04.30.08
The 60-Year-Old Secret That Israel Must Face
Johann Hari, The Independent
When you hit your 60th birthday, most of you will wonder if you have become everything you dreamed of in your youth. In a few weeks, the state of Israel is going to do that.
It will look in the mirror and think — I have a sore back, rickety knees and a gun at my waist, but I’m still standing. Yet somewhere, it will know it is suppressing an old secret it has to face. I would love to be able to crash the birthday party with words of reassurance. Israel has given us great novelists like Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, great film-makers like Joseph Cedar, great scientific research into Alzheimer’s, and great dissident journalists like Amira Hass, Tom Segev and Gideon Levy to expose her own crimes.
But I can’t do it. Whenever I try to mouth these words, a remembered smell fills my nostrils. It is the smell of shit. Across the occupied West Bank, raw untreated sewage is pumped every day out of the Jewish settlements, along large metal pipes, straight onto Palestinian land. From there, it can enter the groundwater and the reservoirs, and become a poison.
Standing near one of these long, stinking brown-and-yellow rivers of waste recently, the local chief medical officer, Dr. Bassam Said Nadi, explained to me: “Recently there were very heavy rains, and the shit started to flow into the reservoir that provides water for this whole area. I knew that if we didn’t act, people would die. We had to alert everyone not to drink the water for over a week, and distribute bottles. We were lucky it was spotted. Next time…” He shook his head in fear. This is no freak: a 2004 report by Friends of the Earth found that only six percent of Israeli settlements adequately treat their sewage.
Meanwhile, in order to punish the population of Gaza for voting “the wrong way”, the Israeli Army is not allowing past the checkpoints any replacements for the pipes and cement needed to keep the sewage system working. The result? Vast stagnant pools of waste are being held within fragile dykes across the strip, and rotting. Last March, one of them burst, drowning a nine-month-old baby and his elderly grandmother in a tsunami of human waste. The Center on Housing Rights warns that one heavy rainfall could send 1.5m cubic meters of feces flowing all over Gaza, causing “a humanitarian and environmental disaster of epic proportions”.
So how did it come to this? How did a Jewish state founded 60 years ago with a promise to be “a light unto the nations” end up flinging its filth at a cowering Palestinian population?
The beginnings of an answer lie in the secret Israel has known, and suppressed, all these years. Even now, can we describe what happened 60 years ago honestly and unhysterically? The Jews who arrived in Palestine throughout the 20th century did not come because they were cruel people who wanted to snuffle out Arabs to persecute. No: they came because they were running for their lives from a genocidal European anti-Semitism that was soon to slaughter six million of their sisters and their sons.
They convinced themselves that Palestine was “a land without people for a people without land”. I desperately wish this dream had been true. You can see traces of what might have been in Tel Aviv, a city that really was built on empty sand dunes. But most of Palestine was not empty. It was already inhabited by people who loved the land, and saw it as theirs. They were completely innocent of the long, hellish crimes against the Jews. When it became clear these Palestinians would not welcome becoming a minority in somebody else’s country, darker plans were drawn up. Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, wrote in 1937: “The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war.”
So, for when the moment arrived, he helped draw up Plan Dalit. It was — as Israeli historian Ilan Pappe puts it — “a detailed description of the methods to be used to forcibly evict the people: large-scale intimidation; and laying siege to and bombarding population centers”. In 1948, before the Arab armies invaded, this began to be implemented: some 800,000 people were ethnically cleansed, and Israel was built on the ruins. The people who ask angrily why the Palestinians keep longing for their old land should imagine an English version of this story. How would we react if the 30million stateless, persecuted Kurds in the world sent armies and settlers into this country to seize everything in England below Leeds, and swiftly established a free Kurdistan from which we were expelled? Wouldn’t we long forever for our children to return to Cornwall and Devon and London? Would it take us only 40 years to compromise and offer to settle for just 22 percent of what we had?
If we are not going to be endlessly banging our heads against history, the Middle East needs to excavate 1948, and seek a solution. Any peace deal — even one where Israel dismantled the wall and agreed to return to the 1967 borders — tends to crumple on this issue. The Israelis say: If we let all three million come back, we will be outnumbered by Palestinians even within the 1967 borders, so Israel would be voted out of existence. But the Palestinians reply: If we don’t have an acknowledgement of the Naqba (catastrophe), and our right under international law to the land our grandfathers fled, how can we move on?
It seemed like an intractable problem — until, two years ago, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research conducted the first study of the Palestinian Diaspora’s desires. They found that only 10 percent — around 300,000 people — want to return to Israel proper. Israel can accept that many (and compensate the rest) without even enduring much pain. But there has always been a strain of Israeli society that preferred violently setting its own borders, on its own terms, to talk and compromise. This weekend, the elected Hamas government offered a six-month truce that could have led to talks. The Israeli government responded within hours by blowing up a senior Hamas leader and killing a 14-year-old girl.
Perhaps Hamas’ proposals are a con; perhaps all the Arab states are lying too when they offer Israel full recognition in exchange for a roll-back to the 1967 borders; but isn’t it a good idea to find out? Israel, as it gazes at her grey hairs and discreetly ignores the smell of her own stale shit pumped across Palestine, needs to ask what kind of country she wants to be in the next 60 years.
‘What Has Happened to the Conscience of the World?’
A hospital worker shows journalists the bodies of four children after their house was shelled by Israeli tanks in the Beit Hanoun neighborhood of Gaza Strip on Monday [April 28 2008] while they were having their breakfast. (Reuters):
In this April 25 photo, Palestinians chant slogans against the Israeli blockade of Gaza. (AP)
Siraj Wahab, Arab News
JEDDAH, 30 April 2008 — The headlines coming out of Gaza daily stun people as women and children are slain by Israeli airstrikes and the plight of the Palestinians worsens through blockades and embargoes of food, fuel and freedom. Pick up any newspaper, turn on any news channel and the message is the same: Gaza is a war zone — a war zone with only one army and an entire population of victims, struggling to stay alive and wondering if they will be alive tomorrow.
Arab News recently gathered four young Saudis to voice their views on the current Palestinian situation, and their assessments were both brutal and often pessimistic about the future of the Middle East as long as Israel disregards human rights and seeks to isolate the Palestinians instead of reaching consensus with them.
“Israel is meting out collective punishment,” said Badria Modeer, who is studying international relations at Dar Al-Hekma Women’s College. “The whole population is being attacked. They are killing infants; they are killing children. Why? And the worst part is nobody can stop them. What has happened to the conscience of the world? Where is humanity? Do other people in the world not see what we are seeing on our television screens every day and every night?”
“The whole Gaza Strip is surrounded by Israelis,” said Ahmad Sabri, 21, who studied political science at Jeddah’s King Abdul Aziz University. “Why did they cut fuel supplies to the entire country? Why did they cut electricity? Power cuts led to dozens of patients dying in hospitals. Isn’t this a massacre? If those patients had been Israelis there would have been a flurry of condemnation led by the United States, but when it’s Palestinian patients who die quietly in the night because there’s no electricity nobody talks about them. This is mass murder.”
Most took a dim view of US foreign policy and its unflagging support for Israel and the failure of the United Nations to act effectively.
“I am not optimistic. Israel is a bully,” said Khaled Yeslam, 25, a graduate of Jeddah’s College of Business Administration who now works at a PR firm. “Israel came into being by force, and it will not listen to reason. American politicians are completely subservient to the Israeli lobby.”
“I don’t believe in the UN; it is not fair,” said Hidaya Abbas, 20, who is a student at Dar Al-Hekma College. “The UN can’t do anything. Instead of being busy putting pressure and sanctions on Iran just because it is allegedly in the process of producing nuclear energy why don’t they impose sanctions on Israel, which has 200 nuclear warheads? Iranians are not at war with anyone, but Israel has no qualms about bombing civilians. Why can’t the UN slap sanctions on Israel? It is a useless organization.”
“America is directly responsible for what is happening in Gaza today because they support the Israeli occupation morally, financially and militarily,” Sabri said. “They also support Israel in the United Nations by blocking all resolutions that condemn Israeli massacres. More specifically, the American government’s foreign policy is the problem.”
“I am for peace. I fully support King Abdullah’s peace initiative that calls for the creation of Palestine on pre-1967 borders,” Modeer said. “If we can’t have the entire cake, we can have some piece of cake — at least we have something rather than having nothing. Saudi Arabia is a rich country. It has good relations with the Americans, and if we pressure America, then Americans can pressure Israel to give up its occupation.”
Not everyone shared Modeer’s conciliatory perspective.
“I think peace can only be between two equal parties,” said Sabri. “I’m against the peace initiative, because it gives legitimacy to the occupation. It lends dignity to thieves. Yes, the Israelis are thieves. They stole our land. According to the international law, Palestinians have the right to resist occupation just like all the wars of liberation in history. Nobody can deny them the right of armed resistance. This happened everywhere.”
“Anybody who is talking about peace with Israelis does not make sense to me,” Abbas said. “Israel is occupying Palestine; how can we make peace with them? Let me simplify it. I have a house, and suddenly someone comes and tells me ‘I will take your house and then I will kill you’. So will I say: ‘OK, OK. Don’t kill me; take half of the house?’ That doesn’t make sense to me. Peace treaties are like that. If somebody wants to kill me and take my house, I don’t give him half of my house — I fight back. They are Zionists at the end of the day, and they are occupying our lands. They are taking something that doesn’t belong to them. They are killing children. So it is the right of the Palestinian people to fight back, and they are fighting. They are not terrorists — the occupiers are.”
The extreme events in Gaza are leading to worries about a conviction among some young people that the horrific situation requires a violent response.
“Islam stands strictly against killing civilians, but any occupier is not a civilian,” Sabri said. “He is stealing my land; he is stealing my water. There are five million Israelis living on my land, and there are six million Palestinian refugees all over the world. It doesn’t matter whether he is holding a gun or not. The most important fact is that most Israelis are reservists and will be called to service whenever required. So every Israeli has to be resisted.”
“This is creating a new generation of extremists,” Yeslam said. “We see blood being spilt in Palestine, and here are our people talking about business, economy and peace. So naturally, they are getting attracted to the extreme point of view: that of violence. You can’t blame the youth. They are frustrated — very, very angry at their helplessness. Remember, the Bin Ladens and the Al-Zawahiris emerged out of this chaos. They exploited the frustration of our youth. The world should wake up and tell Israel to stop its barbarity.”
All of them long for the rarest commodity in the Middle East, which is peace.
“Those Israeli settlers have the right to live in Palestine like all Christians in Palestine and like all the Jews in Iraq, like the Jews in Tunisia and Egypt and the Christians in Yemen,” Sabri said. “They have the right to live as Palestinian citizens like all the Jews and Christians living in the Islamic world. There are a lot of Christian Palestinians. They are our brothers and sisters. They are not occupiers; they are part of the country. This is what should happen. There should be coexistence. But the Israelis came as an armed force, so they are occupiers, and they need to be resisted.”
“Every European and every Americans should log onto IfAmericansKnew.org website to know what is happening in Palestine,” Abbas said. “All of us would stop thinking in a selfish way. This earth belongs to all people. We are all brothers and sisters in this world and share this world, and it is important that we find solutions for our grandchildren.”
“Israel should lift the siege immediately,” Modeer said. “Commit to the peace deal — open the borders. Let there be free trade. Let the Palestinians live in peace.”
Muhammad’s sword
By Uri Avnery
From Media Monitors
Since the days when Roman Emperors threw Christians to the lions, the relations between the emperors and the heads of the church have undergone many changes.
Constantine the Great, who became Emperor in the year 306 – exactly 1700 years ago – encouraged the practice of Christianity in the empire, which included Palestine. Centuries later, the church split into an Eastern (Orthodox) and a Western (Catholic) part. In the West, the Bishop of Rome, who acquired the title of Pope, demanded that the Emperor accept his superiority.
The struggle between the Emperors and the Popes played a central role in European history and divided the peoples. It knew ups and downs. Some Emperors dismissed or expelled a Pope, some Popes dismissed or excommunicated an Emperor. One of the Emperors, Henry IV, ‘walked to Canossa’, standing for three days barefoot in the snow in front of the Pope’s castle, until the Pope deigned to annul his excommunication.
But there were times when Emperors and Popes lived in peace with each other. We are witnessing such a period today. Between the present Pope, Benedict XVI, and the present Emperor, George Bush II, there exists a wonderful harmony. Last week’s speech by the Pope, which aroused a world-wide storm, went well with Bush’s crusade against ‘Islamofascism’, in the context of the ‘Clash of Civilizations’.
In his lecture at a German university, the 265th Pope described what he sees as a huge difference between Christianity and Islam: while Christianity is based on reason, Islam denies it. While Christians see the logic of God’s actions, Muslims deny that there is any such logic in the actions of Allah.
As a Jewish atheist, I do not intend to enter the fray of this debate. It is much beyond my humble abilities to understand the logic of the Pope. But I cannot overlook one passage, which concerns me too, as an Israeli living near the fault-line of this ‘war of civilizations’.
In order to prove the lack of reason in Islam, the Pope asserts that the prophet Muhammad ordered his followers to spread their religion by the sword. According to the Pope, that is unreasonable, because faith is born of the soul, not of the body. How can the sword influence the soul?
To support his case, the Pope quoted – of all people – a Byzantine Emperor, who belonged, of course, to the competing Eastern Church. At the end of the 14th century, the Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus told of a debate he had – or so he said (its occurrence is in doubt) – with an unnamed Persian Muslim scholar. In the heat of the argument, the Emperor (according to himself) flung the following words at his adversary:
‘Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached’.
These words give rise to three questions: (a) Why did the Emperor say them? (b) Are they true? (c) Why did the present Pope quote them?
When Manuel II wrote his treatise, he was the head of a dying empire. He assumed power in 1391, when only a few provinces of the once illustrious empire remained. These, too, were already under Turkish threat.
At that point in time, the Ottoman Turks had reached the banks of the Danube. They had conquered Bulgaria and the north of Greece, and had twice defeated relieving armies sent by Europe to save the Eastern Empire. On May 29, 1453, only a few years after Manuel’s death, his capital, Constantinople (the present Istanbul) fell to the Turks, putting an end to the Empire that had lasted for more than a thousand years.
During his reign, Manuel made the rounds of the capitals of Europe in an attempt to drum up support. He promised to reunite the church. There is no doubt that he wrote his religious treatise in order to incite the Christian countries against the Turks and convince them to start a new crusade. The aim was practical, theology was serving politics.
In this sense, the quote serves exactly the requirements of the present Emperor, George Bush II. He, too, wants to unite the Christian world against the mainly Muslim ‘Axis of Evil’. Moreover, the Turks are again knocking on the doors of Europe, this time peacefully. It is well known that the Pope supports the forces that object to the entry of Turkey into the European Union.
Is there any truth in Manuel’s argument?
The pope himself threw in a word of caution. As a serious and renowned theologian, he could not afford to falsify written texts. Therefore, he admitted that the Qur’an specifically forbade the spreading of the faith by force. He quoted the second Sura, verse 256 (strangely fallible, for a pope, he meant verse 257) which says: ‘There must be no coercion in matters of faith’.
How can one ignore such an unequivocal statement? The Pope simply argues that this commandment was laid down by the prophet when he was at the beginning of his career, still weak and powerless, but that later on he ordered the use of the sword in the service of the faith. Such an order does not exist in the Qur’an. True, Muhammad called for the use of the sword in his war against opposing tribes – Christian, Jewish and others – in Arabia, when he was building his state. But that was a political act, not a religious one; basically a fight for territory, not for the spreading of the faith.
Jesus said: ‘You will recognize them by their fruits.’ The treatment of other religions by Islam must be judged by a simple test: How did the Muslim rulers behave for more than a thousand years, when they had the power to ‘spread the faith by the sword’?
Well, they just did not.
For many centuries, the Muslims ruled Greece. Did the Greeks become Muslims? Did anyone even try to Islamize them? On the contrary, Christian Greeks held the highest positions in the Ottoman administration. The Bulgarians, Serbs, Romanians, Hungarians and other European nations lived at one time or another under Ottoman rule and clung to their Christian faith. Nobody compelled them to become Muslims and all of them remained devoutly Christian.
True, the Albanians did convert to Islam, and so did the Bosniaks. But nobody argues that they did this under duress. They adopted Islam in order to become favorites of the government and enjoy the fruits.
In 1099, the Crusaders conquered Jerusalem and massacred its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants indiscriminately, in the name of the gentle Jesus. At that time, 400 years into the occupation of Palestine by the Muslims, Christians were still the majority in the country. Throughout this long period, no effort was made to impose Islam on them. Only after the expulsion of the Crusaders from the country, did the majority of the inhabitants start to adopt the Arabic language and the Muslim faith – and they were the forefathers of most of today’s Palestinians.
There is no evidence whatsoever of any attempt to impose Islam on the Jews. As is well known, under Muslim rule the Jews of Spain enjoyed a bloom the like of which the Jews did not enjoy anywhere else until almost our time. Poets like Yehuda Halevy wrote in Arabic, as did the great Maimonides. In Muslim Spain, Jews were ministers, poets, scientists. In Muslim Toledo, Christian, Jewish and Muslim scholars worked together and translated the ancient Greek philosophical and scientific texts. That was, indeed, the Golden Age. How would this have been possible, had the Prophet decreed the ‘spreading of the faith by the sword’?
What happened afterwards is even more telling. When the Catholics re-conquered Spain from the Muslims, they instituted a reign of religious terror. The Jews and the Muslims were presented with a cruel choice: to become Christians, to be massacred or to leave. And where did the hundreds of thousand of Jews, who refused to abandon their faith, escape? Almost all of them were received with open arms in the Muslim countries. The Sephardi (‘Spanish’) Jews settled all over the Muslim world, from Morocco in the west to Iraq in the east, from Bulgaria (then part of the Ottoman Empire) in the north to Sudan in the south. Nowhere were they persecuted. They knew nothing like the tortures of the Inquisition, the flames of the auto-da-fe, the pogroms, the terrible mass-expulsions that took place in almost all Christian countries, up to the Holocaust.
Why? Because Islam expressly prohibited any persecution of the ‘peoples of the book’.[1] In Islamic society, a special place was reserved for Jews and Christians. They did not enjoy completely equal rights, but almost. They had to pay a special poll-tax, but were exempted from military service – a trade-off that was quite welcome to many Jews. It has been said that Muslim rulers frowned upon any attempt to convert Jews to Islam even by gentle persuasion – because it entailed the loss of taxes.[2]
Every honest Jew who knows the history of his people cannot but feel a deep sense of gratitude to Islam, which has protected the Jews for fifty generations, while the Christian world persecuted the Jews and tried many times ‘by the sword’ to get them to abandon their faith.
The story about ‘spreading the faith by the sword’ is an evil legend, one of the myths that grew up in Europe during the great wars against the Muslims – the reconquista of Spain by the Christians, the Crusades and the repulsion of the Turks, who almost conquered Vienna. I suspect that the German Pope, too, honestly believes in these fables. That means that the leader of the Catholic world, who is a Christian theologian in his own right, did not make the effort to study the history of other religions.
Why did he utter these words in public? And why now?
There is no escape from viewing them against the background of the new Crusade of Bush and his evangelist supporters, with his slogans of ‘Islamofascism’ and the ‘Global War on Terrorism’ – when ‘terrorism’ has become a synonym for Muslims. For Bush’s handlers, this is a cynical attempt to justify the domination of the world’s oil resources. Not for the first time in history, a religious robe is spread to cover the nakedness of economic interests; not for the first time, a robbers’ expedition becomes a Crusade.
The speech of the Pope blends into this effort. Who can foretell the dire consequences?
Uri Avnery is an Israeli journalist, peace activist, former member of the Knesset, and leader of Gush Shalom.
NOTES
[1] Not only “Peoples of the Book”, but oppression of all others as well.
[2] The author is mistaken in this statement, as the tax imposed upon non-Muslims was insubstantial to other means of generating public income. Rather, all Muslims encouraged and will continue to encourage others to enter its fold .
India and Pakistan Don’t Share US Assessment of Iran
Randeep Ramesh, The Guardian
Napoleon is said to have observed that geography is destiny. Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, will be emphasizing the truth of the emperor of France’s words in the next two days as he makes surprise appearances in Pakistan and India.
The president’s visits will last just a few hours and are likely to set in train big changes for the region. Sensing that the clock is ticking for the Bush administration, Iran wants to press ahead with a long-proposed 1,700-mile pipeline to deliver gas to Pakistan and India, at a cost $7.5bn.
Understanding that such a project would see a shared strategic interest develop between three nations straddling the world’s main oil and gas artery, the US peddles a rival scheme: The $7.6bn gas pipeline from Turkmenistan’s Dauletabad field through Herat and Kandahar in Afghanistan to Multan in Pakistan, and finally into India.
Both may go ahead but it is Iran’s proposal that has momentum. Oil ministers met in Islamabad last week and agreed to sign a bilateral agreement and to start construction of the pipeline by 2010. India also wants to put back on track a floundering $25bn deal for getting 5 million tons of liquefied gas from Iran every year for the next 25 years.
In recent months, it has become increasingly clear that the US has been unable to crack the Persian puzzle. The US’s attempts to ostracize Iran over its nuclear program have so far yielded little. Washington’s sanctions strategy has also been undone, principally by China’s announcement that it would develop oil and gas fields in southwestern Iran for $2bn late last year.
None of this has gone unnoticed in New Delhi and Islamabad. Pakistan has had a fractious relationship with Iran in recent years. India’s dealings with Iran have been bedeviled by baubles dangled by the US: Principally a deal that would legitimate Delhi as a nuclear-weapons power in return for the inspection of civilian atomic energy plants. To Tehran’s annoyance, India also voted with the US and against Iran’s nuclear program twice — in October 2005 and February 2006 — at the International Atomic Energy Agency. The Indians are likely to be seeking to make amends with President Ahmadinejad in a big way.
Nukes have long been at the center of Iranian dealings with South Asia.
India has never shared Washington’s assessments of Iran as an aggressive regional power. India’s reason is simple: My neighbor’s neighbor is my friend. Hence it sees Iran as offering a road to Central Asia — a key Indian concern — that bypasses Pakistan. To this end New Delhi has been building up Iran’s Chahbahar port and constructing roads that skirt Pakistan’s border.
India and Iran’s energy, strategic and diplomatic ties, likely to be revived this week, may also see more private sector dealings between the two nations. In the past this has led to revelations of Indian transfers to Iran of high-technology goods that could be useful for Iran’s atomic program.
The truth is that in the past few months, Tehran has emerged as the Gulf’s main power center. In Iraq, Tehran has outfoxed competitors, gaining influence at their expense. Iran’s intervention a few weeks ago to end a bloody Shiite conflict on the banks of Iraq’s Tigris did not go unnoticed in Washington.
In Afghanistan both Indian and Pakistani diplomats have noted that the West’s position is becoming seriously eroded, leaving Iran to shape the debate.
This means they have to take seriously President Ahmadinejad’s recent questioning of NATO’s legitimacy in Afghanistan. There is also a feeling that the Western alliance has become lopsided: The US has accepted it will need to airlift more troops because the Europeans will not. If America ends up as the sole defender of the Kabul regime then the attacks on the “coalition” can be construed as a resistance army fighting an occupier.
All this comes at a time when the Northern Alliance, the former rebels in Kabul over which Iran has considerable influence, have been talking to their archrivals the Taleban, something that is anathema to Washington.
However much the Americans might wish otherwise, the reality is that no one can ignore Iran. Involved in bloody imbroglios in Afghan and Iraq, Tehran calculates the US would not use force against Iran, even if it pursues its nuclear ambitions.
To reinforce this point Iran recently announced that 6,000 new advanced centrifuges were up and running at the Natanz uranium enrichment facility.
Ahmadinejad plainly enjoys the taunting the US. This is an Iranian luxury, afforded by geography and geology, that neither India and Pakistan have.
A Curious Asymmetry in US Ties With Israel
Gwynne Dyer, Arab News
You have to admire the macho instincts of Hillary Clinton. Asked on the day of the Pennsylvania primary what she would do if Iran made a nuclear attack on Israel, she replied: “If I’m the president, we will attack Iran… we would be able to totally obliterate them.” And it’s perfectly true. The United States has enough nuclear weapons to blast, irradiate, incinerate and obliterate all 75 million people in Iran many times over. All she has to do is press the button.
First she has to win the presidential election, of course, but American voters can rest easy in the knowledge that Mrs. Clinton would not hesitate to kill tens of millions of people on behalf of their friends in Israel. What a contrast with wimpy Barack Obama, who said: “Using words like ‘obliterate’ — it doesn’t actually produce good results.” What does he use for a backbone?
Tedious purists will point out that Iran doesn’t actually have any nuclear weapons. Indeed, late last year the US intelligence agencies produced a joint National Intelligence Estimate stating that Iran has not even been working to develop nuclear weapons for the past four years.
The critics and the carpers might also point out that Israel has hundreds of nuclear weapons of its own, and is perfectly capable of obliterating Iran without American help. But practical politicians like Hillary Clinton know that there is always some political mileage to be gained by promising to help Israel, whether it needs help or not.
On the very same day, by coincidence, another American was revealed to be in the business of helping Israel. His name is Ben-Ami Kadish, and he appeared in a New York courtroom charged with spying on the United States for Israel.
Kadish, who worked at the US Army’s Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center in New Jersey from 1979 to 1985, allegedly gave secrets involving information about nuclear weapons, fighter jets and missiles to Israel in the 1980s. He was charged with four counts of conspiracy, including disclosing documents relating to national defense and acting as an agent of Israel.
Kadish, 84, is long retired, but he is still in touch with Israeli diplomats. When he realized on March 20 that he was going to be arrested, he called his current Israeli handler, according to the Justice Department, and was instructed: “Don’t say anything….What happened 25 years ago? You don’t remember anything.” Nor is this the first time that an American citizen has been publicly accused by the US government of spying for Israel.
In the most prominent case, Jonathan Jay Pollard was convicted in 1987 of passing thousands of secret documents to Israeli agents while working at the US Defense Department. He was sentenced to life imprisonment for spying for Israel, and ever since then Israeli governments have been trying to secure his release. He was granted Israeli citizenship in 1998.
State Department spokesman Tom Casey, asked what Washington was going to do about the Kadish case, said that Israel would be informed of his arrest. “Twenty-plus years ago, during the Pollard case, we noted that this was not the kind of behavior we would expect from friends and allies, and that would remain the case today,” he said. But there will be no diplomats expelled, none of the dramatics that you would see if the US government caught some American spying for the Russian or Chinese.
To be fair, the United States probably spies on Israel as well. This is just the normal behavior of sovereign states, but even close allies normally complain quite loudly when they catch the other party spying on them.
There is a curious asymmetry in the US-Israeli relationship. Israel is the sole beneficiary of this alliance — indeed, the US pays a significant price for it in terms of its relations with other Middle Eastern countries — and yet Israel can spy on the United States with impunity.
During the Cold War, Israel was a valuable strategic ally for the United States in the Middle East, but that ended 20 years ago. Now it is not a strategic asset at all, but Israel has persuaded the American public otherwise. So much so that Israel can brazenly spy on the United States and suffer no political penalty.
Hillary Clinton presumably knows this, but she also knows that threatening mass slaughter in defense of Israel is a vote-winner in the current political environment in the United States. Barack Obama obviously knows it, but although he is not going to commit political suicide by saying it out loud, at least he refused to echo her blood-curdling threat.
04.23.08
Carter the Bold Peacemaker
Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations on Thursday, April 24, 2008 called former President Jimmy Carter “a bigot” for meeting with the leader of the Hamas movement in Syria. Carter, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, “went to the region with soiled hands and came back with bloody hands after shaking the hand of Khaled Mashaal, the leader of Hamas,” Ambassador Dan Gillerman told a luncheon briefing for reporters. The ambassador’s harsh words for Carter came days after the ex-president met with Mashaal for seven hours in Damascus to negotiate a cease-fire with Gaza’s Hamas government. The ambassador called last weekend’s encounter “a very sad episode in American history.” He said it was “a shame” to see Carter, who had done “good things” as a former president, “turn into what I believe to be a bigot.” (Reference for Text: AP)
Linda Heard,
If any one individual could make a difference in the Middle East, former President Jimmy Carter is in the running. His statements display sincerity, impartiality and the kind of objective wisdom that a few elder statesmen acquire once they are no longer in a competitive arena. He has close links with regional leaders, is generally respected by all sides and has proved that he has a personal commitment to peace.
Many Americans do not consider Jimmy Carter an ex-president of note and he is not revered in the way that Ronald Reagan and others were. Perhaps because they tend to associate his presidency with Iran’s 444-day-long occupation of the US Embassy in Tehran forgetting that he brokered an Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty in 1978 and is a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.
It’s unfortunate that Carter’s term of office came too early. Arab states were invited to join Egypt at the peace table but their chairs remained empty. There had been too many bloody wars with Israel and memories were too fresh to give up the struggle. Still, putting Israel and Egypt together was an incredible coup for President Carter bearing in mind their mutual enmity stretched back decades.
Imagine the face of our world if a mature and experienced President Carter inhabited the White House today. For one thing 83 percent of Arabs wouldn’t have an unfavorable opinion of the US as a recent Zogby poll indicates, while 88 percent wouldn’t classify the US as the country that most poses a threat to them.
A Carter White House wouldn’t have led an invasion of Iraq and wouldn’t now be clamoring to punish Iran. Furthermore, a Carter-envisioned “road map” to a Palestinian state might have led to a positive destination rather than taking the more gullible within this region on a merry-go-round.
He might not have the international clout he once enjoyed but Carter is determined to pursue his personal peace mission even in the face of US State Department’s disapproval. Israeli politicians have shunned him over his decision to meet with Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal, considered a terrorist by Israel and the US, while Sean McCormack a White House spokesperson accused the former president of opening himself up to exploitation by Hamas and Syria.
“I don’t think people are going to confuse the efforts of a private citizen, former President Carter, with the very clear policies of the United States government,” McCormack said in an effort to deprive Carter of any remnants of legitimacy.
He’s right about one thing. The former president’s efforts based on the principle of getting people together could not possibly be confused with those of the Bush administration, which is only interested in fomenting division and stirring up belligerency.
Carter believes that peace in the Middle East cannot be achieved without the participation of Hamas, which he says should be engaged in the process instead of isolated.
To this end, he recently met twice with Meshaal and his second-in-command Moussa Abu Marzouk. Both meetings were described as warm and dignified. Discussions included such subjects as the ongoing siege of Gaza, a deal involving the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, and a unilateral cease-fire on the part of Hamas. Carter is said to have laid certain proposals on the table, which Meshaal is believed to be considering along with other senior Hamas officials.
If Meshaal responds positively to Carter’s requests then the latter’s bold move will signify as a major ice-breaker that could lead to bigger and better things. But somewhere along the way, Israel and the US will have to render support to Carter’s efforts else they will go for naught along with the former president’s credibility in Palestinian eyes.
Sadly, I don’t believe this US administration is capable of a major U-turn over Hamas, which, ironically, must thank the White House for its January 2006 election into office. George Bush pushed for a new democratic Middle East and a Hamas-led Palestinian National Authority was the result.
Bush is also responsible for the rift between Fatah and Hamas and the resultant two separate Palestinian entities. It’s a division that has taken Israel off the hook. This time, it really doesn’t have a partner for peace representing all Palestinians.
Nevertheless, with the US ballot on the horizon, there is hope. It’s known that Carter supports Democratic hopeful Barack Obama for the top job and as a superdelegate Carter’s vote will count when it comes to the party nomination. If Obama makes it into the Oval Office he might return the favor by giving the former president more of an official peace-making role.
In the meantime, Carter would de well to prepare the way forward while Hamas leaders should capitalize on this public relations opportunity to display their softer, more reasonable sides. If they were to return Shalit and declare a unilateral cease-fire those steps would display good intentions and make it more difficult for their detractors to whip up international support.
It may also quieten the right-wing loons who are flooding the Internet which such messages as “Carter hasn’t found a dictator, thug or terrorist that he hasn’t wanted to embrace…” and “Somebody shred his passport please”.
Carter is a true patriot and a brave man. His book “Palestine Peace not Apartheid” shows his fearlessness of America’s pro-Israel lobby that vindictively accused him of being anti-Semitic. He’s a man who follows his own truth, no matter where the journey ends. The world needs more leaders like him and courageous individuals unafraid to stand strong beside him. Who knows! 2009 may signify the beginning of another era when Carter’s views may at last find a solid platform.
04.22.08
Champion of Human Rights?
Champion of Human Rights?
Tariq A. Al-Maeena,
The ruling US clique selectively ignores certain vital aspects when it comes to protecting and preserving human rights. They view even human rights from a religious or racist angle. That American lawmakers exhibit blatant hypocrisy in this matter is too obvious but rarely reported.
Take the case of the US State Department that recently released a report to the US Congress identifying any vocal criticism of Israel as anti-Semitism, warning that anti-Jewish attitudes and incidents were on the rise worldwide.
This was based on a study conducted by Tel Aviv University’s Stephen Roth Institute. The study found an increase in serious anti-Semitic incidents across the globe, encompassing physical attacks and vandalism, from 406 in 2005 to 593 in 2006.
The report went further and talked at great length about the intensification of anti-Semitic rhetoric among governments and international elites. Assessing the report, the State Department did not think twice before declaring that attacks on Israel are anti-Semitism — a bold statement indeed from an organ of the government that generally refrains from making extravagant statements.
“Anti-Semitism has proven to be an adaptive phenomenon,” the report said. “New forms of anti-Semitism have evolved. They often incorporate elements of traditional anti-Semitism. However, the distinguishing feature of the new anti-Semitism is criticism of Zionism or Israeli policy that — whether intentionally or unintentionally — has the effect of promoting prejudice against all Jews by demonizing Israel and Israelis and attributing Israel’s perceived faults to its Jewish character.”
In its introductory overview, the report singles out governments with whom the Bush administration has no relations (Iran for example), or Syria and Venezuela with whom Washington’s relations are in a parlous state.
The report, however, cites pronounced examples of anti-Semitism among the nations that the United States has cultivated as allies, including Russia, Ukraine and Iraq.
This report followed four years of research launched in 2004 after US lawmakers passed a bill commissioning it. The process was accelerated in 2006 when President Bush named Gregg Rickman the first US special envoy on anti-Semitism.
The 94-page report suggests at length that Holocaust denial is a vehicle for anti-Semitism, focusing on the role Iran’s government has taken in its propagation. It also targets the United Nations, suggesting that some of its constituents, criticizing Israel, promote a hostile environment for Jews.
“Regardless of the intent, disproportionate criticism of Israel as barbaric and unprincipled, and corresponding discriminatory measures adopted in the UN against Israel, have the effect of causing audiences to associate negative attributes with Jews in general, thus fueling anti-Semitism,” it says.
Naturally, Jewish groups, including the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee, welcomed the report, as did some members of Congress. “All too often, legitimate criticism of the State of Israel can veer into naked anti-Semitism characterized by vile hate speech,” said Rep. Howard Berman, the chairman of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee. “When hate speech arises, we should call it what it is — and do what can be done to stop it.”
Considering how the Israeli-fueled Zionist lobby has throttled US legislative bodies, no US politician would dare say otherwise.
Now let me get this straight. Isn’t it Israel’s policy of land grabbing and ethnic cleansing that generates criticism of this country?
Isn’t the Holocaust being perpetuated against the Palestinian people during the last fifty years a cause for unflattering rhetoric against a country whose raison d’etre seems to be the illegal thievery of others’ land and oppression of its rightful owners?
If that is anti-Semitism, so be it. It will not stop those calling for justice to the Palestinians from cowing down in the face of such dim-witted conclusions from a government that has lost much of its credibility as a champion of human rights.
What Is Wrong With McCain’s Talk About Islam
Jonathan Power,
First it was Mitt Romney who wrote in Foreign Affairs that “radical Islam’s threat is just as real as that posed before by the Nazis and the Soviet Union.” And now, last week, it was John McCain saying the US needed a leadership “to confront the transcendent challenge of our time: The threat of radical Islamic terrorism”.
To realize what poisonous nonsense this is you only have to turn back a page to the time of the Palestinian liberation movement, whose daring terrorism at the Munich Olympics and constant plane hijackings kept the world as jittery as it is now with Al-Qaeda. The IRA managed, together with its Protestant opposite numbers, to hold hostage to violence a whole province of the United Kingdom, beside murdering the queen’s uncle and nearly succeeding in murdering the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. These were very disturbing events, and if the terrorists had had just a tiny bit more success, with a lucky hit like 9/11 — and it wasn’t for lack of trying — they really would have rocked Western societies. But to my recollection no one, neither politician nor commentator, said this was “the transcendent challenge of our time” or likened these minority movements to the threat of the biggest military powers of the 1940s and 1950s. If anyone had it would have been considered over the top, clearly noncomparable to the threat of Nazi conquest or, later, world wide atheistic communism whose creed was permanent revolution. Likewise, it was noncomparable to the economic angst of the 1980s or to the oppression in southern Africa or to the maliciousness of dictatorship in South America.
Hold on, wait a moment will say my critics. Romney and McCain said “radical Islam”. They were not tarring the whole of the Muslim religion. But context is everything.
Those in the Islamic world who follow the Western debate know their texts and how it all began. First with the academic scholarship of Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington. Huntington’s words in his world-famous book, “The Clash of Civilizations” still chill the bone: “The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism, IT IS ISLAM, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power”.
If McCain wants to continue like this in the campaign to come, I would ask him first to reflect on the recent remarks of Zbigniew Brzezinski who observed in response to Romney’s statement, “ A candidate who says that kind of stuff either thinks, probably correctly, that the American people are not well informed — in which case he’s demagoguing — or he’s stupid enough to believe it himself. In either case it offers a compelling argument as to why such a candidate should not be president.”
This in a nutshell is what is wrong with McCain’s talk. The recent election in Pakistan should give him pause. One good reason given by the anti-Musharraf voices for having an open election was that with the parties competing in the western border areas, where the Taleban are active and the Al-Qaeda leadership may be hiding, was that it would make it more difficult for the Islamic fundamentalist parties, then in power, to win another election. The Americans and the British refused to buy this argument, preferring Musharraf to kill off the militants. But this indeed is what happened. The militant religious parties were roundly defeated in the North-West Frontier Province by a moderate regional party, the Awami National Party. Although Pathan-based they want to end the violence not by military might but by sustained dialogue and reviving the neglected economic development of the province.
The conclusion is obvious. Even in the most desperate of situations if the Islamic masses are given the vote and open choice they will often enough vote for moderates who shun violence. In recent years they have they done so consistently in Indonesia and Turkey, Islam’s two most populous states. So have they done in Malaysia and Nigeria.
Every time some outrageous act is committed by the fundamentalist supporters of an extreme version of Shariah law the Western press, and now some of its politicians, highlight it. What they should do instead is to highlight the last 1400 years of Islamic behavior. When confronted with Islam the Christian nations have persecuted it. But the Islamic world when confronted with Christians in their midst preferred tolerance.
Islamic terrorism is a marginal force still. Its adherents and sympathizers have grown because of the crudity and violence of the policies of George W. Bush and Tony Blair. McCain seems to be heading to stir the pot even more. Then the chickens really will come home to roost.
Tibet and Palestine: Hypocrisy of World Media
You have the gun and I have the guts
A Palestinian child confronts an Israeli soldier during a protest near Bethlehem on Friday. (EPA)
Uri Avnery
Like everybody else, I support the right of the Tibetan people to independence, or at least autonomy. Like everybody else, I condemn the actions of the Chinese government there. But unlike everybody else, I am not ready to join in the demonstrations.
I support the Tibetans in spite of it being obvious that the Americans are exploiting the struggle for their own purposes. Clearly, the CIA has planned and organized the riots, and the American media are leading the worldwide campaign. It is a part of the hidden struggle between the US, the reigning superpower, and China, the rising superpower — a new version of the “Great Game” that was played in Central Asia in the 19th century by the British Empire and Russia. Tibet is a token in this game. What is really bugging me is the hypocrisy of the world media. They storm and thunder about Tibet. It seems as if the Tibetans are the only people on earth whose right to independence is being denied by brutal force. But are not the Kurds in Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria entitled to the same? The inhabitants of Western Sahara, whose territory is occupied by Morocco? The Basques in Spain? The Corsicans off the coast of France? And the list is long.
Why do the world’s media adopt one independence struggle, but often cynically ignore another independence struggle? What makes the blood of one Tibetan redder than the blood of a thousand Africans in East Congo?
Again and again I try to find a satisfactory answer to this enigma. In vain.
Immanuel Kant demanded of us: “Act as if the principle by which you act were about to be turned into a universal law of nature.” (Being a German philosopher, he expressed it in much more convoluted language.) Does the attitude toward the Tibetan problem conform to this rule? Does it reflect our attitude toward the struggle for independence of all other oppressed peoples? Not at all.
If Immanuel Kant knew what’s going on in Kosovo, he would be scratching his head.
The province demanded its independence from Serbia, and I, for one, supported that with all my heart. This is a separate people, with a different culture (Albanian) and its own religion (Islam). After the popular Serbian leader, Slobodan Milosevic, tried to drive them out of their country, the world rose and provided moral and material support for their struggle for independence.
The Albanian Kosovars make up 90 percent of the citizens of the new state, which has a population of two million. The other 10 percent are Serbs, who want no part of the new Kosova. They want the areas they live in to be annexed to Serbia. According to Kant’s maxim, are they entitled to this?
I would propose a pragmatic moral principle: Every population that inhabits a defined territory and has a clear national character is entitled to independence. A state that wants to keep such a population must see to it that they feel comfortable, that they receive their full rights, enjoy equality and have an autonomy that satisfies their aspirations. In short: That they have no reason to desire separation. That applies to the French in Canada, the Scots in Britain, the Kurds in Turkey and elsewhere, the various ethnic groups in Africa, the indigenous peoples in Latin America, the Tamils in Sri Lanka and many others. Each has a right to choose between full equality, autonomy and independence.
This Leads us, of course, to the Palestinian issue.
In the competition for the sympathy of the world media, the Palestinians are unlucky. According to all the objective standards, they have a right to full independence, exactly like the Tibetans. They inhabit a defined territory, they are a specific nation, a clear border exists between them and Israel. One must really have a crooked mind to deny these facts.
But the Palestinians are suffering from several cruel strokes of fate: The people that oppress them claim for themselves the crown of ultimate victimhood. The whole world sympathizes with the Israelis because the Jews were the victims of the most horrific crime of the Western world. That creates a strange situation: The oppressor is more popular than the victim. Anyone who supports the Palestinians is automatically suspected of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.
Also, the great majority of the Palestinians are Muslims (nobody pays attention to the Palestinian Christians). Since Islam arouses fear and abhorrence in the West, the Palestinian struggle has automatically become a part of that shapeless, sinister threat, “international terrorism”. And since the murders of Yasser Arafat and Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the Palestinians have no particularly impressive leader — neither in Fatah nor in Hamas.
The world media are shedding tears for the Tibetan people, whose land is taken from them by Chinese settlers. Who cares about the Palestinians, whose land is taken from them by our settlers?
In the worldwide tumult about Tibet, the Israeli spokespersons compare themselves — strange as it sounds — to the poor Tibetans, not to the evil Chinese. Many think this quite logical.
If Kant were dug up tomorrow and asked about the Palestinians, he would probably answer: “Give them what you think should be given to everybody, and don’t wake me up again to ask silly questions.”
Obama’s ME Policy: Support for Israel
Barack Obama said Friday, April 11, 2008 he would not meet with representatives of Hamas but declined to criticize former U.S. president Jimmy Carter’s reported planned meeting with the head of the radical Palestinian group. “I’ve said consistently that I would not meet with Hamas, given that it’s a terrorist organization,” the Illinois senator, who is locked in a bitter battle for the Democratic presidential nomination with rival Hillary Clinton, said at a press briefing in Indianapolis. “It’s not a state, and until Hamas clearly recognizes Israel, renounces terrorism, and abides or believes that the Palestinians should abide by previous agreements that have been entered into, I don’t think conversations with them would be fruitful.” (Reference for text: AFP)
Caren Bohan
Barack Obama will take a hands-on approach to Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking if elected US president but without pressuring Israel any more than his rivals for the White House, advisers say.
Obama’s advisers assail US President George W. Bush for taking a low-profile approach during the first seven years in office and for not following up more vigorously on the Annapolis peace summit he launched in November. “What is true is that (Obama) is undeniably and openly committed to putting his own presidential power in the service of trying to help the Israelis achieve a two-state solution with the Palestinians,” said a close Obama adviser who was not authorized by the campaign to speak for attribution. “That doesn’t equate to pressure. It does equate to a sustained commitment.”
The Democrat, who would be the first black American president if elected in November, has yet to fully outline a detailed approach to Middle East peacemaking. Casting himself as the candidate of change, he has vowed not to change the unflinching support of Israel that is a cornerstone of US Middle East policy. Critics have raised doubts about his commitment to the Jewish state, floating rumors that Obama is a Muslim and linking him to Louis Farrakhan, a US political figure known for his anti-Israel rhetoric. Obama is a Christian and has denounced Farrakhan. His campaign is upset by what they see as scurrilous attacks by those seeking to erode his support with US Jewish voters. “The tenets of Sen. Obama’s Middle East policy are that he is a staunch supporter of Israel and strongly supports Israel’s right to self-defense,” said Rep. Robert Wexler, a Florida Democrat who the senator consults on Middle East issues.
Some foreign policy conservatives have openly questioned Obama’s approach on the Middle East, criticizing his call for direct talks with states like Iran and suggesting he would be more inclined than other presidential candidates to pressure Israel to make concessions toward the Palestinians. “There is no evidence to that,” said Daniel Kurtzer, former ambassador to Israel and Egypt, recently recruited to advise Obama on the Middle East and reach out to Jewish voters. The senior adviser said Obama is highly sensitive to the dilemma many Israelis face, on the one hand wanting peace but worrying about the ability of divided Palestinians to follow through on any promises made in talks. “The Israelis have every reason to be cautious and skeptical as they evaluate whether they have a Palestinian partner that is not only committed to peace but also capable of delivering on that,” the adviser said.
In the Arab world, where many view US policy as biased toward Israel, there is intense interest in whether Obama’s approach to the Middle East would be different. Some Muslim commentators closely following the US election find little indication of that in his rhetoric or Senate record, which includes his co-sponsorship of a resolution during the 2006 Lebanon war that strongly backed Israel’s right to defend itself.
Hussain Abdul-Hussain, a US-based journalist for the Daily Star of Lebanon wrote: “Even from a Lebanese viewpoint, there is no reason to believe that Obama would be better than Bush on Israel.” While in sync with Bush’s policy of championing Israel’s right to defend itself, Obama also backs the administration’s policy of shunning Hamas, which seized control of the Gaza Strip last June, in favor of talks with rival Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
Obama is facing greater difficulty in defining for voters his views on the Middle East than has New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, his rival for the Democratic nomination and a former first lady, or Arizona Sen. John McCain, the Republican nominee who has been a prominent voice on foreign policy for years. On Israel, McCain is likely to be as staunch an ally as fellow Republican Bush. Clinton benefits from the reputation that her husband, Bill Clinton, had of rock-solid support for the Jewish state.
Iraq: The Israeli Agenda
Iraq: The Israeli Agenda
Neil Berry
Last week’s fifth anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq war occasioned much debate in the British media. But the contributors to the debate conspicuously did not include the war’s principal British proponent, Tony Blair. As little inclined as ever to admit to culpability over the Iraq debacle, Britain’s former prime minister has “moved on” and is now preoccupied with a dizzying assortment of fresh projects.
One of those projects has been to resolve the Palestine-Israel conflict, though the signs are that it is already giving way to other concerns, such as combating climate change and making a start on his lucrative memoirs. Perhaps only a professional fantasist could ever have supposed that tackling a problem that has defeated so many others would require anything less than sustained personal commitment over an indefinite period of time. That Blair undertook the role of Middle East peace envoy on a part-time basis speaks for itself.
It is true that in the run-up to the war Blair insisted Britain would only support a US-led pre-emptive war on condition that it entailed an all-out effort to resolve the conflict. But, echoing the manifesto of the neoconservatives in Washington, he also intimated that simply deposing Saddam Hussein would yield a substantial peace dividend. The settling of the Palestine-Israel conflict was billed as the prize, the great byproduct of “regime change” in Baghdad and the emergence of Iraq as a beacon of democracy in the Middle East.
What is extraordinary is how Blair, along with all the other protagonists of the Iraq war, continues to be portrayed as having acted in good faith if nothing else. The mainstream Western media are little receptive to the notion that he functioned as one of the chief salesmen for an ideology-driven war whose true objective, far from being to make the Middle East a better place, was to create havoc. In the US, claims that the war was undertaken for essentially cynical reasons find no place in public discussion; they do not find much more of one in British public discussion either, for all that the media in Britain permit more open discussion of the Palestine-Israel conflict.
The British journalist, Jonathan Cook, makes a persuasive case that the chaos into which Iraq has descended was anything but an unintended consequence of the Anglo-American invasion. Yet Cook’s is a voice unfamiliar not just to the general public but even to the more educated sections of British society. A sometime staff writer for the Guardian who now lives in Nazareth, he operates, perforce, as an underground writer, publishing much of his work on the US online left-wing magazine Counterpunch: His trenchant analysis of the motives underlying the Anglo-American intervention in Iraq is deemed far too radical for mainstream consumption.
In his last book, Blood and Religion (2006), Cook argued that Israel is a pseudo-democracy whose systematic oppression of the Palestinian people was inherent in the Zionist program to establish a Greater Israel, an expanded military state where only Jewish blood and religion count. In his new book, Israel and the Clash of Civilizations, he argues that the Iraq war was as much a Zionist as an American undertaking and that it was inspired in no small degree by the US/Zionist ambition to sow discord in the Arab and Muslim worlds. It is a view of course that Cook is by no means unique in holding but few have propounded it with such cogency. Cook maintains that civil war in Iraq followed by partition was the projected upshot of the invasion, just what the pro-Israeli neoconservatives who came to shape US foreign policy under President George W. Bush wanted. He points out that while the United States has long gone in for regime change, especially in its “backyard” of Central America and the Caribbean, it has usually had in mind whom it was planning to install as its dependable “strong man”. In the case of Iraq, however, the striking thing is that it has not been impossible to identify the strong man Washington hoped would replace the old one. Indeed, the actions of the Bush administration guaranteed that no such strong man would emerge. In short, Iraq seems to be a case of “regime overthrow” rather than “regime change”, with brutal military occupation the actual goal of the invasion rather than a brief transitional phase while a new leader was installed.
Cook’s central contention is that this distinctive strategy for regime overthrow originated not in Washington but in Israel. In the early 1980s, he writes, the Jewish state’s security establishment developed ideas about dissolving other states of the Middle East with a specific view to nurturing ethnic and religious conflict. This was in effect a re-imagining of the regional power structure that existed under the Ottoman Empire — before the arrival of European colonialists and their reordering of the Middle East into nation states — but with Israel replacing Turkey as the local imperial power. The aim was to partition potentially powerful states such as Iraq and Iran between their rival ethnic and sectarian communities, thus neutralizing the threat they posed to Israel.
Not the least benefit of the ensuing chaos, it was calculated, would be that Israel became free to pursue the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from the occupied territories, and possibly from inside Israel too. That such a policy was bound to promote Islamic radicalism was seen by Zionist strategists as positively desirable, and the fact is that with the rise of Hamas in the occupied territories, Israel has succeeded in greatly increasing Western alarm about Islam as a global threat, in the process identifying the question of what to do with the Palestinians with the issue of what the West should do about Islamic extremism.
Of a piece with all this has been Israel’s assiduous cultivation of a view of itself as standing in the frontline of an epoch-making “clash of civilizations” between East and West. The message of Israel and the Clash of Civilizations is that Israel was all too well prepared to exploit the US “war on terror” to reshape the Middle East in its own interests and that the legitimacy of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinians and that of the US occupation of Iraq have become inextricably bound up with each other.
What is certain is that the Zionist plan to remake the Middle East is no figment of Jonathan Cook’s imagination. Nor can it be doubted that, fortuitously or not, events have unfolded much as the plan envisaged. Whether Cook is right in every particular may be a matter for debate, but that he has written a challenging book is not. Nevertheless, the Western media can be expected to carry on peddling the line that the instigators of the Iraq debacle meant well, ignoring the indications that they were party to a project designed not to bring peace to the Middle East but to ensure Israel’s safety, albeit at the cost of plunging the Middle East into chaos.
Warsaw Ghetto and Gaza: Disturbing Parallels
How In the world can we ignore the holocaust of our children ??
The father of 6-month-old Palestinian baby Mohammed al-Borai holds his son’s body during his funeral in Gaza City, Thursday, Feb. 28, 2008. Mohammed al-Borai, was killed when an Israeli aircraft blasted Hamas government offices and metal shops in the Gaza Strip late Wednesday. (AP Photo/Khalil Hamra)
Why is the American Public not shown these images ? Do we even know what is done with Billions of tax-dollars given to the Neo-Nazis as “aid” ?
Steve Hutcheson
I saw a photo last week of a father holding his 6-month-old baby son. The father’s face was devoid of expression; the child in his arms was dead. The boy’s name was Mohammed Al-Borai; he along with several others had been killed in a blast fired indiscriminately by an Israeli cannon into the densely populated areas of Gaza.There were more photos, one of a group of young boys holding flowers standing around the battered and bloodstained body of the baby boy. That struck me as the most poignant. I had been having a discussion about the cause of suicide bombers among Palestinians and it will be this image more than any other that will concern me more than most. In their minds the young dead boy will have more impact on their future than anything any one might tell them.It was then that I started to contemplate perhaps more fully the plight of the Palestinians today and the parallels in the history of the Jews that led to their mass exodus from their own countries to immigrate to the land that was at the time known as Palestine.The Warsaw Ghetto during the Jewish Holocaust holds special significance to the European Jews. It was a place of oppression and the pathway to the ultimate death of thousands of their population that has become symbolic with their struggle for recognition. Yet what they are failing to acknowledge as their descendants press forward with their own brand of Jewish and Zionist idealism is the parallel set of conditions that they are now imposing on the Arab people of Palestine.
The Nazis rounded up the Jews of Poland and quartered them in a small area of Warsaw, building a barricade around the perimeter to prevent them leaving. So too have the Israelis through conflict and force pushed many of the Arab inhabitants out of Israel into an enclave that now has a population density of 4,200 people per sq. km which is 14 times that of the surrounding area of Israel which has 360 people per sq. km.
The Nazis deprived the ghetto inhabitants of food and essential supplies. So too has the Israeli government stopped the flow of goods to the 1.4 million inhabitants of Gaza by limiting the convoys of supplies to a mere trickle.
The Nazis reduced the average calorie intake of the Jewish inhabitants of the ghetto to 241 calories per day. So too have the Israelis reduced the calorie intake of the Palestinians in Gaza. According to a UN report, it is presently at 61 percent of the average daily requirements.
The Nazis restricted public utilities such as water and electricity. So too has the Israeli government.
The Nazis restricted the inhabitants from adequate health care. Israelis restrict the health care in Gaza by limiting the medical supplies in or the treatment of cases that need to be done outside.
The Jewish inhabitants through the ZZB and the ZOB resisted the oppression by the Nazis albeit too late and their rebellion was brutally crushed without concern for who was in the way. So too have the Palestinians of Gaza through their own resistance organizations, in particular Hamas, rebelled against their oppressors and so too do the Israelis use all means available to crush the rebellion without concern for who is in the way or who they maim or kill in doing so.
The Nazis destroyed the structure of the ghetto leveling it to the ground in a broad quest to rout the resistance to their oppression. Israelis indiscriminately level buildings and the infrastructure in Gaza in a quest to rout out the resistance to their oppression. The Nazis assigned the Jewish people to a lesser status of all their inhabitants depriving them of their rights as citizens and even as humans. Israel assigns the refugees held in Gaza less status than is given to the Jews worldwide and deprives the Palestinians of their rights to return to their former lands.
The Nazis applied whatever was at their means to break the will of the Jewish inhabitants of the ghetto. Israelis do the same thing; they use whatever is at their means to break the will of the Palestinians.
The Nazis killed the Jewish inhabitants of the ghetto indiscriminately. Don’t the Israelis kill indiscriminately the inhabitants in forcing their control over Gaza?
The Jews of Israel and elsewhere are quite right to protest at the inhumanity of the Nazis in their treatment of them and oblige the world not to allow the same situation to happen again. The Palestinians protest at the inhumanity of the Israeli treatment, yet in a bizarre twist of events, the world still allows the oppression to happen and continue.
It was after the Jews in the ghetto had been largely killed or transported that the world stood up and felt guilty in not acting sooner.
With the picture of Mohammed Al-Borai in my mind I question when the world will stand up and say: Enough is enough, there is not going to be a repeat of the Warsaw Ghetto and particularly when its perpetrators are those who suffered the most by its conduct.
There is a basic conflict of inhumanity occurring to the Palestinian people of Gaza that the world is deliberately ignoring. An inhumanity that was inflicted by the Nazis on the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto is now more than ever closely paralleling that which they are inflicting on the people of Gaza. They learned a hard lesson but it was not a lesson learned well. They have been given the power to practice humanity but have decided instead that they will treat the concerns of the Palestinians in the same inhumane way the Nazis treated them.
A future monument will no doubt contain photos of Mohammed Al-Borai in the arms of his father and the world will decry the injustice.
Terrorism — Compare and Contrast
Terrorism — Compare and Contrast
Tanya Hsu
Last week in Arab News, columnist Fatin Bundagji wrote of a letter from an American, rather typical of the refrain we have heard for the past five years. Accusing Ms. Bundagji of “conveniently” forgetting that Arab terrorists attacked the US, the writer implied that America has every right to retaliate against anybody, an individual or nation, it considers an enemy. Thus the rightful invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, neither state having had anything to do with 9/11 whatsoever.
It is fallacious logic. One cannot compare apples to oranges.
No Arab nation has ever attacked the United States. The same cannot be said of the West, who has for the past century been invading the Middle East repeatedly in its quest for control of the region’s resources. Instead, the argument should be made with all elements being equal.
The 9/11 attacks were terrorist acts, to be certain, but not by an Arab state. One must compare a terrorist to a terrorist, and contrast the results. An example of an American terrorist who did attack Arabs on their own soil would be Baruch Goldstein.
Born and bred in Brooklyn, New York, Goldstein walked into the Cave of the Patriarchs in Jerusalem on Feb. 25, 1994, at 5.20 a.m., opening fire on 500 Palestinian Muslims at a Friday-morning prayer in Ramadan. Spraying the worshippers with his automatic rifle, he emptied 110 bullets in less than a minute and a half. Thirty Palestinians were killed immediately, and three were trampled to death in the ensuing panic. Those who fought back beat Goldstein to death. More than 20 further Palestinians were killed the same day in retaliation for Goldstein’s death, including fiver killed by the Israeli Defense Forces.
Deaths of Arab civilians at the hands of this American terrorist amounted to 1/500ths of a percent of the total Arab population in Israel. The 9/11 attacks resulted in the deaths of 1/1000ths of a percent of the total American population. In other words, comparing terrorist act to terrorist act, one man alone, Goldstein, massacred twice as many Arabs in a single incident as per capita deaths on 9/11. If one includes all Israelis, Muslim and Jewish citizens alike, Goldstein still murdered half as many per capita as those who were killed in the US on 9/11.
Yet not one Arab state launched a retaliatory attack on Israel. No one invaded Israel; not a single Arab nation decided that the Israeli people should pay the collective price for a massive act of civilian terrorism. In fact, Israel and America barely raised an eyebrow, and Goldstein was praised in New York by the Jewish extremist organization Kahane Kach. Instead, Baruch Goldstein was buried as a martyr and hero in Israel.
Today pilgrims visit Goldstein’s gravesite daily, his burial plaque reading: “Here lies the saint, Dr. Baruch Kappel Goldstein, blessed be the memory of the righteous and holy man, may the Lord avenge his blood, who devoted his soul to the Jews, Jewish religion and Jewish land. His hands are innocent and his heart is pure. He was killed as a martyr…”
Meanwhile, the US continues to cite 9/11 to justify a war resulting in the death of over one million Iraqis (according to the British Opinion Research Business report in 2007).
As for US troop casualties, the Pentagon releases only death reports for troops killed on the field, from bullets or bombs (4,000). They do not include deaths sustained “not in direct combat”, e.g. those who die during evacuation, Humvee accidents, hospital deaths, those killed off duty, or private contractors (as many in Iraq as US troops). Also not included are suicides: 120 traumatized veterans kill themselves per week, according to a CBS 2007 investigation.
Thousands will die of cancer or kidney toxicology from depleted uranium exposure; thousands more have been infected with “Sandfly Disease” that can be fatal. Little wonder that the Pentagon bans the publication of photos of caskets flown home under cover of darkness.
If sheer statistics account for a sound argument, more than a million have paid the price for 9/11. How many more before the US is satisfied? As Dick Cheney himself said after the 1991 Gulf War (146 US troops killed), as to why the US left Iraq: “How many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth?…not very many”. George W. Bush this week announced that it “makes no sense” for the US to retreat from Iraq, and suggestions to the contrary are unpatriotic. But his vice president said in 1991, “I do not think the United States wants to have US military forces accept casualties and accept the responsibility of trying to govern Iraq. I think it makes no sense at all.” If the US did that, Cheney prophesied in 1991, it would cause the US to be “involved in a civil war inside Iraq (that) would literally be a quagmire.”
Neither Iraq, Afghanistan, nor Saudi Arabia was responsible for 9/11, in the same way that America was not responsible for the Goldstein massacre. One must compare military state action to military state action, not terrorist to nation state.
The equation seems simple:
Arab kills Americans = mass retaliatory military force required in revenge that is morally justifiable.
American kills Arabs = hero.
Merchants of Lethal Deceit
Tariq A. Al-Maeena
Five years into the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, US President George Bush claims it’s been worth the haul. And although he claims he sheds tears for every one of the 4,000 soldiers he has sent to their death, little or no mention is made of an estimated one million or more innocent Iraqi civilians who have lost their lives as a result of his grand adventure.
Remember the proponents of the aggression then? One of the strongest, Tony Blair of UK, is now keeping himself as far away from Bush as possible, and privately conceding that this adventure was a “horrible mistake”. Was he led into this deceitful adventure by the smooth-talking neocons of the Bush administration and the gentle prodding by Bush himself?
Whatever happened to Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Donald Rumsfeld, those active cheerleaders of a murderous and unlawful invasion of countries that harbored no ill will toward the United States or the American people?
Now facts have proven that this carnage was built on an orchestrated deception, first among Bush’s constituents through selective manipulation of the media, and later by presenting false evidence to the world community, the United Nations.
These past five years will remain embedded in the minds of those who had lost their loved ones in Iraq and Afghanistan with pain and anguish. For it was under the US commander in chief’s instructions that US soldiers used their most brutal practices among the prisoners by systematic acts of rape, sodomy and torture. They dehumanized their captives. Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo have become synonyms for gross human rights violations.
This continued and sustained assault on these two countries is a violation that has for the most part remained unchecked. Most nations are noticeably quiet on US transgressions in the region. It has not, however, failed to create deep chasms of animosity and suspicion of Bush’s intentions. His talk of “spreading democracy in the Middle East” is now met with derision.
For poll after poll has proven that the inhabitants of Afghanistan and Iraq see themselves as worse off today than before the acts of aggression began. And really, what was it that Bush was after?
There were no weapons of mass destruction. Nor was there any sign of ill will in either country toward the United States. Was it the oil? Well maybe, but there was always the specter of an Israeli lobby dictating terms and manipulating things.
Many of those smooth-talking neocons who convinced their constituents of a doomsday situation if Iraq was not invaded are not around today parading in front of the world’s media with their false assertions. Perhaps they are keeping a low profile for fear of being charged for these crimes against humanity in some tribunal sometimes in the future.
For, if you strip away all irrational rhetoric, what is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan is indeed a crime. A war crime to match the Israeli aggression and occupation of Palestine! How closely were the two operations orchestrated with Bush and Sharon in power?
And while one languishes in a vegetative state, the other is free to continue his acts of violence unchecked and unfettered.
And not satisfied with the amount of innocent blood already spilled, he is now pushing for another bloody adventure, this time against Iran.
Iran is an Islamic state, and Bush should think long and hard before contemplating any such moves. He lacks credibility when he talks about Iran’s threat to the region and his evidence is dismissed as a joke.
The people in this region have seen and heard enough. The real threat has never been Iran. The real threat has been the willingness of some to believe what Bush says.
While Bush and his remaining neocons work covertly with the Israelis in an effort to convince the world body of the threat Iran poses, such alarmist talk has indeed been falling on deaf ears in the region.
As for the tears Bush says he sheds for the fallen, everyone knows they are as fake as the evidence he presented to justify his wars of aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq.
What Muslims Think
Aijaz Zaka Syed
Opinion polls fascinate me. They are, if honestly conducted, perhaps the best possible way of gauging public opinion. At a time when spin is the norm and global media is controlled, manipulated and dictated by powerful corporate interests and governments, it’s not easy to get a clear picture on any given issue.
This is especially true when the story involves marginalized minorities and dispossessed groups. And of late the Muslims have been at the receiving end. After the disintegration of Soviet Union, the West found itself a new enemy in Islam.
The 9/11 attacks in the US and 7/7 strikes in the UK were only excuses, not the causes, to hasten this process. They might have contributed to the current hysteria against everything Islamic but they never were the Original Sin as we’ve been given to believe.
Myths like this have been demolished in a most interesting survey conducted by Gallup. What makes this opinion poll like no other is that it was conducted over a period of six years, beginning after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Gallup conducted research in 35 Muslim countries, interviewing more than 50,000 people, to come up with what it calls the first comprehensive survey of Muslim world opinion.
The results have also given birth to a book called, Who Speaks for Islam? What a billion Muslims really think by John L. Esposito and Dalia Mogahed.
The poll and the book offer a much-needed reality check on the relations between the West and Muslim world. Some of the findings are genuinely surprising even for someone like me who has been obsessed with the issue.
Many conclusions of the poll only go to confirm what we in the Muslim world have always known but couldn’t succeed in putting them across to our friends in the West. For instance, the fact that it’s not Islamic teachings that drive some individuals to violence but historical injustices inflicted and perpetuated by some Western powers.
Which is why one so hopes that the urgent message this poll seeks to convey reaches the Western audience — and the wider world. It would be such a shame if it doesn’t. Because, as Dalia Mogahed argues in the book, this ostensible conflict between Islam and West is far from inevitable.
Many concerned commentators have repeatedly argued that what is fuelling the so-called clash of civilizations is not some absurd hatred of Christian West sanctioned by Islam but Western ignorance about Muslims. The poll backs this argument.
Most Muslims, regardless of where they live, whether in Saudi Arabia or Iran, are surprisingly well informed about the West and its values and ideals. In fact, most of them admire the West for its scientific achievements, economic progress and celebration of knowledge and excellence. The West is admired for the political freedom, democracy and rights it offers its people.
There are other findings that are equally interesting. Contrary to common perceptions in the West, the majority of respondents think men and women have equal rights. A whopping 94 percent of Indonesians share this view. Indonesia is the world’s largest Muslim nation. In Iran, the figure is 89 percent. And in Saudi Arabia, it’s 73 percent.
A great majority of Muslims also believe a woman can work outside her home in any job for which she is qualified (88 percent in Indonesia, 72 percent in Egypt and 78 percent in Saudi Arabia). And they also believe women should be able to vote without interference (87 percent in Indonesia, 91 percent in Egypt, 98 percent in Lebanon).
And what about the supposed Muslim sympathy for terrorism? While 6 percent of the Americans think attacks involving civilians are “completely justified,” in Saudi Arabia this figure is 4 percent. In Lebanon and Iran, it’s 2 percent.
And mark this, it’s important. The majority of Muslims absolutely rejects violence and terrorism. In fact, many of the respondents quoted Qur’anic verses to point out that extremism goes against Islamic teachings.
Going by these findings, would any reasonable person in his right mind blame Islam for extremism and violence? And remember, the survey was not sponsored by Al Jazeera, Bin Laden’s favorite channel, but by Gallup, the biggest name in the business.
So what is it then that drives the West and Muslim world apart? The answer lies in Western indifference, nay casual contempt, for a billion believers and all that they believe in. I am not saying this; Gallup poll does.
Again this shouldn’t come as a surprise. While admiring Western values such as democracy and freedom, Muslims feel these values are conveniently cast aside when it comes to applying them to Muslim world.
More than 65 percent of Egyptians, Jordanians and Iranians believe the US will never allow people in the Middle East to run their own affairs and chart their own course.
When the Gallup pollsters asked Muslims around the world what the West could do to improve relations with the Muslim world, the most frequent responses called for greater respect for Islam and treatment of Muslims as equals, not as inferior.
The Western contempt for Islam, especially the ignorance of Americans, is not something imagined by us. The poll findings speak for themselves. The majority of Americans (66 percent) admit to having “some” prejudice against Muslims; one in five say they have “a great deal” of prejudice. Almost half do not believe US Muslims are “loyal” to their country; and one in four doesn’t want a Muslim as a neighbor!
Given these views, is it any surprising that Muslims are invariably portrayed as terrorists in the US media, including that big propaganda machine called Hollywood?
If the Muslims harbor some degree of anti-US sentiment, it’s not because of what the Americans are but because of what they do or have been doing in the Muslim world. But how would you explain the deep-seated paranoia and Islamophobia in the US and West?
Whatever its causes, this divide is unfortunate and unnatural. Because there is a great deal lot that unites the Muslims and Americans. In an increasingly materialistic world, they continue to hold on to their belief in God.
Unlike in Europe and much of the world, religion plays a healthy role in the day-to-day life of the Americans as well as Muslims. They both cherish universal values like honesty, truthfulness, hard work, accountability and being always loyal to your family.
Just look around. What we have in common is much more than what we do not. Which is why this divide is such a tragedy. We Muslims want to bridge this gulf. Is the other side equally willing?
Recommended External Links :
1. Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think
04.19.08
World’s ‘Unwavering Commitment’ to Inequality
Ramzy Baroud,
Death hovered over Gaza long before locally-made Palestinian rockets struck near the Israeli southern town of Sderot on Feb. 27, killing Roni Yechiah and sparking an Israeli retaliation that has claimed over hundred Palestinian lives.
Yechiah’s death was actually the first of its kind in nine months, and understandably so. The crude Palestinian rockets were often criticized even by Palestinians as useless in the tit-for-tat style of war under way, while easily used by Israeli officials as a “casus belli,” or at least as an excuse for keeping Gaza contained, besieged and on the brink of starvation.
For Israel the rockets are important as a pretext to maintain a state of siege against Hamas and wage a low-intensity warfare that creates permanent distraction from the confiscation of Palestinian land and the expansion of illegal settlements. It also provides a justification for slowing the peace process.
While pro-Israeli pundits in the US and elsewhere are prepared to defend Israel’s actions, many Israelis are no longer buying into their government’s pretexts.
According to a recent Tel Aviv University Poll, cited by the Israeli daily Haaretz on Feb. 27, “Sixty-four percent of Israelis say the government must hold direct talks with the Hamas government in Gaza toward a cease-fire and the release of captive soldier Cpl. Gilad Shalit.”
The mayor of the Israeli town of Sderot — which borders Gaza and is the main target of rockets — had also told the British newspaper, The Guardian, on Feb. 23, “I would say to Hamas, let’s have a cease-fire. Let’s stop the rockets for the next 10 years and we will see what happens.”
Hamas was actually first to issue calls for cease-fire. In fact, for years it has held true to a self-declared abstention from carrying out any suicide bombings inside Israel.
Meanwhile, the uneven numbers of casualties speak volumes.
While Yechiah’s death is tragic, he was the “first person killed by rocket attacks from Gaza since May 2007, and the 14th overall since the resumption of Israeli-Palestinian armed clashes in September 2000,” according to a Human Rights Watch press release on Feb. 29, citing Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem.
B’Tselem reported that “1,259 of the 2,679 Palestinians killed by Israeli security forces in the Gaza Strip (since September 2000) were not participating in hostilities when they were killed, and 567 were minors.”
According to a news agency report published in Al-Arabiya website, as of Feb. 22, 190 Palestinians were killed since the resumption of the peace process following the Annapolis talks last November. That number increased when the Israeli Army escalated its attacks on the Gaza Strip, killing 34 Palestinians in 48 hours between Feb. 27-28, not counting several other Palestinians killed in the West Bank during the same period.
Despite the facts, Israel’s actions are repeatedly accepted by most media as a legitimate ‘response’ to Palestinian violence.
In an article published days before Yechiah’s death, the Sydney Morning Herald reported on the death of three Palestinians who were killed by Israeli tank missile. The men were picnicking at the time, according to eyewitness accounts. However, the article seemed to report an entirely different story, featuring a photo of a Palestinian rocket that hit an empty field.
“Deadly rain,” read the caption, conveniently forgetting that the rockets had not caused any deaths. The article also undermined the fact that the killed Palestinians had been picnicking, citing this as yet another Palestinian ‘claim.’
Donald Macintyre of the British newspaper, The Independent, who is usually much more objective than his counterparts elsewhere, reported on the killing of four Palestinian children: “Four boys playing football have been killed in Gaza by Israeli airstrikes…as Israel responded to the death of a man from a barrage of rocket attacks with a bloody escalation of violence.”
The perpetuation of the idea of Israel always ‘responding’ to events and never initiating them is indeed unfair.
When the utter desperation of Gazans forced them to storm massive walls separating them from Egypt in search of food and medicines, their cry fell largely on deaf ears. Palestinians were herded back into Gaza, and the border was sealed once more, followed by an escalation of troop levels alongside it (reportedly beyond those set in a 30-year-old peace accord).
Besieged, browbeaten and starved — in a way that all major human rights groups have decried as illegal and inhumane — Palestinians are told to expect more of the same.
Only this time the terminology used is much more frightening. Israel’s Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai threatened Palestinians in the Gaza Strip with a ‘holocaust’, stating that, “the more Qassam [rocket] fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they (the Palestinians) will bring upon themselves a bigger “shoah” (Hebrew term of Holocaust) because we will use all our might to defend ourselves.”
Since the Nazi Holocaust, the Hebrew term has been used almost exclusively to describe the tragic event. While many media commentators jumped to limit the damage caused by Vilnai’s revelation, the acknowledgment of the Israel-imposed crisis on Palestinian — and the term ‘bigger’ in particular — is but another fleeting reminder of the horrors under which Gaza lives, and Gaza alone is blamed for.
As Palestinians hurriedly buried their dead, US and Israeli celebrities — including Sylvester Stallone, John Voight and Paula Abdul — rallied at an Los Angeles benefit concert for Sderot. Speaking via satellite, US presidential nominees Hillary Clinton, John McCain and Barack Obama also expressed their unquestionable allegiance to Israel, as if only Israel’s dead counted, only Israel’s security mattered.
Clinton — as the other presidential contenders — received another golden opportunity to express her ‘unwavering commitment’ to Israel.
When will US officials begin to acknowledge that both Palestinians and Israelis have equal rights and equal responsibilities?
When will the media begin to provide the needed context and stop manipulating terms and numbers in such a way that the Palestinians are always at fault?
When will we all accept that military occupation and state-sponsored terror beget violence and breed more terror, and how this will always be the case in Palestine — as anywhere else — as long as the circumstances remain unchanged?
04.16.08
Arabs Divide, Israel rules
Linda Heard
Russian President Vladimir Putin was recently quoted as saying, “No one can seriously think that Iran would dare attack the US. Instead of pushing Iran into a corner, it would be far more sensible to think together how to help Iran become more predictable and transparent”. Finally, a voice of reason amid a cacophony of belligerence!
Indeed, the way Iran is being treated by the so-called “international community” a euphemism for nations hanging onto the coattails of Uncle Sam, does little except provide fodder for hard-liners and their incendiary rhetoric. As long as Iran is under siege it will lock down rather than open up.
I’m reminded of the competition between the sun and the wind that saw a man pulling his coat around him. Both boasted that they would be the one to force the man to remove his coat. The wind whipped up a gale but the man simply held on tightly to the garment. Then the sun shone brightly and you know what happened next.
Iran is being demonized for a purpose. The deliberately orchestrated hype and fear mongering obscures the reality. There is no evidence that Iran is working toward the production of nuclear weapons as a US National Intelligence Estimate clearly stated and far from threatening its neighbors it is going out of its way to extend the hand of friendship to all except Israel, which, by the way, President Ahmadinejad did not advocate wiping off the map. His words were mistranslated and the Western media shirked its duty to correct the mistake.
The fact is Iran remains the last obstacle to America’s complete domination of this region. If Washington could force Iran to do its bidding its hegemonic ambitions in this part of the world including control over its resources would be attained. This, my friends, is the bottom line. This is why Iraq was invaded and occupied and this is why Iran is being groomed to go the same way.
Weakening Iran is just another phase of the neoconservative New Middle East itinerary, which has nothing to do with spreading freedom and democracy and all to do with increasing US power and that of its regional satellite Israel. If you look at it from the American/Israeli perspective, a defanged Iran might translate into a compliant Shiite population, and the eventual demise of Hezbollah and Hamas due to a lack of funding and weapons.
But this truth isn’t palatable to most ordinary people and flies in the face of international law. So, just as the US contrived to come up with a pretext — or rather a series of pretexts — to invade Iraq, it has had to find excuses to sanction Tehran, perhaps as a prelude to military action.
Indeed, a military assault on Iran looks ever more likely. Now that the nuclear weapons pretext has been shelved, US officials have changed tack and are now accusing the Iranian Revolutionary Guard of supplying Iraqi Shiite militias with weapons, cash and training with which to attack US forces. They say Iran is using surrogates to wage a de facto war on the US. Gen. David Petraeus and US Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker are expected to reinforce this message to Congress today; not that President Bush requires approval from lawmakers to launch strikes on Iran.
The Daily Telegraph has quoted “a Whitehall assessment” to the effect “a strong statement” from Gen. Petraeus “about Iran’s intervention in Iraq could set the stage for a US attack on Iranian military facilities”.
Indicators that there may be a looming conflagration include the recent resignation of head of CENTCOM Adm. William Fallon, who famously said “there will be no attack on Iran on my watch”.
Then came the botched attack by the Iraqi military backed up by the US on pro-Iranian Shiite militias in Basra, which defeated the purpose of eradicating hostile entities by, instead, bringing them together to expose the feebleness of the Iraqi Army whose members deserted or switched sides in large numbers.
At the same time, Israel is engaged in a five-day homeland security exercise that, according to Ha’aretz will “include a simulated missile attack on civilian areas — some missiles with chemical warheads”. Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora has urged his army to remain alert, while Hezbollah believes the emergency drill is a precursor to a new war.
The Israeli Premier Ehud Olmert is trying hard to allay Lebanese and Syrian suspicions but when it comes to Iran he has made his position clear. He says he is absolutely certain Iran is seeking nuclear weapons and has called for a “concerted world action” to prevent it from attaining such “nonconventional capacity”.
Another piece of the puzzle may be found in the presence of US warships off the coast of Lebanon, while, according to reports, the USS Abraham Lincoln strike force is heading for the Gulf along with a US nuclear submarine. It’s also worth noting that Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Minister Robert Gates have recently been touring the region and holding discussions with its leaders.
Countries here are caught between the devil and the deep blue sea on this issue. Most moderate predominately Sunni states fear the unencumbered rise of Iran that would empower Shiite populations and result in a power play. But at the same time, they don’t want another war on their doorstep in which they will be coerced to take sides for when the dust settles Iran will still be their neighbor and memories in this part of the world tend to be long. The mistrust between Sunnis and Shiites engendered by the occupation of Iraq has tragically fueled this divide, which plays right into the hands of the US and Israel.
A visiting alien might wonder why Muslim nations sharing the same turf and seas and with so much in common can’t get together preferring instead to allow a foreign power to set their neighborhood alight to further its geopolitical interests with virtually no risk to itself. On second thoughts, one doesn’t have to be an extraterrestrial to be shocked at the ridiculousness of that.
Zionists Drag Judaism’s Name Through the Mud
Seth Freedman
Though my detractors often claim otherwise, I see myself as anything but a “self-hating Jew”, and the more vocal I am in my criticism of the Israeli government’s crimes, the more credence I give that claim. I passionately love my religion, and just as fervently defend its teachings to the hilt when it comes to how to treat our fellow man. That Zionism has come along, hijacked Jewish doctrines, and twisted them to form part of an all-out supremacist movement is not something I can swallow if I want to stay loyal to the true values of Judaism.
Unfortunately, by demanding that the world sees Zionism as a philosophy essentially based on Jewish principles, Zionists have managed to unforgivably drag the religion’s name through the mud for over 60 years. However, I drew some comfort from an unlikely source after talking to a boy in the Deheisha refugee camp in Bethlehem.
I was there as part of a marathon tour that took in Hebron, the village of Al-Nueman, the Machpelah Mosque, the Church of the Nativity and various other stops along the way — including the pitiful, crumbling buildings of Deheisha. Half-way through the trip, my eyes began to glaze over, as I sought to put a barrier between myself and the relentless barrage of proof we were shown of how cruelly the authorities deal with the Palestinians.
Sneering soldiers manning checkpoints, freshly-demolished family homes, welded-shut shop fronts, blood-thirsty settler graffiti crudely daubed on Palestinian houses … the list was endless, and the evidence was overwhelming. While it was clearly an invaluable experience for those on the tour who’d never seen the awful truth of the occupation up close and personal, I’d seen it all before — not that it gets any easier to take, however many times I am exposed to the reality.
But that was before I met Jihad, a young man charged with showing us round the garbage-strewn streets and decrepit homes of Deheisha. The first thing I noticed about him were his eyes, which were as dead as any I’ve seen in all my four years living here. As he sat on a chair facing our 10-man semicircle, his face was utterly devoid of emotion, and he simply went through the motions as he reeled out his clearly well-polished introduction to life in the camp.
I could hardly begrudge him his lack of enthusiasm; we were probably the hundredth group he’d spoken to about his community’s plight, and what difference had all the lip-service made to their situation? He and his people were still here, still caged in their concrete prison, still at the mercy of the Israelis, and still no nearer to achieving their dreams of independence and freedom from the shackles of their overseers.
“I just want to be like you,” he said tiredly as he gazed into the middle distance, and with those seven words summed up the eternal plight of the downtrodden and discriminated against. “I’ve got two arms, two hands … why am I any different from other people?” he went on — and, of course, the answer was staring us in the face from the gun turrets of the guard towers overlooking the camp.
As we wended our way up the narrow alleys where skinny children clad in ill-fitting clothes played among the refuse, I asked Jihad to elaborate on how he could be “like us”. His answer was simple, and — he said — representative of the views of the majority of Palestine’s millions of refugees. “We want to go home”, he said flatly. “There is no other way (that will suffice). A two-state solution will not bring peace — the fight will go on.” He told me that although he’d chosen to use pen rather than sword to get his message across, he had no truck with those who chose to join the armed resistance.
He was vicious in his condemnation of those at the helm of the Israeli government, castigating them for their decades spent keeping his people down and subjugating them with brute force and bloodshed — however, he was adamant that he did not view their actions as emanating from Jewish sources. “Zionism is far, far removed from the Jewish religion,” he assured me. “I have no issue with Jews — just as I have no problem with Christians or Buddhists. I don’t mind Jews living here, just so long as they do it peacefully.”
He echoed the words of another local I’d met earlier, who had asked why Zionists had felt the only way to emigrate to the region was via conquest and control, rather than “the way my brother moved to the United States. He went there not to kill, not to occupy, but just to live there in peace and be a citizen like anyone else.” Both his and Jihad’s ability to clearly distinguish between Zionism and Judaism is a chink of light in an otherwise pitch black situation — and must be capitalized on by those with an interest in bringing this 60-year-old conflict to an end.
The window of opportunity won’t stay open forever. Islamic radicals and fundamentalists are highly adept at conflating the Zionist philosophy with the Jewish faith, and Israel’s hiding behind a façade of acting on behalf of World Jewry only plays into their hands. Which is why it’s essential that those Jews who recoil at the criminal actions of the Israeli government make it quite clear that this is not being done in their names.
The dominant form of Zionism might be a racist, supremacist ideology — but Judaism is most definitely not. And the more Jews who make this distinction, the better — both for the security of their fellow Jews, as well as to prove to the Israeli authorities that they most definitely do not have carte blanche to crush the Palestinians for ever more under the guise of religious values.
Palestine Between Misguided Fantasies & Pandering Politicians
Ramzy Baroud
A memorable quote in Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894) still carries a wealth of relevance. He writes, “They own the (Holy) land, just the mere land, and that’s all they do own; but it was our folks, our Jews and Christians, that made it holy, and so they haven’t any business to be there defiling it. It’s a shame and we ought not to stand it a minute. We ought to march against them and take it away from them.”
Recently an influential pastor John Hagee, of the Dallas’ Cornerstone mega-church, followed his endorsement for Republican candidate for president John McCain with some telling remarks. “What Senator McCain, I feel, needs to do to bring evangelicals into his camp is to make it very clear that he is a strong defender of Israel and that he has a strong 24 years of being pro-life. And I think on those two issues they will get on common ground and have a common understanding.”
Such were the views of a man who has an ever-growing influence among an ever-swelling culture in the US — the Evangelical Christian bloc. Nothing was mentioned about the well-being of Palestinians, even those Christian Palestinians, many of whom are descendants of the early church.
And for that matter, human rights and recognition of the needs of Palestinians are quite rarely addressed by American officials, and on the rare occasion that they are, any such support must be closely linked to a strong condemnation of Palestinian terrorism.
Welcome to America’s parallel reality on Israel and Palestine, barefaced in its defying of the notions of common sense, equality and justice, ever-insistent on peeking at the Arab-Israeli conflict from a looking glass manufactured jointly in the church, in the Congress and in the news room, where the world is reduced to characters interacting in a Hollywood-like movie set: good guys, well groomed and often white-skinned vs. bad guys bearing opposite qualities.
One may become accustomed to watching, reading and listening to the chorus of support that America — its politicians, most of its mainstream media and a large conglomerate of its churches and clergies — tirelessly offer Israel. While the advocacy for Israel by various evangelical churches is both bizarre — since the ultimate objective of this crowd is the annihilation of most Jews and the conversion of some as prerequisites for the Rapture — and widely acknowledged, their influence on the political culture of America is not equally recognized. For example, Pastor Hagee — a televangelist to 99 million viewers — established Christians United for Israel (CUFI) in 2005 following the publication of his book, ‘The Jerusalem Countdown: A Warning to the World.”
US writer Robert Weitzel explains, “Hagee envisions CUFI as the Christian version of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the powerful pro-Israel lobby whose political clout has significant influence on US foreign policy in the Middle East.”
Journalist Max Blumenthal took his cameras to the CUFI’s Washington-Israel Summit held July 2007, in Washington DC. The result was a documentary entitled, “Rapture Ready: The Unauthorized Christians United for Israel Tour.” It opens with a dialogue with former Republican House Majority Leader Tom Delay, who was asked how important the Second Coming is in his support of Israel. “Obviously, it is what I live for. Really, I hope it comes tomorrow. Obviously, we need to be connected to Israel to enjoy the Second Coming of Christ.”
Weitzel reports, “John Hagee is not without fawning friends in Washington. Presidential hopeful John McCain made a campaign stop at the summit and admitted to the audience that, ‘It’s very hard trying to do the Lord’s work in the city of Satan . . .’ House Minority Leader Whip Roy Blunt followed McCain to the podium and assured the faithful that “This is a mission, this is a vision that I believe is a vision for God’s time.” Sen. Joe Lieberman was there and described Pastor Hagee as an “Ish Elokim,” a man of God.” Even President Bush sent his best wishes, “I appreciate CUFI members…for your passion and dedication to enhancing the relationship between the United States and Israel. Your efforts set a shining example for others…”
While most US politicians are self-seeking, power-hungry and would do whatever it takes to be elected, the average American, unlike what it may seem, is not born “pro-Israel,” and “anti-Palestinian.” Most Americans are pro-the-manufactured, yet misleading, images of Israel that reach their homes through television, wait at their doorsteps in the morning and confront them through the web. Israel has mastery over the language of the Western media, which, again, helped create a parallel reality that has little correlation to the real world, that of facts, numbers and actual events. That alternative universe only exists on newspapers’ editorial pages, mega-churches and the blabber of Fox News “experts.”
There is no serious or equitable debate regarding Palestine and Israel in the US corporate media, nor any other cultural, political and religious circles. If the existing narrative is to be called a debate, then it’s one with an imagined, not real, language, almost entirely irrelevant to the realities in Palestine and Israel. It’s one that is largely predicated on a narrow-minded, apocalyptic religious discourse which for decades has found itself an accepted point of departure for most politicians, even those who falsely pose as liberals.
Between the two discourses, that of misguided religious fantasies and pandering politicians, there maybe exists enough room for alternative narratives. Unfortunately, that space is too overwhelmed by cultural misconceptions, institutional bias and deliberate confusion, introduced and instilled deliberately by media producers, pundits and the other manufactures of American popular culture. Until the gatekeepers of US culture are seriously challenged, Palestine will continue to reside in the American imagination as a battle between good and evil, a “Holy Land” that must be wrestled from the hands of those who might have owned the land, at one point, but now, they “haven’t any business to be there defiling it.”
— Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an author and editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His work has been published in many newspapers and journals worldwide. His latest book is The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People’s Struggle (Pluto Press, London).
