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.

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.

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.”

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
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.

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
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.

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.

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

2.Muslim World