05.31.08
Terror Knows No Faith
The Jaipur blasts happened in areas where both Hindus and Muslims live. (AFP)
By Aijaz Zaka Syed
“I am puzzled at your silence and the silence of your newspaper on the Jaipur blasts,” wrote in an intelligent reader based in the US. Venkat, an Indian techie, (not his full name) seems to follow what I write and often sends me his feedback. And I must confess I often enjoy his interesting take on the issues that usually exercise me, even if I don’t always agree with him.
This one, coming as it did soon after the terror attack on Jaipur in India this month, was a little surprising. Because after my day-to-day responsibilities, I barely manage to do a weekly column and it comes on a fixed day of the week. The Jaipur incident took place on May 13 and my column, even if it were devoted to the issue, wasn’t due until May 22.
I wrote back to Venkat explaining my inability to keep up with his expectations. I also pointed out in passé that we had run an editorial and several letters on Jaipur the very next day condemning the attack in strongest terms.
Back home in India, numerous Muslim organisations and public figures have vehemently protested the attack that killed 62 people. But their voices couldn’t have reached Venkat or the larger Indian society. Because the marginalised, ghettoised and semi-literate community that I come from has lost its voice — literally.
Even when an anguished Indian Muslim speaks his mind on issues like terror and the larger concerns facing the community and the country, the media has little time or patience for these sound bites. The media is more interested in burning the ‘usual suspects’ at the stake of public opinion even before they are judged by a court. Evidence be damned. Justice can go take a walk! Who cares who really is responsible for the Jaipur attacks? Or the Hyderabad blasts? Or the Mumbai bombings?
I wish friends like Venkat could read Urdu dailies. For they’d see how Indian Muslim views these despicable acts targeting innocent people. The minority community is as outraged as fellow Indians over the spilling of innocent blood. In fact, it’s all the more anguished because the responsibility for these heinous acts is being laid at its door.
Prominent Urdu dailies are full of commentaries by Muslim leaders and intellectuals condemning the Jaipur tragedy and growing incidents of this nature.
How much of this has found its way into the English dailies or perennially hysterical Hindi news channels? Little. No wonder Venkat is ‘puzzled’ over our silence.
This is precisely why one has been shouting out, for what it’s worth, to tell the world that such outrageous actions have nothing to do with Islam. Terrorism is an extremist and nihilistic death cult. There cannot be a greater absurdity than linking it to a faith that celebrates life and hope and advocates peace, justice, reason, balance and moderation in everything we do.
This is what I tried to argue after the 7/7 London bombings. Even as one has repeatedly assailed the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and widespread human rights abuses as part of the terror war, one has never shied away from taking on the extremists who claim to speak on behalf of Islam and yet shed innocent blood.
In fact, I see these elements as greatest threat to Islam and Muslims because they kill in the name of our faith and distort its humane teachings. Which is why one has constantly pleaded with Muslim intellectuals and leaders to raise their voice against this lunatic fringe.
God knows we can’t afford to lose this battle of hearts and minds. We really need to make some noise; making it clear to the world that this is not the Islam we know (no apologies to Bush).
That said, I find these expectations from Indian Muslims to prove they are not with the terrorists every time there’s an attack of this sort rather disconcerting. Why do we have to prove our innocence and loyalty to the land that has been our home for more than a thousand years every time there’s an incident like this?
Indian Muslims have paid and continue to pay an incalculable price for the Original Sin of the country’s Partition. How long are we supposed to carry this cross on our shoulders? This is especially unfair to people born after the Partition. The people of my generation and even those from my parents’ generation never had a role to play in the division of the country, whatever the geopolitical and historical factors contributing to it.
Why then is this burden of historical guilt thrust on us time and time again? It’s the shadow of this guilt that has been the bane of Indian Muslim’s existence. Weighed down by this shame, he has put up with every injustice and insult all these years.
This is why while his fellow Indians confidently demand their share of the pie, he is content in his ghettos and grateful for crumbs — or promises of crumbs — the politicians throw his way. He is elated when his identity as an Indian is recognised at the time of polls and is wooed by political parties. But times are a-changing. Today’s Muslims aren’t prepared to be treated like second-class citizens in their own land.
We love this great land as much as the next Indian. Nobody has any right to lecture us on patriotism. And we aren’t ready to stand there, our heads bowed in shame, and take the blame every time some nut out there goes berserk.
Trust me it does hurt us too when innocent people suffer. I still can’t get the image of that young woman in a new saree, henna still fresh on her hands, out of my mind. She lay there on the road, next to a young man, maybe her husband. She looked as if she was in a deep, peaceful sleep. My heart went out to her and her loved ones. She didn’t deserve to die this way. And those who did this to her must be brought to justice and must be made to pay for their crimes.
But don’t blame a whole community when it’s not even established who is responsible for this outrage. And please don’t expect us to apologise. For we too are victims of terrorism.
After Jaipur, RSS and BJP men went on the rampage targeting Muslim homes and small businesses in the old city. But how many of us know that at least eight of those killed in Jaipur were Muslim? All of those killed in Mecca Masjid blast in Hyderabad and many of the victims of the Gokul chaat joint, again in Hyderabad, had been Muslims. Many of those killed in the Mumbai train bombings were from the minority community.
In fact, if there’s one community that has suffered the most at the hands of terrorists, it is the Muslims. Just look around, from Pakistan to Afghanistan and from Iraq to Palestine, it is Islam and its followers who are at the receiving end, whatever the causes. Not to mention the disgrace it has brought to the fair name of a great faith, distorting its humane and liberating teachings, perhaps forever.
But this goes beyond religious identities and ideologies. Terror knows no faith. And we are all its victims, whether we are Muslims, Christians or Hindus.
-Aijaz Zaka Syed is a senior journalist and commentator based in Dubai. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. Contact him at: aijaz.syed@hotmail.com.
An Open Letter to Israeli Defense Minister, Ehud Barak
Where was the democratic nature of your state when your soldiers killed my daughter?
By Bassam Aramin
Honorable General Ehud Barak, you don’t know me personally. I am a seeker of peace, and I struggle with all my strength and ability for the realization of a just peace that will bring calm and prosperity to Palestinians and Israelis together. I have suffered personally from your criminal occupation and I have paid a heavy price. Firstly, I was imprisoned when I was 17 years old and wasted seven years of my life in your barbaric prisons. Secondly, have you perhaps read or heard about what happened to the young girl Abir Aramin? She was a ten-year-old whom your soldiers killed with a rubber bullet from a distance of 15 feet on January 16, 2007 in front of her eleven-year-old sister Areen. Despite this I, the father of Abir — may she rest in peace — believe in the right of the Israeli person, as in the right of all people, to exist and to live in peace and security. So why do you not believe in our right to enjoy these same things, sir?
Where was the democratic nature of your state when your heroic soldiers killed my daughter before the eyes of her friends at the entrance to her school in Anata? Where were your democratic ideals when you closed the investigation file into Abir’s murder for lack of sufficient evidence, this despite the fact that the crime is clear and was committed in front of more than ten witnesses? Was Abir really a threat to your soldiers, sir?
I carry in my possession the weapons with which Abir threatened those soldiers. I have in my hand her school backpack, reinforced and armored, of course — the mechanical pencil she had, laden with dangerous lead cartridges, and her math book in which class she had a test the same day, which of course included detailed instructions on how to prepare chemical weapons. In addition to all this, she had a sharp ruler, which could for sure be used as a weapon to stab someone. Lastly, I found in her possession two pieces of chocolate that perhaps contained a bit of enriched uranium that would have certainly brought devastation upon your state, if she hadn’t been tempted to take them in her hand for a taste seconds before she was shot.
Here I have to give your soldiers credit in their incredible ability to incapacitate and kill with such deadly accuracy. The bullet hit Abir exactly one centimeter from her hypothalamus—this caused her to immediately enter a coma and she died thereafter and went to dwell in the presence of God, sparing her the continuing pain and heartache herein expressed.
Thus, Abir Aramin can be added to the list of great successes and security accomplishments in the name of the state of Israel. But I request, Minister and General, in that I am the father of this young girl, at the very least an admission of responsibility for this murder, or its cause. It is your duty to bring the soldier who murdered Abir to court so he may be tried and judged a murderer and criminal.
I believe that there is no military solution to the conflict and when those cowards murdered my daughter, I announced that I did not want revenge, I wanted justice, even though revenge is much easier. The real fighter is one who chooses the harder path of the two for the sake of peace, and revenge is the path of the coward.
Sir, the Palestinian people cannot forever pay the price of the fear and suspicion of the Israeli people. Free my people from this abominable occupation so that your people may live in prosperity and be free from fear.
For sixty years, the Palestinian people have paid the price of the Israeli military occupation an occupation which, in celebration of the Israeli state’s inception, carries out acts of outright antagonism that spill the blood of Palestinian fighters, women, children and elders indiscriminately. It is the Palestinian general public that provides a target for your war machine that does not protect the small from the grown. Our people has faced the same murderer since Gaza in 1956 — and the never-ending series continues.
I will not remind you now of the massacres that your government committed against my people; you know them far better than I. I read about them, heard about them — but you took part in them.
The question I pose to you is this: in light of your rich military experience, and as someone who himself has seen sixty years of conflict go by, when will Israel have the strength to finish the conflict militarily and realize a complete victory over the Palestinian people? Do you continue to believe that what cannot be done by might may be done by more might? Does the occupation conceal in its bag of tricks additional methods of killing that the Palestinian people have not yet had the misfortune to know?
If this is the case, perhaps it is a good idea for the Israeli government to try and use those methods. And perhaps they will be able to accomplish that tantalizingly complete victory…in another 60 years.
Sir, when will you understand that the conflict between us cannot be ended with an army? For despite all the effort and conceit of the occupation, it could not stop the stones of our children from hitting your occupying soldiers. How will you be able to stop the Palestinian uprising? This is a dream that will never come true, even in another 1000 years. Why are you not telling this truth to the residents of Ashkelon and Sderot, that there is no solution that will stop the Qassam missiles flying at them from a destroyed and blockaded Gaza except if there would be an end to the occupation?
This is the truth you’ve been running from for a long time.
Believe me, sir, that you will gain nothing out of continuing to detain people. More than 750,000 Palestinians have been detained from 1967 until today. What result has been achieved except an increased determination on our part for confrontation and resistance?
The policy of occupation only creates more and more people who rise up to fight occupation and refuse to accept its burden. The Palestinian prisoners who sit in your jails are among the most learned and erudite of our people, those are the most sensitive and humanistic. They have become educated in the tradition of liberty and democracy—and for this reason they will never agree to accept the occupation and subjugation. It is these men and women who will fight for peace, and if you want to realize peace you have no option but to set free these soldiers of peace first and foremost.
How much have you really benefited from your strategy of home demolitions, uprooting of trees, confiscating lands for questionable reasons and then establishing illegal settlements on those same lands? How much has it helped you to set up disgraceful checkpoints in every corner and every road of the West Bank and Gaza and at each intersection for the purpose of humiliating the residents of those areas, among them workers, students and political leaders. What is the expediency of all this, sir?
When will the bloodthirsty bullets of your soldiers be sated by the blood of our children? When will you be satisfied with our blood that you have already spilled and leave us? When will you leave our waters and our heavens? Do you not see the helmets upon which your soldiers write, “I was born to kill”? Do you not see your brave men killing children every day? How can you decide to prevent the people of Gaza from acquiring cooking gas and at the same time send them teargas and tanks and warplanes?
Only now do I understand the will of an Israeli woman in Italy — my colleague Eidan and I met her when we participated in a peace march from Perugia to Assisi as representatives of Combatants for Peace. When I asked her, “You aren’t planning to return to Israel?” She answered me: “I swore that if Ehud Barak won the election, I will leave Israel forever.” She continues to live there because you act according to a policy that says there is no Palestinian partner.
I cannot begin to express in this short letter the enormity of the moral failures that have harmed Israeli society. The newspaper Yediot Ahronot said that 40 per cent of new recruits to the IDF have criminal records and this may go a long way in explaining the long list of acts against Palestinian civilians that they commit during their service. This is supposed to be the most distinguished, moral army in the entire world, no? Is this why we find that 25 per cent of the soldiers of the army of the occupation took part in instances of torture and punishment of innocent civilians or were witnesses to such acts?
Sir, I want to submit that I have read the shameful report that every person of conscience should be horrified by, that talks of the torture of children in Hebron. And this — the strangling of Palestinian children by soldiers to test how much time they can stand without breathing, incidents that were committed by captains in your army, the most moral army in the world, this is the crown of shame on the brow of the occupation.
Sir, how do you justify your soldier’s use of children aged 10 as personal shields that they tie to the front of your patrols when they search for wanted persons or break up a demonstration? Where does international law permit this? I am trying to understand if this use of children as human shields is in some way related to the science of modern warfare, for the accusation that I hear in all instances of the killing of children in particular and in the killing of Palestinian citizens in general is that the Palestinians fighters use citizens for human shields to hide behind. How can there be a legal justification and distinction even in the Israeli terminology, but not in the international terminology, between Israelis and Palestinians?
How can you justify the deaths of those innocents just trying to peacefully pass though the checkpoints that your soldiers put up at all entrances to villages, cities or camps that prevent pregnant women from walking to hospitals to deliver? Would you ever agree to let this happen to your wife? What would you do then?
There are, however, military men, Israeli soldiers that used to do battle with the Palestinian people who at the moment of truth found that they are no more than pawns in the hands of the occupation. They had the courage and the valor to announce unanimously that they refuse to be occupiers. They exposed the falsehoods of their leaders who claim that Israel is reaching out her hand for peace but she has no partner on the Palestinian side. They discovered that they had never met a real Palestinian fighter face-to-face in combat, and that instead their day-to-day work was chasing schoolchildren, enforcing closures, destroying houses and putting up checkpoints and roadblocks to stop children who aren’t even 13 years old. They took a moral and courageous stance and without any difficulty found themselves a Palestinian partner from within the heart of the Palestinian movement, people who wasted the spring of their youth in the prisons of your occupation. Together they founded the organization Combatants for Peace. The name itself exposes the false promises and the policy that says there is no partner for peace. This organization, united in courageousness and and morality, is made up of people from both sides who understand that there is only one shared enemy that conceals the path of realization of peace and life together as two nations. This enemy is the illegal and immoral Israeli occupation. I am a member of this organization, and I call upon all who are searching for a true peace to join us.
We tell our peoples the truth, only the truth. We are committed to nonviolent resistance to the occupation, and I call here, in this very missive, to the people of our Palestinian nation that have been inscribed in the pages of history as the epitome of resilience, that have had the humanity to withstand decades of abuse and occupation with the purest steadfastness. I call also upon the people in Israel to accept moral and historic responsibility for the establishment of these two states together, and for a national, humanistic, peaceful Intifada, a rising up against this unjust occupation that has transformed your children into war criminals and to abject murderers. You Israelis — stop sending your soldiers — your sons — to kill our children, because the blood of our children and the blood of all those Palestinian innocents will chase your soldiers and the generals of your army to judgment in international courts as the rest of the war criminals in the world. You must learn this lesson. The honorable general must surely be aware that the majority of captains and generals in the Israeli army are forbidden from entering any European state for they will be wanted persons there, to be arrested and taken to court as war criminals and for crimes against humanity?
One last word – the blood of Abir will remain as a black crown on the brow of every Israeli and every Jew in the world until her murderer is brought to justice and passes the remainder of his days in jail, among the murderers and the criminals.
-Bassam Aramin is co-founder of Combatants for Peace. Translation by Mimi Asnes.
05.30.08
The Little Girl Who Shocked World Leaders Into Silence
Fatin Bundagji
There is a YouTube video clip being forwarded that is worth seeing and definitely worth passing around. Its content is an old footage from the “Earth Summit Conference” organized by the United Nations back in 1992, and the scene is taken from a plenary session under the theme, “Development and the Environment”.
The speaker is Severn Suzuki, a 13-year-old Canadian girl, and her audience is world leaders.
Two aspects of the footage got my attention: The speaker, and her message. At the age of 9, Severn started her own Environmental Children’s Organization (ECO), made up of a small group of children committed to teaching other kids about the ongoing environmental crisis. In 1992, Severn and her group raised enough money to attend the Premier Earth Summit in Brazil to warn decision makers of the catastrophic results of their actions — or inactions as we see today — on future generations.
And this is what she had to say:
“Hello, I am Severn Suzuki speaking for ECO the environmental children’s organization. We are a group of 12- and 13-year-olds trying to make a difference. Venessa Suthie, Morgan Geisler, Michelle Quigg and I. We have raised all the money to come here ourselves, to come 5000 miles to tell you adults you must change your ways.Coming up here today I have no hidden agenda. I am fighting for my future. Losing my future is not like losing an election or a few points on the stock market. I am here to speak for all generations to come. I am here to speak on behalf of the starving children around the world whose cries go unheard. I am here to speak for the countless animals dying across this planet because they have nowhere left to go. I am afraid to go out in the sun now because of the holes in our ozone; I am afraid to breathe the air because I don’t know what chemicals are in it. I used to go fishing in Vancouver, my home, with my dad until just a few years ago we found the fish full of cancers. And now we hear of animals and plants going extinct, every day, vanishing forever. In my life I have dreamt of seeing a great herd of wild animals, jungles and rainforests full of birds and butterflies, but now I wonder if they will even exist for my children to see.Did you have to worry of these things when you were my age? All this is happening before our eyes and yet we act as if we have all the time we want — and all the solutions. I am only a child and I don’t have all the solutions. But I want you to realize, neither do you! You don’t know how to fix the holes in our ozone layer; you don’t know how to bring a salmon back up a dead stream; you don’t know how to bring back an animal now extinct; and you can’t bring back the forests that once grew — and where there is now a desert. If you don’t know how to fix it, please stop breaking it.Here, you may be delegates of your government, business people, organizers, reporters, or politicians. But really you are mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles, and all of you are somebody’s child. I am only a child, yet I know that we are all part of a family, five billion-strong. In fact, thirty million species-strong, and voters and government will never change that. I am only a child yet I know that we are all in this together and should act as one single world toward one single goal.In my anger I am not blind, and in my fear I am not afraid of telling the world how I feel. In my country we make so much waste, we buy and throw away… buy and throw away… buy and throw away… and yet northern countries will not share with the needy, even when we have more than enough, we are afraid to share. We are afraid to let go of some of our wealth. In Canada, we live the privileged life. We have plenty of food, water and shelter. We have watches, bicycles, computers and television sets… the list could go on for two days.Two days ago here in Brazil, we were shocked when we spent time with some children living on the streets. This is what one child told us: “I wish I was rich. And if I were, I would give all the street children food, clothes, medicines, shelter and love and affection”. If a child on the street who has nothing is willing to share, why are we, who have everything, still so greedy?
I can’t stop thinking that these are children my own age and that it makes a tremendous difference where you are born. I can’t stop thinking that I could be one of those children living in the Favellas of Rio… I could be a child starving in Somalia… or a victim of war in the Middle East…or a beggar in India. I am only a child and yet I know that if all the money that was spent on war was spent on finding environmental answers and ending poverty… what a wonderful place this would be. At school, even in kindergarten you teach us how to behave in the world. You teach us to not to fight others, to work things out, to respect others, to clean up our mess, not to hurt other creatures, to share and not be greedy. Then why do you go out and do the things you tell us not to do?
Do not forget why you are attending these conferences, and who you are doing this for! We are your own children. You are deciding what kind of a world we are growing up in. Parents should be able to comfort their children by saying ‘everything is going to be alright, it is not the end of the world, and we are doing the best we can’. But I don’t think you can say that to us anymore. Are we even on your list of priorities? My dad always says, you are what you do, not what you say. Well, what you do makes me cry at night. You grownups say you love us, but I challenge you please make your actions reflect your words. Thank you…”
As Severn said her piece, her audience sat speechless. Some were teary-eyed; others sat their heads bent down in shame, while others simply nodded in agreement… Like them I was taken back -not only by the child’s maturity and wisdom but also by her piercing vision and premonition of things to come. I wondered what had become of her and of her timeless cry and I wondered what impact her plea had on her audience on that hot Brazilian summer day. With a little bit of research I discovered that according to Severn’s own account, her historic initiative landed on deaf ears.
I hope to believe that today, things will be different, and that as her 16-year-old revived plea makes its journey through the e-mails of billions of people around the world, someone in a remote land will take the lead and make sure that her message is not only heard, but also acted upon.
05.29.08
In the Propaganda Game, Israel Easily Wins
By Stuart Littlewood
Some time ago Hamas complained that the Palestinian Authority was not getting its message across thanks to “poorly qualified or unqualified spokespersons with inadequate political and linguistic abilities”.
Diplomacy had failed and the Palestinians needed “professional spokespersons with excellent knowledge of the world and mastery of foreign languages, especially English, to tell the world in a straightforward manner that Israel is a murderer, liar and land thief…”
How right Hamas is. Israel is the undeserving winner in the propaganda game. The Palestinians squander their chances and make little impact even though truth and justice are on their side. They occupy the moral high ground but consistently lose the all-important war of words. Why? The Palestinian General Delegation in London, for example, is blessed with two very talented people who should be making an impression.
Professor Manuel Hassassian took up his post as ambassador two and a half years ago, arriving at a critical moment in Palestinian diplomacy. He’s an academic “big gun” – a BA in Political Science from the American University of Beirut, an MA in International Relations from Toledo University, Ohio, USA, and a PhD in Comparative Politics from the University of Cincinnati, Ohio, USA.
Before his appointment to this vital London job he was executive vice-president of Bethlehem University as well as professor of political science and president of the Palestinian-European-American Cooperation in Education (PEACE) programme. Among other things, he’s an expert on Palestinian civil society and citizenship, the right of refugees to return and church affairs. And he’s very articulate.
Husam Zomlot is the Oxford Research Group’s Middle East consultant and political adviser to the Palestinian diplomatic effort in the UK. Another highly qualified academic, Zomlot has a BA in Economics and Political Science, an MSc in Development Studies, and his PhD thesis dealt with international peace building and post-conflict reconstruction aid programmes.
He has worked with the UN, the London School of Economics and the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute. He lectured on international economics at the University of London and has contributed to several books, including State formation in Palestine: viability and governance during a social transformation – heavy stuff by the sound of it. Zomlot is an expert on the Arab-Israeli conflict, Palestinian and Arab politics, transitional economies, and bilateral and multilateral negotiations.
These are the voices appointed to speak to Western diplomats and media on behalf of a dispossessed, tormented and humiliated people in what is possibly the world’s hottest of hot-spots. The General Delegation also has a public relations person, so with a team like this the Palestinians surely can’t go wrong.
During the Palestinian elections (January 2006) I tuned in to British TV and radio expecting informed comment from key Palestinians. The BBC wheeled in people whose English was often so bad as to be almost unintelligible, while giving generous air-time to well-rehearsed Israeli propagandists.
This prompted a letter of frustration to the BBC. “Why wasn’t the Palestinian ambassador at the forefront of your election news coverage?” I wanted to know. “I understand from the Palestinian Delegation in London that he was interviewed for the World Service and one or two digital channels, but that hardly gave mainstream viewers such as myself a chance to hear the authentic voice of Palestine…”
The BBC’s reply gave links to a few reports most of which had indeed been broadcast on the World Service rather than domestic channels. “I saw and heard none of them,” I wrote back. “Also you do not say why the official voice of Palestine in the UK, Professor Manuel Hassassian, is so seldom heard.”
Is Hassassian’s team not pushy enough? Has the tame Fatah administration in Ramallah ordered them to dumb down and not rock the boat? Or is it a case of not being “savvy” enough? One thing is certain: they are no match for the Israeli lie machine.
I twice asked the General Delegation’s London office to copy me on all press releases, and they twice promised to do so. I have received nothing except a few notices about forthcoming demonstration and suchlike, nothing a journalist could use to develop a good story. Are they not bothering to brief the press and TV? Is there no attempt to educate and inform?
How are British people supposed to understand the Palestinian point of view? The appalling situation in the West Bank and Gaza, which can be traced back to Britain’s foolishness 90 years ago, is massively relevant to us in the West today: it’s about Israel’s grand theft of the Holy Land, no less, and the terrorizing of its Christian and Muslim communities.
Hamas’s Haniyeh, Al-Zahar and Abu Zuri, and even the Catholic priest Fr Manuel Musallam, all bottled up in Gaza, seem far more effective with their limited access to news organizations than Hassassian and Zumlot in London with the world’s media on their doorstep. It is puzzling that Prof Hassassian, who comes from the besieged town of Bethlehem and ran a university that has been closed 12 times by the Israeli invader and shelled by Israeli tanks, apparently cannot make himself heard. As a Christian Palestinian with the highest credentials, one might have thought he’d find a ready audience here in Britain.
But academic guns are not necessarily the right calibre for counter-propaganda work, and Hamas have a point. Getting the message across, exposing Israeli disinformation, broadcasting the truth and setting the news agenda are tasks that require diplomats and senior politicians to be properly trained in Western media and publicity skills. The Palestinian Authority needs a shrewd communication strategy, a more proactive style and the right people to carry it off.
They must be able to refute and demolish Israel’s distorted definition of the conflict and re-frame it in Palestine’s terms, based on truth and justice.
Otherwise, the General Delegation in London might as well pack its bags.
-Stuart Littlewood is author of the book Radio Free Palestine, which tells the plight of the Palestinians under occupation. For further information visit: www.radiofreepalestine.co.uk.
One State: Coexistence, Not Apartheid
An area roughly the size of the US state of Vermont cannot sustain such a complex model.
By Ramzy Baroud
For the last 60 years, all those who have sought a genuinely peaceful and fair solution for Israel and Palestine have faced the same obstacle — Israel’s sense of invincibility and military arrogance, abetted by the US and other Western governments’ unwavering support.
Despite recent setbacks on the military front, the Israeli government is yet to awaken to the reality that Israel is simply not invincible. The wheel of history, which has seen the rise and fall of many great powers, won’t grind to a halt. Experiences have also repeatedly shown that neither Israel’s nuclear arms nor Washington’s billions of dollars in annual funds could create ’security’ for the former.
While Israel can celebrate whatever skewed version of history it wishes to, it still cannot defeat a people, ordinary people armed with their will to survive and reclaim what was rightfully theirs. The same problem confronted the US in Vietnam, France in Algeria and Italy in Libya. The Palestinian people will not evaporate. Attempts to undermine Palestinian unity, instigate civil violence, and groom and present shady characters as ‘representatives’ of Palestinians have failed in the past and will continue to fail.
Representing, and thus dealing with the conflict as one invented and sustained by Arab greed and Palestinian terrorism helped Israel garner sympathy, while simultaneously convoluting what should have been an urgent example of injustice, predicated on colonialism and ethnic cleansing.
More, depicting the mere existence of Palestinians as a ‘threat’, a ‘problem’ and a ‘demographic bomb’ is inhumane and actually a full-fledged form of racism. Throughout its 60 years of existence, successive Israeli governments have treated Palestinians — the native inhabitants of historic Palestine — as undesired and thus negligible inhabitants of a land that was promised only to Jews by some divine power thousands of years ago.
This archaic concept has managed to define mainstream politics in Israel, and increasingly the US, allowing religious doctrines to discriminate and brutally repress Palestinians, both citizens of Israel and residents of the occupied Territories.
Needless to say, neither a figurative Iron wall, like that proposed by Vladimir Jabotinsky in 1923, nor an actual massive and menacing structure as the one being erected in the West Bank can really separate Israel from its ‘problem’, the Palestinians. An area roughly the size of the US state of Vermont cannot sustain such a complex model — a country that is open unconditionally for all Jews who wish to immigrate, and an oppressed population that is caged in between walls, fences, and hundreds of checkpoints — without inviting perpetual conflict.
What Israel has created in Palestine belies its own claim that its ultimate wish is peace with security. While occupied East Jerusalem is entirely annexed by an Israeli government diktat, 40 per cent of the total size of the West Bank is used exclusively for the purposes of the illegal Jewish settlers and the Israeli military. How can Israel’s claim of wanting to live in peace be taken seriously if it continues to invade the lives, confiscate the land and usurp the water of Palestinians?
When Israel invaded East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, the Jewish citizens of Israel celebrated the ‘return’ of biblical Judea and Samaria and the reunification of Jerusalem. Nearly 300,000 more Palestinians were ethnically cleansed, adding to the many more who were evicted from historic Palestine in 1948.
Yet, most Palestinians have remained hostage to the Israeli-invented limbo that suggests they were neither citizens of Israel, nor of their own state, nor deserving of the rights of an occupied civilian population under the Geneva Convention.
Despite this, Israel’s insistence on employing military ’solutions’ in its dealing with Palestinians have constantly backfired. Palestinians naturally rebelled and were repeatedly suppressed, which only worsened the feud and heightened the level of violence.
The PLO’s acceptance of Israel’s existence, and UN Resolution 242 as a first step towards a two state solution was both ridiculed and rejected by the Israeli government, which continued to arrange for its own ineffective and ultimately destructive solutions.
Throughout the years, Israel translated its military strength to erect more settlements and move its population to occupied Palestinian territories. Even after the Oslo Accords of September 1993, the construction of settlements didn’t slow down, but rather accelerated. After the most recent peace talks in Annapolis in November 2007, Israel continues to grant more permits to build more homes in illegal settlements under the guise of ‘natural expansion.’
But it may have gone too far, leaving itself and Palestinians with few options now.
In a November 29, 2007 interview with Israeli daily Ha’aretz, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert warned that without a two-state agreement, Israel would face “a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights” in which case “Israel (would be) finished.” It’s ironic that Israeli leaders are now advocating the same solution that they vehemently rejected in the past. However, the Israeli version of the two-state agreement hardly meets the minimum expectations of Palestinians.
Without Jerusalem, without their refugees’ right of return as enshrined in UN resolution 194 and with a West Bank dotted with over 216 settlements and scarred by a mammoth wall, asking Palestinians to accept an Israeli version of the two-state solution is asking them to agree to their eternal imprisonment, subjugation and defeat — which they have rejected generation after generation.
If Israel is indeed interested in a peaceful resolution to this bloody conflict, one that is based on equal human and legal rights, justice, security and lasting peace, then it must add a new word to its lexicon: coexistence. Jews and Arabs coexisted peacefully prior to the rise of Zionism, and they are capable of doing so in the future. Any other solution would simply institutionalise racism and apartheid, undermine democracy and human rights and thus further perpetuate violence.
It’s time for a secular, democratic state to cease being part of a removed academic discussion, and instead be integrated into mainstream debate, if not dialogue in Palestine and Israel. This is the right, moral and indeed urgent course of action required now.
-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).
05.27.08
Blame It on Oil? No, Blame It on Bush
Aijaz Zaka Syed
Unlike English poet Alexander Pope — I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came — I suffer from a natural discomfort with numbers. Which is why one had to be more than dependent on one’s more calculating classmates when it came to mathematics. Even now I often fail to fathom the fundamentals of my modest monthly budget.
So while everybody who’s somebody holds forth on the perils of rising inflation and declining dollar (Emirati dirham, like other Gulf currencies, is handcuffed to the greenback), I can’t join the conversation thanks to my ineptitude with numbers. But even if one doesn’t understand the first thing about inflation and budgetary constraints we brown expats of subcontinental variety currently face in the Gulf, one constantly feels its effects.
Six years ago when I landed in Dubai, my weekly grocery bill used to range between 250 dirhams to 300 dirhams at Lulu, the neighborhood supermarket. Today, we feel blessed if we can keep it between 500 dirhams and 600 dirhams, even though my wife still checks the price tag and thinks twice before throwing anything in her trolley. The bag of Basmati rice that would be yours for 60 dirhams now costs you more than 110 dirhams. The humble “roti” that you’d get two for a dirham now costs the double. The monthly school fees for my children used to be well under 1,500 dirhams. These days, I have to write a check of 2,500 dirhams. These two being my biggest monthly expenses after housing, they are my budgetary benchmarks.
They also leave two huge holes in my pocket. And like so many other struggling expats, one finds the going increasingly tough. This despite the substantial pay rise most companies and governments have given their staff over the past couple of years.
I hate talking about my financial and domestic woes. And this is not a veiled appeal to my bosses for a raise either. But I am genuinely perplexed by the unparalleled rise in cost of living. If a guy like me who has a reasonably nice job with a big media organization finds the daily grind challenging, I wonder how people whose pay is less than what I shell out for my kids’ school fee or groceries manage?
A great deal has been said about the world food crisis. But it is not as if food and the staples like rice and wheat are scarcer today. They are not. They have only got too pricey. There is no shortage of food for those who can offer the right price. Supermarket shelves are still bursting with bags of rice and wheat flour. Only their prices have shot up — out of reach of less fortunate.
Some of our friends in the West, especially pundits like Thomas Friedman of New York Times, have been running a campaign against oil-producing countries — read Arabs and Muslims — blaming the high oil prices for the world’s economic woes.
The crude prices may be partly responsible for global economic problems. But have holier-than-thou wonks like Friedman ever wondered what is driving the oil prices?
It is the quirky dollar that is driving the oil. And why has the mighty dollar gone berserk? The people of Iraq and Afghanistan would tell you why. It is Bush’s disastrous wars that have broken the greenback’s back. And it is not just the luckless people of Iraq and Afghanistan who are paying for this cowboy president’s Oedipal insecurities. From the suicidal farmers in India to the hungry multitudes of Africa, all of us are paying for these wars.
There is strong evidence now to suggest that the shooting price of energy is a direct result of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the accompanying geopolitical instability.
As if these two disastrous campaigns were not enough to drive nervous energy markets crazy, our neocon friends are pitching for a war with Iran.
Can you blame the markets then if they are getting jittery? After all, Iran is one of the world’s biggest producers of oil. And in case some of us fail to recall, Iraq, the main front of the neocon war, too was a big producer of oil. Under Saddam, it was the second largest producer after Saudi Arabia.
So is this a mere coincidence that the oil prices shot up soon after the US attack on Iraq? When Bush took the Americans, and the rest of us, into the morass called Mesopotamia, the crude was selling at about a quarter of what it is today. And look where we are today, at $129 a barrel.
If things continue in this fashion, top economic brains warn, before long the world could be looking at $200 a barrel. Imagine what it could do to multiply our current economic woes.
Even a layman like me can see that markets are sensitive to bad news and their short- and long-term effects. Especially when it is inspired by the US, the world’s biggest economy and the custodian of the international trade and financial system. And all Bush has done over the past seven years is bombard markets with bad news.
Oil prices began to climb after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and have risen in tandem with the escalation of conflict and turbulence in the Middle East. There’s clearly a method in the madness. These wars are also contributing to the escalation of fuel cost and economic woes in indirect ways; by plunging the US ever deeper into debt and depreciating the dollar. The oil is largely priced in US dollars. And as the greenback’s value is eroded, oil-exporting countries demand more and more dollars for their produce.
Aside from pushing up oil and inflation, the war is also at the heart of the global food crisis. The prices of essential foodstuff and grains like rice and wheat have shot up because fuel prices have gone up; food production and its transportation are critically dependent on fuel.
The World Bank says food prices have more than doubled over the past three years. The price of rice, the staple for billions of Asians, is up 147 percent over the past year alone. The mounting food prices have caused hunger and riots across the Third World.
Maybe it is time for the Americans and the rest of the world to see that the disastrous consequences of Bush wars go beyond Iraq and Afghanistan. They have set the whole world on fire. And the first thing the Americans can do to put out the blaze is persuade the cowboy in the White House to bring the troops home.
— Aijaz Zaka Syed is a Dubai-based journalist and commentator.
Escaping Forwards
Is Israel ready to concede the occupied Golan Heights?
By Uri Avnery
The Germans call it “die Flucht nach vorne” – escaping forwards. When the situation is desperate, attack! Instead of retreating, advance!
When there is no way out, storm ahead!
This method was successful in 1948. At the end of May, the Egyptian army was advancing on Tel Aviv. We – a very, very thin line of soldiers – were all that stood in its way. So we attacked. Again and again and again. We suffered heavy losses. But we stopped the Egyptian advance.
Now Ehud Olmert is applying the same method. His situation is desperate. Most people in Israel do not doubt that he has received large bribes in envelopes stuffed with dollars. The Attorney General is liable to indict him any time, and this will compel him to resign.
And lo and behold, at the most critical moment, just before the most damning details come out, a joint statement is issued simultaneously in Jerusalem, Damascus and Ankara, announcing the start of peace negotiations between Israel and Syria, with Turkey acting as mediator. The talks will be based on the principles of the 1991 Madrid Conference, meaning the return of the entire Golan Heights.
Wow!!!
In this, too, Olmert is the worthy pupil of his predecessor and mentor, Ariel Sharon.
Sharon was up to his neck in corruption affairs. In one of them, the so-called “Greek Island affair”, the Israeli millionaire David Appel paid huge sums to Sharon’s son, a novice, for “advice”. At the time, too, it seemed that the Attorney General could not possibly avoid issuing an indictment.
Sharon’s response was sheer genius: the Separation. Separation from the Gaza Strip. Separation from the Attorney General.
That was a gigantic operation. In a minutely orchestrated melodramatic performance, the Gush Katif settlements were dismantled. Together with several army divisions, all police forces – the same police that was supposed to investigate the Sharon family’s business affairs – were deployed in a breath-taking national endeavor. The peace camp supported, of course, the evacuation of the settlements. The corruption affairs were all but forgotten.
The separation, which was carried out without any dialogue with the Palestinians, has turned the whole of the Gaza Strip into a ticking bomb, and now Ehud Olmert has to negotiate a cease-fire. For Sharon, though, the entire exercise was a success. If he had not suffered a stroke, he would still be Prime Minister today.
The lesson did not escape Olmert.
Aesthetes May exclaim: Phooey! We should not countenance such a dirty trick! We cannot agree to a peace conceived in sin!
Maybe my aesthetic sense is blunted. Because I am ready to accept peace even from a totally corrupt leader, even from Satan himself. If the corruption of a politician causes him to do something that will save the lives of hundreds and thousands of human beings on both sides – that’s OK with me. Didn’t the philosopher Friedrich Hegel talk about the “cunning of reason”?
The Bible recounts that when the army of Damascus laid siege to Samaria, the capital of the Kingdom of Israel, four leprous men brought the news that the enemy had fled (2 Kings, 7). The Hebrew poetess Rachel wrote, alluding to this story, that she was not willing to receive good news from lepers. Well, I am.
Conventional wisdom has it that to make peace, one needs a strong leader. Now it appears that the opposite also works: that a weak leader, almost submerged in troubles, whose term in office could come to a sudden end at any moment and whose coalition stands on feet of clay, a leader who has nothing to lose – he too may risk all to make peace.
The plot may move on from here in several possible directions.
The first possibility: it’s all “spin” – an American term that has become Olmert’s middle name. He will just stretch the negotiations out like bubble gum, as he has been doing with the Palestinians, and wait for the storm to blow over.
It will be difficult for him to do so, because Turkey is now a partner in the game. Even Olmert understands that it will be sheer folly to annoy the Turks, who are risking their national prestige here. Turkey is a very important partner of our security establishment.
Whatever comes of it, Olmert’s agreement to conduct negotiations based on the return of all the Golan is an important step forward. Coming on top of the previous undertakings by Yitzhak Rabin, Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak, it defines a line of no return.
The second possibility: Olmert really means it. For his own reasons, he will conduct negotiations “in good faith”, as he undertook this week, and reach an agreement. In the country, a wild campaign of incitement will be launched against him. The Knesset will fall apart, new elections will be held, Olmert will again head the Kadima list and win as peacemaker.
Alternatively: he will lose those elections. But he will leave the scene in an honorable cause, not thrown out for his own corruption, but sacrificing himself on the altar of peace.
Alternatively: the Attorney General will indict him in spite of everything, he will resign but go home with head held high as a leader who has taken a historic step. The Attorney General will look like a saboteur of peace and perhaps even the cause of another war.
A pertinent question: if Olmert has indeed decided to “escape forwards”‘ why escape forwards towards peace and not towards war? This is what usually happens: leaders on the threshold of disaster prefer to start a little (or sometimes big) war. There is nothing like war to divert attention, and waging war is almost always more popular, at least at the beginning, than making peace.
Here there are also two possibilities:
The first: like Paul, Olmert had a revelation, and has really become a man of peace. The nationalist demagogue has matured and now understands that the national interest demands peace. A cynic will laugh out loud. But stranger things have happened on the road to Damascus.
The second: Olmert believes that the Israeli public prefers peace with Syria to war with Syria, and hopes to gain some popularity as a peace-maker. (I believe this to be true.)
The third: Olmert knows that all the chiefs of the Security Establishment (with the notable exception of the Mossad boss) support peace with Syria out of cold strategic calculation. In the eyes of the army General Staff, the loss of the Golan Heights is a reasonable price to pay for breaking Syria loose from Iran and lessening its support for Hizbullah and Hamas, especially if an international force is stationed there after they revert to being the “Syrian Heights”.
Syria is a Sunni country, even if it is ruled by members of the small Alawite sect, which is closer to the Shia. (The Alawis derive their name from Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet, who the Shiites consider his rightful heir.) The alliance between secular Sunni Syria and orthodox Shiite Iran is a marriage of convenience, without an ideological basis. The alliance with Shiite Hizbullah is also based on interests: since Syria does not dare to attack Israel in order to get the Golan back, it supports Hizbullah as a proxy.
All this happens without the US. This, too, has its precedents: the Sadat initiative of 1977 matured behind the backs of the Americans (as the American ambassador in Cairo at the time told me later). The Oslo initiative also ripened without American participation.
Until lately, the US has opposed any Israeli-Syrian thaw, and even now looks at it askance. In George Bush’s cowboy world vision, Syria belongs to the “axis of evil” and must be isolated.
That is grist to the mill for John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, the two American professors who are due to visit Israel next month. Their provocative book asserted that the Israel lobby totally dominates US foreign policy. In this new development, it does indeed seem that Jerusalem has bent Washington to its will.
During his visit to Jerusalem a few days ago, Bush railed against talking with enemies. This was understood to be a rebuke aimed at Barack Obama, who has announced his willingness to speak with the leaders of Iran. Perhaps Olmert is already betting on Obama’s entering the White House.
But Bush is not finished yet. He has got eight more months to go, and he, too, may come to the conclusion that he should “escape forwards”. In his case: by attacking Iran.
How is all this going to affect the mother of all problems, the core of the Israeli-Arab conflict: the question of Palestine?
Menachem Begin made a separate peace with Egypt and gave back the whole of the Sinai Peninsula in order to concentrate on the war with the Palestinians. Undoubtedly, Begin was ready to do the same on the Syrian front. According to the map used by Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky, which Olmert was brought up on, the Golan, like Sinai, is not a part of Eretz Israel.
A separate peace harbors great dangers for the Palestinians. If the Israeli government reaches a peace agreement with Syria (and then Lebanon), it will have peace with all the neighboring states. The Palestinians will be isolated and the Israeli government will be able to deal with them as it wishes.
As against this danger, there is a positive prospect: that after the evacuation of the Golan, there will be increased pressure, from inside and outside, to reach peace with the Palestinians, too, at long last.
The Golan settlers are far more popular in Israel than their West Bank counterparts. While the Ofra and Hebron settlers are viewed as religious fanatics, whose crazy behavior is quite alien to the Israeli character, the settlers of the Golan are seen as “people like us”. The more so, since they were sent there by the Labor Party. If the Golan settlers are evacuated, it will be much easier to deal with the “Judea and Samaria” crowd.
Being at peace with all Arab states, the Israeli public may feel more secure, and therefore more willing to take risks in making peace with the Palestinian people.
The international atmosphere will also change. If the “axis of evil” fantasy disappears together with George Bush, and a new American leadership makes a serious effort to achieve peace, optimism will again dare to raise its battered head. Some people dream about a partnership of Barack Obama and Tzipi Livni.
All this belongs to the future. In the meantime we have a weak Olmert, who needs a powerful initiative. In the Biblical legend, the hero Samson killed a young lion, and when he returned to it, “behold, there was a swarm of bees and honey in the carcase.” Samson put forth a riddle unto the Philistines: “Out of the strong came forth sweetness”, and nobody was able to solve it (Judges, 14).
Now we can well ask: “Will the weak bring forth sweetness?”
-Uri Avnery is an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.
05.26.08
Why the Middle East Doesn’t Matter
Jonathan Power
Osama Bin Laden has made Al-Qaeda’s position crystal clear in his latest tape released on May 16. He said the fight for the Palestinian cause is the most important factor driving Al-Qaeda’s war with the West and that was the primary reason for 9/11.
It sounds topical enough given the amount of attention that the Washington is presently giving the Israel/Palestinian peace quest. But, in truth, Bin Laden may well be behind the curve.
A two-state solution can no longer be a viable political goal, because: a) in terms of the demographics a Muslim majority in Israeli-controlled territory is less than a decade away, b) the Israelis have effectively created a single state encompassing both Jews and Palestinians. To all intents and purposes it imitates the South Africa of apartheid days, a unitary state with a minority group attempting to rule by oppression over a minority.
The only way to bring peace is to do what the white South Africans did under President F.W. de Klerk. As he once explained it to me, he felt compelled to negotiate with the African National Congress led by Nelson Mandela, not because of the outside world’s sanctions, but because he realized that South Africa was becoming unlivable for all and a way had to be found for the minority to live safely under the rule of the majority.
Perhaps it’s time overdue for the US and Europe to make clear that the preservation of Israel as a pure Jewish state is no longer of strategic concern whose interests must be preserved at all costs, by money, by political muscle and, in case of a showdown, by the support of the force of arms. If this penny can be made to drop in the Israeli mind and the Jewish diaspora then, as did the white South Africans, it would be time to sit down with the Palestinians and work out how to hold an election in a unitary state.
But first, for this to happen, the West has to shed its notion of the whole of the Middle East being strategically important. In an important essay last year in Prospect magazine Edward Luttwak from the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC, made a convincing argument for this.
Israel and Palestine are not at “five minutes to midnight”, he argues. “It is the same old cyclical conflict which always restarts when peace is about to break out, and always dampens down when the violence becomes intense enough.”
In strategic terms the Arab-Israeli conflict has become almost irrelevant since the end of the Cold War. The conflict has had no impact on oil prices since the 1973 Saudi embargo, the last time the “oil weapon” was wielded.
Continuously, the West seems to have bought the Israeli argument that they are up against the threat of the combined armies of the Arab world. But military expenditure in all the Arab states has fallen rapidly since the 1973 war. Even when Egypt was aided by massive Soviet military purchases and gifts in the 1960s it was quickly defeated in both 1967 and 1973.
The West made the same mistake of overestimating Iraqi military power in the 1990s. Saddam Hussein’s divisions were counted as if they were well-trained German Panzers. But when the war came the Iraqi air force fled to Iran and the tanks became target practice for the Western invaders. The second Gulf War had an even more farcical rationale (but it wasn’t that funny) with the assumptions that well-sanctioned Iraq had built a terrifying arsenal of ultra modern weapons of mass destruction.
Even with non-Arab Iran and its acolytes, Hezbollah and Hamas, we are whipped into hysterics of “fear of the terrorist”. Yet their activities are very localized, unlike the Palestinian strikes of the 60s and 70s, and Iran’s special international terrorist department has produced only one major bombing in the Middle East in 1996. Compared with what the Soviet Union threatened the West with and with what Hitler actually did, this is derisory. Even if Iran is developing nuclear weapons to say that the people of Iran patriotically support the endeavor is a large overstatement. Persian nationalism is a minority position in a country where half the population is not even Persian. Clever diplomacy would play to these cleavages.
In short, the West should de-couple itself from the Middle East, from both the Arab side and the Israeli side. It should declare it has no strategic interest in the region. This would create the space for both the Palestinians and the Israelis to look each other in the eye and realize it is they who have to find a way to peace.
05.24.08
How to Destroy a Country and Get Off Scot-Free
Just who are the real terrorists ?
By Linda Heard
Someone once told me if you’re going to tell a lie make it a whopper based on the premise the more outrageous the lie the more likely it is to be believed. At the time, I wrote off his advice as hogwash but as we see from the Iraq debacle, he was right. Five years later, the deceit continues undiminished and nobody has been held to account.
Britain’s Gordon Brown yesterday promised to hold an enquiry into the “mistakes” made in Iraq. Sounds good, but don’t hold your breath. All previous inquiries have been labeled “whitewashes”. They can’t afford the truth to come out else they might get a one-way ticket to The Hague.
Ambassador David Satterfield, and adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, is doing the rounds of talk shows lauding America’s victories over Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
On one occasion the host interjected to mention the unpalatable fact that Al-Qaeda members only flocked to Iraq once the Americans were in place leaving Satterfield momentarily nonplussed.
It’s obvious that Satterfield is so saturated in the party line he forgot the Pentagon’s recently published study that found with certainty that Saddam Hussein had absolutely no links to Al-Qaeda. And lest we forget Saddam didn’t have WMD either, which means not only was the war immoral the prewar sanctions on that country that contributed to the deaths of over half-a-million Iraqi children were too.
Think about it for a moment. The warmongers invaded, crushed and occupied a country that was no threat to anyone. They stood by as it was looted, exacerbated sectarianism, flattened entire towns, tortured untold numbers of innocents, brought in gum-chewing, tattooed foreign mercenaries and paid crony companies billions of dollars for mythical reconstruction projects.
They then pretended to hand over sovereignty to that country while at the same time constructing permanent bases and the biggest US Embassy in history resembling a small town. They said they had no interest in Iraq’s oil, yet they are putting immense pressure on the Iraqi government (sic) to sign into law a bill that permits foreign (read American) oil companies to lock up decades-long deals. Let’s be frank. Iraq wasn’t a blunder, it was a crime. So how did they manage to get away with implanting their long-conceived plot to do away with Israel’s No. 1 foe, ensure their competitors couldn’t get their hands on Iraq’s resources and entrench their military might in the region? Future historians will no doubt be scratching their heads over this one. You had to live through it to believe it.
First, they cleverly used the politics of fear to sway public opinion. As noted in the Project for the New American Century’s document “Rebuilding America’s Defenses”, the warmonger signatories – who later became senior members of the Bush administration – needed “a new Pearl Harbor”. On Sept. 11, 2001 they got it. Americans and their allies were in shock. Almost every country in the world was sympathetic and willing to do anything to help. And, boy, did they capitalize on that empathy even managing to persuade Russia to stay silent as they made deals with Caspian states to allow US bases.
Step one was a country where a giant bogeyman was supposed to be hiding out in a cave presumably equipped with a dialysis machine and a production studio and whose black-turbaned government forced women to wear a burqa and disallowed nail polish. But then Defense Minister Donald Rumsfeld was disappointed because there weren’t enough targets for his bombs. It was no fun bombing a country into the Stone Age when it was already there.
Step two was the insidious demonizing of Muslims, thousands of whom were arrested and held for months without charge or access to lawyers. In that climate of fear, it was relatively simple to persuade the American people that Saddam Hussein was conniving with the people who brought down the World Trade Center. US officials warned of mushroom clouds; Prime Minister Tony Blair said British interests could be attacked within 45 minutes of Saddam giving the order. Then Secretary of State Colin Powell allowed himself to be used as their fall guy. He spouted the most unbelievable scripted codswallop the UN had ever heard…yet, bullied and bribed nation after nation pretended to believe him as IAEA chief Mohammed El-Baradei and UN weapons inspector Hans Blix did little to discredit the hoax.
Step three entailed replacing Osama in people’s minds with Saddam, who overnight morphed into a hydra-headed monster whose idea of a pleasant weekend was gassing and torturing his own people.
Step four was ‘Shock and Awe’ which illuminated the Baghdad skyline on March 19, 2003. As their bombs and missiles rained down on crowded market places scattering limbs, they told us those bombs and missiles were Saddam’s even though the Independent’s Middle East correspondent inconveniently dug up their Made in the USA shards.
As the months went on, we began to wonder what happened to the WMD. They told us it was only a matter of time before it would be unearthed from under the sands or discovered in a tunnel under one of Saddam’s palaces. They even suggested it may have been shipped off to a neighboring country for safekeeping!!
Step five was an orchestrated administration campaign to inject us with mass amnesia. Never mind about the weapons, they said. We are here to liberate the poor Iraqi people from their evil dictator and deliver freedom and democracy. Look, look, they said. The Iraqis have purple fingers! With up to one million dead, Iraqis are lucky they have any fingers at all.
To be fair, they couldn’t have done it without the aid of a compliant, supine media, which embedded its reporters with US battalions and agreed not to show captured US soldiers, flag-draped coffins, military funerals or scenes of blood-soaked Iraqi civilians. Independent reporters who neglected to abide by the script were discredited, refused access to information and even shelled.
I still recall a live report from David Chater of Sky News, who saw the barrel of a US tank slowly turn toward the Palestine hotel – known to be a journalist’s hang-out – before firing its shell killing three reporters. The Baghdad offices of Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya were also hit.
With so much information on tap I’m flabbergasted that so many people still believe the Iraq fairytale. I wish they’d get in touch with me. I’ve got a few pyramids and a sphinx going cheap. Sad, isn’t it!
05.22.08
When Free Speech Doesn’t Come Free
By Remi Kanazi
Free speech is not without consequence. In the United States, for example, criticism of Israel is tantamount to heresy.
Former US President Jimmy Carter felt a societal backlash last year after the release of his book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, which condemned Israel’s apartheid-style policies in the occupied Palestinian territories. Consequently, and without foundation, Carter was branded by many in the American press as a one-sided, anti-Semitic propagandist. Similarly, Harvard professor Stephen Walt and University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer were lambasted for a paper the two co-authored that discussed the power of the Israel lobby and its adverse effect on American policy. Additionally, Norman Finkelstein, an esteemed professor at Depaul University and author of the bestselling book, The Holocaust Industry, witnessed a McCarthyite-style campaign mounted against him when he came up for tenure. Finkelstein, the son of Holocaust survivors, has been an outspoken critic of Israel’s human rights abuses and of pro-Israel apologist and Harvard professor, Alan Dershowitz. Predictably, it was Dershowitz who led the anti-tenure campaign against him; ultimately, Finkelstein was not only denied tenure, but he lost his job at Depaul.
The attacks against Carter, Finkelstein, Walt and Mearsheimer serve as a few well-known examples of the consequences writers and intellectuals face when they breach the line and criticize Israel. Furthermore, the condemnation writers and intellectuals of Arab descent face are invariably higher than Jews of conscience, former presidents, and highly regarded academics. As a result, many writers often acquiesce to the demands of the mainstream. Their self-censorship usually appears in the form of “toning down the message,” be it to please editors or critics—essentially to conform to the reality of purported pragmatism. Yet, this “pragmatism” is a euphemism for acceptance of a repressive status quo and is analogous to the “necessary” practical thinking that silenced a multitude of commentators during the Oslo years – the supposed time of peace. Unsurprisingly, untold Palestinian suffering followed as a result of increased settlement expansion, land confiscation, checkpoints and seizures, and the ultimate failure of Camp David 2000.
Shying away from perceived controversial matters may help to protect a mainstream career, but the intent of a political analyst should not be to produce works of fiction. The vast majority of Americans weren’t open to criticism of US policy during the run-up to the war on Iraq, mainly due to the media’s complicity in promoting the war, but criticism was still the appropriate course of action based on the facts, and Americans would have been better off for it today.
A man who combined principle, activism, and human appeal quite masterfully was distinguished educator and commentator, Edward Said. In the realm of academia and Middle East analysis, Said was by no means viewed as the quintessential radical. Nonetheless, his positions were radical when juxtaposed with “conventional wisdom”: he was a proponent of the one-state solution, an unwavering critic of the Israeli government, and an ardent supporter of the ostensibly controversial right of return. Said was still heavily criticized throughout his career and endured incessant attacks by his detractors, yet his accessible personality and articulate message kept him relevant.
Sadly, Said’s relative acceptance has been the exception rather than the rule. In recent years, there has been increased emphasis on putative pragmatic dialogue. However, this accentuation on so-called rational and balanced thinking has proven to be little more than a sinister means to pressure the oppressed to accept the position of the oppressor. The greatest leaders of the last hundred years didn’t shy away from controversy; they remained persistent, and saw their visions brought to fruition; be they Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, or Mahatma Gandhi. Nevertheless, one cannot overlook that even paramount figures have been castigated for “overstepping” their boundaries, namely Martin Luther King who was chided for speaking out against the war in Vietnam, imperialism, and social injustices that plagued the US.
This week, Palestinians across the US commemorated 60 years of displacement. Yet, the lens the Palestinian people are expected to look through under the pragmatist vision is one that sees a dispossessed people as necessary victims for a righteous state to take form. Unfortunately, waves of writers and commentators continue to adopt this line in fear of retribution, in exchange for nicer houses and comfortable livings, or a combination of both. That is their free will. Free speech is not without consequence. Nonetheless, losing piece of mind is the only repercussion a writer should fear.
-Remi Kanazi is the editor of the forthcoming anthology of poetry, Poets For Palestine, which can be pre-ordered at www.PoetsForPalestine.com. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. Contact him at: remroum@gmail.com.
Israel’s Game of Assassination
B’Tselem: 231 Palestinians have been assassinated, 385 innocent bystanders murdered since 2000.
By Stuart Littewood
Some readers will remember the 1969 film The Assassination Bureau, a tongue-in-cheek romp based on Jack London’s unfinished novel. The setting is the turn of the century a hundred years ago, a fanciful time for regime change and the purging of corrupt monarchs and cruel tyrants. The Bureau’s hit team is for hire provided that Ivan Dragomiloff, founder and mastermind, deems the targeted killing “socially justifiable” and there’s proof of the candidate’s misdeeds.
Eventually, however, the moral rectitude of the enterprise gives way to financial greed, and the day comes when the Bureau accepts a mission to eradicate an unnamed but prominent public figure. The fee is paid in advance, proof supplied, job accepted… then the name is revealed. The target is Dragomiloff himself. The Assassination Bureau cannot go back on its word and Dragomiloff finds himself pitted against the killing machine he himself created and perfected…
Assassination is the targeted killing of persons usually for political or ideological (and often insane) motives. This is OK, but not OK.
In 1976, US President Ford issued an Executive Order which was enacted after revelations that the CIA had made several attempts on the life of Cuba’s Fidel Castro. Henceforward targeted political killings were outlawed: “No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination.” Every US president since then has upheld Ford’s prohibition on assassinations… or somehow got round it.
Carter and Reagan reaffirmed the ban, although it didn’t stop the US bombing Gaddafi’s home in 1986 in the hope of rubbing him out, or the Clinton administration firing cruise missiles at suspected guerrilla camps in Afghanistan in 1998, or Bush instructing the CIA to engage in “lethal covert operations” (based on an intelligence ‘finding’) to destroy Bin Laden and his al-Qaeda organisation.
Nice and Legal, Though
White House and CIA lawyers claim that an intelligence ‘finding’ makes a difference because the ban on political assassinations doesn’t apply in wartime. Hey presto! the right sort of finding puts everything on a war footing. They also say that the prohibition won’t prevent the US taking action against terrorists. And in the wake of 9-11 it won’t stop the United States acting in self-defence. So… all the US has to do is invent or manufacture a ‘finding’, label the folk who stand in their way ‘terrorists’ and claim the murder was an act of self-defence in a war situation, and they’re home and dry.
Reports suggest the Bush administration has got together with Israel to establish the legal framework for a new American targeted-assassination policy. The Israelis, of course, are world experts. Annoying pockets of resistance to their land-grabs, ethnic cleansing, abductions, illegal settlements and other criminal activities in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are answered with the wholesale imposition of specially concocted warfare laws for the benefit of Israel’s ’self-defence’, or ‘homeland security’, but which trample on everyone else’s rights. This is the sort of chicanery that suits Bush admirably as he presses ahead with his war-without-end on terror.
Israel’s liking for assassination and murder goes way back to pre-State days when such atrocities were practised against Arab and British targets by the Irgun, a thoroughly unpleasant organisation that believed political violence and terrorism were legitimate tools for removing obstacles to the Zionist cause and driving the Arabs off their lands. Assassination became official Israeli policy in 1999 when the military planned ‘initiated attacks’ to stop Yasser Arafat’s militia, the Tanzim, from firing on illegal Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza.
The Israelis demonstrated rare ingenuity in bumping off bomb maker Yahya Ayyesh. In 1996 this master-technician in the art of suicide bombing had been on Israel’s most-wanted list for 3 years. Shabak (Israel’s secret service) finally tricked a friend into giving Ayyash a booby-trapped cell phone. When Ayyash used it, Shabak detonated it.
Earlier this year they excelled themselves again by terminating Hezbollah’s Imad Mughniyeh, ‘the Fox’, with an exploding headrest in his Mitsubishi.
However, their preferred method of assassination is the airstrike, which is lazy, lacking in finesse and often messy. In 2002 Israeli F-16 warplanes bombed the house of Sheikh Salah Shehadeh, the military commander of Hamas, in Gaza City scandalously killing not just him but at least 11 other Palestinians, including seven children, and wounding 120 others.
In 2004 at the second attempt Hamas’s spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, wheelchair-bound since the age of 12, and nine innocent bystanders were killed in a helicopter gunship attack. Yassin had survived an F16 bomb blast the previous year. Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon characterised Yassin as “the mastermind of Palestinian terror” and a “mass murderer”, which was comical coming from the war criminal who ran Israel’s death squad, Unit 101, and was found indirectly responsible for the massacres in the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps.
According to the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem 231 Palestinians have been assassinated, 385 innocent bystanders murdered and heaven knows how many injured or mutiliated by Israel since the second intifada in 2000. “The use of state assassinations by Israel against Palestinian suspects is undermining the rule of law and fuelling the cycle of violence in the region” warns Amnesty International.
But this systematic extermination is regarded as “legal and legitimate” by Israel’s attorney-general. “If anyone has committed or is planning to carry out terrorist attacks, he has to be hit. It is effective, precise, and just,” said Israeli minister Ephraim Sneh in 2001, careless of the frequent lack of precision, the collateral casualties and the possibility that his information is wrong… and the justice of it?
It’s catching though. The US State Department similarly describes its own hits on Al-Qaeda as “legal and necessary.” But pre-emptive strikes are not America’s only tool. There’s the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay where hundreds of prisoners of ‘war’, from 13 years old upwards, are held long-term under inhuman conditions, without ‘due process’ and in flagrant breach of Geneva Conventions. Many have now been ‘rendered’ to other countries. It’s a living death and many will actually die in unlawful captivity, victims of a quite different form of assassination.
US Vice President Dick Cheney told Fox News: “If you’ve got an organisation that has plotted or is plotting some kind of suicide bomber attack, for example, and they [the Israelis] have hard evidence of who it is and where they’re located, I think there’s some justification in their trying to protect themselves by pre-empting.”
This endorsement gave a welcome boost to Sharon’s accelerated assassination programme. Arafat claimed the Israeli cabinet had approved a plan to kill a large number of leading Palestinians. Sharon denied it but defended assassinations as a “defensive counter-terrorism measure”. He said he had sent the Palestinians a list of 100 terrorists the Palestinian Authority must arrest, otherwise Israel would continue to “exercise our right of self-defence.”
We’re told Israeli advisers are now training US special forces in aggressive counter-insurgency methods in Iraq, including the use of assassination squads against guerrilla leaders. Urban warfare specialists are sharing the skills they have honed against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza in order to help the US set up its own hunter-killer teams.
Israeli Death Squads in the UK?
Even more worrying are reports that Israeli death squads have been authorised to enter “friendly” countries and kill those suspected of being a threat to the Jewish state wherever they are hiding. Targeted killings were pretty much restricted to Occupied Palestine but the appointment of a new Mossad director, Meir Dagan, in 2002 changed all that.
Sharon was said to have given his old friend Dagan a mandate to revive the traditional methods of Mossad, including assassinations abroad, even at the risk to Israel’s bilateral relations. So our Home Secretary, the fragrant Jacqui Smith, had better tell us truthfully whether Mossad hoodlums are at this moment prowling the streets of London, Bradford, Glasgow and Manchester snuffing out plotters against their regime.
-Stuart Littlewood is author of the book Radio Free Palestine, which tells the plight of the Palestinians under occupation.
Another Ominous Bush Bash
Bush began by praising Sharon as ‘one of Israel’s greatest leaders.’
By Ira Glunts
In a talk eerily reminiscent of his “Axis of Evil” speech, President George W. Bush told the Israeli Knesset on May 15 of his commitment to vanquish any group that opposes his vision of American hegemony in the Middle East. He specifically included Syria, Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and Al Qaeda as the enemies in his “war against terror and extremism.” Oddly he did not include the Taliban, whom the US military is currently fighting in Afghanistan, on his list of Muslim enemies. Perhaps this is because his Israeli hosts do not perceive the Taliban as an immediate threat to their security.
It is difficult to know whether Bush’s exaggerated bellicosity derives from his desire to please the Israelis, play to his political base in the United States, or is simply another occasion for him to engage in the type of ominous saber-rattling that has been characteristic of his administration. President Bush emphasized his dedication and resolve to press on with his aggressive foreign policy by proclaiming that the war on terror is “an ancient battle between good and evil.” Considering the current unstable political situation in both Gaza and Lebanon, plus the diplomatic crisis in US/Iranian relations, one has to wonder if the President’s words signify that the US has immediate plans for an increased military engagement in the region.
Bush began his remarks by praising Ariel Sharon as “one of Israel’s greatest leaders” and reiterating his provocative statement that the former Israeli Prime Minister was “a man of peace.” Sharon, who is considered the major architect of the Israeli settlements, is reviled among Palestinians. Apparently oblivious to how his Sharon statement compromised his credibility, Bush compounded his flight of fancy by telling his listeners that “Israel has always worked tirelessly for peace.” I imagine that many of the members of the Knesset in their self-serving obtuseness may actually believe that this is true, but to the rest of the world this is simply a statement that Israel will not, at least under Bush’s watch, be required to make any concessions to its enemies.
The present practice among American politicians is to shamelessly pander to Israeli and Jewish-American interests as they are understood and transmitted by lobbying groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Bush, rising to the celebratory occasion, did not disappoint his listeners. First Bush substituted the name “Eretz Yisrael” for Israel. This biblical term is generally associated with the settlers who believe that Israel should retain all of the West Bank. He then reiterated the false argument, albeit popular among Israelis, that to be against a Jewish state is anti-Semitic. This is obviously not true, since all Jews do not support the State of Israel, especially as it is represented by its current policies of occupation and human rights violations. Bush further endeared himself to his audience by comparing the futility of negotiating with the groups he labeled “terrorists” with trying to negotiate with the Nazis in 1939. The Israelis often recall the British appeasement of the Nazis when attempting to counteract criticism of their own actions. Ariel Sharon famously employed the appeasement argument to criticize the US for opposing his 2002 reinvasion of the West Bank. In that case, President Bush backed down from his blunt admonitions to the Israelis to withdraw their invading troops from Palestinian-controlled areas.
The Palestinians were notably excluded from Mr. Bush’s speech except for one brief mention of a future state. In the context of this speech, such a state could be easily interpreted as the truncated mini-state that many in the Israeli establishment would be willing to consider. There was no mention of the so-called Annapolis Peace Process that the Americans are currently sponsoring, and which Bush occasionally trumpets as his Israeli/Palestinian plan for peace. There was no mention of the ongoing creation and expansion of settlements, which the Bush administration sometimes timidly proclaims are not helpful in moving the peace process forward. These omissions surprised and delighted many of the Israelis who were present. The fact that Bush was so effusive in his praise of the Israelis and basically neglected the Palestinians was a clear signal that the President is not committed to the peace negotiations in which his Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is now involved.
The best Bush could come up with as a rosy future for the Middle East in 60 years was decidedly modest. He described the relationship among nations there by stating “it doesn’t mean Israel and its neighbors will be the best of friends.” The American President’s hope for the region in the future is a Pax Isra-Americana over which the Arabs will have no choice.
What was most startling about the speech was Bush’s aggressive talk about Israel’s enemies and how the US was ready to act against the many groups that both countries consider “terrorists,” groups that in the US President’s mind, are beyond redemption. One such group is the Iranian government. The US administration’s war drums are beating louder and louder for military confrontation against Iran. There have been reports that the neocons in the government feel that now is the time for at least a “surgical” attack against that country’s nuclear sites. In Lebanon there is an increasingly unstable political and security situation where Hezbollah forces are flexing their military muscle. In 2006 Israel, with American backing, tried to vanquish Hezbollah, but failed. Will Bush now use the American military in Lebanon or encourage the Israelis to do so? In Gaza, Hamas is gaining support due to the failure of its opponents to deliver on their promise to improve conditions and achieve statehood. Could this bellicose tone from Bush signal that the Israelis have a green light for a massive reinvasion of the Gaza Strip, as proposed by Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak?
In a speech filled with hyperbole and emotional appeals, Bush derided those who cannot “fathom the darkness in these men [the terrorists]” and those that harbor the “foolish delusion” that we can negotiate a peaceful settlement. This latter statement has been interpreted to be an implied criticism of ex-President Jimmy Carter who met with Hamas leaders recently. It has also been seen as directed against Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama, who, despite the pointed objection of administration officials and his Democratic primary opponent Senator Hillary Clinton, has continually expressed a willingness to negotiate with Syrian and Iranian leaders. Obama issued a statement which said that he has never advocated negotiating with terrorists. The Illinois Senator does not perceive the governments of Iran or Syria to be terrorists, as Bush does. Additionally, by criticizing those who want to talk to the terrorist enemy, Bush is again telling the Israelis that the US will not pressure them into engaging in meaningful negotiations with the Palestinians, since Hamas is part of the evil enemy. Unfortunately, like Bush Obama also considers Hamas a terrorist organization who is not an appropriate negotiating partner, despite its standing as a legally and democratically-elected government.
As we learned from the “Axis of Evil” speech, tough talk from George Bush can foreshadow disastrous consequences for both his enemies and the people of the United States who will be paying for his military adventures in countless ways for many years. Hopefully, Bush’s term will expire before he can act militarily against those whose names he called out during his speech. However, even if Bush does not order US forces into another ill-conceived military engagement, the next President will inherit not only the armed conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, but a huge war lobby with a very effective propaganda machine, that will make it difficult for any US leader to avoid staying the same horrific course.
Hebron: World’s Neglect of a Great Injustice
Ian Jack, The Guardian
At Birzeit University in Ramallah last week a young woman student in a head scarf asked how it was that Nadine Gordimer, the South African novelist and Nobel laureate, could agree to visit and speak in Israel. Hadn’t Gordimer fought apartheid for years — famously fought it in her writing and her actions? And now she was about to appear at the International Writers Festival in Jerusalem, a guest in one way or another of the Israeli government. What did we think of this? Weren’t these double standards? Wouldn’t we condemn her?
The question was asked of Roddy Doyle and myself, both of us participants in another literary jamboree, the first Palestine Festival of Literature, whose six-day tour of the West Bank and East Jerusalem ended last Monday.
Like every other writer and journalist on the tour, Doyle and I agreed to do “workshops” at universities. Six or seven students were waiting in the classroom; they were all young women — men rarely study English literature at Palestinian universities — mostly wearing headscarves and very bright. One knew the work of Edith Wharton, which I do not, and there was an interesting exchange about writers ranging from Austen to Orwell. Then came the Gordimer question, to which Doyle gave the wisest answer: “We don’t know what she will say. Let her come and let’s hear what she says before we condemn her.”
Perhaps less wisely, certainly less clearly, I suggested that to equate apartheid in South Africa with Israeli behavior toward Palestinians in the occupied territories was still “a big step” for most people in Europe and North America. Two days’ experience of the West Bank didn’t seem enough to reach such forthright condemnation, and yet the evidence was already abundant that Israel’s behavior toward its captive Palestinian population is profoundly racist, oppressive and unjust. It started when we crossed the border from Jordan at the Allenby Bridge. All of us had EU or American passports and most us got through immigration in less than an hour. Then we waited for our colleagues with Arabic names. One hour, two hours, three hours. Khalid Abdalla, the actor, got out first; a conversation about his co-star Matt Damon seemed to be key. Last were our two American-Palestinian women poets, Suheir Hammad and Nathalie Handal. What had detained them was hardly rigorous research into their political connections.
According to United Nations figures, there are now 621 Israeli Army checkpoints and barriers spread throughout the West Bank — this week Tony Blair was celebrating the good news that he had persuaded the Israelis to remove four of them (though “subject to Israeli security assessments”) and at most of those we passed through we witnessed the same kind of caprice in action: Palestinians of all kinds — women, children, old men with hospital appointments — sent back for “security reasons” or because they had the wrong piece of paper, journeys abandoned or started again by circuitous routes.
On our last evening in Jerusalem our program of readings was meant to include a performance by a sextet from the Edward Said Conservatory of Music in Ramallah, which turned into a quartet because the lute player and the percussionist were refused entry to the city. Nobody could say why. Perhaps a security manual categorized lutes and drums as more dangerous than flutes and violins. More likely, a soldier broke his boredom by the small exercise of power.
But checkpoints are the least of it. Throughout the West Bank, Israel is steadily, relentlessly and apparently unstoppably imposing what old South African regimes used to know as “separate development”. Israeli and Palestinian cars have different number plates (yellow and green) and travel on separate roads (the Israeli roads newer and straighter). Jewish settlements march east into Palestinian territory in acts of illegal conquest unknown even to Dr. Verwoerd. And then there is The Wall, more properly known as the West Bank Barrier, which when complete will run eight meters high for 400 miles north to south, often looping forward impudently to take 10 percent of the West Bank’s land that before the 1967 war belonged to Jordan. The wall separates neighbor from neighbor, farmers from their olive groves, and strikes into the heart of Bethlehem to “protect” Rachel’s tomb, which is sacred to the Jews.
Most of this is well-known; it can be read about on dozens of campaigning websites and in any decent newspaper. But I was completely unprepared for Hebron. I’d last came to Hebron in 1981 to see the famous Rabbi Moshe Levinger, who had arrived in the city as its only Jew some years before. Levinger was (and is) a religious Zionist who believed that the borders of Israel should accord with the Book of Deuteronomy. In 1974 he helped establish the settler movement, the Gush Emunim. In 1981 he seemed a lonely, crazy figure with a house full of guns (later he served a brief prison term for “negligent homicide”). But consider his achievement: the occupied territories now contain around 400,000 settlers and their number grows every day. Government subsidies and tax breaks have become as great a motive as Deuteronomy. Their presence in Hebron has killed the commercial and social life of the biggest city in Palestine, home to 160,000 Muslims and Christians who have had their bazaars and thoroughfares blocked by 4,000 Israeli troops who are there to guarantee the safety of the 500 Jewish settlers who have moved in. Hebron is a ghost town. Three-quarters of its shops have closed. Among the few people moving freely through the streets were groups of settler joggers, each including a man carrying an automatic rifle. In the empty tunnels of the old bazaar, our bus driver said: “They do it to scare and humiliate us.”
How could the “peace process” begin to dismantle what Ariel Sharon called these “facts on the ground”? Nobody knows. Sharon himself is being kept alive at vast expense in an Israeli hospital (Palestinian joke: “Is Sharon alive or is he dead?” “Neither, he is still going through the checkpoints.”) In fact, no Palestinian I met believed in the peace process, “a process gyrating in an empty circle” in the words of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.
Our audiences were touched that we had come. They were, they said, glad to be recognized by the outside world as a people who read and wrote and talked, rather than simply as silent victims or vengeful suicide bombers. What angered and puzzled them was the world’s neglect of their isolation and the justice of their cause. I couldn’t explain it; European guilt over Jewish history no longer seems a sufficient excuse. The comparison with apartheid may not be completely apposite, but that hardly matters. What is happening in Palestine is a great and tragic wrong.
McCain Guilty of Hypocrisy on Hamas
James P. Rubin, The Washington Post
If the recent exchanges between President Bush, Barack Obama and John McCain on Hamas and terrorism are a preview of the general election, Americans are in for an ugly six months. Despite his reputation in the media as a charming maverick, McCain has shown that he is also happy to use Nixon-style dirty campaign tactics. By charging recently that Hamas is rooting for an Obama victory, McCain tried to use guilt by association to suggest that Obama is weak on national security and won’t stand up to terrorist organizations, or that, as Richard Nixon might have put it, Obama is soft on Israel.
President Bush picked up this theme Thursday. Without naming Obama during his speech Thursday night to Israel’s Knesset, Bush suggested that Democrats want to “negotiate with terrorists” while Republicans want to fight terrorists.
The Obama campaign was right to criticize the president for his remarks and for engaging in partisan politics while overseas. Many presidents have said things abroad that could be construed as violating this unwritten rule of American politics. But it is hard to remember any president abusing the prestige of his office in as crude a way as Bush did Thursday. Charging your opponents with appeasement and likening them to Neville Chamberlain in the Knesset is a brutal blow. It is bad enough that Republicans use the politics of personal destruction here at home, but to deploy that kind of political weapon at an occasion as solemn as an American president addressing the Parliament of a friendly government marks a new low.
McCain, meanwhile, is guilty of hypocrisy. I am a supporter of Hillary Clinton and believe that she was right to say, about McCain’s statement on Hamas, “I don’t think that anybody should take that seriously.” Unfortunately, the Republicans know that some people will. That’s why they say such things.
But given his own position on Hamas, McCain is the last politician who should be attacking Obama. Two years ago, just after Hamas won the Palestinian parliamentary elections, I interviewed McCain for the British network Sky News’s “World News Tonight” program. Here is the crucial part of our exchange:
I asked: “Do you think that American diplomats should be operating the way they have in the past, working with the Palestinian government if Hamas is now in charge?”
McCain answered: “They’re the government; sooner or later we are going to have to deal with them, one way or another, and I understand why this administration and previous administrations had such antipathy toward Hamas because of their dedication to violence and the things that they not only espouse but practice, so … but it’s a new reality in the Middle East. I think the lesson is people want security and a decent life and decent future, that they want democracy. Fatah was not giving them that.”
For some Europeans in Davos, Switzerland, where the interview took place, that’s a perfectly reasonable answer. But it is an unusual if not unique response for an American politician from either party. And it is most certainly not how the newly conservative presumptive Republican nominee would reply today.
Given that exchange, the new John McCain might say that Hamas should be rooting for the old John McCain to win the presidential election. The old John McCain, it appears, was ready to do business with a Hamas-led government, while both Clinton and Obama have said that Hamas must change its policies toward Israel and terrorism before it can have diplomatic relations with the United States.
Even if McCain had not favored doing business with Hamas two years ago, he had no business smearing Barack Obama. But given his stated position then, it is either the height of hypocrisy or a case of political amnesia for McCain to inject Hamas into the American election.
— James Rubin, an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of International Affairs, was an assistant secretary of state and the State Department’s chief spokesman during the Clinton administration.
Palestinians Mourn Continuing Catastrophe
Seth Freedman, The Guardian
In sharp contrast to last week’s Independence Day celebrations on the streets of West Jerusalem, the east side of the city took on an air of mourning Thursday, as the 60th anniversary of the Nakba (“catastrophe”) was marked. All over Gaza and the West Bank, demonstrations took place to commemorate the fate that befell the Palestinian people in 1948, and — despite their residing inside Israel proper — East Jerusalem residents were just as eager to make their voices of protest heard.
I headed to Damascus Gate on Thursday morning, to see for myself how high emotions were running amongst the demonstrators — yet before I’d even arrived I was already knee-deep in discussion about the conflict. Upon learning my reasons for crossing the divide into East Jerusalem, my Arab cab driver poured out a stream of invective against the Israeli authorities, bemoaning the situation he and his people had been forced to endure for 60 years.
Beginning with a scathing attack on George Bush — “He only cares about the Israelis; he’s not done a single thing for the Arabs in all his time as president” — he grew steadily angrier and more bitter as we circumvented the Old City walls en route to the protest. “We have no rights in our own land,” he muttered, “and even then the Israelis aren’t satisfied. It’s not enough for them to control us and humiliate us in our homes; now they want to drive us out of Jerusalem completely.”
“It’s a systematic program to get rid of us”, he assured me, sucking furiously on his cigarette. “They make our lives hell — they give us no (municipal services); they don’t let us build in our own neighborhoods, so people are forced to move out as the population grows; and they make us feel as though we don’t belong.” As I got out of the cab, next to a phalanx of border policemen fanning out to encircle the protesters, he beckoned me back to deliver his parting thoughts: “If you think I sound angry now, wait till the 70th anniversary of the Nakba. As long as Israel carries on behaving like this, our rage is only going to get worse.”
His words rang in my ears as I watched nine- and ten-year-old children stand defiantly alongside their parents at the protest. Several of them clutched cheap plastic poles with the UN flag flying atop them in the breeze; the words “Right of Return — 194” emblazoned across them in bold black letters. The children were under no illusion about what measures had to be taken to redress the injustices suffered by their forebears, and demanding the right of return suggested the time for talk of two states had been and gone.
A local shopkeeper told me just as much, asking me not to attach his name to his words, “since this country isn’t quite as democratic as they’d like you to think”. The right of return for Palestinian refugees was, he said, “something we can never give up on, not whilst every Jew on earth is allowed to move here without hindrance. Maybe if they said ‘no more Jewish immigrants — we’re full up’, then I’d consider it, but that’s not going to happen. They let people from Europe and Africa move here, yet refuse to discuss the issue of refugees (who came from here originally).”
“Any agreement with the Palestinian Authority must include the right of return, or at least significant compensation for those expelled. I know that Jews were kicked out of Arab lands too, and they should also be compensated, but on a much smaller scale. After all, they might have lost property, but we lost an entire country.”
At this point, his eyes glazed over and his tone took a marked shift away from the here and now and into the realms of fantasy born out of years of frustration with the status quo. “The truth is, my friend, that Nasser was right. He said that ‘What’s taken by force can only be returned by force’. We’re never going to get what we deserve from the Israelis. The only way we’ll have our dignity restored is when the Arab world stands up and fights for us and our rights.”
“And it will happen”, he declared forcefully, his eyes blazing as he spoke. “It might not happen in my lifetime, but it will happen in the next 50 years. I am one of the most moderate men around here, but — believe me — if an Arab army rises up to fight the Israelis, I’d join them myself. Not the groups carrying out suicide bombings, mind you, but a real army that had the power to take on the Israelis.”
“My son gets so furious when he is humiliated at checkpoints”, he went on. “He asks me ‘why should we deal with these kind of people at all? Better to live under the occupation, sign no agreements whatsoever, and wait for the Arab world to come to our aid’”.
His sentiments were distressingly similar to those of the embattled Jews in the shtetls of Eastern Europe, who bore their oppression at the hands of the Cossacks and others by falling back on waiting for messianic redemption. By retreating into an otherworldly shell, they were able to block out the injustice and iniquities that they were dealt, and focus on a time when they would be delivered salvation by a higher power.
For the shopkeeper, the “Arab world” is the messiah; the white knight who will ride in on his trusty steed to right all the wrongs and restore to the Palestinians their dignity and honor. Despite the last 60 years of history suggesting otherwise — that the Arab world is neither powerful nor interested enough to take serious action on the Palestinians’ behalf — he clings to this belief like a shipwreck survivor to a narrow plank of wood.
As each year passes, and the Palestinians feel ever more scorned by Israel and her allies, it’s no wonder that they seek comfort in droves in the arms of the extremists. Dogmatism and fundamentalism can promise them the moon, whilst the facts on the ground remain the same, and the longer the status quo persists, the stronger groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad grow. For them not to achieve utter domination amongst their people before the 70th anniversary of Israel’s creation, much must be done to convince the Palestinians that there is an alternative — but no one on the Palestinian side is holding their breath.
60 Years of Denial
Palestinian refugee children (Photo: Matthew Cassel)
By Ramzy Baroud
‘Don’t ask for what you never had,’ is the underlying message made by supporters of Israel when they claim Palestine was never a state to begin with.
The contention is, of course, easily refutable. Following the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th Century, colonial powers plotted to divide the spoils. When Britain and France signed the secretive Sykes-Picot agreement in 1916, which divided the spheres of influence in west Asia, there were hardly any ‘nation-states’ in the region which would fit contemporary definitions of the term.
All borders were colonial concoctions that served the interests of the powerful countries seeking strategic control, political influence and raw material. Most of Africa and much of Asia were victims of the colonial scrambles, which disfigured their geo-political and subsequently socio-economic compositions.
But Palestinians, like many other people, did see themselves as a unique group linked historically to a specific geographic entity. All That Remains by Professor Walid Khalidi is one leading volume which documents a thriving pre-Israel history of Palestine and the Palestinian people. Such history is often overlooked, if not entirely dismissed. Some choose to believe that no other civilization ever existed in Palestine, neither prior to nor between the assumed destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 CE until the founding of Israel in 1948. But what about irrefutable facts? For example, the Israeli Jerusalem Post was called the Palestine Post when it was founded in 1932. Why Palestine and not Israel? Whose existence, as a definable political entity, preceded the other? The answer is obvious.
It isn’t the denial or acceptance of Israel’s existence that concerns me. Israel does exist, even if it refuses to define its borders, or acknowledge the historic injustices committed against the Palestinian people. The systematic and brutal ethnic cleaning of the majority of Palestinian Christians and Muslims from 1947 to 1948 is what produced a Jewish majority in Palestine and subsequently the ‘Jewish state’ of Israel.
Also worth remembering are the equally systematic attempts at dehumanising Palestinians and denying them any rights. When Ehud Barak, Prime Minister of Israel at the time, compared Palestinians in a Jerusalem Post interview (August 2000) to “crocodiles, the more you give them meat, they want more,” he was hardly diverting from a consistent Zionist tradition that equated Palestinians with animals and vermin. Another Prime Minister, Menahim Begin referred to Palestinians in a Knesset speech as “beasts walking on two legs.” They have also been described as “grasshoppers”, “cockroaches” and more by famed Israeli statesmen.
Disturbingly, such references might be seen as an improvement from former Prime Minister Golda Meir’s claim that “there were no such thing as Palestinians…they did not exist.” (June 15, 1969)
To justify its own existence, Israel has long subjugated its citizens to a kind of collective amnesia. Do Israelis realise they live on the rubble of hundreds of Palestinian villages and towns, each destroyed during a most tragic history of blood, pain and tears, resulting in an ethnic cleansing of nearly 800,000 Palestinians?
As Israel celebrates its 60th birthday, nothing is allowed to blemish the supposed heroism of its founding fathers or those who fought in its name. Palestine, the Palestinians, and an immeasurably long relationship between a people and their land hardly merit a pause as Israeli officials and their Western counterparts carry on with their festivities.
While some conveniently forgot many historic chapters pertinent to the suffering of Palestinians, Israeli leaders — especially those who took part in the colonization of Palestine — were fully aware of what they did. David Ben Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel, warned in 1948, “We must do everything to insure they (the Palestinians) never do return.” By ensuring that Palestinians were cut off from their land, Ben Gurion has hoped that time will take care of the rest. “The old will die and the young will forget,” he said.
Moshe Dayan, a former Israeli Defence Minister also had no illusions regarding the real history beneath Israel’s momentous achievements. His speech at the Technion in Haifa (April 4, 1969) was quoted in the Israeli daily Haaretz thus: “We came here to a country that was populated by Arabs and we are building here a Hebrew, a Jewish state; instead of the Arab villages, Jewish villages were established. You even do not know the names of those villages, and I do not blame you because these villages no longer exist. There is not a single Jewish settlement that was not established in the place of a former Arab village.”
Israel has, since its foundation, laboured to undermine any sense of Palestinian identity. Without most of their historic land, the relationship between Palestinians and Palestine could only exist in memory. Eventually though, memory managed to morph into a collective identity that has proved more durable than the physical existence on the land. “It is a testimony to the tenacity of Palestinians that they have kept alive a sense of nationhood in the face of so much adversity. Yet the obstacles to sustaining their cohesiveness as a people are today greater than ever,” reported the Economist (May 8, 2008).
Living in so many disconnected areas, removed from their land, detached from one another, fought with at every corner, Palestinians have not just been oppressed physically by Israel, but physiologically as well. There are attempts from all angles to force them to simply concede, forget, and move on. It is the Palestinian people’s rejection of such notions that makes Israel’s victory and ‘independence’ superficial and unconvincing.
Sixty years after their Catastrophe (Nakba), Palestinians still remember their past and present injustices. Of course more than mere remembrance is necessary; Palestinians need to find a common ground for unity — Christians and Muslims, poor and rich, secularist and the religious — in order to stop Israel from eagerly exploiting their own disunity, factionalism and political tribalism.
But, despite Israel’s hopes and best efforts, Palestinians have not yet forgotten who they are. And no amount of denial can change this.
-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).
THE APARTHEID WALL-In Photos
Images from Zoriah’s Collection
© zoriah/www.zoriah.com
GAZA IN PHOTOS
GAZA LIFE – Taken from Zoriah’s collection.
© zoriah/www.zoriah.com – zoriah.com
Photographing War: ‘I Simply Want to Change the World’
Images of War: Afghanistan (© zoriah/www.zoriah.com)
By Suzanne Baroud
It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words. At the risk of sounding terribly cliche, I have to say that my understanding of war, the pain of war, the humanity that is able to rise above war, the valiant spirit of mothers and children caught in the midst of war….were ever so slight until I stumbled upon the miraculous work of the award-winning war photographer called Zoriah.
What an amazing and talented artist. What wonders this man captures with his camera. It is as if he has an enchanting ability to transport the viewer of his work right to the heart and soul of the many conflicts he has covered. I cannot remember being so moved by a photograph and the story which it imparts.
I always felt that I had a keen understanding of the tragedy in Iraq, the catastrophes of Palestine and Afghanistan, but after witnessing Zoriah’s works of pure genius, my understanding seems deeper and closer then ever before. The wisdom in the eyes of Gaza’s children, the knowing expression of an elderly man wasting away in a Baghdad hospital, I leave Zoriah’s work with a profound sense of grief and admiration that is rarely felt. It is like I too have been there.
Zoriah is a multiple award winning photojournalist whose work has been seen in some of the world’s most prestigious galleries, museums and publications, with clients such as Newsweek, the BBC, Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, Grand Reportage and many many others.
Before his career as a photojournalist, Zoriah was involved in disaster management and humanitarian aid to developing countries. But after a brief period of working for a large international aid organization, he realized that red tape and bureaucracy would significantly hamper the work he hoped to do: “So I decided to pick up my camera after a long hiatus and set out to document disasters and humanitarian crisis. I believed that I could use the power and emotion of the still image to educate the people about suffering in the developing world.”
And so this man travelled to uncountable countries with “his camera as his weapons” to do just that. For the greater part of his career, Zoriah has worked as a freelance photographer, explaining that he could only “go so far” with the corporate mainstream media: “I do feel like there is quite a lot of censorship in the mainstream media. My editors in the past used to tell me ‘this is an incredible story Zoriah…you know it will never sell, right?’ It is so painful to put every bit of yourself into a story and risk your life to capture images that will never end up being seen.”
I asked Zoriah if he felt that his work with mainstream media was highly censored, he replied, saying: “Censorship can be in the form of blatantly removing blood or body parts from images of war, down to subtle censorship, choosing only a select group of images from a larger story or not running graphic or controversial stories/images at all. As long as news remains a moneymaking industry, publications will cater to what they believe the average person wants to see. Somehow it has become ok to show violence for the sake of movies and entertainment but not for the sake of news and education.”
Zoriah has been in the heart of the world’s most ruthless of conflicts and disasters, from working as an embedded journalist with the US army to his work as a disaster technology specialist with the American Red Cross. I asked him to share an experience that had made a profound impact on his life as a humanitarian worker and a photojournalist. He narrated an episode in Pakistan: “After the Asian Earthquake I was in Pakistan photographing the injured in a local hospital. A man came up to me and gently put his arm around me and pointed down the hall. He did not speak English but I knew he wanted me to follow him. He took me into a room where a woman sat crying next to the body of dead man as two other women comforted her. I found out that the man was her husband and had just died do to injuries he sustained when their house collapsed.
I spent the rest of the afternoon photographing this family mourn the loss of this man. I was truly humbled by the fact that they had brought me into their lives to let me document such a personal and painful moment. They seemed to instantly understand my motivations for being there and I believe that I understood their need to show the world the pain that they were experiencing. To this day my favorite photograph is from this moment and the experience will remain in my heart as long as I live.”
He shared another story of his experience as an embedded journalist with the US army in Iraq:
“While in Iraq, I find out that a group of detainees are about to be released. Although formally forbidden to take photos of any detainees under any circumstances, I am close with the unit and they invite me along.
The detainees, still blindfolded and cuffed are led into a convoy of armored vehicles. We set out to drop the men off in the area that they had been taken into custody the day before. It is about a fifteen minute drive and the sun is beginning to set.
‘This is it, this is where we picked them up’ says one of the soldiers as the convoy pulls off to the side of the road in a residential neighborhood. The detainees are led out of the vehicles and lined up against a wall. Their blindfolds are taken off and when the men realize that they are being released they begin to cry with relief. They look absolutely exhausted, their clothes filthy and torn with a look of fear and confusion on their eyes.
As the soldiers escort the detainees back to their homes, a crowd of friends and relatives begins to gather on the streets. There is screaming, crying and hugging as the community sees the missing men are alive. Two women faint and are held up by their husbands and sons.
One man starts screaming in English “why did you do this? Why did you take them? They are graduate students at the University. These are not terrorists, they are students! Why did you take them? What did you do to them?”
Zoriah’s work is raw and it is real. It does not induce a false sense of comfort nor can it leave the viewer with the faintest feelings of impartiality. I have an ironic feeling of frustration as our exchange ends; I simply cannot find the words to commend this man for the invaluable work he has done. I conclude with asking him about his source of inspiration. His answer is frank and poignant: “Every photographer is different and has different motivations. My motivation is pretty simple…I just want to change the world… and I am fairly sure I can do it.”
- For more on Zoriah’s work, visit his website: www.zoriah.com and his blog: www.zoriah.typepad.com.
Clinton’s ‘Final Solution’ to the Persian Problem
What are the underpinnings of Hilary Clinton’s threat to obliterate Iran?
By Robert Weitzel
“To misunderstand the nature and threat of evil is to risk being blindsided by it…An evil unchecked is the prelude to genocide.” – Dr. Mordechai: The Ezekiel Option
There are over 70 million human beings living in Iran, 17.5 million of whom are under the age of fifteen. Hillary Clinton vowed to attack Iran and “totally obliterate” the majority of the Persian race in a furnace of primordial fire should the Iranian government attack Israel with nuclear weapons, which they do not now possess or are likely to for some time – if ever.
Hillary’s “final solution” to the Persian problem bests Adolf Hitler by a magnitude of ten. Missing in Clinton’s campaign trail pandering to America’s pro-Israel lobbies and the mushrooming evangelical Christian Zionist movement is the “inconvenient truth” that Israel has the most modern and most deadly army in the Middle East thanks to an annual $3.5 billion in American aid – one third of the U.S. aid budget.
Israel is also a major nuclear power in the region – though it refuses to admit it – with up to 200 nuclear warheads and the inter-continental-range ballistic missiles to deliver them and, according to the U.S. Congress Office of Technology Assessment, also has an undeclared offensive chemical and biological warfare program. Israel, along with India and Pakistan are the only three nations not to have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran is a signatory of the NNPT, by the way.
The most inconvenient truth, however, is that Israel has a 60-year history of attacking – with American-supplied armaments – any Arab country it perceives as a threat, nuclear-armed or slingshot-armed alike. Israel’s bombing of Iraq’s Osirak nuclear facility in 1981 comes to mind as an example of the former, its shelling of Gaza the latter. Israel can and will “ pre-emptively defend” itself against Iran, the country that a February 2008 International Atomic Energy Agency report concluded has not diverted nuclear material to non-peaceful purposes.
Unfortunately for the 70 million Persians in Hillary’s bombsight, Iran’s biggest liability is its president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – but then the U.S. is equally burdened. So the real truth behind Clinton’s “final solution” to the Persian problem or John McCain’s “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, Iran” off-key hyperbole is not simply a “David and Goliath” struggle for survival, but is instead a cynical exploitation of the unholy marriage of convenience between fanatical Jewish Zionists who want a Muslim-free Eretz Israel in order to fulfill Old Testament prophecy and bring about the first coming of their Messiah and fanatical Christian Zionists who want the entire Middle East in flames to fulfill New Testament prophecy and bring about the Second Coming of their Messiah. Jewish Zionists need the money and the political clout of the Christian Zionists. Christian Zionists need the Semitism and the chutzpah of the Jewish Zionists. Politicians need the votes that both groups can deliver, which in religion-drenched America is a hefty consignment. According to a 2006 Pew Research Center poll, fully 44 percent of Americans believe that “God gave the land that is now Israel to the Jewish people” and 36 percent believe the “creation of the state of Israel is a step toward the Second Coming of Jesus.”
Depending on which poll is the most accurate, there are between 105-135 million evangelical and born-again Christians in the United States. Of these Christians, a 2004 International Fellowship of Christians and Jews poll found that 31 percent identified U.S. support for Israel as their “primary consideration” in selecting a presidential candidate, while 64 percent cited it as an “important factor.”
Predictably then, when Hillary Clinton or John McCain threaten to obliterate Iran, or any predominately Muslim country in the Middle East, with nuclear weapons, the primary audience for their saber rattling is not the Muslim “evildoers” but is, instead, the pro-Israel lobby and the Christian Zionist muscle in America who are willing to see the “ultimate evil” committed to further their ideological and eschatological agenda.
Nowhere does “ultimate evil” play a more prominent role than in the End Time machinations of two well-connected Christian Zionists, Tim LaHaye and John Hagee.
Tim LaHaye is best known as the co-author of the blockbuster Left Behind series, which has sold over 60 million copies worldwide. The pulp fiction series takes the Book of Revelation as its inspiration and chronicles the tribulations that will occur between the Rapture of born-again Christians and the Second Coming of Jesus. The blood and viscera of millions of infidels and heretics—unrepentant Atheists, Jews, Muslims, and Catholics—are spattered on every page.
Tim LaHaye is least known as the founder and first president of the secretive Council for National Policy. The CNP was formed in 1981 as an umbrella organization to advance an ultra-conservative, right wing Christian agenda. LaHaye’s particular agenda items include replacing U.S. secular law with Old Testament biblical law and a Middle East foreign policy that expedites the Second Coming.
According to the New York Times, the CNP consists of “a few hundred of the most powerful conservatives in the country” who meet “behind closed doors at undisclosed locations…to strategize about how to turn the country to the right.” Though the membership of the CNP is a guarded secret, a list of those known to have been associated with it reads like a who’s who of Christian Zionists and neocon ideologues whose passion is to see the Middle East in flames and in chains.
A short list includes: George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, former Attorney Generals John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales, former U.N. ambassador John Bolton, the late Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobson, Phyllis Schlafly, and Oliver North – the guy who sold weapons to Iran using Israel as the middleman.
Do not be blindsided. The CNP is a major player in domestic and foreign policy decisions and the “evil” that results.
John Hagee, televangelist and pastor of the 19,000-member Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, is the founder of Christian United for Israel. Hagee formed CUFI in 2005 following the publication of his book, The Jerusalem Countdown: A Warning to the World, which sports a mushroom cloud on its cover and argues for a pre-emptive nuclear strike on Iran to fulfill God’s plan for both Israel and the West.
Hagee’s theology – and vision of the future – focuses on selected apocalyptic passages from the Old Testament. He believes that a nuclear strike against Iran will cause Arab nations to unite under Russian leadership, as outlined in the Book of Ezekiel, leading to an “inferno [that] will explode across the Middle East, plunging the world toward Armageddon.” Consequently, CUFI exists to set the fires of the Apocalypse and bring about the Rapture and the Second Coming, but it needs Jewish Zionists to strike the match.
Christians United for Israel is the evangelical equivalent of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the powerful pro-Israel lobby courted and placated by every American politician who has national aspirations. John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and Barak Obama have each pledged their fealty to AIPAC.
John Hagee is not without his own short list of beltway benefactors. The list includes, but is not limited to: George W. Bush, House Minority Whip Roy Blunt, Senator Joe Lieberman—who called Hagee an “Ish Elokim,” a man of God—and John McCain who was “very honored by Pastor John Hagee’s endorsement [for president].”
When Christian Zionists with the stature of LaHaye and Hagee shill for fanatical Jewish Zionists who are promoting the ethic cleansing of Eretz Israel for biblical or nationalistic reasons or the pre-emptive “defensive” nuking of Iran, politicians with the stature of Hillary Clinton and John McCain, along with a hefty consignment of the electorate, are their willing dupes. It’s just the politics of religion as usual in America.
But Jewish Zionists need to understand that the difference between Christian Zionists and Muslim suicide bombers is scale, a nuclear warhead versus a backpack bomb, and a willingness to let others do the killing – and the dying – for them.
Jewish Zionists should also keep in mind that Christian Zionists have no intention of being around when the sands of the Middle East are turned to glass in a furnace of primordial fire. They will have been Raptured and out of harm’s way in Paradise. Their Bible tells them so.
- Robert Weitzel is a contributing editor to Media With a Conscience. His essays regularly appear in The Capital Times in Madison, WI. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. Contact him at: robertweitzel@mac.com
