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May 7, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
A Travesty of Justice
May 6, 2002
Fran Schor
Invasion
of Iraq:
Coming Soon
Dave Marsh
Love Hurts
John Chuckman
The
Paradoxes of Israel
Rep. Ron Paul
End Corporate Welfare, Pull
the Plug on the Ex-Im Bank
Hussein
Ibish
Devastation
Only Feeds Resistance to Israeli Rule
May 5, 2002
Jeffrey St. Clair
High and Dry in the Mojave
May 4, 2002
Robert
Fisk
Sharon
the Merciless
and Arafat the Corrupt
Sam Bahour
New United States of Israel
Alexander
Cockburn
Extreme
Solutions:
Priests and Palestinians
May 3, 2002
Arundhati Roy
Democracy and
Religious Fascism
Wayne
Madsen
Dispatch
from Paris:
Le Pen's Strange Coalition
Yigal Bronner
A Journey to Beit Jalla
CounterPunch
Wire
Otto
Reich Named to Board of School of the Americas
John Troyer
Hatemongers Try to Cleanse History:
Gays and 9/11
John Stauber
Big
Food/Tobacco/Booze
Attacks "Mad Cow" Authors
Kathleen Christison
Before There Was Terrorism
May 2, 2002
CounterPunch
Wire
Rep.
Dick Armey Calls for Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians
Rami Kaplan
Israeli Soldiers Resisting
the Occupation:
Why We Refuse to Fight
Carol
Norris
Subterranean
Mini-Nuke Blues
Bernard Weiner
A Peek Inside Colin Powell's Personal
Diary
May 1, 2002
Badiou,
Michel, Lazarus
French
Elections:
What is to be Done?
Baruch Kimmerling
The Battle of Jenin as
an Inter-Ethnic War
Edward
Hammond
Hiding
History:
NAS Suppresses Chem/Bio War Documents
Kristen Schurr
Inside Gaza
Sam Bahour
Corporate
America and
the Israeli Occupation
Jacques Ranciere
Prisoners of the Infinite
April 30, 2002
Mike Leon
Chomsky,
Letters to the Writer and the Peace Movement
Dave Marsh
The FBI and the Music
Industry: Paying the Cost to Feed the Boss
Steen
Sohn
Something
Rotten in Denmark:
New Danish Government's Alliance with Far Right
Desmond Tutu
Apartheid in the Holy Land
Christopher
Reilly
Kissinger:
the Wanted Man
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
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How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
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Reviews of Gore:
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May
8, 2002
The Solution to this Filthy War:
Foreign Occupation
By Robert Fisk
The Independent
Ariel Sharon's "peace" plan presented
to President Bush in Washington last night--get rid of Arafat,
devise a more obedient Palestinian Authority and keep building
settlements for Jews and Jews only on Palestinian land--is fantasy.
That the Americans should smooth his
way by claiming that Arafat's need to reform his authority is
more important than a halt to settlement-building--the gormless
contribution of Condoleezza Rice, the US National Security Adviser,
to this sterile debate--shows just how out of touch the Bush
administration is.
Sharon's hopeless attempts to suppress
a vicious anti-colonial war are accompanied by all the usual
psychological weapons: dishonest attempts to label any criticism
of Israel as anti-Semitism, fraudulent assertions that the Israeli
army behaves with restraint, mass rallies and continued attempts
to portray Palestinians as beast-like, suicidal animals.
Sharon himself has now taken to blaming
not just Arafat and his corrupt henchmen for the wicked suicide
bombing of Israeli civilians. He now blames the Palestinians
as a people. Only last month, in the Knesset, he was referring
to "the murderous insanity that has taken hold of our Palestinian
neighbours". If Palestinians as a people are now possessed
of "murderous insanity", Mr Sharon is not going to
make peace with them.
And if the Palestinians have to go on
watching the Jewish settlements surrounding them on their land,
they are not going to make peace with Israel. And contrary to
song, myth and legend, the Israeli army has been behaving more
like a militia than a disciplined military force. The reports
of mass looting by Israeli troops in Ramallah, especially of
jewellery and cash, have reached epic proportions. Israel may
publicly claim that this is Palestinian propaganda, but the Israeli
army's high command knows the stories are true--one officer referred
to it as "the wide-scale, ugly phenomenon of vandalism".
Anyone who doubts this has only to read
Amira Haas's shocking report in the Israeli daily Ha'aretz earlier
this week, in which she catalogues a month-long Israeli army
orgy of destruction at the Palestinian Ministry of Culture in
Ramallah. The soldiers based there wrecked and stole masses of
computers, furniture, television sets, children's paintings and
left much of the building--including office drawers--soiled with
excrement and urine.
The question has to be asked: is this
army any more capable of defending Israel than the Palestinians
are capable of defending themselves? A seminar at the Steinmetz
Peace Research institute in Tel Aviv threw up some fascinating
data last month. Over 40 per cent of Israel's Jewish population,
the institute found, said they were prepared to have international
intervention in the conflict. More astonishingly, 35 per cent
of interviewees said that intervention could involve foreign
troops who would physically separate Israel and the Palestinian
Authority.
In other words, many Israelis would allow
foreign armies to protect them from Palestinian suicide bombers.
And the Palestinians, be sure, would be more than happy to have
foreign armies on their soil; they have been asking for just
that for decades. Mr Sharon or any Likud successor would object.
But it is their own insane policy of
settlement-building that has brought about such misery for Israelis.
For a real border separating "Palestine'' from the sovereign
state of Israel would afford Israelis much greater security.
But Mr Sharon can't erect such a fence because it would cut Israel
off from the illegal settlements that it has been building for
35 years on Palestinian land.
Outside the Middle East, however, there
is growing impatience with this wretched war. Europeans are becoming
weary of this cynical, ruthless conflict, tired of being called
anti-Semites when they object to Israel's occupation and equally
sick of Arafat's corruption and nepotism and his inability to
prevent Palestinian suiciders from killing children. No matter
how many rallies in their favour--or how much inane support from
the likes of Iain Duncan Smith--Israelis themselves are well
aware how isolated they have become.
And despite the roar of the old pro-Israeli
pundits on the US east coast and Israel's lobbying power over
Congress, Americans are infuriated by the gutless, supine Middle
East policies of their own government. A war that is affecting
oil prices and the world economy, that is turning Muslims into
enemies of Europe and Westerners into enemies of Islam, that
involves occupation and colonial rule, cannot be allowed to continue
indefinitely.
So I'll make a rash, fearful prediction.
After Bosnia and Kosovo and East Timor, we have grown tired of
regional wars. And I think that, in time, we will close down
the Middle East war. With Russian and EU and UN support, there
will, eventually, be American and Nato troops in Jerusalem. There
will be a Western protection force in the West Bank and Gaza--and
in Israel. The Israeli and Palestinian armies will have to return
to barracks. Jerusalem will be an international city. The Palestinians
will have security. So will the Israelis.
Yes, it will be a form of international
colonialism. Yes, it will mean foreign occupation for both sides.
But it will put an end to this filthy war.
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