could mean deportation
of all of us who were foreign students -- surprisingly succeeded.
He asked the police to stand by. After several rounds of the
rabbi's polite pleas for quiet, which included promises to give
us the floor after the speech, and our unyielding, yet orderly,
chanting, amidst a state of collective shock that had struck
the audience -- after all, it wasn't everyday that someone could
so audaciously challenge such an omnipotent alliance of Zionist
groups at Columbia -- the MC decided to negotiate with me to
end the standoff. Since I had no mandate to speak on behalf of
the group, I look from afar at my colleagues, and they instantly
gave me a green light. They trusted me to reach a good compromise.
What would Edward Said advise me to do in such a predicament,
I asked myself. We met in the middle; the rabbi went up a few
steps, I went down a few. I had every intention to stall, but
at the same time I had to maintain my honesty and sense of responsibility
in my negotiations with him. I did respect his integrity and
occasional flurry of humanism. Ten minutes into our respectful
dialogue, we reached an agreement.
The rabbi went to the small stage to
inform his guest of the agreement. I crossed the hall to share
with my colleagues the details.
And then, I held up my flag and went
down to the podium. The rabbi announced the agreement on the
microphone: "A representative of the protesting groups will
speak for five minutes and then ask his group to walk out. Then,
our distinguished speaker will finally get to deliver his speech,
uninterrupted." The audience was now entering into clinical
shock. Unable to hide my glee, I slowly mounted the stage and
stood behind the podium to give my five-minute speech, basically
trying to convince as many people as possible to walk out with
us to protest the speaker's criminal record. Suddenly, the general
got up and shouted: "I shall not accept this humiliation,
standing next to a Palestinian carrying a flag." He carried
his briefcase and walked out with his guards. Conscious of the
meaning of this windfall, we feverishly started chanting. Some
in the audience cried, some just left with their heads down.
We, on the other hand, felt that our heads were going to hit
the ceiling. Said must be proud, I thought. I was dead wrong.
When the news reached him, he ranted
and raved. He immediately accused us of hurting our own cause,
and he made well on his promise, he spoke out publicly against
us. When I met him after that, he had cooled down, and we had
a rational debate. He did admit that our act was "courageous,"
"effective" and "seemingly unavoidable,"
but wrong, nonetheless. I could live with that.
Despite his unapproachable aura, he was
there when we needed insightful advice. Even when he wasn't with
us, we summoned him in our minds when we needed a voice of reason
and humanness to guide us. Now that he is physically gone, his
voice, his words, his unfulfilled dream will literally live on,
educating, enraging, provoking, enchanting and ultimately freeing
us.
Omar Barghouti is
a Palestinian doctoral student of philosophy (ethics) at Tel
Aviv University. He is also a political analyst. His article
"9.11 Putting the Moment on Human Terms" was chosen
among the "Best of 2002" by the Guardian. His articles
have appeared in the Hartford Courant, Al-Ahram and CounterPunch,
among others.
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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