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Today's
Stories
October
3 / 5, 2003
Bruce
Jackson
Addio
All Armi
October
2, 2003
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
What's
So Great About Gandhi, Anyway?
Amy Goodman
/ Jeremy Scahill
The
Ashcroft-Rove Connection
Doug Giebel
Kiss and Smear: Novak and the Valerie Plame Affair
Hamid
Dabashi
The Moment of Myth: Edward Said (1935-2003)
Elaine Cassel
Chicago Condemns Patriot Act
Saul Landau
Who
Got Us Into This Mess?
Website of the Day
Last Day to Save Beit Arabiya!
October 1, 2003
Joanne
Mariner
Married
with Children: the Supremes and Gay Families
Robert
Fisk
Oil,
War and Panic
Ron Jacobs
Xenophobia
as State Policy
Elaine
Cassel
The
Lamo Case: Secret Subpoenas and the Patriot Act
Shyam
Oberoi
Shooting
a Tiger
Toni Solo
Plan Condor, the Sequel?
Sean Donahue
Wesley
Clark and the "No Fly" List
Website of the Day
Downloader Legal Defense Fund
September
30, 2003
After
Dark
Arnold's
1977 Photo Shoot
Dave Lindorff
The
Poll of the Shirt: Bush Isn't Wearing Well
Tom Crumpacker
The
Cuba Fixation: Shaking Down American Travelers
Robert
Fisk
A
Lesson in Obfuscation
Charles
Sullivan
A
Message to Conservatives
Suren Pillay
Edward Said: a South African Perspective
Naeem
Mohaiemen
Said at Oberlin: Hysteria in the Face of Truth
Amy Goodman
/ Jeremy Scahill
Does
a Felon Rove the White House?
Website
of the Day
The Edward Said Page
September 29, 2003
Robert
Fisk
The
Myths of Western Intelligence Agencies
Iain A. Boal
Turn It Up: Pardon Mzwakhe Mbuli!
Lee Sustar
Paul
Krugman: the Last Liberal?
Wayne Madsen
General Envy? Think Shinseki, Not Clark
Benjamin
Dangl
Bolivia's Gas War
Uri Avnery
The
Magnificent 27
Pledge
Drive of the Day
Antiwar.com
Recent
Stories
September
26 / 28, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Alan
Dershowitz, Plagiarist
David Price
Teaching Suspicions
Saul Landau
Before the Era of Insecurity
Ron Jacobs
The Chicago Conspiracy Trial and
the Patriot Act
Brian
Cloughley
The Strangeloves Win Again
Norman Solomon
Wesley and Me: a Real-Life Docudrama
Robert
Fisk
Bomb Shatters Media Illusions
M. Shahid Alam
A Muslim Sage Visits the USA
John Chuckman
American Psycho: Bush at the UN
Mark Schneider
International Direct Action
The Spanish Revolution to the Palestiniana Intifada
William
S. Lind
How $87 Billion Could Buy Some Real Security
Douglas Valentine
Gold Warriors: the Plundering of Asia
Chris
Floyd
Vanishing Act
Elaine Cassel
Play Cat and Moussaoui
Richard
Manning
A Conservatism that Once Conserved
George Naggiar
The Beautiful Mind of Edward Said
Omar Barghouti
Edward Said: a Corporeal Dream Not Yet Realized
Lenni Brenner
Palestine's Loss is America's Loss
Mickey
Z.
Edward Said: a Well-Reasoned Voice
Tanweer Akram
The Legacy of Edward Said
Adam Engel
War in the Smoking Room
Poets' Basement
Katz, Ford, Albert & Guthrie
Website
of the Weekend
Who the Hell is Stew Albert?
September
25, 2003
Edward
Said
Dignity,
Solidarity and the Penal Colony
Robert
Fisk
Fanning
the Flames of Hatred
Sarah
Ferguson
Wolfowitz at the New School
David
Krieger
The
Second Nuclear Age
Bill Glahn
RIAA Doublespeak
Al Krebs
ADM and the New York Times: Covering Up Corporate Crime
Michael
S. Ladah
The Obvious Solution: Give Iraq Back to the Arabs
Fran Shor
Arnold and Wesley
Mustafa
Barghouthi
Edward Said: a Monument to Justice and Human Rights
Alexander Cockburn
Edward Said: a Mighty and Passionate
Heart
Website
of the Day
Edward Said: a Lecture on the Tragedy of Palestine
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
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
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|
Weekend
Edition
October 3 / 5, 2003
The Racism Barrier
Answering
William Safire
By M. JUNAID ALAM
In the United States, the Palestinian narrative
receives the same brutally dismissive treatment meted out to
the dispossessed natives whose moving plight it strongly conveys.
Concrete evidence is blocked and barred entrance at the gates
of serious social discourse much as Palestine's pregnant women
are stalled and forced to give birth dangerously at checkpoints;
important historical facts and statistics are swept aside like
the lives of stone-throwing youths shot dead by ruthless occupation
soldiers; undeniable facts on the ground are met with shameful
silence by the mainstream media, their mastery over the art of
indifference evidenced by a lack of outrage against the crushing
realities imposed upon an increasingly desperate Palestinian
mass pressed under the Israeli boot.
No doubt complicity in colonialism requires
such cowardice as a national necessity: can a nation hand over
its billions, its tanks, its fighter aircraft - its foreign policy
-- to a settler-state without also relinquishing every basic
and fundamental principle of human justice? The last of these
exports, of course, must be cloaked in the most deliberate distortions
and obfuscations, hidden and buried under layers of disinformation
and lies, so as to soothe the conscience of initial doubters
and stifle criticism evinced by those unimpressed with the farce
playing out before them.
One of the primary court jesters in this
gruesome debacle is William Safire, ardent Zionist, columnist
for America's paper of record, and personal friend of indicted
war criminal and mass murderer Ariel Sharon -- who, naturally,
holds the position of Prime Minister of Israel. On October 1st,
our eminent columnist published a wonderfully deceptive and revealing
piece titled, "The Arafat Barrier". Mr. Safire justifies
the creation of Israel's monstrous twenty-foot high, barb-wire-adorned
apartheid wall by invoking the specter of Arafat as an all-pervasive
demon whose evil influence can only be exorcised by erecting
a massive physical barrier. In less than two pages, Mr. Safire
manages to pack and compress so many lies and myths into his
argument one almost expects his salvos to explode straight out
of an Israeli tank barrel and into the body of whatever Palestinian
standing in the way.
No such luck for our New York Times
columnist. But "The Arafat Barrier" does afford us
on the pro-Palestinian Left the opportunity to expose and illuminate
the moral poverty of Israel and the core tenets of Zionism itself.
Any breakthroughs in the public debate about Israel can only
emerge if such leftists actively tear apart the casually presented
lies by going on the offensive.
Mr. Safire starts out with an impressive
burst of fire: "By unleashing and sustaining suicide bombers
against Israeli civilians, Yasir Arafat outfoxed himself: the
Palestinian boss has given substance to the Israeli dream and
U.N. promise of 'defensible borders.'"
Immediately, Arafat is anointed as the
chief scapegoat for the latest manifestation of Israeli racism.
Arafat, all-powerful and all-evil being that he is, snaps his
fingers, conjures up hordes of suicide-bombers, and orders them
into Israel. Imbued with magical powers, he not only summons
Palestinians into action single-handedly, but has actually forced
Israel to build a costly wall spanning miles. Arafat would be
flattered-and also, one might gather, confused: deity that he
is, he can set Israeli construction firms into motion but remains
unable to escape the crumbling walls of his own shelled-out compound,
where Israel has imprisoned and threatened to execute him for
the past year. Surely, God works in mysterious ways.
Mr. Safire, his racist frothing spilling
out in his first few words, conceives of Palestinians not as
a living, breathing, human people, but as mindless beasts
controlled by a single leader, a leader beset by internal divisions
in his own party and trapped under penalty of Israeli "liquidation."
In our esteemed columnist's hallucinatory world, none of this
matters: Arafat is everything, everything is Arafat.
By making suicide-bombings the active
agent for what is then inevitably characterized as the Israeli
"response", Mr. Safire also rips bombings from their
context, positing them as irrational and unprovoked attacks.
This is a deliberate reversal of the actual flow and volume of
violence: a century of Israeli expulsions, village-razing, expropriating,
murdering, raping, looting, tank-shelling, bulldozing, and air-bombing
preceded this desperate Palestinian response. It is a response
which does not account for even 25% of overall casualties since
1987.
Suicide attacks inside Israel were never
a part of the Palestinian strategy until the 1990's, after the
first Intifada, when Yitzakh Rabin ordered Israeli soldiers in
their confrontation with protestors to "break their bones."
Israel murdered hundreds of Palestinian civilians, mostly youth
armed with only stones and the dignified pride of a people defying
Ben-Gurion's prediction about them and their forefathers: "Their
old will die, and their young will forget." Many have died:
none have forgotten.
After framing the violence in terms of
the most desperate reaction of the oppressed against their oppressors,
Mr. Safire must have felt quite pleased with himself when speaking
of "the Israeli dream" of "defensible borders."
In truth, Israel abhors borders; its entire existence, including
its very creation, depended precisely upon swallowing up and
aggrandizing Palestinian land, every boundary a temporary vortex,
a set of teeth arranged in a voracious jaw set to devour more
and more Palestinian land and property while spitting out or
chewing up its inhabitants. Indeed, how strange for our court
jester, striking a serious pose, to speak of "defensible
borders" about a nation founded by a group of white European
settlers in the heart of the Arab world.
Nothing has revealed this historical
-- and ongoing -- reality of Israeli ethnic cleansing more clearly
than that nation's own group of 'new historians', who have exposed
Israel's past via declassified archives for the past twenty years.
The founder of Zionism, Theodore Herzl, writing in Europe more
than fifty years before Israel was created, raised the urgent
matter of "spirit[ing] the penniless [Palestinian] population
across the border" and "expropriat[ing] gently the
private property on the state assigned to us." As the blade
of colonialism was sharpened by time this "gentleness"
gave way to the formulation of Vladmir Jabotinsky, Zionist leader
of the 1920's and admirer of Mussolini's fascism: "Zionist
colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated
or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population.
This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop under
the protection of a force independent of the local population
-- an iron wall"
Others who followed expressed equally
revealing comments: Ben-Gurion, justifying the expulsion of Palestinians
from 1947-1949, said, "I support compulsory transfer. I
don't see anything immoral in it;" Moshe Dayan gloated in
1969 that "There is not one single place built in this country
that did not have a former Arab population;" a few months
ago IDF Chief of Staff Ya'alon described Palestinians as a "cancer"
for Israel requiring "chemotherapy." From 1880 to the
present, Zionism has seen its control of historical Palestine
rise from 0% to 7% to 48% to 78% and now 100%. Israeli historian
Tom Segev summarizes, "'Disappearing' the Arabs lay at the
heart of the Zionist dream, and was also a necessary precondition
of its existence." In a word, the verdict is in, and Mr.
Safire should take note: Israel does not want "borders"
unless they are marked in Arab blood.
Our columnist continues, "Two-fifths
of the barrier against terrorist infiltration is already built,"
and soon after he terms it "a protective fence." At
first glance one is inclined to rejoice: surely, a wall erected
between colonizer and colonized, a "protective" wall
preventing "terrorist infiltration", might have been
constructed, in a moment of Israeli generosity, to provide Palestinians
some small respite from the infiltration, usurpation, and annexation
of their land, homes, olive groves, and water resources by Israeli
zealots. This would be a most welcome development: accounts of
our Israeli 'new historians' inform us Israeli terrorism has
resulted in the massacre of hundreds of Palestinians, the displacement
of almost a million more, destruction of a half-thousand villages,
and theft of truckloads of private property, jewelry, land deeds,
bank accounts, furniture -- in 1948 alone.
In the end one is left disappointed,
for Israel's new wall is in fact another one of its agents of
violence in its vast array of overt and subversive weapons, designed
to destroy the Palestinians by isolating and demoralizing them.
As reported by the London Guardian on July 3, 2003, the
wall is an excuse to engage in the old Zionist pastime of land
theft: "The Israeli government has confiscated hundreds
of acres of Palestinian land on the West bank," the article
begins, "this week." Not to worry: this will be accompanied
by another Israeli favorite -- destroying homes: "The first
phase of the road mapobliges Israel to stop demolishing Palestinian
homes -- but yesterday an Israeli official accompanied by soldiersmark[ed]
out the confiscated land and hand[ed] out demolition orders."
The military administrator had an explanation for Guardian
reporters ready at hand: "It's a bit sensitive."
But hasn't the administrator read Mr.
Safire's latest? -- the wall is made to protect Israel's "vulnerable"
cities. Whether these cities are built on land occupied in 1948,
or land occupied in 1967, or land occupied yesterday, does not
concern our columnist: even the settlements, "where 200,000
West Bank Jews live," the good writer kindly notes, must
not be left "exposed" to evil Arafat. That the very
existence of these settlements epitomizes the total negation
of Palestinian rights to land they have lived on for centuries,
and represents a violent thrust into Palestinian lives, does
not trouble Mr. Safire. Every settlement is but one spike on
the deadly end of a mace, for each one is accompanied by racist
bypass roads which slice up Palestinian villages and are accessible
only to Jews, bringing with them army checkpoints, blockades,
and outposts, all instruments used to harass and beat Palestinians
on a daily basis, a phenomenon widely reported by international
and Israeli human rights groups as well as Jewish and Christian
activist groups on the ground who have been attacked by the settlers
themselves.
Yes, Mr. Safire, the settlements must
be "exposed"-that is, seen for what they are, colonial
enclaves occupied by racists built on stolen land.
Our columnist nonetheless goes on. After
explaining that he once "choppered" into the settlement
of Ariel with his good friend Sharon in tow, he hails the illegal
enclave as a "courageous town." Does Mr. Safire lack
the intelligence to see that there is actually very little that
is courageous about settlers, living a posh existence off of
stolen land, often as hooligans assisted by the army in their
mission to ravage a basically defenseless Palestinian people,
burning their crops, poisoning their cattle, and ransacking their
stores? Once the inevitable rage on the Palestinian side accumulates,
it implodes: not in an army base or settlement, but, most of
the time, in a major Israeli city. What a deluxe, consequence-free
venture for the "courageous" settlers (and army)!
But of course, as our columnist reminds
us, this is precisely why the wall is being built: so that Palestinian
anger at present injustices can be further aggravated and pressurized
by the separation wall enterprise before unleashing itself, perhaps
not in a suicide bombing (or perhaps so) but through crude though
increasingly improved grenade, rocket, and missile launches.
The specific means do not matter: No people who have endured
this much violence and suffering will lapse into complacent cooperation
with their own extermination because of any wall, no matter how
high it reaches, how many volts run through it, or how many moral
eunuchs support it.
After reviewing some details concerning
expenditures for the separation fence, Mr. Safire goes on to
restate one of the most oft-repeated lies of the past decade:
Arafat was "presented with almost all the West Bank"
- excluding our "courageous" Ariel settlement - refused
this kind offer, and "launched the second intifada."
To lend this lie legitimacy, Mr. Safire cites Dennis Ross. The
problem of course is that Dennis Ross is a prostitute of the
pro-Israeli lobby; formerly propped up by the noxious American
Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC), he works as a consultant
for a pro-Israeli lobbying group and is a colleague of the American
ayatollah Daniel Pipes. Our 'friend of Sharon' might as well
have invoked David Duke to back up the integrity of the Aryan
Nation.
Ross or no Ross, a more categorically
absurd fairy-tale spin of events concerning the Barak accord
and the second Intifada is difficult to imagine. Barak never
offered to hand over all the West Bank to the Palestinians, because
Barak in fact never agreed to dismantle the settlements at all.
Indeed, he built more settlements on the West Bank (some
forty) than Likud's Netanyahu. Palestinians would have lacked
real control and sovereignty, their land reduced to disconnected
ghettoes, broken up by Israeli settlements and surrounded by
the soldiers guarding them. A brief look at any recent map of
the Occupied Territories with the settlements shown confirms
this.
Moreover, Barak denied the Palestinians
sovereignty over not only land but water, since the settlers
hold monopoly over water rights. He also announced there would
be no compensation, not to speak of actual implementation of
the UN-guaranteed right of return, for the millions of Palestinian
refugees created by Israeli ethnic cleansing over the years.
A specialist working for the British Foreign Office put it thusly:
"Barak offered the trappings of Palestinian sovereignty
while perpetuating the subjugation of the Palestinians."
(Guardian, April 10, 2002) This is the substance of the
"offer": a prison cell with a sticker label.
As for Arafat "launching" the
second Intifada, the truth turns out to be quite different. The
deliberately provocative visit of the Likud hawk Ariel Sharon
to a Muslim place of worship is what sparked the second Intifada.
Sharon, surrounded and escorted by hundreds of Israeli troops
and at the time best known for his murderous performance in the
Lebanese refugee camps in 1982 (before more recent murderous
performances had to be taken into account), marched into Islam's
third holiest place on the day of Muslim prayer. Even Israeli
"liberals" termed it a "provocation." In
the first few weeks of the violence that followed, Israeli soldiers,
described by former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges
as the only troops he has seen who killed children "for
sport", murdered hundreds of Palestinian civilians, most
of them teenagers. In the same period there was only a dozen
or so Israeli dead.
Mr. Safire has completely inverted the
truth on two major counts in the course of one sentence. Does
Mr. Safire borrow his method from Mr. Goebbels? Perhaps; what
is quite clear is that he borrows his ideology from Mr. Jabotinsky
& co.: explaining the need for Israel to hold off construction
for one part of the wall for now, he gleefully adds: "That
does not mean to abandon Ariel; far from it.fencing can encircle
each of the villages, defending them as islands, or perhaps a
horseshoe-shaped barrier not attached to the main line with Israeli
troops stationed in the gap." Our columnist sketches out,
in military language, to what great lengths Israel must go to
secure its colonists, positioned like artillery, supported by
walls, flanked by troops.
Is this any way to live as garrisoned
"islands"? Yet this is supposed to be the Zionist dream:
an existence which, dependent on separation and exclusivism,
removes the Palestinians and "redeems" the land for
the Jews. Yet, politically, financially, and demographically,
it is so absurd and fantastic that Mr. Safire must play the role
of General to achieve it.
This is no small matter: It was Jabotinsky,
after all, who penned the essay The Iron Wall and once
wrote, "Zionism is a colonizing adventure and, therefore,
it stands or falls on the question of armed forces." He
and other Zionists, however, posing their solution to what Jewish
scholar Norman Finkelstein has described as "the reciprocal
challenges of Gentile repulsion or anti-Semitism and Gentile
assimilation" facing European Jewry, adopted the position
that Jews will constantly be harried and disrupted in Gentile
society because of their efforts to assimilate, and will
find refuge only in their own homogenous state. Has not the opposite
occurred?
Consider the following: In his revealing
book The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust
Israeli scholar Tom Segev notes, "The Revisionists"
- the wing of Zionism Jabotinsky belonged to -"had fairly
wide-ranging links to the Nazis," adding that their leadership
"distributed a memorandum to its members" advising
that "The Nazis should be treated politely and with reserve."
(p. 32) By 1928, Segev adds, "The revisionist righthad long
been sympathetic to Benito Mussolini and now and then even to
Adolf Hitler's Nazism-except, of course, his anti-Semitism,"
and quotes a 1932 Revisionist lawyer as saying "Were it
not for Hitler's anti-Semitism, we would not oppose his ideology."
(p. 20, 23) Such was the level of faith placed in European racist
philosophy by Zionism (how different were Goebbels and
Jabotinsky?). Even Ben-Gurion, who was repulsed by Jabotinsky
as Segev notes, declared "If I knew that it was possible
to save all the children in Germany by transporting them to England,
but only half of them by transporting them to Palestine, I would
choose the second" (p.24)
Zionist leaders invested so much in their
racialist approach that they acted at the expense of other Jews.
To cite Segev's book one last time, the author quotes 1925 Zionist
Jacob Klatzkin, author of Encyclopaedia Judaica, who wrote,
"If we do not admit the rightfulness of anti-Semitism, we
deny the rightfulness of our own nationalism." (p.30) In
practice this meant the Zionist attitude toward the Holocaust
left much to be desired from the humanist point of view. Yet
precisely where Jews have separated themselves, discriminated
against and pushed apart the racial Other (Arabs), life has been
most difficult; where they exist as equals and partners in multicultural
societies, such as America and Britain, and now even Germany,
they are thriving, with anti-Semitism no more (or in some cases
less) prevalent than other forms of racism against other minority
groups. Therefore the core tenet of Zionist philosophy, that
anti-Semitism is a natural and inevitable Gentile impulse, has
now been discredited by reality and shamed by history.
So whereas mindless pro-Israel fanatics
like Mr. Safire cling to their precious settlements and all the
madness that comes with them, others have become wiser: Avraham
Burg, former speaker of Israel's Knesset and former chairman
of the Jewish Agency, has written an article which, given the
stature of the author, is worth quoting at length:
"The Israeli nation today rests on a scaffolding of corruption,
and on foundations of oppression and injusticeIt turns out that
the 2,000-year struggle for Jewish survival comes down to a state
of settlements, run by an amoral clique of corrupt lawbreakers
who are deaf both to their citizens and to their enemies. A state
lacking justice cannot survive. More and more Israelis are coming
to understand this as they ask their children where they expect
to live in 25 years. Children who are honest admit, to their
parents' shock, that they do not know. The countdown to the end
of Israeli society has begunA structure built on human callousness
will inevitably collapse in on itself." (Guardian,
September 15, 2003 [adopted from original publication in Hebrew
in Israeli paper Yediot Arahnot])
Returning to our op-ed piece, Mr. Safire
is doubly pleased with himself for having not only spelled out
the details of increasing Israel's neurosis but also showing
that such a maneuver would illustrate that "Israel respects
America's intercession" and that "only Bush not
the Europeans or U.N. can influence Sharon." The swipe
at the rest of the world is understandable enough: aside from
the U.S, everyone else is, of course, "anti-Semitic."
But the first part is truly comical: whatever inkling of impartiality
maintained by the Bush administration that has not been crushed,
intimidated, and bullied into irrelevance by Israeli lobbying
and browbeating has been ignored by Sharon anyway, save killing
Arafat. Whether or not the White House withholds a few meager
millions to "punish" continued Israeli construction
of the wall is meaningless given the cover of UN vetoes, military
hardware, and billions in loans and investment it has showered
upon Israel. In short, there has been no "intercession":
when Israel sticks the six-inch serrated blade into Palestine
that Mr. Safire calls "the Arafat Barrier" America
will not be absolved because it did not pay for the last few
centimeters.
After making some noises about "extend[ing]
the fence to defensible [sic] positions," Mr. Safire makes
a nod to the introduction of his piece with an equally dishonest
and disgusting ending: "That gives future Israeli governments
opportunity to improve territorial defenses if a Palestinian
partner does not emerge. When that peacemaker does emerge, he
or she will find the defensible-border issue already settled
thanks to Yasir Arafat."
In other words, Israel will do as it
pleases, pushing the Palestinians into a more and more hopeless
predicament, such that a puppet leader of our choosing will be
forced to bow and kneel before the new territorial reality created
by irreversible Israeli colonization.
The final and oft-repeated canard concerning
the lack of "a Palestinian partner" for peace is also
a nice ending touch, and, in fact, the one part of Mr. Safire's
article with which I agree entirely. Indeed, no nation has worked
as hard to find a peace partner than Israel, which has been searching
so meticulously and methodically that it has occupied the entire
Palestinian nation to find this treasured partner. Israel's advanced
search party of F-16 aircraft and Merkava IV tanks has scoured
the land; its bulldozers overturned houses; its torturers beaten
children; its security services corralled thousands of men; to
find and dig out this reluctant Palestinian messiah.
But a willing accomplice to Israel's
genocidal agenda with even an iota of support from the Palestinian
masses will never be found. Mr. Safire can continue with his
paper columns, Mr. Sharon with his tank columns and Israel with
its barriers, bullets, bombs, and bulldozers: it will not matter
in the end. Every injustice, every atrocity, has and will only
continue to sharpen and strengthen the indomitable Palestinian
will to resist against all odds.
M. Junaid Alam
is a political science student at Northeastern University. He
designed and manages the http://msalam.net/
website. He can be reached at: junaidalam@msalam.net
Weekend
Edition Features for Sept. 26 / 28, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Alan
Dershowitz, Plagiarist
David Price
Teaching Suspicions
Saul Landau
Before the Era of Insecurity
Ron Jacobs
The Chicago Conspiracy Trial and
the Patriot Act
Brian
Cloughley
The Strangeloves Win Again
Norman Solomon
Wesley and Me: a Real-Life Docudrama
Robert
Fisk
Bomb Shatters Media Illusions
M. Shahid Alam
A Muslim Sage Visits the USA
John Chuckman
American Psycho: Bush at the UN
Mark Schneider
International Direct Action
The Spanish Revolution to the Palestiniana Intifada
William
S. Lind
How $87 Billion Could Buy Some Real Security
Douglas Valentine
Gold Warriors: the Plundering of Asia
Chris
Floyd
Vanishing Act
Elaine Cassel
Play Cat and Moussaoui
Richard
Manning
A Conservatism that Once Conserved
George Naggiar
The Beautiful Mind of Edward Said
Omar Barghouti
Edward Said: a Corporeal Dream Not Yet Realized
Lenni Brenner
Palestine's Loss is America's Loss
Mickey
Z.
Edward Said: a Well-Reasoned Voice
Tanweer Akram
The Legacy of Edward Said
Adam Engel
War in the Smoking Room
Poets' Basement
Katz, Ford, Albert & Guthrie
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